BOOKS BY SHANE LESLIE Published by CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS THE IRISH ISSUE IN ITS AMERICAN ASPECTS. 12mo .... net $1.25 THE CELT AND THE WORLD. 12mo net 1.25 THE END OF A CHAPTER. 12mo . net 1.25 The Irish Issue In Its American Aspect The Irish Issue In Its American Aspect A Contribution to the Settlement of Anglo-American Relations During and After the Great War By Shane Leslie New York Charles Scribner's Sons 1917 V Copyright, 1917, by CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS Published November, 1917 NOV 27 1917 ©CU479239 TO HENRY C. IDE LATE GOVERNOR OF THE PHILIPPINES AND U. S. MINISTER TO SPAIN CONTENTS PART ONE PAGE America's Family Ghost 3 The Centenary of John Mitchel 17 The Memory of Parnell 33 The Treason of the Redmonds 61 The Ethics of Sinn Fein 71 The Presidency of Pearse 81 The Killing of Kettle 94 Carson and Casement 106 PART TWO The Winning of the United States 121 Irish America During the War 177 Epilogue 207 Part I I AMERICA'S FAMILY GHOST Ireland is the spectre of the British Empire. Sometimes she seems to fill the position of America's family ghost as well. Uncle Sam is far too good and young to be haunted as some of the European nations are haunted by the undying phantasms of those they oppressed. Only the picturesque wraith of the Red Indian broods upon the prairies of the West. If the American has pressed into other lands than his original colonies, it has always been to redeem and civilise, never to enslave persons or dese- crate territory. No ghost came out of the Philippines to decry his record before the na- tions. His Cuban conscience is clean. The Queen of Hawaii, the pride of Spain, and the Pekin summer palace need never trouble his soul. The hazard of the world brought each into his way and he dealt with them severally, as a gentleman should under the circumstances. The American gentleman is so by national tradition rather than by individual birth. Dis- 3 4 THE IRISH ISSUE tressed nations make the same appeal to his sense of chivalry that distressed ladies used to make to the European knight. He is largely descended from those who at different times have made good their release from the English Tory, the German Junker, and the Irish land- lord. There is a gulf between the old families of America and the European aristocrats, whose past deeds cause phantoms to scream about the banners of their country, whenever unfurled even in the justest cause. If America has a ghost, it is Ireland. But if Ireland haunts America, it is with a haunting based on love and not on hate. Like the Janus of the Atlantic, Ireland is two-faced. Towards England she ever looks with anguish and bit- terness, towards the United States with tearful hope and wistful affection. For in the nine- teenth century America was to Ireland what France was in the eighteenth, la grande nation ! The strongest and choicest went into their service, military in the case of France, indus- trial in that of America. The canals and then the railways of America were created by Irish labour. The industrial connection found apotheosis in the names of McCormick and Ford. Ireland has always believed that her freedom AMERICA'S FAMILY GHOST 5 was due to her through American means. No European country was better represented in the Revolutionary ranks. Deep in Irish hearts was laid the unwritten covenant that out of America Ireland should be reborn, out of the strong sweetness. It was unwritten officially, save in the script of Benjamin Franklin, who had attended the debates in the old Dublin Parliament and inscribed Ireland in the list of the revolting colonies to be united against England. Since then sympathy with Ireland has become a tradition in the United States, lisped by statesmen and even pronounced by Presidents. More than once Americans have threatened to obtain by force what the Great War brought them a striking opportunity to procure by peaceful consent. It is curious indeed how Irish action and re- action has run like an uncanny spirit through the woof of American history. Before the Revolution, Ireland and the American colonies were plaintiffs in the same suit. Molyneux's famous Case of Ireland Stated, the first hand- book of Irish nationalism, became a text-book to American thinkers. Otis's Rights of the Col- onies was its adaptation. Rebels, whether in Ireland or in America, were the same children of the stormy time-spirit loosed in the last dec- 6 THE IRISH ISSUE ades of the eighteenth century. Lord Charle- mont, the head of the Irish Volunteers, used to be toasted as the "Irish Washington." When America exchanged her suit for an ap- peal to arms, Ulstermen helped her as bravely in America as they helped Wexford's appeal to arms in 1798. Ulstermen were always the most revolutionary members of the English- speaking world and in no town of the empire was the capture of the Bastille more fiercely celebrated than in Belfast. American independence had as great an effect on Ireland as the Russian revolution has had on the modern world at large. It left Ire- land dreamily ambitious, eternally unsettled, and enamoured of the sunset in the West. Only the perennial safety-valve of emigration out of the political wilderness at home into the Promised Republic prevented explosions in Ire- land. Relations between Ireland and the United States began immediately. Catholic and Protestant, Ulstermen and Irishmen, "the sons of Uladh and of Erinn," as the old writers divided Irishmen, were one in hailing American independence. There is no doubt that Lord North's first conciliatory act towards the Irish Catholics was due to the desire to foreclose sympathy with the Revolutionary States. AMERICAS FAMILY GHOST 7 Oddly enough the same hired Hessians were loosed on rebels in Ireland and America. It is a historical point whether the American Revolution would have succeeded, had it not been for the feud of the exiled Ulstermen with the English Tories. The original Bunker's Hill is near Belfast. Both Scotch and Milesian Irish rallied to Washington. No fewer than thirteen of the Revolutionary generals were born in Ireland herself. It was historically poetic how memories of the different Irish re- bellions found echoes in America's wars. Rob- ert Francis Paine, who with eight others of Irish kindred, signed the Declaration of Inde- pendence, was really an O'Neill, sixth in de- scent from Shane O'Neill, who had held Ulster against Elizabeth. General James Moore, who took the field for the insurgents, was descended from Rory O'More, the most romantic figure in the Rising of 1641. General Clinton found "the emigrants from Ireland our most serious antagonists." Washington's aides included a Fitzgerald and Stephen Moylan, a brother of the then Bishop of Cork. It was a Barry of Wexford who took the new American flag to sea. There is an entire tradition of the Irish share in the Revolution. A Sullivan fired the first shot and captured Fort William and Mary, 8 THE IRISH ISSUE avenging the battle of the Boyne thereby. The British General Fraser fell to a sniper called Murphy. An Irishman ferried Wash- ington across the Delaware and a Lynch kept the doors of the first Congress. It is claimed that Molly Pitcher was an Irish girl of the family of Hayes. Certain it is that the Friendly Sons of St. Patrick raised a "Liberty Loan" for Washington. And when it came to peace, it was on the farm of an Irish Carroll that the White House was erected on the model of Leinster House in Dublin. The Feast of St. Patrick had already passed into the American calendar. During the Revolu- tion it had proved a lucky day for the United States. On that day in 1776 the English evacuated Boston and on that day in the following year a French ship arrived with a stand of arms. Ireland and America went their ways, though, as Professor Dunning well states in his work on Anglo-American relations: "There survived in the United States the tradition of Grattan's Parliament, which received the