VA9I3 ifif f n 913 M35 919 opy 1 1HE IRISH ISSUE BY WILLIAM J. M. A. MALONEY, M.D. Captain in the British Army August, 1914— August, 1916 THIRD EDITION Revised and Amended New York THE AMERICA PRESS 173 East 83d Street 1919 PRICE TEN CENTS CONTENTS The Irish Issue I. In Its American Aspect 3 II. In Its English Aspect 12 III. In Its Irish Aspect 2.2 IV. In Its " Ulster " Aspect 32 V. In Its International Aspect 47 The above articles appeared successively in AMERICA, a Catholic Review of the Week, on October 16, 23, and 30, and on November 6 and 13, 1918, respectively. Copyrighted, 1919, by THE AMERICA PRESS ©CI.A512368 .ty*> The Irish Issue in Its American Aspect ABOUT 150 years ago the American States, becom- ing increasingly self-conscious, felt it to be inconsistent with their rights longer to submit to colonial bondage. They readily perceived a community of interests with Ireland, the oldest ©f England's de- pendencies. Not that the American States, 3,000 miles from England, had ever experienced the weight of the yoke which Ireland, on the threshold of England, endured. But in principle the problem confronting the two dependencies was identical. " The question in both countries," wrote Froude (" English in Ireland," p. 189), " was substantially the same ; whether the Mother Country had a right to utilize her dependencies for her own interests irrespective of their consent." And the all- wise Franklin, preparing for the contest which was to settle this question for his people, visited Ireland in 1771 to emphasize to the Irish Patriot party the essential unity of American aims with Irish interests. " I found them," he records (" Franklin's Works,* VII., p. 557-558) " dis- posed to be friends of America in which I endeavored to confirm them with the expectation that our growing weight might in turn be thrown into one scale and by joining our interests with theirs a more equitable treat- ment from this nation (England) might be obtained for themselves as well as for us." Franklin not only sought through Ireland to "weaken England in the impending struggle against the American States, he also contem- plated an affiliation of Ireland and of Canada with the people he represented. His diplomatic mission was fol- lowed up by action on the part of the first general Con- gress which met in Philadelphia on September 4, 1774. For any subject of England to aid America was, of course, treason against England. And the American Fathers, conscious of the consequences of this crime, deemed it their duty to forbid the Island of Jamaica to incur the dangers of aiding the Revolution. " The peculiar situation of your Island," said the Congressional Letter to the Jamaican Assembly, read on July 25, 1775, " forbids your assistance." Remoteness from England endowed Jamaica with, at least, relative safety. If wise discretion was advisable in Jamaica, it might have been considered imperative in Ireland, isolated and well nigh defenseless at the very gates of England, and therefore in a " peculiar situation " to perform vicarious expiation for all traitorous colonists. But no admonition to caution came from Congress to moderate Irish ardor for the American cause. Instead, Congress appointed a committee to draft an address " To the People of Ireland " which was read on July 28, 1775, and which ran as follows : We are desirous of the good opinion of the virtuous and humane. We are peculiarly desirous of furnishing you with the true state of our motives and objects ; the better to enable you to judge of our conduct with accuracy and determine the merits of the controversy with impartiality and precision. Your Parliament has done us no wrong. You had ever been friendly to the rights of mankind ; and we acknowledge with pleasure and gratitude that your nation has produced patriots who have nobly distinguished themselves in the cause of humanity and of America. The judgment sought by Congress from Ireland was so unanimous in favor of America that the disastrous effect of the Revolution on Irish trade did not prevent " the mass of the people, both Catholic and Protestant, from wishing success to the patriotic colonists" (Mitchel). " Ireland was with America to a man," declared Pitt, the " Great Commoner " (Bancroft's " History of the United States," vol. VII., p. 194). The people of Dublin pre- sented their thanks, and the " Merchants' Guild " gave an address of honor to the Earl of Effingham who " re- fused to draw the sword against the lives and liberties of his fellow-subjects " in America. In Belfast meetings were held and money was raised to support the American cause. And Grattan boldly referred to America as " the only hope of Ireland and the only refuge of the liberties of mankind " (" Select Speeches of Grattan," edited by Duffy, p. 104). The menace of that "hostility to the pretensions of England " which Franklin had sought to excite in Ireland, grew aggressively until it proved powerful to reinforce American valor in establishing the independence of the revolting States. The Americans had incited in the Irish a fervor for freedom which Lord North and his contemporaries, in spite of conciliation, corruption and concession failed to calm. It did not evoke a crisis till 1782, and it did not make the country a shambles till 1798; but from the first it was an ever present danger at the very heart of the British Empire and it gravely handicapped the war council at Westminster in the conduct of their operations against the American revolutionaries. But apart altogether from the influence which Ireland's attitude exerted upon the fate of the American Revolu- tion, England had direct evidence of the Irish share in her defeat. Practically the first blow in the Revolution was struck on behalf of the American rebels by the son of a Lim- erick schoolmaster, John Sullivan of New Hampshire, who on December 13, 1774, captured the Fort of William and Mary. The first stroke at British sea power was delivered for America, off Machias, on the coast of Maine, in May, 1775, by Jeremiah O'Brien. Richard Montgomery of Raphoe and other Irish generals helped to lead the American forces in the field ; Andrew Brown, an Ulsterman, served as Mustermaster General ; Stephen Moylan, brother of the Bishop of Cork, acted as aide-de- camp to Washington, and later as Quartermaster General to the Forces ; John Barry, formerly of Wexford, father of the American navy, scoured the seas ; the Friendly Sons of St. Patrick contributed to the revolu- tionary treasury $517,000, an immense sum in those days ; and men of Irish birth and blood stood high in the councils of the revolutionary Government. The famous Pennsylvania line, the bulwark of the American defense, was called " the line of Ireland," so largely was it formed of Irishmen. The New Jersey line " bristled with Irish- men." There were Irishmen in every American camp and field. In the course of a debate in the Irish House of Commons on April 2, 1784, the Hon. Luke Gardiner stated : I am assured from the best authority that the major portion 6 of the American army was composed of Irish and that the Irish language was as commonly spoken in the American ranks as English. I am also informed that it was their valor determined the contest so that England had America detached from her by force of Irish emigrants. Major General Robertson of the British army in " The Evidence as Given Before a Committee of the House of Commons on the Detail and the Conduct of the American War" (London, 1785), is recorded as testifying under oath that the American General, Henry Lee, informed him that " half the rebel Continental army were from Ireland." In 1779 Count Arthur Dillon, the son of an Irish noble- man in the service of Louis XVI., addressed to the French War Office a petition on behalf of all the Irish soldiers in France craving that they be allowed to go to fight for American freedom. The petition being granted, he sailed from Brest with 2,300 Irish troops. In con- formity with the American plan of campaign, Dillon was directed to attack British strongholds in the West Indies. He and the other Irishmen, the very van of the forces sent from France, soon paralyzed British power in the West Indies and captured there, bases of British activity against America. Presently, Count Arthur Dillon was Governor of St. Christopher ; Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Fitzmaurice, Governor of St. Eustasia, and Lieutenant Colonel H. D. Dunn, Commandant of the Island of Granada. The Irish died on the field, languished in the British prison-hulks in the harbor of New York, lived maimed, and were branded traitors, that America should be free. And when the Declaration of Independence was issued among those who signed it were: Smith, Taylor, and Thornton, of Irish birth ; McKean, Read, and Routledge, of Irish parentage; Carroll and Lynch, grandsons of Irishmen ; and Hancock and Whipple, of Irish descent on the maternal side. Well might George Washington Parke Custis, the adopted son of the Father of the United States, say to his countrymen : The Shamrock should be entwined with the laurels of the Revolution. Americans, recall to your minds the recollections of this heroic time when Irishmen were your friends, and when in the whole world we had not a friend beside. The rank grass had grown over the grave of many a poor Irishman who had died for America, ere the Flag of the Lilies floated in the field by the Star-Spangled Banner. The triumph of the American cause had the conse- quence in Ireland which the American Fathers had humanely foreseen in the case of Jamaica. The Irish share in that triumph induced a very natural resentment in England, to which the proximity of America's chief and most jubilant accomplice afforded an occasion and an opportunity for leisurely satisfaction. Hence we find General Abercromby, the penitent chief of the British Forces in Ireland, writing of the '98 rebellion : " Every cruelty and crime that could be committed by Cossacks or Calmucks had been committed in Ireland by the Army and with the sanction of those in high office." After the rebellion of 1867, John Stuart Mill (Pamphlet, "Eng- land and Ireland") felt sorrowfully impelled still to con- fess : " Short of actual depopulation and desolation and the direct enslaving of the inhabitants little was omitted in Ireland which could give a people cause to execrate its conqueror." Americans may gage the bitterness of Eng- 8 land's resentment by the long persistence of her hostility to America, in spite of the conciliatory efforts of the best statesmen of both countries ; and its continued action in Ireland was demonstrated in May, 1916, by the brutality of the executions of the Irish rebels, then daily occurring in Dublin, a brutality which led the doyen of American literature, a sincere friend of England, William Dean Howells, publicly to protest that mercy was still an at- tribute of justice. The triumph of America imposed another and a greater burden upon Ireland. Economic conditions, unrelieved by a resentful England, and, in part, imposed by her, to- gether with the lure of freedom, converted Ireland into a nursery for the great American Republic, and depleted Ireland not only of her man power, but also of the resources and energies absorbed in training citizens to the greater honor and glory of the United States. In the last seventy years the population of Ireland has sunk from *8,i75,i24 to 4,390,219; over 6,000,000 people have left her shores ; and the vast majority of these sailed for America. The success of the American Revolution forewarned the Government of England and taught them successfully to resist its repetition elsewhere. So Ireland's task be- came more formidable, while she grew physically less able to accomplish it. In other words, America's triumph immeasurably increased the odds against Ireland. A striking example of this result is visible at present when Ireland is in possession of an English army of occupation which musters only half the number of the Irish born who fell in the American Civil War. * Census reports 1841 and 1911. But in 1776, a new principle was forever established in the world, a principle that was assumed to be self-evident, the principle of the absolute and equal natural rights of man, rights derived from God alone. This principle was graven on Irish minds by America, when Irishmen had the honor to contribute greatly to its triumphant vindica- tion, on behalf of the citizens of the United States. The principle is obviously as applicable to Ireland as it was to America ; and Irishmen, in spite of all handicaps have never abated their efforts to enforce their right to apply it to Ireland. Since the days when she was incited by America to assert that right " with the expectation that our (America's) growing weight might in turn be thrown into one scale . . . that a more equitable treatment from this nation (England) might be obtained for them- selves as well as for us," Ireland has continuously main- tained her right. A succession of patriots, in 1798, 1803, 1848, 1867, and in 1916, " dared beyond their strength, and hazarded against their judgment, and in extremities were of an excellent hope " that that right might not lapse. More a small nation unaided may not accomplish for freedom ; and more is not necessary to establish now the unequivocal right of Ireland to the full and free application of President Wilson's principle of self- determination. As many Irishmen have fallen in this war as Ameri- cans. Unlike some now specially favored peoples, the Irish have fallen fighting only for the Allies' cause. If a geographical situation within the Empires of the Central Powers be not the only claim to freedom which is now valid, the claim of Ireland should be, at least in America, on an equality with the claims of other subject nations. 