SUICIDE—ABETTING, AIDING, AND INCITING.
THE Lord Mayor of Cork has starved himself to death in Brixton Prison. To prevent him from committing this criminal act the authorities did everything that was in their power. On the other hand, the Lord Mayor's friends and relations in effect aided, abetted and encouraged him to commit the crime of self-murder. Stranger still, the ecclesiastics of the Roman Church who visited him to give religious aid and consolation appear to have done nothing to dissuade him from so grave an offence. By refraining from so doing and by giving him the ministra- tions due to one in full peace with the. Church they in fact endorsed his action, and this though the Roman Church has set its canon so unreservedly against self-slaughter. No doubt the Casuists have attempted here as else- where to fritter away the sin of suicide by the arts and crafts of distinction, but in the case of suicide, almost more perhaps than in that of any other crime, they have been unsuccessful. The teaching of religious authority remains clear. Even the men whose amazing subtleties Pascal exposed in the Provincial Letters could hardly find an ecclesiastic expert who had declared the allowability of suicide probable—i.e. capable of proof—and accordingly self-homicide not certainly a crime, but instead a matter open to argument.
To destroy oneself, in the view of the Church as of the Law, is murder, and murder is sin. The British Govern- ment and the British people need have no sense of remorse nor even misgiving as to whether we did right in not allowing the Lord Mayor of Cork to escape the punishment due to Very serious crimes because he claimed the right to annul his sentence by the threat of suicide. Unless it is wrong to punish a man for treason and felony and the planning of treason and felony, we need have no uneasiness in this matter. Very different would be the feeling awakened when some unfortunate soldier or policeman walking in the streets or along some country road meets his death from the mutilation of a soft-nosed bullet, fired by a foot-passenger coming up quietly behind or by an assassin concealed in the ditch. For such deaths we have a deep responsibility, and must not only grieve but ask ourselves in anxiety and contrition whether we have done all we ought to do, and could do, to protect these gallant men and to save them from the hands of murderers so cruel, so cowardly, and so ruthless. If mortal sorrows touch us at all, for these indeed our hearts should be much more nearly touched than for the misguided and self-condemned fanatics of a hunger-strike.
There is nothing to move us in the case of the Lord Mayor of Cork more than in that of any other deliberate suicide. That the Lord Mayor showed courage and fortitude we do not, of course, for a moment deny. There- fore we rightly feel less indignation in his case than in that of the persons who supported and encouraged and abetted his misdemeanours. He suffered. They posed as patriots in ease and safety. Even in a bad cause the man who goes into the firing line is less to be condemned than he who sends him from a place of safety. The Junker lieutenant in the trenches, in spite of his bad opinions, was a much better man than the Kaiser or his Chancellor.
What was really happening in the case of the Lord Mayor of Cork ? What was he doing or trying to do ? These are questions which it is necessary to ask, for to deal effectively with the Sinn Feiner we must understand him. The Lord Mayor of Cork was not merely endeavouring to defeat the cause of justice and to show that he could render himself immune from punishment by taking advan- tage of the sentimentalism of a war-worn and divided nation and the timidity of an opportunist Government. He wanted to do a great deal more than to save his own life, and herein, of course, he may claim a certain sympathy— the sympathy which we all accord to the man who pushes and presses every point against an opponent as far as it can possibly be pushed. The Lord Mayor's object in threatening to starve himself to death was to make murder and the planning of murder safe and easy for his friends and colleagues. The pretence that we are not at war with Ireland, and therefore must not inquire too closely who are our friends and who are our enemies, makes it very difficult to detect and punish the Irish murderer. When a police- man or soldier is killed in a street by a shot in the back, " dead men tell no tales," and the witnesses intimidated by the fear of death say as little as the dead. But murder on a great scale requires organization, and that organization undertaken by the Irish Republican Army could not by any means be so easy to hide as the actual work of the assassin. The organization of murder and of murder societies is only punished in Ireland with imprisonment. If, then, imprisonment could be made practically im- possible by the hunger-strike, the cause for which the Irish Republican Army was striving would have in effect been won. We have too much kindliness to hang for any crime less than actual murder, and our only other resort- imprisonment—would have had the sting entirely taken out of it by the threat of suicide. Still, to persuade people that you can plan murder and join murder societies without any very serious consequences is not altogether an easy task. Therefore, very great issues depended upon the final success of the hunger-strike.
At first the Sinn Fein plan met with a very great success. Men were arrested for the gravest of crimes and placed in prison. They were at once ordered by their superiors in sedition and homicide to take no food. They obeyed, and after they had reached a certain stage of emaciation and weakness and there was danger of their dying they were let out—often to return again, and again play the same game. Imprisonment became a farce. At last, though not till far too late in the day, the Government decided that the prisoners would not be allowed to open the prison doors at their own will by the simple device of threatening suicide. In future, if they voluntarily turned their sentences of imprisonment into sentences of death, the Government'
though it would do everything it could to prevent suicide, would not be intimidated.