breath of life through the success of the war that made America free from Great Britain." When war broke out afresh between England and America in 1812 Ireland lifted no voice. AMERICA'S FAMILY GHOST 9 Her revolutionary zeal had been quenched in the Rising of 1798, and her adventurous youth had gone with "Charles O'Malley" into Wel- lington's armies. But in America there were no less than six of the "United Irishmen" in Congress to vote for war against England, while hosts of exiles took their part in that amazing campaign which gave America her national anthem. It was then that Commodore Stew- art, the grandfather of Parnell, won his naval honours against the British fleet and that An- drew Jackson, the son of an Ulsterman, slew and defeated Pakenham at the battle of New Orleans. It was in keeping with historical jus- tice, for Pakenham was one of the corrupt oli- garchs who had sold the old Parliament in Dublin. During the hostilities it required special ef- forts to obtain the treatment of prisoners of war for captured Irish-Americans. Bad as was the measure meted out to all American prison- ers, it is pleasant to find Congress recognising the humanity which befell some who were sent to Ireland. After the war Irish matters tended to be forgotten in America. It was only two great and appalling events, which gave Ireland a new footing in the New World, from which she could bitterly and successfully oppose and 10 THE IRISH ISSUE thwart some of England's dearest projects. They were the Irish Famine and the American Civil War. Sydney Smith had pointed out that "the disaffected state of Ireland is a standing pre- mium for war with every Cabinet which has the most distant intention of quarrelling with this country for any other cause." If the famine supplied the necessary disaffection, the Civil War led to serious Anglo-American quar- relling. The Irish famine emptied the strongest and best survivors of the race in shoals upon the American seaboard. At terrible cost and at an unrecorded loss the mighty transmigration was accomplished. Success and prosperity were by no means theirs for the questing, then or previously. For thousands who had per- ished as pioneers, history records the John Sul- livan, a centenarian schoolmaster from Limer- ick, who became the father of governors both of New Hampshire and Massachusetts, and the grandfather of a governor of Maine. It was the same after the famine. For every one who left his mark or famous descendants, a thousand fell unknown in the struggle. Nev- ertheless numbers and morality told, and as F. Hugh O'Donnell pointed out: "From Presi- AMERICA'S FAMILY GHOST 11 dents of the Republic to Presidents of Trusts, and from the pioneer founders of eastern cities to the mighty athletes of Olympian competi- tions, where will you not find Irish-Ameri- cans ? " Never again could Sydney Smith gibe the United States with ' where are their Burkes, their Sheridans ? " The Civil War gave the Irish a magnificent opportunity of proving their loyalty to the States. Irish services in the field outweighed any local indulgence in draught rioting. Arch- bishop Hughes was successfuly invoked by the civil authority to allay the riots and in death was honoured by a tribute from Lincoln. Archbishop Purcell hoisted "Old Glory," which perhaps may be Latinised as Gloria Patri Pa- trice, from the spires of Cincinnati Cathedral. As President Hayes said afterwards of this in- cident: "The spire was beautiful, but the Cath- olic Prelate made it radiant with hope and glory for our country." The events of the Civil War cemented Irish and American feeling. The Irish Brigade under Meagher died on the slopes of Fredericksburg, "one of the hand- somest things in the whole war," confessed Longstreet. A shaft marks where the Irish Sixty-ninth threw back Pickett's charge at Gettysburg. 12 THE IRISH ISSUE In the seventies and eighties the Irish cause caught fire in America. There was the Ala- bama and the Trent to commend it to American taste. Sumner was more of a prophet than a politician when he said: "Justice to Ireland is a British necessity." There was even a sug- gestion in the House to recognise the "Irish Republic" as a belligerent. Soldiers returning from Appomattox took up the refrain "We're marching next to Ireland." The Eenian move- ment was cradled round the camp-fires of the Union. During the eighties the Irish-Americans reached their zenith. Governor Curtis stated that there were no less than forty-two Irish- men in the House, while one-half claimed to have Irish blood in their veins. It became al- most necessary for an American President to claim Irish blood to be a successful candidate. It was amusing how Cleveland's mother (Neal) was made to do duty against his rival Blaine's Irish grandfather (Gillespie). American ministers in London came to be acquainted intimately with the Irish question. Mr. Adams vexed his last days trying to pro- cure the release of Fenian prisoners. The Dub- lin police were able to do what Confederate fire could not and arrest Colonel Denis Bourke, AMERICA'S FAMILY GHOST 13 who had been the first to cross the bloody angle at Spottsylvania. Lowell's ministry was perpetually troubled by Coercion Acts. He diagnosed Ireland not unskilfully as, "the clot of blood in England's veins always discomfort- able and liable always to lodge in the brain." All the great thinkers saw truly but were thwarted by the politicians. Goldwin Smith realised that "nothing stands in the way of a reconciliation between the two branches of the Anglo-Saxon race except the influence of the Irish." The war with Spain seemed to afford a pos- sibility of general reconciliation. On the one hand friendship sprang up between the Anglo- Saxon twain and on the other hand Irishmen were under arms for America. In the most brilliant exploit of the war Hobson's choice of companions included a Murphy and a Kelly. But the Boer War sent England and America their different ways and the Irish banshee set out to haunt both, one with remembrance of ancient wrong and the other with pleading of benefit performed. Two totally distinct views may naturally be taken as to the Irish infiltration into America. On the practical side we find Charles Norton writing: "The Irish have become inmates of 14 THE IRISH ISSUE our houses to a degree of intimacy impossible if it had not been for their pecuniary honesty and their chastity." From the old-fashioned view of Saxon sentiment Professor Freeman grieved: "Alas, alas, in the oldest of the wooden houses when I went to find New England Puri- tans I found Ould Irish Papishes, Biddy instead of Hepzibah." Socially and domestically the Irish have done for the United States what no other race could have achieved. Martially and politically, also, they have rendered Celtic ser- vice. But they have complicated the foreign relations of the country in one important as- pect. They have kept and still keep England and America apart. By an overoptimistic estimate Lord Bryce wrote in September of 1914 of Irish hostility: "It is now confined Wa comparatively small section and is likely soon to disappear. But from the end of the Civil War till about the end of the century it was an obstacle to perfectly good relations." As events have shown, a better estimate was made by J. F. Maguire, M. P., in 1867: "It may sub- side, so may the sea. But like the sea the first breath will set it again in motion, while a storm would lash it into fury. It may subside, but it is difficult to think how without some coun- teracting cause it can die out." AMERICA'S FAMILY GHOST 15 Henceforth the ghost of Ireland sat at the American hearth to rise and wail like a watch- dog at any approach of the hereditary enemy, whether friendly or hostile. In the uttermost parts of the sea Ireland has risen again and again to baffle and perplex England. She has stood not merely geographically but politically between England and America. In the world's great changing time when alliances