10 But, while other nations are fortunately freed, Irish leaders are held without form, or trial, or charge, in Eng- lish jails ; an alien army occupies Ireland ; martial law prevails there ; and the press and the people are held incommunicado. Will Americans now recall to their minds, as Custis once exhorted them, that heroic time when Irishmen were their friends and when in the whole world they had not a friend beside? For today, as in the days of Grattan, America " is the only hope of Ireland." It is, however, a strong and confident hope, for on the fate of Ireland rests the whole moral structure of the Allied cause, and the warrant of America's President is sufficient guarantee for the integrity of that structure. II The Irish Issue in Its English Aspect WHEN America, mainly to enforce in Europe her cardinal national principle of " government only by the consent of the governed," joined with England against Germany, unity of moral purpose as well as the former identity and unbroken community of American with Irish interests, together with the prom- inent part which Americans of Irish blood would in- evitably play in this country's war efforts, seemed morally to require that England should free Ireland. England refused. America's first objective in the war was the defeat of Germany. To attain it, the maximum effort of the Allied strength was needful, and was pro- curable only through the completely harmonious asso- ciation of America with England. It became, therefore, impolitic for America to urge a denied claim upon her obdurate associate. England's refusal led the American authorities to regard Ireland's demand for freedom as a possible cause of discord in American national unity : hence, America, the belligerent, proceeded to discourage Ireland's demand. Powerful influences, both domestic and alien, were then brought to bear upon American public opinion, and that court, so far as the case of Ireland was concerned, virtually abdicated its function, in favor of England. 12 Irish witnesses were denied a hearing, or were allowed to testify only through England's advocates who, at their pleasure, suppressed, altered, or mutilated the Irish testimony. The Mansion House Committee, consisting of the Nationalist, Sinn Fein, and Labor leaders, pre- pared a brief of Ireland's case (June u, 1918), in the form of an address to President Wilson, and deputed the Lord Mayor of Dublin to deliver it at Washington. Be- cause the address to the President was not submitted to the approval of the military governor of Ireland, Eng- land refused passports for the journey; and when the address ultimately reached this country, through Am- bassador Page, the American press, with scarcely an exception, denied publicity to it. These facts are now cited mainly to prove that Eng- land was entirely uninfluenced and unhampered in the preparation and presentation of her defense against Ire- land's claim. The form which that defense took' may, therefore, be presumed to be the English aspect of the Irish issue, which England desires every American to appreciate. And now that Germany is vanquished it is surely permissible — and, perhaps, essential to America's purpose in the war — to examine this English aspect of the Irish issue. England alleged: first, that Ireland was too poor to exist unaided as well as too weak to live undefended, and was in fact at the moment both subsisting on Eng- land's bounty and sheltering under the protection of England's army and navy; secondly, that the Irish were too backward to be competent for self-government, but were, nevertheless, through the Irish representatives in the British Parliament, allowed to share in the govern- 13 ment not only of Ireland, but also of Britain and of the Empire; thirdly, that the Irish, being divided into dis- cordant groups of Catholics and Protestants, of Ulsterites and natives, of Unionists, Nationalists," and Sinn Fein- ers, were notoriously incapable of agreeing among them- selves as to the form of government they desired, and that, therefore, the Irish alone were to blame for. placing England, in the interests of peace and order, under the necessity of continuing to govern Ireland. At this point in the case, in response to a suggestion made by leading Americans that to facilitate the free development of America's war strength, as well as for other reasons, a settlement was desirable and might be possible (Sym- posium of American opinion published by the London Times April 27, 1917), the Prime Minister of England offered on behalf of his Government (Letter from Mr. Lloyd George to Mr. John Redmond, May 16, 1917) a convention of Irishmen, and later, his pledge that if that convention could " substantially agree upon any form of government for Ireland, within the Empire, England would legalize that agreement." Certain of the Irish objected that the rider, " within the Empire," begged the whole question at issue. The objection was ignored; and England appointed a group of Irish peers and com- moners who on April 5, 1918, by a final vote of forty- four to twenty-nine, agreed on a plan for the self-gov- ernment of Ireland (Official Report of the Proceedings of the Irish Convention, p. 172). England, on the grounds (1) that the twenty-nine in the minority repre- sented the British in Ireland whom the mother country could not in conscience condemn to the status of irre- dentists, and (2) that the size of the majority denoted 14 lack of " substantial " agreement, declined to fulfil the Prime Minister's pledge; and, instead, proceeded to allege that the Irish issue, being a question solely of England's domestic policy, was a British and not an Irish question. In proof of this contention, conscription of the Irish solely by the English and against the unan- imous vote of the Irish representatives in Commons was passed on April 17, 1918; therefore, the Irish issue was beyond the jurisdiction of American public opinion. Lastly Britain asserted that Ireland was an enemy both of England and of America, was, moreover, a friend of Germany, and was, therefore, a menace, and should be outlawed and debarred from justice. In support of the last contention (1) certain events of the Rising of 1916 were disinterred (chiefly Roger Casement's activities and the alleged attempt to land arms for the Irish Republi- cans made by the S. S. " Auk ") and exposed to the public gaze; (2) an ex-police official of Irish birth, lately a corporal in the British army, was, first, mysteriously produced from an island on the west coast of Ireland where he was said to have landed from a German sub- marine, and then ostentatiously interned in the Tower of London; and, (3) eighty-six of Ireland's leaders were suddenly arrested (May 19, 1918) and deported to England, without charge or form, under the imputation of being concerned in a German plot. The first remarkable feature of this English aspect of the Irish issue is its irrelevancy. The Irish issue, the right of the Irish to " government only by the consent of the governed," was neither admitted nor denied: nor was it ever even discussed by England. No effort was made to prove by geography, or history, by ethnography IS or tradition, by religion or customs, that Ireland was an inseparable part of Britain. So soon after the 1916 Re- bellion, England could not credibly allege that the Irish did not desire freedom; nor was there available such evidence of Irish content with things appertaining either to this world or to the next, and derived from English rule, as would condone that rule in Ireland. In brief, the morality of the English occupation of Ireland was not defended. Would it be permissible to infer that the English occupation of Ireland is morally indefensible? It was not on the grounds of the morality but of the expediency of that occupation that sanction for it was sought by England from America. In 1914, when Ire- land was hailed by England's Foreign Secretary, Grey, " as the one bright spot in the darkness of war," when Ireland's war efforts rivaled England's, America, at that time a neutral spectator, observed that Ireland was then, no less than she now is, denied her freedom; and was, besides, commonly subject to that Zabernism which Mr. Lloyd George later excused as arising from " the malig- nant stupidities of the War Office." The Auk, in 1916, failed where a Danish S. S., renamed the Fanny, and chartered by the Carsonites, had succeeded in 1914. On April 26, of that year, the Fanny landed at Larne 50,000 rifles, purchased from the Deutsche Muni- tionen und Waff en Fabrik, and shipped from Hamburg; and the Germans, thereby encouraged, started, in the fol- lowing August, the world war that has just come to an end. Carson's activities were the incentive to Casement's. America, the reluctant belligerent, has doubtless judged 10 Carson: America, the America of Nathan Hale, has doubtless judged Casement also. The allegation that Ireland is hostile to America was too vaguely put to permit or to require refutation. Un- like the Poles, the Czechs and Slovaks and others now much favored, no Irish can be accused of fighting in the German army. The fewness of the Irish prisoners in Germany who are stated to have harkened to Casement is in itself proof of Ireland's loyalty to the Allied cause. The English royal princes and Houston Chamberlains in the German service far outnumbered the suborned starv- ing Irish captives. Friendship with Germany (except amongst those Ulsterites who, in 1914, invoked the aid of that great " Protestant Prince," the Kaiser) was, and is, of neces- sity, non-existant in an Ireland whose chief link with Germany is hateful memories of Hessians and Hano- verian kings. Ireland alone in all the world afforded organized combatant aid to France in the Franco- Prussian war. Even the British confess that 200,000 of the 4,000,000 people of Ireland (five per cent of the total population, and at least two-thirds of the available men of military age) voluntarily enlisted to fight Ger- many. The casualties inflicted by Germany on the Irish troops far exceeded in number those inflicted upon the troops of the 110,000,000 people of America. After the United States, Ireland was the chief source of England's food supply, the chief defence against the starvation of England by the German submarine. Every Irish tax- payer contributed shilling for shilling with the British taxpayer in meeting the costs of the war against Ger- many. And the almost complete destruction — even to 1? the final tragedy of the S. S. Leinster — by the German submarine, of all ships plying from Irish ports, ships Irish-manned — these discreetly unemphasized things are surely no evidence of friendship with Germany. Concerning the German plot, the Irish pointed out that the former police official, the alleged submarine pas- senger, had landed not from a submarine collapsible, but from a Ford collapsible boat, made in the city of Cork : and his trial for treason, in London, was not secret enough to hide the fact that he had nothing German to reveal. It was also pointed out that the Irish revolution- ary leaders, imprisoned in England, at the bare