Very soon after this perfectly sound resolve had been taken, one against which no just charge of inhumanity can possibly prevail, the Lord Mayor of Cork was found guilty of a very grave crime—not a political crime, but one in fact, though not of course in name, involving the organization of murder. The Lord Mayor—and here again we admit his courage and hardihood of mind—determined that he must have a trial of strength with the Govern- ment. He must prove to his fellow-conspirators in the Irish Republican Army, of which, remember, he was one of the leaders, that they were safe in their attacks on soldiers and police because the Government, whatever it might say, would not dare to let the hunger-striker die. Probably Mr. MacSwiney and the members of his family, and the other persons who encouraged him in his suicide, did not for a moment believe that the Government would dare to do what they said they would do—that is, stand firm. They trusted by the appeals to sentiment in the newspapers and on the platform to beat the Government. Unfortunately, however, for the Lord Mayor of Cork, they went too far in their protestations and in their aiding and abetting of self-murder under an alias at Brixton as of murder pure and simple in Ireland. When they saw the game was up it was too late to withdraw. Possibly the late Lord Mayor's friends and spiritual advisers are now regretting this fact, and are seized with a feeling of remorse. It is difficult to believe that if they had from the beginning helped and supported the prison authorities in the measures which they took to keep the Lord Mayor alive such measures would not have succeeded. Certainly remorse ought to be theirs, for never was a man more cynically sacrificed for a political aim. The Lord Mayor died in an unsuc- cessful effort to defeat, discredit and disparage the British Government. That is the long and short of the whole ignominious story. They and the Lord Mayor wanted to be able to say : " Don't be afraid. Look at Alderman MacSwiney and how he beat them ! So can you if you like. Never let the fear of imprisonment prevent you from joining the Irish Republican Army and doing its work. You see, they cannot now even imprison you. If they do you can let yourselves out of prison at any moment by a hunger-strike. Thanks to MacSwiney, we can do what we like in Ireland now." That cannot now be said.
Perhaps it will be urged that, right or wrong, by letting the Lord Mayor deliberately starve himself to death we have made another martyr, and shall never be forgiven by the Irish people. We do not believe a word of it. The Irish are at heart not half as sentimental or as easily taken in as the British people. They are much better politicians than we are, and under- stand facts much more quickly. They know what Mr. MacSwiney was trying for, and they have seen what the Irish conspirators were playing for in Mr. MacSwiney's threat of suicide. Finally, they have seen the threat fail, and they with their quick wits will soon apply the lesson of that failure, for failure has a very rapid effect in Ireland, just as has success. The newspapers may talk about the terrible sense of gloom in Ireland, and of the oaths of revenge and so on ; but that is a misleading view of the facts. What is really happening is that the Irishman is beginning to say : " After all, perhaps the Simi Feiners are not going to win. That being so, I had better go gently for a little and not commit myself too much to them. If, after all, I have miscalculated in thinking that they are going to be my masters, I shall be a long way out unless I hedge a bit, and promptly."
We have one more thing to say to our readers. We ask them not to be influenced by what they read in the pro- Nationalist and anti-Unionist papers regarding the death of the Lord Mayor of Cork. They must remember that the Irish are masters of calumny, and that half the things that are said in regard to our rule in Ireland are either lies or, what is worse, half lies. The Irish rhetorician has a positive genius for political invective. He can blacken a man's character with a certainty and a skill— we had almost said a delicacy of touch—which almost take one's breath away by their apparent innocence and sincerity. Take as an example the way in which Irish writers by their own pens and by inspiring the pens of ignorant and sentimental English writers managed to pour calumny on the head of Lord Castlereagh and to represent him as a kind of callous and bloodstained imbecile. He was hated because, though a strong Whig by inclination, he saw that nothing but the Union would save his country. If ever a man was written down by others and proved an exception to Dr. Johnson's rule, it was Castlereagh. For a hundred years the world believed him to be a ruthless, worthless man. Yet now that we look into his case, we find that he was an extraordinarily enlightened politician and that many of his views should commend him to the Pacifists. At any rate, he would now be an ardent supporter of the League of Nations, and very strongly against anything in the nature of vindictiveness to beaten enemies. His memor- anda to his colleagues and to the Congress of Vienna, his speeches in Parliament in regard to the Holy Alliance and his refusal to guarantee the doings of the anti-Liberal Govern- ments on the Continent, are examples of his political sagacity and his liberal spirit, as also are his Indian despatches. Just the same effort to crush by calumny has been made with regard to Sir Edward Carson. Sir Edward Carson, instead of being the brutal, bloody-minded man that his unscrupulous Irish detractors represent him to be, is in truth not only one of the kindest-hearted of men, but one of the most just-minded. If he erre, it is from too great a sensitiveness and from too strong a sense of humanity, not from too little.
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