are shuffled like cards and the traditional emotions of peo- ples are thrown into new shapes, has not a time come for the reconsideration of the rela- tions affecting Ireland, England, and America ? As long ago as 1852 Seward declared: "The people of Ireland are affiliated to us as we are to the people of Great Britain. Surely there can be no offence given by a younger member in offering mediation between the elder breth- ren of the same family upon a point of differ- ence between them." Has not the time come for England to cry peace to her pursuing avenger? Is it not good for all that the un- forgiving ghost that haunts the common pur- pose of England and America should be laid? Does not the exorcism and the magical influ- ence which can lead to Ireland's healing, Eng- land's pardon, and America's comfort lie in the stupendous sentences by which America 16 THE IRISH ISSUE made known to the world the unfurling of her flag over Armageddon? Is none great enough to banish the Banshee of the Atlantic ? II THE CENTENARY OF JOHN MITCHEL The centenary of John Mitchel has passed. Of all the surprises of the war the most curious piece of topsy-turvydom was enacted when the British Commission was received by the mayor of New York, the grandson of John Mitchel, Irish patriot and British felon. In political de- scent Mr. Balfour was but two places from Dis- raeli, the Tory leader, who prevented the head of the Mitchel family of two generations back from entering the House of Commons on the ground of his former conviction. John Mitchel was the most brilliant, the most downright, the most dreamshot of the patriots of forty-eight. Some may live by "the pathos of a pikehead," but Mitchel lives by his pen. Of all the literary mirrors which were held up to the terrible decade preceding the Irish fam- ine, his Jail Journal remains the most polished, the most reflective. He was the literary fore- runner of modern Irish nationalism, and after his escape from Australia he initiated those 17 18 THE IRISH ISSUE Irish-American relations which have lasted down to our own times with but slight modi- fication. "Nations have no future state," was his be- lief, and since they have no hope of immor- tality in the next world he required them to seek rebirth in this. Hence the "Young Ire- land" movement. It has found its record in two books, in MitchePs Journal and in his col- league Gavan Duffy's Young Ireland. Their centenaries have fallen within a few months of each other. By a playfulness of fate one be- came a prime minister in the country to which the other had been sent as a convict. Mitchel wrote under grim circumstance. As a partisan he felt an unholy hatred for his op- ponents and some sympathetic horror for his own plight, which was pitiable in all conscience. His writing is stuff that illuminates history as with gas flares. Not unlike the quivering bit- terness of Swift, his Journal is filled with the living utterance, the trampled spirit, the exul- tation and defiance of the dean, varied only with bursts of ironical philosophy. The history of Ireland in the forties has come down to us in a blur of broken enthusiasm and disheartened battlement. The Young Ire- land movement had dissipated itself with the CENTENARY OF JOHN MITCHEL 19 fine frenzy due to its name. Thomas Davis had lived and died. Meagher, not yet an American general, had threatened the sword, which Thackeray had fixed as his eternal nick- name. The tragedy had been that O'Connell had died old, while Young Ireland had^ died young. The great iridescent bubble of O'Con- nell's oratory had been pricked by the sting of death. MitcheFs paper had been suppressed. Ireland had entered into the ghastly trance of famine. The whole nation from the heights of enthusiastic and aerial agitation had fallen into the depths of the valley of the shadow of death. Mitchel had seen it all with the cool eyes of an Ulsterman, and knowing the end was near, gave notice of armed resistance. The govern- ment gave him fourteen years to reconsider his decision, in prison. So the Journal came to be written, with its wistful but fierce recapitulation of events, forces, and characters, throwing a clear light upon the workings of that period of debacle. To Mitchel England was responsible for the whole misery, but O'Connell was no hero. A little sadly he had watched the great-souled Homeric mobs that had flocked to the monster meetings. He had foreseen that all was not well, though O'Connell's perorations had 20 THE IRISH ISSUE swelled with his audiences. He was one of those who had striven to add some real fuel to the wind which O'Connell thought was suffi- cient to keep the smoking embers of nation- hood in a blaze. He differed a good deal from O'Connell as to how the liberation of Ireland should be achieved. Mitchel thought only of liberty. O'Connell not unnaturally thought of the "Liberator," as he was called. The youth of Ireland were swayed between repeal and revolution. It was the perennial Irish strife between the theorists of moral force and the abettors of physical force. "Tell me not of O'Connell's son," thundered the author of the Jail Journal; "his father begat him in moral force and in patience and perseverance his mother conceived him!" Mitchel possessed that gift of the terrible phrase which has always played havoc with Irish parties. When this same son of O'Connell visited Paris in 1848 and made some mild depreciation of the blood shed at the barricades, out spake Mitchel in the United Irishman: From amidst the sacred graves, where the soldiers of liberty sleep gloriously in their bloody shrouds and the hymns of vic- tory are chanted by a liberated nation, what craven canting drivel is this borne to our ears? It was not in Ireland's name that he sent round among the Parisians a dead man's hat, a posthumous begging box ! CENTENARY OF JOHN MITCHEL 21 From his prison cell he wrote a passage of unique strength on the old man himself, that Irish writers dare not quote: Poor old Dan ! wonderful, mighty, jovial and mean old man ! with silver tongue and smile of witchery and heart of melting ruth ! lying tongue ! smile of treachery ! heart of unfathomable fraud ! What a royal yet vulgar soul ! with the keen eye and potent swoop of a generous eagle of Cairn Tual, with the base servility of a hound and the cold cruelty of a spider ! Think of his speech for John Magee, the most powerful forensic achievement since before Demosthenes and then think of the gorgeous and gossamer theory of moral and peaceful agitation. And after one has thought of all this and more, what then can a man say? what but pray that Irish earth may lie light on O'Connell's breast and that the good God who knew how to create so wondrous a creature may have mercy on his soul. Mitchel was unafraid to write strong stuff. He believed that O'Connell led the Irish "all wrong for forty years," that they had followed him into the wilderness of agitation after agi- tation, mistaking in their simplicity every oasis for the Promised Land. Rich and sparkling oratory was their manna. And the govern- ment watched, knowing that intoxication with words or with wine must be the prelude to a fall. Within a few years, indeed, there happed a fall such as few could have imagined, a fall in the population by two millions. After the happy hurrahing came the great famine, a story that is beyond the function of words. It 22 THE IRISH ISSUE changed Irish history and, more serious still, it changed Irish character. Mitchel made the gruesome discovery that it changed even the Irish soil: Human bones considered merely as phosphate of lime, not counting the bones of famished dogs, to the amount of fifteen hundred thousand perfect skeletons, most of them not buried deep but judiciously scattered, with a slight covering of mould or even as top dressing, must have considerably mellowed and fattened the soil of Ireland within twelve months. The plight of the people was pitiful. Their enemies told them