announce- ment of the plot, were, during the time that the plotting was alleged to have occurred in Ireland, actually held in English jails, because of their part in the rising of 1916. Lord Wimborne, the Viceroy during whose administration the plotting was alleged to have taken place in Ireland, stated from his place in the British House of Lords, be- fore the plot was announced, that the Irish were not pro- German, but pro-Irish (November 15, 1917). After the plot was announced, he denied the existence of any such conspiracy. And from then till now England has disclosed no credible evidence of the alleged plot and has declined not only to bring to trial, but even to charge, the alleged plotters. Under the circumstances is the conclusion that the alleged plot was bogus, unwarranted? Would it be right to contrast (1) the grounds of expediency wh'<^ England used to justify the military occupation of a help- less Ireland thus alleged to be friendly to the enemy, Germany; with (2) the grounds of expediency which Bethmann-Hollweg with frank brutality used to justify 18 Germany in the occupation of a helpless Belgium alleged to be friendly to the enemy, England ? Nations in being vanquished are made poor and weak and are kept so to keep them subject. As a further mili- tary precaution, conquered peoples are degraded, divided, and colonized by the victor. The first four points in the English aspect of the Irish issue seem chiefly the stereo- typed and tragic consequences of usurpation, disguised by time, and perverted in origin. These four points sufficed both to condemn German usurpation in Poland and to justify English usurpation in Ireland. The colo- nists whom Germany had planted in Alsace-Lorraine served only to strengthen the French demand for restitu- tion : the colonists England had planted in Ireland — now in many cases more Irish and anti-English than the Irish — served only to strengthen the English denial of restitution there. England correctly characterized as a temporary expedient of evident insincerity, the German decree of December 8, 1916, which ap- pointed a Polish Council and deputed to that Council the drafting of a plan for the self-government of Poland within the German Empire: England on May 16, 1917, announced that she was about to appoint an Irish Convention and to depute to that Convention the drafting of a plan for the self-government of Ireland within the British Empire. Germany set up a provi- sional Polish Government and requested it to conscript the Poles ; and Germany set up a provisional Esthonian Government and requested it to conscript the Esthonians : for which England rightfully denounced Germany. But without even this Teutonic concession to nationality, the British enacted conscription for Ireland. Would it be 19 just to conclude that the Irish issue in its English aspect, as succesfully presented to the American people by Eng- land, differed only in nomenclature from the Polish, Es- thonian, Alsatian and Belgian issues in their German aspect, as successfully presented by Germany to the Ger- man people? This English aspect of the Irish issue might be thought to be merely the war-fevered fancy of irresponsible Eng- lish propagandists. But present conditions in Ireland show that the conduct of the English in Ireland both conforms to the English propaganda here and duplicates the con- duct of Germany towards her subject peoples. And this English conduct towards Ireland is not a new develop- ment, induced by the stress of war, in a sorely beset Eng- land. While Britain, abroad, was championing the cause of Greece and Hungary, Italy, and Poland, just as today she is championing the cause of — among others — the Czecho-Slovaks, Esthonians, Arabians and Jugo-Slavs, and is insisting upon self-determination for the German African Askari, England, at home, held, as she now holds, Ireland from freedom. When circumstances com- pelled, England gave Ireland doles of liberty, and with- drew or reclaimed them when circumstances permitted. In 1782, England, in difficulties with America, France and Holland yielded to Ireland legislative independence for- ever; in 1800, England, in fewer difficulties, destroyed the independent Irish Parliament. Catholic emancipation in Ireland was, and is vitiated by Protestant ascendancy rule. Nearly 100 separate Coercion acts, together with periods of martial law, have efficiently filled the void in the Eng- lish system of governing Ireland, left by the repeal of the penal laws. The Irish, in 1903, were partially restored to 20 their own land, by the aid of money borrowed in Eng- land, and repaid with interest by the Irish. The Home Rule act, passed in 1913, has since remained securely in- terned among inoperative British statutes. It is not necessary further to multiply instances to prove that the English aspect of the Irish issue has ever been what it now is, the conventional aspect of a con- queror to a conquered people ; and if today be any guide to the morrow, England intends to continue to apply to Ireland, so far as America will permit, those standards which another arbitrary power was also wont to follow in dealing with subject peoples now happily free. Amer^ ica, the belligerent, might permit an associate much that is fortunately not American either in principle or in pur- pose, even the English aspect of the Irish issue, because of the necessity to substitute the American for the Ger- man aspect of certain other national issues deemed more urgent. The armistice is now signed : these issues are in process of satisfactory rectification : the substitution of the American for the English aspect of the Irish issue, the institution in Ireland of government only by the con- sent of the people, is now in order. 21 Ill The Irish Issue in Its Irish Aspect AT the time of the American Revolution the states- men of America and of Ireland had attained to almost the same eminence of political concep- tion, and in their zeal to give to their respective peo- ples the principle of popular freedom, they had gone much further than any contemporary nation. One hun- dred and forty years later America is the arbiter of the world's destinies, and Ireland seems to be the last, if not the least, of the world's concerns. The question in- evitably arises : Has Ireland affirmed her right to free- dom by all the ways a conscious nationality can affirm that right? The answer can be found in Ireland's his- tory only. The events of that history are indisputable and undisputed. Such of these events as resulted from Irish action reflect the Irish aspect of the Irish issue. Ireland can ask no fairer presentation of her case than that which the Irish themselves have offered at the court of history. And America can seek no better guide to the nature of the Irish issue, and its Irish aspect, than that which history affords of the period from the end of the American War of Independence to the present day. At the very beginning of that period, the first great affirmation of Irish nationality occurred : an Irish volun- teer army, over 100,000 strong, was organized (1782). 22 With this army Ireland was content to accept from Eng- land a parliament endowed with " perpetual " legisla- tive independence for Ireland. The mass of the Irish people were excluded from direct participation in this parliament; but, as it represented Irish, as distinguished from English, rule, Ireland welcomed it, although America, more wise, had declined in 1778 a similar Eng- lish substitute for freedom. " In 1783, a haughty peti- tion was addressed to the throne on behalf of the Roman Catholics by an association styling itself a Congress. No man could suppose that a designation, so ominously significant, had been chosen by accident; and by the court of England it was received, as it was meant, for an insult and a menace. What came next?" (De Quincey, " The Irish Rebellion," " Essay in Life and Manners," Boston, 1851, p. 127). Next came the suborning of the planters and placemen of Ireland's Parliament, till, under duress and largess, they yielded their function to the English Government. The Union of the Irish to the English Parliament was not legalized before 1800, but it had then long been effective. De- frauded of their perpetual legislative independence by extra-constitutional means, the Irish sought independence by arms (1798) ; and insurrections followed which were not finally crushed until 1803. The Union and the proc- ess of crushing the rebellions, deprived Ireland both of her planter statesmen and of her republican revolutionaries: and for a time Ireland was stunned and still and leader- less. Then O'Connell appeared with his scrupulously constitutional agitation to amend the laws by which Catholics were degraded to an inferior political status, an agitation that was as essentially an expression of a 23 demand for political freedom as was the militant dem- onstration of the Volunteers, which extorted the 1782 Parliament. Peel explained his conversion to the cause of emancipation on the ground that the peasants of Clare, who he had believed were serfs, were the pos- sessors of the " true and unbreakable spirit of freemen." Wellington frankly admitted that he supported the meas- ure because " the Irish regiments were cheering for O'Connell." Then the Irish people, with the sympathy of Ledru Rollin in France and of President Tyler in America, put forward a constitutional demand for the repeal of the Union (1832-1844), for the return of their legislative independence, for the resumption of that path to freedom which they had trod in the days when Franklin and Washington were one with them in thought and in purpose. England defeated this consti- tutional demand by the unconstitutional imprisonment of O'Connell (1844). Led by Smith O'Brien the Irish again revolted (1848). Out of the grave of the insur- rection of 1848 arose the Fenians, a physical-force party pledged to an Irish republic, a party that was defeated and dispersed in the risings of 1867. The Church of Ireland, mainly a hierarchy of aliens, ministering to less than a tenth of the people of Ireland, took a tithe of the country's goods. As an instalment of freedom the Irish sought the remission of this tribute by the disestablish- ment of the Church that legally imposed it. Gladstone who enacted the disestablishment in the English Com- mons (1868) confessed that it was the Fenians who had " rung the chapel bell," and he had legislated fearful of that warning. Meanwhile, a movement, through passive resistance, strikes and sabotage, to free the peasant from 24 the status of chattel and to raise him to the level neces- sary for a stable national society, had spontaneously de- veloped among the Irish peasantry. The Irish were not freed by imperial rescript, as were the " souls " in Rus- sia. A long and relentless struggle ensued in Ireland, which was virtually ended by the Land Act of 1903. While this struggle was waging, the fight for legislative independence continued. At Westminster, Parnell stood " single handed in the ford to hack and hew an ancient parliament till it fell misshapen from his sword." The fight he fought enabled his successor, Redmond, to gain for Ireland, first, local government for counties in county affairs (1898); and, finally, that modified form of legislative independence which is called Home Rule. In 1912, again in 1913, and yet again in 1914, the British Commons passed the Home Rule bill. In 1914, it re- ceived the endorsement of King, Lords, and Commons. It was then " suspended." The Irish after this final lesson in the futility of constitutional endeavor, again re- sorted to arms; and the Republic of Ireland was once more proclaimed (Easter, 1916). As a climax to this period, English-appointed courts, in suits brought by Dublin property owners, decreed that damage done in the 1916 revolution was legally the act oi an usurping government in Ireland. Every legislative gain sought or achieved by Ireland was in one direction : every gain was the best that was obtainable having regard to the circumstances of the time: every method, whether constitutional or uncon- stitutional, was devised for one end, and was designed to overcome the prevailing form of the opposition of Eng- land: every leader who sprang to take the place of him 25 who fell, or of him who was silenced by execution, de- portation, or imprisonment, led the forces of Ireland toward the same goal. With constitutionalists and with rebels, in peaceful and in forceful