it was their own fault for agitating and they must wait. Their friends told them it was the fault of the government and they must wait. They waited, but famine and fever waited not. Official stupidity slew thousands, where the potato blight slew its hundreds. Relief in burlesque was introduced. Crowds were employed in uprooting hills and burying the debris in carefully prepared pits. Irish corn was exported and Indian meal fetched from the ends of the earth to take its place. The Archbishop of Canterbury sug- gested as a remedy a day of national prayer and fasting, which was certainly practicable. The viceroy at the time condemned "intra- mural" interments as unsanitary. MitchePs CENTENARY OF JOHN MITCHEL 23 sarcasm was instant. s 'And you starveling people of Ireland, where do you bury your dead? For twelve months you have enjoyed the full benefits of extra-mural interment and in the open air, too!" Of the famine he left a weird but realistic description, which deserves literary remem- brance : Go where you would, in the heart of the town or in the suburb, on the mountain side, on the level plain, there was the stillness and heavy pall-like feel of the chamber of death. You stood in the presence of a dread, silent, vast dissolution. An unseen ruin was creeping around you. You saw no war of classes, no open janissary war of foreigners, no human agency of destruction. You could weep, but the rising curse died unspoken within your heart like a profanity. Human passion there was none but inhuman and unearthly quiet. Children met you toiling heavily on stone heaps, but their burning eyes were senseless, and their faces cramped and weazened like stunted old men. Gangs worked, but without a murmur or a whistle or a laugh, ghostly like voiceless shad- ows to the eye. Even womanhood had ceased to be womanly. The birds of the air carolled no more, and the crow and the raven dropped dead upon the wing. The very dogs, hairless with the head down and the vertebrae of the back protruding like a saw of bone, glared on you from the ditchside with a wolfish avid eye, and then slunk away scowling and cowardly. Nay, the sky of heaven, the blue mountains, the still lake, stretching far away westward, looked not as their wont. Be- tween them and you rose up a steaming agony, a film of suffer- ing, impervious and dim. It seemed as though the soul of the land was faint and dying, and that the faintness and the death had crept into all things of heaven and earth. 24 THE IRISH ISSUE This was a sombre vignette of an event which Lord Brougham deplored as "surpassing any- thing in the pages of Thucydides, on the canvas of Poussin, in the dismal chant of Dante." During the short run of his paper he literally set the currents and ideals of Irish nationalism as they were to move Irishmen until the rise of Sinn Fein. His appreciation of the land ques- tion was succinct: Land in Ireland is life. Just in the proportion that our people contrive to keep or to gain some foothold on the soil, in that proportion exactly they will live and not die. Ireland for the Irish means primarily and mainly not Irishmen for Irish offices, it means Irishmen fixed upon Irish ground and grow- ing there, occupying the island like trees in a living forest. While the phrases of his white-heat hate have passed into a coinage, which is current to this day, it must not be forgotten that he had a constructive programme and that he urged Na- tionalist unity with the Ulster, out of which his own soul had been digged, and even with the people as distinct from the government of England. It is true he issued that terrible saying that, if he could, he would pour coals of fire on the heads of the enemies of his country, a saying that is recorded on a public monu- ment in Cork. It was true he avenged himself CENTENARY OF JOHN MITCHEL 25 when carried from penal station to penal sta- tion, from Bermuda to the Cape, from the Cape to Van Diemen's Land, by saying that on British felony the sun never set ! True that he fiercely prayed that whatever disgrace Eng- lish law might inflict upon him it might remain upon his head and upon the head of his chil- dren, but his hatred of England was exceeded by his love of Ireland. Of that love of Ireland there are pathetic instances in the Jail Journal, as when he wrote from Bermuda: Well known to me by day and by night are the voices of Ireland; winds and waters, the faces of her ancient mountains. I see it, I hear it all, for by the wondrous power of imagination, informed by strong love, I do indeed live more truly in Ireland than on these unblessed rocks. And no one wrote more pitifully of the Irish dispersion than Mitchel, as he found himself on one of the very convict ships: They were born, these men to a heritage of unquenched hun- ger, amongst the teeming plenty of their mother land, hunted like noxious beasts from all shelter on her hospitable bosom, driven to stay their gnawing hunger enemy with what certain respectable men call their property. And so now they are traversing the deep under bayonet points, to be shot out like rubbish on a bare foreign strand, and told to seek their for- tune there amongst a people whose very language they know not. They hardly know what troops of fell foes, with quivers full of arrows, are hunting for their young souls and bodies, 26 THE IRISH ISSUE they hardly know and so much the more pity for them they hardly feel it. But in poor frail huts on many an Irish hill- side, their fathers and mothers dwell with poverty and labor and sorrow and mourn for their lost children with a mourning that will know no comfort till they are gathered to their people in the chapel yard. For indeed these convict boys were not born of the rock or the oaktree, human mothers bore them, sang them asleep in lowly cradles, wept and prayed for them. But they were not only peasants whom he met in the felon field. If Mitchel had been the Robespierre of the movement, Smith O'Brien had been reckoned an Irish Lafayette. He had been sentenced to death and then to penal ser- vitude, for the law made no difference between Gael and Gall, between republican and aristo- crat. Mitchel met him in the Antipodes and made some amends for the ungenerous mirth of Thackeray in a passage which will outlive even the statue which Ireland gave O'Brien in Dublin : It is sad to look upon this noblest of Irishmen, thrust in here among the offscourings of England's jails, with his home desolated, and his hopes ruined, and his defeated life falling into the sere and yellow leaf. He is fifty years of age, yet has all the high and intense pleasure of youth in these majestic hills and woods, softened indeed and made pensive by sorrow and haunted by the ghosts of buried hopes. He is a rare and noble sight to see, a man who cannot be crushed, bowed or broken, who can stand firm on his own feet against all the tumult and tempest of this ruffianly world, with his bold brow CENTENARY OF JOHN MITCHEL 27 fronting the sun like any other Titan, son of Coelus and Terra, anchored immovably upon his own brave heart within, his clear eye and soul open as ever to all the melodies and splen- dours of earth and heaven and calmly waiting for the angel death. So wrote the grandfather of Mayor Mitchel of the relative of Sir Cecil Spring-Rice. Some of MitchePs political writings are so scarce that he is worthy of quotation. The relation of Ulster to America and to rebellion and its whole history he slipped into one para- graph : For a long time the notion of a Protestant Republic in Ire- land had prevailed among the sturdy spawn of the old Cov- enant in the North, dreamily rather than in expressed intent. The Presbyterian religion, the memories of Scotch strife, the independent enterprise which impelled the settlers to Down and Antrim two centuries before, and won for them by their right arms broad lands and walled towns by the sea, continued to guide and influence the Northernmen. Since they held Ulster against James, the philosophy of Locke filtered through Molyneux and Lucas and every orator and writer of that whole century reminded them of the liberty for which they had fought and which they had not. The struggle in America re- called the old dream of the Protestant Republic. The aris- tocracy driven into the combat aided the Ulster Presbyterians, until by finesse and fine talk and fanfaronade they got Ireland into their hands constitutionally. Then liberty was cushioned. In a famous passage Mitchel ridiculed the Ulstermen for the manner in which they had 28 THE IRISH ISSUE allowed themselves to be sidetracked from their old ideals of liberty into religious an- tipathy : How much of the linen do you, who weave it, get to wear ? How much of the corn do you, who sow and reap it, get to eat ? Where does it go ? Who eats and wears what you make? Ahf perhaps it is the Pope of Rome who swindles you in this fashion? The Pope we know is the Man of Sin and the Mystery of Iniquity and all that, but he brings no ejectments in Ireland ! Against the strong and the oppressor Mitch- el's fearless pen was wielded in the day of Ire- land's greatest need and when her voice was hushed his rose in crescendo on her behalf. Carlyle wrote few passages so telling as this attack on the viceregal festivities: In the light of that mock throne on the hill over the Liffey there vibrate now all the dizened atomies of happy Ireland. Glittering Captains, silvered Lieutenants, epauletted puppy- ism in every grade and phase and fashion, wigged debasement fresh from a public hanging and gowned simony flock around delighted at "the flourishing condition of the state." No whisper of death, no shadow of desolation breaks over the crowd . . . and so begins a third year of uninterrupted famine. Nevertheless he never allowed himself to lose sight of the proper relations which should sub- sist between England and Ireland under proper CENTENARY OF JOHN MITCHEL 29 conditions. Crying off all hatred between the working people of the two countries, he sug- gested with profound political philosophy: Already the two long-slumbering nations have recognised each other and seen where their help lies. Why may not an alliance be then and there struck, strictly defining our common purposes and pointing out where our roads diverge and at what point the British and Irish nations are to wend their several roads, parting in peace, if it be possible, and fulfil their own destinies in the coming ages. "If it be possible" has become not only a local but an international question to-day. It was the testament Mitchel left with Ireland, for after his escape from penalism he was hence- forth to be absorbed in the wider problems of the world. As he drew near to the coasts of free America, rumours of wars involving Eng- land with Russia reached him, and he wrote: "Czar, I bless thee, I kiss the hem of thy garment, I drink to thy health and longevity. Give us war in our time, O Lord !" They were strange words for a Republican preparing for American citizenship to utter, but Mitchel was an Irish Republican ! His petition for war was fulfilled and two of his sons fell in the cause of the Confederacy. He could not help being on the losing side. After the Civil War he took up the cause of France as fiercely as he had 30 THE IRISH ISSUE upheld that of Ireland and who of his old ene- mies would hold him wrong to-day? From New York in the Irish Citizen he sounded the top note of anger and warning in 1870: We take part instantly, frankly and zealously for France. France has here the just cause. Everyone who has read the history of the false House of Hohenzollern, whether in the pages of their partisan Carlyle or anywhere else, must have got an idea of the insatiable ambition and utterly desperate treachery of that royal house. No family of professional bur- glars, the burglar father training up the burglar son, has ever been so unrelentingly bent upon living on the plunder of the others, and coming by that plunder through all possible and conceivable lies, frauds and violence as this brood of Hohen- zollern. As far back as 1866 he had foreseen and accurately defined the idea of Pan- Germanism: 'The idea that the Teutonic nationality is to be unified and bound together in one mighty mass so as to become predominant and irresis- tible in Europe." The statesmen of Anglo-Saxondom would have saved themselves a great deal of trouble if they had studied MitchePs writings in those far-off days. It was not any Celtic seership so much as downright Republican rage which led him to proclaim in 1870: The Prussian policy is to prepare very actively in secret for some unjustifiable aggression, to affect friendship till the CENTENARY OF JOHN MITCHEL 31 last moment, to employ military and engineering spies on an immense scale, to affect innocence and unconsciousness, if taxed with these tricks and at last when the moment has arrived, to burst in with overwhelming force. It was nearly fifty years later before the rest of the English-speaking world began very sol- emnly to discover and disinter the Prussian policy as a sudden and woful plot against man- kind. How brilliant Mitchel could be in his political diagnosis is shown in the most ac- curate prediction perhaps ever made. In the Irish Citizen for October 1, 1870, he wrote: Prussia cannot be England's friend. Prussia has her own aspirations and ambitions. One of them is to be a great mari- time power, or rather the great maritime power of Europe, and nothing in the future can be more sure than that Prussia, if successful finally in this struggle with France will take Bel- gium and threaten from Antwerp the mouth of the Thames. But neither in his own country or in any other country was John Mitchel reckoned a prophet. Patriot and visionary ? Yes. But how clear-sighted he was he could not have known himself. In America he planted the philosophy of Fenianism, which sprang up to distort and occasionally convulse Anglo-American relations until the approach of home rule induced the dawn of constitutionalism and the dream of 32 THE IRISH ISSUE reconciliation, both of which he had no less foreseen. Having sowed the dragon's teeth for England in the New World he returned to take his rest in Ireland, "under the globe of silver that hangs between the branches of the laurels in Dromolane." He could be indifferent to his exclusion from the House of Commons, even though his wildest guess into the future would hardly have revealed to him the sight of his grandson accepting the amende honorable from a suppliant prime minister of England on the steps of the City Hall of New York! Ill THE MEMORY OF PARNELL It is now a quarter of a century since Parnell died. During the nineteenth century he was the most meteoric figure in Irish life, though he had nothing meteoric in himself except a cer- tain stoniness. But if there are men of des- tiny, Parnell was of them. Cold, purposeful, unrelenting, distrustful, fatalistic, he was born at the time of the great famine, in Ireland's hour of fate, and he perished in his own. Parnell for about ten years was the history of Ireland. He was neither a Celt nor an ora- tor nor a Catholic. Like Dean Swift, he was an Anglo-Irishman driven by his savage indig- nation into revolt. He was brought up in the semi-feudal position of the class to whom it was a duty rather to spend than defend the resources of their country. At the University of Cambridge he imbibed an interest in higher mathematics and a certain ability for cricket. Unfortunately he was rusticated as the result of a street row. Tradition used to point out a 33 34 THE IRISH ISSUE spot in Station Road, where the Saxon insulted him as he brooded over the wrongs of Ireland and was rolled in the dust. As a matter of fact, he had not begun to think as yet of any rights or wrongs in connection with Ireland. He was too proud to return to residence and forfeited his chance of a degree. In virtue of his squiredom he entered the militia and be- came