methods, in victory and in defeat, through changes of leaders, weapons, strategy, and tactics, this ultimate purpose of Ireland remained clear and invariable. It was, it is, and it will always remain, the vindication of the right of Ireland to government only by the consent of the governed. In this review of Ireland's history, measures initiated by the Irish to cement the union with England are not mentioned ; for no such measures exist. Indeed, five times since the establishment of the American Republic, the Irish have attempted by force of arms to found the Republic of Ireland. England to this day professes ig- norance of the Irish issue in its Irish aspect ; but there was always at hand in Ireland, as there now is, an Eng- lish army to suppress the realization of the ideal of the Republic of Ireland. In this review of Ireland's history, measures initiated by the Irish and appertaining only to Ulster are not men- tioned; for no such measures exist. The Irish leaders in this continuous struggle came from all quarters of the country : Gavan Duffy, John Mitchel, and John Mar- tin were all Ulstermen, as were also Isaac Butt and Roger Casement. They belonged to both creeds : O'Connell, Meagher, and Pearse were Catholics ; Grattan, Tone, Emmet, Fitzgerald, Smith O'Brien, Davis, Mitchel, Mar- tin, Parnell and Casement were Protestants. And they were drawn from all classes, from Michael Davitt of the Irish peasantry to Edward Fitzgerald of the Irish peerage. In the ranks, too, all classes, creeds, and provinces loyally 26 served. All contributed to the victories and participated in their results : Catholic emancipation was the emancipa- tion of all by all ; the Protestant Dissenter was freed with his Catholic fellow-countryman : the disestablishment of the Church of Ireland relieved of the tithe-burden the Protestant Nonconformist no less than the Catholic: the peasantry of Ulster reached the status of proprietorship at the same moment as the peasantry of the other provinces : government of county affairs was won for Ulster when it was won for the rest of Ireland. And all classes, creeds, and provinces have sustained each other in the course of the struggle and have shared the burdens that could not be removed, the casualties, the executions, the imprisonments, the deportations, the evic- tions, the starvation, and the emigration. The struggle is unequaled in history as a struggle by a united nation for national freedom. Few nations have suffered such casualties and kept their identity; but Ireland is still Irish. The spirit of Ire- land's nationality was long sustained by the Irish priest- hood. O'Connell founded reading rooms in every vil- lage and hamlet to educate his people. Mangan, Davis and Duffy, together with the other Young Irelanders. roused by their writings that pride of race which his- tory bade the Irish remember and which serfdom made them forget. Douglas Hyde and his Gaelic League re- stored her speech to Ireland, and taught her the glories of her ancient literature. Yeats, Synge, AE, and Colum wrote the songs and dramas of Irish Ireland. A national theater, a thing unknown in England, flourished in Ire- land. Pearse and McDonagh in St. Enda's School molded the boyhood of Ireland in an Irish mold. Eoin MacNeill, 27 and others, made the National University an Irish univer- sity. Plunkett and Russell led the Irish farmer to eco- nomic independence through cooperation. 'And a spirit of dignity, discipline, self-reliance and thrift, an Irish spirit worthy of an Irish nation, was fostered and maintained among the people, that a free Ireland might be an Irish Ireland. Since the American Revolution roused men free of soul in every land, Ireland in her history has consistently shown that she is a nation in the grip of a national ideal, the ideal of national freedom. In spite of recurrent slaughter, of a prison policy seldom excelled by Tsars, and of a depopulation which the Turk has not often rivaled and very rarely surpassed, Ireland has not wavered from her purpose to be free. There has been no frailty of spirit, no lack of energy, no want of determina- tion, no dearth of daring, no shrinking from sacrifice, in the affirmation of Ireland's right of national freedom. Now, at the end of 140 years of dauntless endeavor, when Ireland is more unconquerable, more Irish, more free in spirit, and more determined to be also free in fact, is it likely that anything short of the full application of Presi- dent Wilson's principles will satisfy the indomitable peo- ple of Ireland? Circumstances prospered America, but not Ireland; and the legal, social and intellectual censorship which England exerts over the English-speaking world has further tended to make America unmindful of the fact that the Irish issue in its Irish aspect has always been identical with what was once the American issue in its American aspect. America now comes mighty from the vindication of the rights of subject peoples to national 28 liberty. But what will it profit the soul of America if it gain the freedom of the whole world and suffer the loss of the freedom of Ireland? From 1782 to 191 8, England has found it necessary on over 100 occasions to resort to coercion acts, suspen- sions of the habeas corpus act, martial law, and its analogues, to enforce her authority in Ireland. In 1844, 1881 and 1918 England felt compelled to imprison the Irish leaders en masse, in order to secure again for her- self executive power in Ireland. In 1798, 1803, 1848, 1867 and 1916 England had to reconquer Ireland; and England now holds Ireland by virtue of an English army of occupation, under a military governor. Will not these war and siege measures need to be continued until Ire- land be free, a nation once again? And if out of the war a League of Nations be formed, a league that lacks the nation of Ireland, may not its first duty be to aid England in Ireland as the Holy Alliance aided Turkey in Greece? The people of Ireland have, in their isolation, set at defiance England, the possessor of an empire greater than that of ancient Rome, an empire to which 400,000,000 are subject, to which the riches of the universe are tribute, of which the world's largest navy is guard. When Eng- land fought against, and when England fought alongside, the United States ; when England was allied with other nations of Europe against Napoleon; when England approved of that Alliance against freedom that was pro- fanely styled Holy ; when England with France and Pied- mont fought Russia in the Crimea to save the unspeak- able Turk; when England morally supported Prussia against France in the Franco-Prussian War; when Eng- 29 land, as Ribot lately disclosed, entered an entente with Germany against France and Russia; when England allied herself with Japan against Russia ; when England with France and Spain united against Germany at Alge- ciras ; when England was associated with the victorious powers of the world — during all these mutations of the international hatreds and friendships of England, the peo- ple of Ireland were pursuing their immutable purpose of national freedom. If a League of Nations that lacks the nation of Ireland be now created, will not Ireland con- tinue dauntlessly to pursue her purpose till a free Ireland be recognized as an essential member of that league, or until the league itself shall become a thing of the past, and be numbered in history among the fleeting alliances of England? While America has grown to greatness ; while French empires and republics have arisen and passed away ; while Belgium, Greece, Italy, Rumania, Bulgaria, and Serbia, have been born as nations and have developed into powers; while Spanish, Chinese, Russian, Austrian, Turkish, Mexican and Brazilian empires have fallen to pieces ; while the German empire was being created, exalted, and destroyed ; while Norway seceded from Sweden, and Iceland from Denmark, Ireland was per- sistently fighting her fight for freedom. Will not Ireland continue to fight on till she be free, or till the empire that is England be overtaken by the doom that is the fate of empires ? But if Ireland now be paid her earned share of that freedom which is being squandered on the promiscuous and chance acquaintances of war — freedom which Red- mond and Kettle and "more than half a million Irishmen" 30 from Ireland, Britain, Australia, Canada, and New Zea- land, have fought to win ; if Ireland now be given her place in the family of nations; if Ireland's leaders be deemed worthy to appear alongside the Czecho-Slovaks and others at the peace conference; if Ireland now be enrolled as a nation in the League of Nations, would not America's purpose in the war acquire, what it still lacks, absolute and unqualified moral vindication ? Would not the plain people of England be glad that at last amends had been made for an age-long national crime? Would not the foundling nations of the world see in the nation of Ireland a promise and a sign that their life of liberty was established not upon the precarious tenure of the shifting interests of selfish Powers, but upon the firm basis of an inalienable, unalterable, and universal right? Would not the Irish pilgrims, now risen to greatness in every land, become disciples of the new world order, apostles of the new world freedom? Would not an Ire- land, free to live her own life, to think her own thoughts, to write her own message to the world, become again as she once was, the center of Celtic culture, a nation of teachers and scholars, of messengers of peace and good- will to all peoples, even unto the people of England? 31 IV The Irish Issue in Its "Ulster" Aspect w 4 'X^T^ may safely state," writes Van Tyne ("Loyalists in the American Revolution," p. 183), "that 50,000 soldiers, either regular or militia, were drawn into the service of Great Britain from her American sympathizers." These American Loyalists were drawn from the adherents of English families such as " the Carterets and the Penns that had large financial interests in the country " ; from those who " were in re- ceipt of salaries as colonial officials " ; from those " whose families had so long enjoyed the emoluments of office that they formed a class by themselves"; and from British military officers, pensioners and their kin (Channing, "History of the United States," vol. Ill, p. 362). The present-day Ulster Loyalists are composed of Eng- lish and Anglo-Irish peers who have large landed and financial interests in the country, many of whom, like Lord Londonderry, are descended from the men who sold the Irish Parliament to England ; of those who, members of the vast Irish bureaucracy, are in receipt of salaries as Irish officials; of those whose families have so long en- joyed the emoluments of office that they form a class by themselves ; of certain churchmen ; and of British officers, pensioners, and their kin. Some idea of the Loyalism of the last class may be gathered from the fact that, even 32 during the late war for the freedom of small nationalities, in the Sixteenth, the famous Irish division, although ninety-five per cent of the men were Nationalists, eighty- five per cent of the officers, and all above the lowest grades, were Ulsterites or other Unionists (T. P. O'Con- nor, House of Commons, March 7, 1917). In 1776, the American Loyalists maintained that their families had been in possession of the land since its set- tlement; that they, as loyal subjects, "trembled at the thought of separation from England," which " was as necessary to America's safety as a parent to its infant children " ; that " they were prosperous because they were British " ; that " the country did not want independence " ; that the whole agitation " was due to political adventurers of the worst type " ; and that " the unfortunate land would be a scene of bloody discord for ages " if separated from England. " We were formed," said they, " by England's laws and religion. We were clothed with her manufac- tures and protected by her fleets and her armies " (Van Tyne, "The American Revolution," pp. 86 and 87). Today the Ulster Loyalists maintain that their families have been in possession of the land since the colonizations by the Stuarts and Cromwell ; that they tremble at the thought of separation from England ; that they are formed by England's laws and religion and are protected by her fleets and armies ; that Ireland does not want independ- ence; that the whole agitation is duetto adventurers of the worst type ; that the unfortunate land would be a scene of bloody discord for ages if separated from Eng- land ; and that the English know better how to govern the Irish than the Irish do themselves. " By her sheer industry and her connection with England, Ulster has 33 developed into the richest of the provinces (of Ireland). . . . The people of Ulster love the people of England and will not be driven out of the United Kingdom " (Lord Londonderry, London Times, April 6, 1914). Now, however, there is little dispute in Ireland as to the possession of the land : even the peers who assert the contrary have been, or are in process of being, peacefully bought out by the Irish peasantry, Catholic and Protes- tant, Ulsterite and non-Ulsterite, with money lent under the terms of the Land acts of 1903 and 1909. More- over, Ulster is not exclusively Protestant, for it con- tains 690,816 Catholics (45.67 per cent), out of a population of 1,581,696; in live 1 of the nine Ulster counties Catholics are in the majority; and 17 of the 33 actual parliamentary representatives from Ulster are Nationalists. Besides, the Ulster Protestants are not wholly British; there is a considerable admixture of descendants of the Huguenots who came to Ulster after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes ; and, as the Parliamentary returns show, many of the Protestants are Nationalists. Further, Ulster is not the richest of the provinces ; the governmental ratable value of Leins'ter per head is 98 shillings ; of Ulster only 72 shillings. a The pop- ulation of Ulster fell from 2,389,263 in 1861 to 1,581,696 in 191 1 ; this fall affects every county; and the infantile mortality, the best index of civic institutions, is appall- ing in the stronghold of Loyalism, Belfast, where it. chances to be higher in the Protestant than in the Cath- olic sections. Ulster so far from glorying in citizenship of the British Empire, led, even as late as 1910, in the emigration from Ireland (Mr. John Redmond, London, 1 Roman Catholics in Cavan, 81.46%; Donegal. 78.93%; Monaghan, 74.6S%: Fermanagh, 56.18%; Tvrone. 55.39% (OfhVial Report of llie Proceedings of the Irish Convention, 1918, p. 78). 2 Ibid., p. 124. 34 March i, 1912). Nevertheless, there are many prosper- ous Protestants in Ulster ; and they are nearly all Loyal- ists. When America was still a colony, " Protestant dis- senters, descendants of the men who had held London- derry, went in great numbers to America, where they be- came the most irreconcilable of those who sought separa- tion from England " (" Ireland Today," p. 82, reprinted from London Times, 191 3) ; and when America was fighting for freedom from England, these irreconcilable separatists, the Protestant Ulsterites, produced American leaders like Generals Richard Montgomery and Andrew Brown. The Irish Volunteers in 1782, assembling at Dungannon in Ulster, and consisting in goodly proportion of Protestant Ulsterites, extorted from England " per- petual " legislative independence for Ireland. In the '98, Protestant Ulsterites did some of the best fighting for the rebel cause. When the Ulster Protestant brotherhood with Britain was 140 years closer than it is today, the chief question in Ulster was the independence of Ire- land. Since those days there has been an apostolic succes- sion of Ulster Protestants to lead the National cause in Ireland. But, nevertheless, in 1913, Lord Londonderry and kindred peers, with certain among the manifestly prosperous in Ulster, pledged themselves by covenant to resist partial legislative independence (Home Rule) for Ireland, set up an Ulster provisional government in Bel- fast, raised a volunteer corps to support that government, and thus asserted their right to rule Ireland on behalf of the Empire. " I sav here solemnly," announced one Ulster Loyalist who, in 1916, was rewarded with the position of Solicitor- General of Ireland, " that the day England casts me off, 35 I will say, ' England I I will laugh at your calamity, I will mock when your fear cometh ' " (Belfast, May 23, 1913). And another noteworthy Ulster Loyalist wrote in the Irish Churchman (Nov., 191 3) : It may not be known to the rank and file of Unionists that we have the offer of aid from a powerful Continental monarch, who, if Home Rule is forced on the Protestants of Ireland, is prepared to send an army sufficient to release England of any further trouble in Ireland by attaching it to his dominion, be- lieving, as he does, that if our King breaks his coronation oath by signing the Home Rule bill, he will, by so doing, have for- feited his claim to rule Ireland. And should our King sign the Home Rule bill, the Protestants of Ireland will welcome this Continental deliverer as their forefathers, under similar circum- stances, did once before. So some of the prosperous Ulster Loyalists seemed de- termined to maintain their sway in Ireland, even at the cost of transferring their loyalty from England. To rouse the Ulster Loyalists, when Home Rule ap- peared imminent, the Rt. Hon. Walter Long, M. P., came from London to exhort them " to defend themselves by their own right arms and with their own stout hearts " (Newtownards, September 26, 1912). Sir F. E. Smith, M. P., also came from London, with the cry of " To your tents, O Israel! " (Ballyclare, September 20, 1913). And Sir Edward Carson, with his lieutenant, Captain Craig, proclaimed that the Ulsterites " would fight to the last ditch, to the last man." The distinguished Ulster Protes- tant to whom was deputed the task of writing the life of Carson, states: The young men of Ulster . . . were not prepared to die in any ditch, first or last, in order to prevent the enactment of the Home Rule bill, and a reputable number of them were positively 36 prepared to fight for its passage. Intimidation, ranging from threats of social ostracism to threats of dismissal from employ- ment, was used to induce them to sign the covenant or join the Ulster Volunteers. There was talk of boycotting all Protestant Home Rulers, and there was an outburst of ill-will among men who had previously been on good terms. There were shameful scenes of violence in the shipyards, where gangs of infuriated Orange louts attacked isolated Catholic or Protestant Home Rulers and subjected them to acts of outrage and brutality which cannot be fitly described (" Sir Edward Carson," by St. John G. Ervine, p. 56). None of the business men of Ulster, old or young, had any taste for rebellion. They certainly had not the appetite for insurrection that their fathers had in 1798 (loc. cit., p. 57). No matter how it was in Ulster, there was no doubt of the feeling in England, where the following covenant was widely circulated for signature : I, , shall hold myself justified in taking or supporting any action that may be effective to prevent it (the Home Rule act) being put into operation, and more particularly to prevent the armed forces of the Crown being used to deprive the people of Ulster of their rights as citizens of the United Kingdom. Subscriptions were sought in England to sup- port any action that might be effective. Long lists of signers and subscribers appeared at frequent intervals in the London Times and Morning Post during the spring and summer of 1914. The lists comprised the names of Dukes like Bedford, of Earls like Denbigh, of Bishops like Boyd Carpenter, of Barons, Baronets, Knights and lesser personages ; of generals such as Roberts, of ad- mirals such as Beresford, and of their subordinates in the military and naval services ; of financiers and of others with industrial and political purpose, or with social ambi- 37 tion. Sir Edward Carson, who is not an Ulsterman, who has no discoverable relatives in Ulster, who never repre- sented any Ulster constituency, and who was Solicitor- General for England from 1900 to 1906, was chosen to head the Loyalists of Ulster. Under him was an English- man, General Richardson. Another Englishman, Sir F. E. Smith, came over to act as galloper to Carson. Re- tired English officers drilled the Carson army. General Sir Henry Wilson, who is now head of the British War Office, organized it. Generals French and Gough, in com- mand of the British forces at the Curragh, resigned, or threatened to resign, with the officers of their command, if called upon by the British Government to march against their fellow-officers, Protestants and Britishers, of the Carson army. Berlin dispatches (March 31, 1914) informed the world that 50,000 rifles and 1,000,000 rounds of ammunition, " valued at £800,000," had been shipped from Hamburg on March 20. " It is assumed that the rifles are for Ulster," said the London Times of April 1. The Fanny, with the rifles aboard, was soon reported as passing through the Kiel Canal. On April 2j the Times was able to announce that the Fanny, having successfully eluded the entire and forewarned British navy, had peace- fully landed its munitions in Ulster and peacefully de- parted. Among British politicians, Lord Milner, Lord Robert Cecil and all prominent Imperialists and Union- ists, signed the covenant. The people of Ulster, declared the Rt. Hon. Joynson Hicks, M. P., at Warrington, Eng- land, on December 6, 1913, had behind them the Unionist party. Behind them zvas the God of battles. In His name and their name, he said to the Prime Minister, " Let your armies and batteries fire. Fire if you dare. Fire and be 38 damned." An English peer, Lord Willoughby de Broke (Norwich, November 13, 1913), publicly announced: " We are enlisting, enrolling and arming a considerable force of volunteers who are going to proceed to Ulster to reinforce the ranks of Captain Craig and his brave men when the time comes." With a pure and avowed passion to liberate from pend- ing partial Irish rule their brothers in Ulster, their Protes- tant co-religionists, their fellow-citizens in the United Kingdom, their co-heirs in the British Empire, the Impe- rial aristocracy, the Imperial army, the Imperial navy, and the Imperial politicians of England, fomented in Ire- land the act of revolution, and, in England, publicly aided and abetted it. And British " jurists, professors, editors, statesmen, warriors, and even scientists were pro- lific in finding reasons for the act before it was com- mitted." The British Imperialists who organized Carsonism had previously been busy in the Boer War, in the liberation of Protestant Britishers from the thrall of Protestant Burghers. According to the Englishman, Mr. H. G. Wells, " that sort of British Nationalism that is subsi- dized by rich Tories, international financiers and Ulster lawyers who are neither good Irish nor good English, where patriotism is really ■ Britain for the British ex- ploiter,' " is " sham nationalism " (Nezv Republic, No- vember 23, 1918). A Home Rule Ireland would have been an Ireland without economic or judicial or politi- cal or any other independence, an Ireland more sub- ject to Britain than is Canada or any of Britain's self- governing dominions. Hence the avowed concern for 39 the religious, national and imperial rights of the people of Ulster, which was used to sanctify British designs in Ireland, scarcely disguises the fact that a most unjust and pernicious enterprise was undertaken in England to support in Ireland a revolution without legitimate motive. It may be recalled that in 1848 Bismarck, in the Reich- stag, characterized the war of that year in Schleswig-Hol- stein, fomented by the German States, as " a most unjust, frivolous and pernicious enterprise, undertaken to support a revolution without legitimate motive." But he subse- quently planned his autocratic German Empire and in the meantime Denmark's King had bestowed a democratic constitution on the Danish people. Bismarck in 1862 founded his first remonstrances to the Danish Govern- ment explicitly upon its too democratic character. At least one contemporary writer stated (Varnhagen von Ense, Tagebucher, vol. XIII, p. 428)-: "What Austria and Prussia seek at the hands of Denmark is not more regard to the Germanism of Schleswig-Holstein, they do not care much about that. But the anti-German Ministry at Copenhagen is democratic ; they want a reactionary one. That is the root of the matter." So the incentive of Im- perialism together with the fear of an active democracy on his threshold, led Bismarck to say to himself, as he confessed at Friedrichsruhe, May 26, 1895, that Schles- wig-Holstein must be German.. Hazen ("Alsace-Lor- raine under German Rule") and others have likewise shown that the military and profiteering need of German Imperialism, together with the dread of the democ- racy of France, was the real and dominant incentive to the German lust for Alsace-Lorraine. 