high sheriff of Wicklow. He only became a Nationalist quietly and deliberately. When three honest conspirators were hung in Manchester for the accidental death of a policeman, the determination was precipitated in his mind. In an hour pregnant with issue he chose the up-hill task of marshal- ling the broken forces of Irish democracy against his own all-powerful class. He was unsuccessful when he stood for Dublin, but was elected for Meath. His election followed a curious succession. John Mitchel had returned home to take his seat in Parliament, but was disqualified as a felon and died soon after. John Martin caught cold at his funeral and died, too. Parnell succeeded to his seat. Parnell entered Parliament with no reputa- tion save for good looks and inefficient speech. The Parliament that he entered was still a little-changed pillar of the Constitution, as far THE MEMORY OF PARNELL 35 as Ireland was concerned a buttress of con- servative opinion, the shrine of precedent and procedure. Only a moneyed or aristocratic class could breathe its atmosphere. The House was divided into two traditional groups but not against herself. If an uncertain amount of Irish insurgency simmered above the surface at times, both parties combined under an un- written law for its suppression. It was before the day of Labour or of real Liberal, when Whig and Tory played the game after their own heart. Under a fixed code of banter and debate the time-honoured ball of business was kept rolling across the gangways. At election times they merely relieved each other of the combined sweet and sweat of office. Democ- racy was unknown. The Irish secretary at the time was James Lowther, who had no qualification except a knowledge of horse-racing. His appointment was laid to Disraeli's cynical humour. Low- ther once told a deputation of peasants that they needed grass-seed rather than potato- seed, like the French minister who recom- mended the poor to eat grass. In each case a revolution was under way. Ireland was largely represented by Whigs, a perennial type of politicians who combine the 3d THE IRISH ISSUE respectable with the despicable. The type, which from all time has been intelligent enough to realise what was just, but small-minded enough to prefer what was profitable. It was said with a bitter truth that Pilate was a Whig. But the Irish leader was a genuine and warm- hearted man. Isaac Butt had sacrificed a great legal career in order to rally the country to a constitutional policy. Though he had O'Don- nell blood and possessed "a Donegal temper," he was a curious compromise in many ways. He was a Protestant and yet he wore Catholic scapulars. He loved and reverenced the law, but he loved and defended the Fenians. He had been a Unionist orator in O'ConnelFs time, but he invented home rule. For some years he had marshalled a pacific party at West- minster, where every proposed amelioration fell between the two dominant parties of tra- dition. His complacent failure had disheart- ened the Irish and made Parnell's leadership the more necessary. Butt was the first to recognise that Parriell would prove "an ugly customer for the Saxon." By a coincidence the night Parnell took his seat Mr. Biggar endeavoured to retard coercion by speaking for four consecutive hours. This was regarded as against all the rules of the THE MEMORY OF PARNELL 37 game, but it gave Parnell an idea of the policy, which is called obstruction by those who are obstructed, and the active policy by those who are primarily active. Biggar experimented, but Parnell took out its patent. The rules were simple and four in number. To work in government time. To aid anybody to spend government time. Whenever a bill was sighted to block it. Whenever a raw was noticed to rub it. Parnell settled down to play the gentlemanly game of politics remorselessly. The well-bred House stared and protested in vain as two men set out to thwart and menace the business of six hundred. If the government was unwilling to attend to Irish business, the Irish members paid unwelcome attention to government busi- ness. Parnell faced the English like an Englishman. He showed himself more of a tenacious British bulldog than a long-winded Irish wolfhound. He outdid them in political cynicism. He outbowed them in frigid courtesy. He knew exactly how far he could go. He could gauge the temper of the House to the clause and to the minute. His band increased from five to thirty. Their rough apprenticeship was in- spired by his master-personality. 38 THE IRISH ISSUE During bitter years they fought the battle of democracy against friend and foe. They had no pity for the well-meaning Butt, whom they turned down broken-hearted to his grave. They spoke in season and out of season. They spoke neither in vanity nor in vain, not to elicit applause but deliberately to rouse indignation. Parnell instructed them to learn the laws of the House by breaking them. To the science of perpetual 'motion" they added that of un- ceasing speech. They learnt to resist equally the dictates of fear and bullying, the advances of flattery and blandishment. Day and night they relieved each other on the political fence, where neither party could touch them. At last the House surrendered and the Irish question became a serious legacy from one ministry to another. Hitherto the Irish attack had been innocuous and the Irish member went clad with derision. ParnelPs policy was "not rec- onciliation but retaliation," and Parnellism began to loom as a force requiring calculation in political arithmetic. In one stormy decade he had faced the system of genteel fraud and collusion as practised under the cloak of the Mother of Parliaments and reduced her to the plainer-speaking and more democratic creature of to-day. Through the breach which Parnell THE MEMORY OF PARNELL 89 hewed in her walls entered not only the Irish party but later the English Labour party as well. Parnell did not spare his followers or himself. Under the strife and strain his character began to harden to a texture of steel and marble, but, like steel or marble in their plastic shape, he had to pass through an ordeal as fierce as fire. Justin McCarthy describes one of his appear- ances in later years: Appeared is a fitting word to use, for no apparition, no ghost from the grave ever looked more startling among living men, the ghastly face, the wasted form, the glassy eyes gleam- ing, looking like the terrible corpse-candles of Welsh supersti- tion. If ever death shone in a face it shone in that. What were his means and ways ? His state- craft consisted in fitting the axe head of physi- cal force to the handle of moral suasion after each policy had apparently failed separately. Out of both he forged his weapon. In West- minster he was a political reformer, but the eyes and sometimes the sympathy of the American Clan-na-Gael were with him. Dav- itt says the extremists in Ireland opposed him, while those in America secretly favoured him. How dangerous a game he played was shown in the fact that after the Phcenix Park mur- 40 THE IRISH ISSUE ders, which he denounced, he needed police protection from both English and Irish parti- sans. His game was deep but not desperate. He played politics as he played chess. Queen, bishops, castle, pawns were all on his Irish board. The secret of his rule was never clear. His devoted followers spoke of his iron hand, but few of them had ever felt it. He avoided rather than punished them. He ruled by mystery more than by mastery. He fascinated rather than forced the Celtic people into regarding him as their indispensable leader. In one army he arrayed priest and peasant, dynamiter and devotee. His rank and file contained both Fenian and O'Connellite. He knew exactly how far he could go. Between arms and sub- mission there seemed to be no alternative. An unwise agitator would have appealed to vio- lence to back his arguments. Parnell forbade violence but also any dealing with agent or