40 With Mr. Balfour's Ministry, which included Carson, Long, Bonar Law and others who were later to become covenanting Carsonites, the British Imperialists suffered defeat in 1906, owing to the aftermath of the Boer War and the attempt to introduce Imperial preference. In their place a Liberal-Labor-Nationalist coalition appeared which conferred old-age pensions and government insur- ance upon the working classes, reinforced the power of labor unions, began to reclaim the feudal estates of Eng- land for the people, and disestablished the State Church in Wales. To accomplish these reforms, it was necessary to deprive the House of Lords of its summary veto over the popular will ; which was safely accomplished. " For good or for evil," wrote in these days Sir F. E. Smith, the future Carson galloper, the future Attorney-General of England, " we are governed by a democracy. The ap- parent tendency is to extend rather than to restrict the popular character of our government. This country will remain democratic unless the tendency ... be ar- rested by civil convulsions " (" Rights of Citizenship," p. 22). The Imperialists failed by constitutional means to control this tendency in two successive elections within one year. They had lost the power to veto the will of the people in the House of Lords ; but, making the Home Rule bill both an occasion and an excuse, they provoked civil convulsions in Ireland, and conveyed that veto power safely to a chapel of ease in Ulster, where they created Carsonism to be its armed guard. They seduced the Im- perial army and navy so that arbitrary power opposed the enforcement of a statute of the democratic govern- ment of Britain. " The Government which gave the order . . . to enforce the law in Ulster would run a great 41 risk of being lynched in London," announced the leader of the Unionist party, Mr. Bonar Law (London, June 18, 1912), a hint to incite that mob and to terrorize its indi- cated victims. The Rt. Hon. Joynson Hicks, M. P., daring and damning, in the name of the God of battles and of the Unionist party, the democratic government of England, disclosed the forces supporting his leader. And the armed volunteers raised in England by Lord Wil- loughby de Broke likewise effectively tended to restrict the popular character of government in England. The British incentives to Carsonism were not only the military and profiteering needs of Imperialism in Ireland, but also the Imperialist dread of democracy in England. The annexationist maxim in the days of Frederick the Great was : " Seize first and plenty of lawyers will justify afterwards." But with the development of the " Christian Science " of war, war ceased to be the pur- suit of an exclusive military caste and became instead a national function. Hence, to unify and strengthen the national will to war, the German leaders, planning to rob their neighbors, organized appeals to the moral and sentimental feelings of the German people. Thus, be- fore he proceeded to the conquest of Schleswig-Holstein, Bismarck created a popular claim to the coveted terri- tory on the ground of colonization by Germans in the thirteenth century : fellow-Germans in Schleswig-Holstein must be restored to the benefits of Teutonism and of German citizenship. The validity of this claim may be judged by the fact that on July 26, 1720, England had guaranteed perpetual possession of the disputed terri- tory to Denmark ; and France had done likewise in August 18, of the same year. Bismarck encouraged in 42 Denmark the hope that England would intervene, a hope in which Denmark entered the war of 1864. As Lord Palmerston had no intention of intervening to save Denmark, English public opinion on the Schleswig issue was made then by Bismarck, as American public opinion on the Irish issue is made today by the Carsonites. Lord Palmerston was accurately reflecting the popular under- standing in England when, as was his habit, he would say : " The question of Schleswig is so complicated and obscure that only three European statesmen have grasped it thoroughly : the first of these, Prince Albert, is unhappily dead; the second, a foreign politician, has lost his reason; and the third is myself, but I have un- fortunately forgotten it." When the time approached for the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine, German " jurists, professors, editors, statesmen, warriors and even scien- tists were prolific in finding reasons for the act before it was committed" (Hazen, loc. cit. p. 78). Ancient Allaman colonizations were recalled ; the descendants of the original Teutonic colonists were identified as fel- low-Germans, enslaved in France by the Treaty of Westphalia (1648); and marked down for liberation, for restoration to the religious, national and prospective imperial rights of German citizens. And to silence any lingering scruple, Treitschke taught : " The Germans know how to govern the Alsatians better than the Alsa- tians do themselves." The complexity and obscurity of these German na- tional issues recently vanished. A selectively enlight- ened world suddenly learned to appreciate at its true value this conventional plea of religious, national and imperial rights of German colonists in coveted lands ; 43 and to see, at last, that there never was adequate reason to regard that plea as other than a most unjust, frivolous and pernicious subterfuge of German Imperialism. The German Imperialist demonstrably had both in Schleswig- Holstein and in Alsace-Lorraine no purpose distinguish- able from that which the British Imperialist still has in Ireland, and still makes complex and obscure by the stereotyped plea of religious, national and imperial rights of British colonists in Ulster. The world today has just paid the price of refusal to see as they were the things of yesterday. Will the world tomorrow need likewise to pay the price of refusal to see as they are the things of today? So long as England governs Ireland, the privileged, the parasitic, and the professional Loyalists will exercise their religious, national, and imperial right to administer, on behalf of the Empire, the satrapy of Ireland. So long as these Loyalists control in Ireland the avenues of educational, economic, and social preferment, they will find adherents among the ignorant and sophisticated, the needy and covetous, the servile and ambitious. The number and devotion of such adherents were revealed in the last great British recruiting campaign, in which all the arts of persuasion and menace, intensively applied for six months, brought forth from Belfast and all Ulster less than 10,000 Loyalists to save the Empire that is England in the hour of its extremity. Fifty thousand American Loyalists opposed Washington : yet America became a great and harmonious nation. Over three million German Loyalists form Masaryk's Ulster quota in the newly created nation of Czecho-Slovakia. Yet the negligible number of Irish Loyalists, in a world where 44 the principle of majority rule is the foundation of all democracy, is allowed to impose for their Imperial mas- ters an insuperable veto to " the government of Ireland by the consent of the governed." In the negotiation of the Home Rule Act and in the deliberations of the Lloyd George convention, the Na- tional leaders of Ireland manifested for the religious and civil rights of the Loyalist minority a solicitude that transcends justice, and that may worthily serve as an example to the majority rulers of newly-freed States. Outside of its incubation place in Ulster, antagonism of Catholic to Protestant, of Irishman to Irishman, does not exist in Ireland. Major William Redmond, M.P., in his last speech to the British House of Commons, before he went to his grave in Flanders, irrefutably proved the mutual esteem and affection that united the vast armies of Irish soldiers in the trenches of France. Dissension in Ireland is incomparably less than dissen- sion in England, or France, or Italy; and as it was in America in 1776, it is in Ireland today the work of those who desire to divide and rule., Washington characterized the American precursors of the Carson family as " abominable pests of society " ; and treated them as traitors. The Virginia House of Delegates stigmatized them as " vicious citizens against whom vigorous measures should be taken " : and such measures were taken. Bismarck replied, when asked what he meant to do with his exalted analogue of Car- son in Schleswig-Holstein : " It is the right of him who rears a cockerel to wring its neck " : and that Carson was heard no more. The right of England to her Carson, no Irishman will care to contest. 45 As soon as the disrupting force of dual allegiance ceases to act in Ireland, as soon as Ireland is governed only by the consent of the governed, Ulsterite will vie with non-Ulsterite in salutary competition to end the present exploitation of the poor, the ignorant, the credu- lous and the bigoted, to eradicate the existing impieties of the social system of Ireland, and to make all men equal before the law : that selfish rights may be displaced by national duties, and that the life of everyone may con- form to the first and greatest of the laws of the nation, the law that all Irishmen shall unite to fulfill the work of all, the work of the free people of Ireland in the federation of the peoples of the world. 46 V The Irish Issue in Its Interna- tional Aspect WHEN France under Napoleon menaced the free- dom of the world, Alexander I of Russia held a position of detachment not unlike that which America's President held on December 18, 1916, while Germany under the latest Hohenzollern was attempting to overwhelm the Allied Powers. Alexander was loath to embroil Russia in a struggle between contending Powers, whose objects in the war " as revealed by their statesmen were virtually the same." But he was not unwilling to help to end all war. So in 1804 he laid down as a maxim to the English Minister, Pitt, that the peace of Europe would never be permanently established " until ' the internal order of every country ' should be firmly founded on ' a wise liberty as a barrier against the passions, the unbridled ambitions, or the madness which often drive out of their senses those in whom power is vested.' " He proposed that such States as wisely laid their foundations in liberty should, on the cessation of the war then waging, form a League of Nations, all the members of which would guarantee to each the posses- sions of each, in order that there might be no " future attempts to disturb the general tranquillity'' (Phillips, "The Confederation of Europe," London, pp. 34-38). 47 At that time Ireland had just passed through the rebellion of 1798, the sale of the Irish Parliament by Castlereagh to England (1800) and the Emmet rebellion of 1803. The Irish issue was the obvious test of England's con- ception of " wise liberty." But without either applying this test or seeking such an adequate guarantee of Eng- land's sincerity as the freedom of Ireland would have given him, Alexander entered the war, and was a deter- mining, if not the dominant, factor in the overthrow of Napoleon. When the cessation of hostilities came, although the servitude of Ireland remained as a symbol of oppression, a pledge against peace, the plain people everywhere " promised themselves an all-embracing reform of the political system of Europe, guarantees for peace, in one word the return of the Golden Age " (Gentz, " Congress of Vienna," quoted by Lipson, " Eu- rope in the Nineteenth Century," p. 212). But, Great Britain was concerned only with an immediate and practical object, the ending of the war. It is clear that the English Minister meant that only France should not be allowed to disturb the future settlement of Europe by " fresh projects of aggrandizement and ambition" (Lipson, loc. cit., p. 212). The Peace Congress met at Vienna, and, with the nation broker, Castlereagh, acting for Great Britain, resulted in " nothing but restorations ; agreements between great Powers of little value for the future balance and preser- vation of the peace of Europe, and quite arbitrary altera- tions in the possessions of the less important States. No act of higher nature, no great measure for public order or for universal good, which might make up for Europe's long sufferings or reassure it as to the future, was forth- coming." For the only guarantee of the sincerity of the participants was that given, perforce, by France in her exhaustion. Since then the periodic cessation of war has come so often to the world that men have lost count of its comings. In every truce, the hopeful have seen again the vision of Isaiah, of a world united in peace; and in every fresh outbreak of war men have been lured to death by rulers who promised to pinion peace with their sword. The plain peoples of today in the Allied no less than in the American ranks were led to battle, in order that the supremacy of right over might should be finally vindicated, that small nationalities might thereby be freed from the oppression of usurping Powers, and that henceforth the free peoples of the world might unite in equality as members of a League of Nations, a League which would exercise common political sovereignty solely to the end that war should forever cease. They have won the war, but peace is yet to be won or lost. Dominating the Peace Conference are the Government of America and the Government of the British Empire. America's President before the war, at the acceptance of war, during the war, and since the cessation of hostilities has unequivocally stated his purpose to seek the final elimination of war. Plain peoples of the world believe in him, trust in him, but fear for him lest, like Alexander I of Russia, his purpose be defeated, so that millions of lives must be squandered again to reach this same stage on the road to universal peace. And the basis of their fear is the symbol, Ireland. 49 The task of the conferring Governments is to restore and to make permanent the peaceful equilibrium of the world. In the past, England has been the center of that equilibrium, which when disturbed by Spain, Holland, France or Germany led Britain to war : and the disturb- ing elements were thereby reduced to balanced propor- tions, in leagues, alliances, ententes, and associations. England, conqueror of Africa, Palestine, Arabia, Persia, and the German colonies; and possessor of Ireland, Can- ada, Newfoundland, the West Indies, Australia, New Zealand, India, Ceylon and Burmah, has now become empress of the world. Yet it is actually proposed that she grant self-determination to the world and forego her supremacy in favor of a league of which the component States, small and great, shall enjoy equality with her before the law of nations. In this league each nation will arm for domestic order only, and all will contribute to a common force that will guarantee the world's peace. The unit of State proposed for the league is called a nation. It is implicit in the idea of a unit that it should be indivisible, self-supporting, and able to sustain its share of the common burden. This unit has been further qualified as constituted by people " governed only by the consent of the governed." Among the nations of the world the Irish are unsur- passed in the sum of their distinguishing characters of speech, race, customs, and traditions. They take his- torical precedence over all nations, except the nations of Greece and Italy ; they inhabit a country unique in its geographical separateness from all others and greater in area than Greece, Serbia, Switzerland, .Denmark, Hol- land, or Belgium. Ireland contains more people than 50 Greece, Switzerland, Finland, Serbia, Denmark, or Nor- way. Unless the word nation has lost its traditional significance and has become a term of opprobrium con- ferred only upon peoples hitherto fighting in the service of the Central Empires, Ireland is a nation. The nation- hood of Ireland is not dependent upon admission to any league of Powers. A league avowedly founded on nationhood undermines its own basis by the exclusion of Ireland; and its selective character makes of it merely a league of rulers, an entangling alliance to embroil peace- ful members in all the wars on the seven seas. In less than a century, Ireland, in addition to paying out of her own taxes the whole of her own cost, has been made to pay to the maintenance of the imperial army and navy of England a sum of £325,000,000 ($1,725,000,000) (Mr. John Redmond, House of Commons, April 11, 1912). Ireland's annual foreign trade, almost exclu- sively monopolized by England, exceeds that of Switzer- land, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Portugal, Greece, or Serbia, and almost equals the foreign trade of Denmark ("Statesman's Year Book," 1913). The exclusion of a great and historic nation, which is an indivisible State- unit, which even under present conditions is able to pay the sum exacted to support the one Imperial navy of the world, and which has a yearly foreign trade of $737, 750,000, would weaken the stability of any aggregation of of less compact States, increase the pro-rata burden borne by the selected members for the support of the League, and deprive the League of a considerable part of the world's commerce. The inclusion of Ireland as a nation would mean the loss to England of her most treasured possession. True, 51 a war has just been fought in which English statesmen from Sir Edward Grey to Mr. Lloyd George have avowed their essential purpose to be the freedom of small nations. But in a war between empires a subject nation forms a part where each empire is vulnerable, and where the victor can conveniently disarticulate the vanquished. A subject nation, such as Czecho-Slovakia, that has the happiness to have been a component part of a defeated and dismembered empire, thereby receives at least titular freedom. A subject nation such as Ireland, that has the misfortune not to have been a component part of the conquered Empire, receives the treatment Ireland is now receiving. To give moral sanction to the freeing of Poles, Czecho-Slovaks, and other peoples lately subject to Ger- many or Austria, either the victorious Empire itself must free Ireland or else those other nations which associated themselves with England and were privileged to devote their lives, their honor, and all they were and had to the avowed purpose of the war, must decree the freedom of Ireland from England, as in 183 1 the freedom of Belgium from Holland was decreed. In any event, the exclusion of Ireland must mean the exclusion of England, too, from a league of free peoples, of peoples " governed only by the consent of the governed." For an England drag- ging in chains the nation of Ireland " could not be trusted to keep faith within the League or to observe its covenants." Besides moral sanction, a League of Nations will need the sanction of force. It will be absolutely necessary that a force be created, as a guarantor -of the permanency of the settlement so much greater 52 than the force of any nation now engaged in any alliance hitherto formed or projected, that no nation, no probable com- bination of nations could face or withstand it. (January 22, 1917, President Wilson's "Message to the Senate.") Force can be created, but it cannot be thriftily or effec- tively applied except through the control of strategic bases. Concerning Ireland as a base, the British " Navy League " — " from which the German Navy League drew its impulse " (Mahan, " America's Interest in Interna- tional Conditions," p. 171) — in a Manifesto issued on January 10, 1918, stated: Before the great war the security of the Irish ports was wrongly regarded by the majority of the British people as a partisan British interest. The scales fell from our eyes after war broke out. A clear vision of the sacrifices of great and small nations fighting for freedom revealed the relation between Ireland and tvorld trade. The strategic unity of the British Isles is a world problem not merely a British interest. The trade of Europe with Canada, the United States, the West Indies, the Gulf of Mexico, the Panama Canal, the Caribbean Sea, all the Republics of South America, all the States of the Australian Commonwealth, New Zealand, China, Japan, Russia in the Pacific, India, Ceylon, and Africa are dependent directly upon the control of Irish seaports and the communications behind them. The British people before the war were mistaken in regarding Queenstown, Bantry Bay, Valentia, and Lough Swilly as merely British interests. Ireland has eighteen har- bors, five of them first-class. The best of them face the Atlantic Ocean which floats the trade of the world. Friendly naval control of Irish harbors by free nations is essential to the freedom of the zvorld. The ocean of the air, the surface of the sea, and underwater attack or defense will be controlled . . . from Irish Western ports. Even if the League create a navy so large that the burden of its support would strain the loyalty of the S3 members, the strategic position of Japan with her ally England, acting from Ireland as a base, would enable these Powers together to defy any force that the League might bring against them. So long as Ireland is con- trolled by England the equilibrium of the world will remain centered on her, and a League of Nations will exist at her pleasure as an auxiliary to her purpose. Ireland a Heligoland of the Atlantic, would menace the Atlantic coast of the American Continent from Punta Arenas in Patagonia to Quebec. Therefore naval control of Ireland by a naval repre- sentative of the free nations of the zvorld is essential to the freedom of the world. Ireland is truly the key of the Atlantic, a fortress that guards the main trade routes of the world. (Loc. cit., Ian. 10, 1918.) A free Ireland, as is so eloquently and conclusively shown by the British Navy League, is a member essential to any League of Nations. It is, indeed, the one indispensable member, the member vital to the League, the member whose absence would leave undetermined only the moment of the League's disintegration, only the name of the Power which would next dare to disturb the center of the world's equilibrium, the possessor of Ireland. With- out a free Ireland, the force of the League cannot control the world : without such controlling force there can be no League of Nations ; without a League of Nations there can be no permanent peace; and without permanent peace plain peoples have been privileged to dedicate their lives and possessions to what? The freedom of Ireland will be the sign of the freedom of the world from war. Is there any guarantee that this sign will be given to the world ? America, presuming that her associates at least " were 54 as candid and straightforward as the momentous issues involved required," did not deem it necessary " to assure herself of the exact meaning of the note of " acceptance of England's Government before the armistice was signed. America likewise did not deem it necessary " in order that there might be no possibility of misunderstand- ing very solemnly to call the attention of " the Government of England " to the evident principle which runs through the whole American program." It is contained in the " Address to Congress " of January 8. " It is the prin- ciple of justice to all peoples and nationalities and their right to live on terms of liberty and safety with one another whether they be strong or weak." Yet even when the armistice was being signed England was. affirming, as throughout the war England has affirmed, and as she is today affirming by all the ways an autocratic empire can affirm it, her complete consciousness of the distinct national entity — Ireland. In the Peace Conference " the good faith of any discussion manifestly depends upon the consent " of his Britannic Majesty's Government " immediately to withdraw its forces everywhere from the invaded territory " of Ireland ; to liberate those whom by deportation and imprisonment England has recognized as the leaders of the Irish nation ; and to permit the people of Ireland freely to determine by plebiscite the form of their government. No such guarantee of good faith was required from, or proffered by, England : and she reserved for discussion, freedom of the seas, the point upon which the rest of the peace program pivots. As it was in 1814, so in 1918 " it is clear that Great Britain was concerned only with an immediate and practical object, the ending of the war. The English Minister meant that only " Germany " should not be 55 allowed to disturb the future settlement of Europe by fresh projects of aggrandizement and ambition." Just as America enters the Peace Conference, Ireland entered the war without guarantees of good-faith from England. Ireland had no shipping vainly seeking passage through forbidden seas. The only invader on Irish soil was England. And Ireland refused to be terrorized into war by fear of facing unaided the remote contingency of a superimposed invasion by Germany. According to J. I. C. Clarke, 1 480,000 Irishmen fought and died for France between 1690 and 1792. The only entry on the other side of the ledger was the 280 2 Frenchmen lost by Humbert in the rebellion of 1798. Belgium in the eighty-three years of her existence had spared not a man, a dollar, or an audible articulate thought for the freedom of Ireland. If instead of Belgium and France, Ireland had been invaded, what help would Ireland have received from one or other of these countries? Neither interest nor gratitude nor yet kinship called for a single Irishman to fight in the war. No power could take, and no power has been able to take, a single Irish national to fight in France against his free will. But Irishmen thought that if Germany won, Bel- gium would become what they " mourned in Ireland, a nation in chains." The fight seemed to be one of justice against might for the freedom of small nationalities. In such a fight, " Ireland," said Professor T. M. Kettle, who fell at Guinchy, " had a duty not only to herself but to the world . . . and whatever befell, the path taken must be the path of honor and justice." Concern- ing the number of Irishmen who took this vouched-for path of duty before America entered the war, Mr. John Redmond, JVL P., wrote: 1 Glories of Ireland, Washington, D. C, 1914, p. 122. 