bailiff. He added the word boycotting to European dictionaries. By a master-stroke he revived mediaeval excommunication to serve modern democracy. He defied the law by keeping within the letter and outraging the spirit. He soon found himself face to face with THE MEMORY OF PARNELL 41 Gladstone and Forster, Gladstone's chief sec- retary. Gladstone described Parnell as stand- ing between the living and the dead, "not like Aaron to stay but to spread the plague." Par- nell replied, calling Gladstone "a masquerad- ing knight-errant, ready to champion the rights of every nation but Ireland." Gladstone had no better repartee except to send Parnell to gaol. Forster received from Parnell the undy- ing epithet of "Buckshot," which he had or- dered the troops to use instead of bullets when firing on the unarmed crowd. Forster was a Quaker philanthropist let loose on Ireland, who believed that to spare coercion was to spoil the nation. Coercion not unnaturally produced the very crimes it was expected to suppress. Parnell was placed in Kilmainham without trial. When his strong hand was removed, the chariot of Ireland was dragged under the storm. The countryside hailed outrages and the land- lords replied with a rain of evictions. Out of the chaos Parnell managed to wrest the Kil- mainham Treaty. He was willing to slow down the agitation, but his price was the aban- donment of Forster and of the rents in arrears. It was a compromise which the revolutionists regretted, but Parnell was always ready to accept a step to constitutionalism. He told 42 THE IRISH ISSUE Davitt that prison solitude would drive him mad. He had felt strong enough to negotiate the treaty without consulting any others. He knew, much as he disliked prison, that it con- firmed power extraordinary upon him. In his pregnant way he remarked that his release lay with the people, and by this time they had learnt to take him at his word. They made the rule of the country impossible and the gov- ernment had no choice. Had Parnell remained in prison, their surrender would have been even more complete, but Parnell did not enjoy captivity as his followers did. He felt it as an affront to his dignity. He never forgave Gladstone, whom he privately called the Grand Old Spider. He left Kilmainham with the Irish settle- ment at hand, but in one insane hour all was undone. Forster's successor arrived as an emissary of peace and was murdered by the Invincibles in the Phcenix Park. The killing of Cavendish was accidental to the stabbing of the Under-Secretary Burke. In the political sense Parnell was not less stabbed in the back. He made the offer to Gladstone to abandon politics entirely rather than impede the com- ing reforms. The tragedy changed Irish history. Though THE MEMORY OF PARNELL 43 many details have never been known, there was a grim sequence. Years previously, when John Boyle O'Reilly was shipped as a convict, word was passed to him on the ship that Carey had done for the informer who had betrayed him. Carey in turn became the informer against the Phoenix Park murderers. But when he took ship with a free pardon he was shot by a fellow passenger on reaching South Africa. But there was nobility amid the horror. One of those executed refused to for- give Carey before he died, until he heard that the sister of charity who had tended him and entreated him to do so was a cousin of Burke, whom he had murdered. Very sublime was the utterance of Lord Frederic Cavendish's widow to Gladstone: 'You did well to send him." Though Gladstone was one day to drive Parnell out of public life, he behaved with magnanimity this time in bidding him stay. As a result of the crimes Forster enjoyed a keen revenge, for he was able to show in his speech before the House that his policy had some reason. Under the insinuations of com- plicity Parnell sat unmoved. Never had he appeared more incomprehensible to English- men, more magnificent to his subjects. Ste- 44 THE IRISH ISSUE venson has described in The Dynamiter how "Parnell sits before posterity silent, Mr. For- ster's appeal echoing down the centuries." Posterity, however, has learnt the reason of that silence more eloquent than Forster's phil- ippic. It was the silence of contempt. When later he did speak, with the Prince of Wales and Cardinal Manning in the gallery, it was to refuse to consider himself amenable to Eng- lish opinion. To the Irish only would he answer and by them he was prepared to stand or fall. In Ireland he was justified enthusiastically and he began to be known as the "uncrowned king," a title which he strangely shares with Confucius. Never was a politician so feared or hated, or watched by more vigilant enemies. Vested interests, cabinets, newspapers, all the powers of this world conspired to defeat this solitary man, who continued his way extorting the liberties of Ireland. Only one power there was in Ireland greater than his or able to crush him, but that was no power temporal. Supporters and lieutenants he had in legion, but he had realised early that it is sometimes easier to meet one's enemies than to escape from one's friends. He had also discovered that a public man need not have enemies un- THE MEMORY OF PARNELL 45 less he deigns to notice them. Bosom friends he had none. His followers found themselves subject to an influence rather than to a disci- pline. He treated them with such aloofness that at times the Irish "whips" had to dis- cover from others when he intended to speak. He often failed to take part in divisions to which members had been fetched by telegram in his name. For the first time the govern- ment found themselves dealing with a foreign power. He always bargained on the supposi- tion that he had nothing to give and everything to gain. Several ministers grew old and grey doing business on such one-sided terms. Friend and foe he confronted with a pliant impene- trability. In dealing with a crisis, he shared with all successful generals and firemen the gift of instant realisation. He was fortunate in being enrolled under no party tradition, least of all his own. He allowed his party to discuss a political matter, but he would sud- denly appear and make a decisive utterance. He used to say Washington would be a highly unpopular leader in Ireland. His style of speech in the House was terse and pointed. Gladstone said he was able to do what all speakers are supposed to, but which few really do, say what they mean to say. 46 THE IRISH ISSUE He also had the rarer power, which was not among Gladstone's gifts, of saying as little as he started out to say. Concentration stood him in the place of oratory. He wasted no time on perorations. His campaign statements combined the brevity of cablegrams with some of the fire of a minor prophet. His statement that "no man has the right to set the bounds of a nation" was one of these, and it is written in bronze across his granite statue in Dublin to-day. As a free-lance he would have proved for- midable, but as the leader of eighty he was a deciding factor. The new franchise had given him the entry into Ulster. With the balance of power in his hand he tempted the irreproach- able Tories and they fell, but it was the Lib- erals who fell from office. If he put his ene- mies into power, it was for the same reason that a poor man stuffs a broken window with rags, not so much to let the light in as to keep the cold out. The Tories being only human accepted the new situation. There is a pro- phetic passage in Swift's Journal concerning Thomas Parnell, his poetic ancestor, which is worth quoting: "Oxford passed through the crowd of his suitors to welcome Parnell when he deserted the Whigs." Tory leaders did the THE MEMORY OF PARNELL 47 same in the nineteenth century. Salisbury made an academic defence of boycotting. Churchill denounced the application of coer- cion to a sensitive people. Lord Carnarvon hinted at home rule during an interview with Parnell in an empty house. On the other hand, the Liberals awaited