1 De Quincey loc. cit, p. 124. 56 From Ireland, according to the latest official statistics, 173,772 Irishmen are serving in the navy and army. . . . Careful in- quiries made through the churches in the North of England and in Scotland, and from other sources, show that, in addition, at least 150,000 sons of the Irish race, most of them born in Ire- land, have joined the colors in Great Britain. It is a pathetic circumstance that these Irishmen in non-Irish regiments are for- gotten except when their names appear in the casualty lists. Adding to these the other young men of Ireland who, compelled by the economic conditions at home to seek elsewhere the means to exist, had emigrated to Canada, Newfoundland, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, and who had enlisted in their adopted countries, Mr. Redmond estimated that there were " more than half a million Irishmen with the colors" ("Ireland on the Somme," London, 1917, pp. 3-8). This number, 500,000, represents about one-tenth of the Irish-born outside this country : and they fought as volunteers. They took the indicated path to justice and went to war as Irish " Inter- national Nationalists," believing that the greater freedom would include the less. Their number* exceeded the vol- unteers of any other land : proportionately they repre- sented an army of 11,000,000 Americans. They went to their graves in France and Gallipoli believing that the Irish issue in its international aspect was an integral part of the new international aspect of all national issues, the right to government only by the consent of the governed. The Irish from their unassailable position of racial detach- ment and material disinterestedness were the only people in the world who could give the Allied cause moral vindi- cation; and they gave it — without requiring England to consent immediately to withdraw from Ireland, without * According to the New Statesman, London, Nov. 30, 1918, Ireland's fighting quota in the Great War was greater than Japan's, South Africa's, New Zealand's, or Canada's. 57 fulfilling the world duty of obtaining a guarantee that the war would be waged in good faith. Graciously acknowledging the belligerent value of this international aspect of the Irish issue, Lord Kitchener, the British War Lord, wrote to the Dublin Viceregal Conference (1915): "Ireland's performance has been magnificent." " England is unworthy to kiss the hem of Ireland's garment," wrote the English litterateur, Chester- ton, moved by the spectacle of a subject nation, volun- tarily fighting for international freedom alongside its oppressor. " Whatever the future may have in store, the British people will never forget the generous blood of the sister nation which has been shed on so many hard- fought battlefields," said the London Daily Telegraph, March 18, 1916. The war report of a subject nation in an imperial war, is published when to publish it is useful ; and is altered or suppressed, when necessary, for the benefit of the Empire. The significance of the record may not have varied : but the accounting is in the hands of the imperial bookkeepers : there are no auditors : the report is pub- lished by those who compile it for their own ends. Hence, although England's gratitude to the sister nation of Ireland was still ringing in men's ears, although, too, the survivors of the 500,000 Irish were still fighting abroad for international freedom, from the day (Easter, 1916) when the Irish felt compelled to wrest from England a guarantee of good faith, to fight in Ireland, too, in the name of right against might, in the name of the freedom of small nationalities, of the cause of international justice, the war report of the Irish was " Pigotted " in the press which England controlled throughout the world. And a 58 grateful England shot as felons Pearse and his fellow- poets and seers, condoned the murder of Sheehy Skeffing- ton and others, imprisoned Countess Markiewicz, Pro- fessors MacNeill and De Valera, and a thousand more, hanged then libeled Casement, placed an army of occupa- tion in Ireland, put the country under martial law, and gave full imperial recognition to the subject nation of Ireland before the silent but comprehending gaze of the suffering people of Belgium. Prior to the revolution of 1916 there had been lacking an international standard by which to test the solicitude of England for the freedom of small nationalities: a lack which the revolution sup- plied. Ireland measured England's avowed cause by that standard : and then unaided continued the fight for small nationalities on the Irish front : a front to which the recent armistice was not extended. When America entered the war the Irish-born here felt that President Wilson had made holy again the Allied cause; had made the Irish issue once more an inalienable part of the international aspect of all national issues. They felt that it was the duty of everyone in America to fight for the freedom of all, for the freedom for which America's President had pledged his word. Cobelligerent aliens* who were called in the draft then possessed the right to claim exemption as aliens. The following per- centages, computed from the Provost Marshal General's Report (Appendix 33a) show the fashion in which this duty was accepted by the nationals of the several co- belligerent aliens. The percentages of the alien co- belligerents called who waived exemption and were accepted are as follows : 59 Ireland 30.4 Belgium 24.4 Scotland 24.2 England 22.5 Wales 22.0 Servia 21.7 Canada 21.0 France 19.4 Italy 16.8 Alexander of Russia sought and received no guarantees from England : and experienced the Congress of Vienna. Ireland sought and received no guarantees from England, and is now the only nation in the civilized world that is still being actively subjugated by an imperial Power. America sought and received no guarantees from Eng- land, and the consequences are yet unrevealed. But certain dominant English statesmen now openly oppose the principles they formerly loudly professed or tacitly accepted and for which this war was fought. The British Coalition Government were elected on a plat- form antagonistic to the Wilson principles of the new world-order. The Populo Romano (Dec. 4) published that Italy had joined England and France in an entente. The Allied Premiers have met, have secretly deliberated and publicly made announcement of their agreement. To at least this extent plain people are now forewarned. Analogous anticipatory secret deliberations, from which Russia was excluded, occurred at the end of the Russo- Turkish war in 1878, but it was only when the Peace Congress of Berlin was far advanced, and when by long preparatory maneuvering the way had been cleared for the announcement, that Europe was permitted to learn of the bargain made prior to the public Peace Congress, the 60 bargain by which England in return for the long-coveted Island of Cyprus, guaranteed Turkey yirtual integrity. Already tentative divisions of territory have been publicly and authoritatively suggested in the manner of the Con- gress of Vienna, in the manner of the Congress of Berlin. America has been party neither to these anticipatory deliberations nor to these munition mongers' suggestions. America's President seems to be alone at the Peace Con- gress spea'king for friends of humanity in every nation and of every program of liberty . . . for the silent mass of mankind every- where who have as yet had no place or opportunity to speak their real hearts out concerning the death and ruin they see to have come upon the persons and homes they hold most dear? He has gone to uphold the principles and policies for which he led Americans to spend their lives, their honor, and their possessions. The seclusion of serried cordons of armed guards may surround the Conference; and its diplomacy may be shrouded by a censored press. But plain people everywhere will know how to judge the President's progress. There is one tested standard and only one by which the Allied cause may be judged, a standard by which every principle President Wilson has enunciated may be measured, a standard by which the present may be weighed with the past and the future may be estimated — the standard of Ireland. For, first, there can be no " absolute freedom of the seas outside of terri- torial waters, alike in peace and in war," without the free- dom of Ireland : secondly, there can be no "removal, so far as is possible, of all economic barriers," without the free- dom of Ireland : thirdly, there can be no " adequate guar- antees given and taken that national armaments will be 61 reduced to the lowest point consistent with safety," with- out the freedom of Ireland : fourthly, there can be no " general association of nations formed under specific covenants for the purpose of affording mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity in great and small States alike," without the freedom of Ireland : and lastly, there can be no moral application of " the principle of justice to all peoples and nationalities, and their right to live on equal terms of liberty and safety with one another whether they be strong or weak," with- out the freedom of Ireland. " Unless this principle be made its foundation no part of the structure of interna- tional justice can stand." Hence, by his own standard as well as by the standard of plain people everywhere. President Wilson must seek first the freedom of Ireland and all things else shall be added unto him. Belgium a nation again is music to Irish ears. The free soil of France affords at least a grave worthy of the freemen of Ireland. The liberation of Poland gives glad- ness nowhere greater than in Ireland. Even from the waters of Babylon, Ireland welcomes the Jew to Zion. For Ireland, though fated to be the symbol and shield of empire, has faith in her freedom. She knows how to fight and pray, till the day of empires shall pass, till freedom shall come to the latest of nations, shall come even unto the last, when an Ireland free shall be given to the peoples as a sign that a message 2,000 years old, the message of peace and good-will on earth, has been heard and heeded by men. 62 OTHER IMPORTANT PUBLICATIONS of THE AMERICA PRESS THE POPE'S WAR WORK. A wonderful record of noble deeds done by the Pope for God and men. Every church, camp, college, school, priest and layman should extend its circulation. Price, $0.10; $6.00 a hundred. WAR, PEACE AND LABOR. By Edwin V. O'Hara, LL.D. Is a discussion of the grave industrial problems now facing the world. Price, each, $0.05; in quantities, $3.00 a hundred. PROBLEMS OF THE PEACE CONFERENCE. By the Rev. Dr. John A. Ryan. A pamphlet discussing the nature of a permanent peace. A good corrective for militarism. Price, each, $0.10; $7.00 a hundred. MARRIAGE AND THE FAMILY. 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