the first chance to make terms, but Parnell insisted on an unconditional surrender to home rule. There was a grim pause and Gladstone, after due deliberation, announced himself a Home Ruler. The two mightiest swordsmen in the parliamentary duel had met. Parnell did not possess the eloquence or learning of the other, but he had weapons of his own. His dogged will power had made the Tories set the pace for Gladstone. In relation to Gladstone he had repeated St. Paul's achievement and con- verted his gaoler. It was Parnell's supreme success in politics. He had made home rule inevitable. The first Home Rule Bill was defeated. The Tories returned to office and celebrated the Queen's Jubilee with a Coercion Act in Ireland. Led away by the general exuberance, The Times published letters purporting to connect Parnell with the Phoenix Park murders. Par- nell declined to prosecute, for he did not care 48 THE IRISH ISSUE to trust his reputation to an English jury. He despised the press but the press did not despise him. With a forged letter they had stabbed the man they feared. A royal commission was appointed by his political enemies, who sifted the lives of the Irish members as well as the whole Irish move- ment as though in the vice of an Inquisition. But the plot recoiled, for the letters proved forgeries and the forger committed suicide. Before the acquitting board of judges Parnell sat as unmoved indeed as though they had found him guilty ! To their verdict he was so indifferent that it was with difficulty that his counsel could induce him always to attend. But the political and artistic world flocked to witness the drama. Some sketches from Miss Wellord's Memories are worth quoting. Of Piggott the forger: Shall I ever forget his face? Despair, griin, awful despair had settled down upon it. A livid hue had overspread every feature, the veins on the forehead were swollen almost to bursting and the nostrils rose and fell with every respiration. When he tried to speak he could with difficulty articulate. Mr. Parnell had a wonderful face, the face of a fanatic. There was a dreamy beauty, pathos, mingled strength and weakness in it, there was also an underlying persuasive melan- choly. And he looked ill. His very tall spare form drooped. THE MEMORY OF PARNELL 49 while nervous agitation was visible in a variety of spasmodic movements, indeed it was so obvious that he was suffering physically as well as mentally that the presiding judge more than once said kindly, "If you are fatigued, Mr. Parnell, pray be seated." "I thank your Lordship, not at all," replied Par- nell, but he had to grasp the rail in front to steady himself. He took no favours. Another interested witness was Burne- Jones. As the sunlight for a while fell on Parnell's haggard and bearded face he could not help noting to Meredith that he had seen a wonder- ful model for the judgment scene enacted once before Pontius Pilate. The summing of the commission was made as condemnatory of the Irish party as possible, but the main accusation against Parnell was held false. It was as great a triumph as is per- mitted to a statesman once in his lifetime. From Ireland arose but one cry, Vivat Rex! When he entered the House of Commons, all parties rose from their seats to atone for the terrible wrong that had been done to him, all except Lord Hartington, the brother of the victim of the Phoenix Park. It was an amaz- ing scene, but Parnell made no acknowledg- ment of the ovation. Sardonically he told Mr. Harrington that he knew they would have pre- ferred to find him guilty. 50 THE IRISH ISSUE It was Parnell's apotheosis. Up to that time none had done battle with him and come away unscathed. From behind his prison bars he had broken Forster. He had converted Gladstone. He had pinned Carnarvon. The Times lay in rags. The Tories could only groan in impotence. Every political party ac- knowledged him as a master. Even so, unsus- pected ruin lay in his path. Who could have foreseen the utter and blighting calamity which awaited him so instantly? In a grey hour for Ireland Captain O'Shea instituted a divorce suit, naming Parnell. Why it was brought then has never been ex- plained, for Parnell and O'Shea had had the matter out some years before. O'Shea had not been ignorant, but he had accepted the Galway seat from Parnell in the teeth of the Irish party. Sir George Lewis pressed him to defend the suit, as he believed collusion could easily be proved. Parnell assented, but re- turned the next day to say that his first duty must be to the lady. There was no legal de- fence, though there might have been. Of moral defence there could be none. Balzac says that love is the fool's one chance to rise superior to himself. Unfortunately it is also the great man's only loophole to lower himself. THE MEMORY OF PARNELL 51 Parnell's morals were irregular, but not sen- sual. An unhappy, lonely man, he found a companion and a mother rather than a mistress in Mrs. O'Shea. She became as essential to his balance as to his happiness. Chivalry rather than passion dictated his course during and after the divorce case. The sequel was the greatest split that has ever divided even an easily divided nation. For a while his party bade him hold the wheel. But later they echoed Gladstone's virtual let- ter of deposition and thrust him from the lead- ership. Then it was that he defied them, not so much out of mortified pride as because his party had accepted an English word of com- mand. He became a giant at bay. The com- mission had revealed every word and act of his public life. In the hateful campaign which followed the divorce every scrap of his private life, every shadow of love that he had ever known was pitilessly nailed to a thousand platforms. The Irish electorate staggered into suicidal conflict, dividing towns, parishes, and families. The party which Parnell had created tried their creator. The trial of Charles Stew- art Parnell by his subjects in Westminster was the most dramatic since King Charles was tried there by his. In each case the sentence was 52 THE IRISH ISSUE one of deposition and eventually of death. Parnell was offered good terms but he refused them. Word for his destruction was first whispered from England, but it was his fellow countrymen who carried it out. It is idle to pretend that Gladstone was un- willing to see Parnell's fall, as soon as he real- ised that his own politics were liable to be compromised. What he never expected was that he would be overthrown by his own party. It must have soothed many an old sore of his to find he had dictated Parnell's doom. Swin- burne had once sung, "Parnell spurs his Glad- stone well," and doubtless the old man remem- bered past galling. Parnell was girded with his foes. All but a handful of his party for- sook him. The church swelled his disaster. Even the students in Maynooth turned his photographs to the wall. The parochial clergy followed Gladstone's political lead better than they had followed the Pope's. When Rome had forbidden the tribute subscribed in favour of the chief by a brief "Qualecumque de Par- nellio," the faithful to whom it was addressed turned Peter's pence for that year into Par- nell's pounds. The church has a long memory, and Par- nell's occasional trips into red radicalism had THE MEMORY OF PARNELL 53 been noted. With some of his followers he had voted for the blasphemous Bradlaugh, and to please Dilke and Chamberlain he had used Irish votes to block the body of the prince imperial from Westminster Abbey. The clergy refused to condone a private fault in a public man. Criticism is unadjustable. The priests thought they were right and Par- nell did not think he was wrong. Had he had any knowledge of the old books of Ireland he might have remembered a destruction of roy- alty such as his, when the Celtic saints lay Tara desolate. As they rang their bells and chanted their curses, the unhappy King Der- mot cried out bitterly: Woe to him that to the Clergy of the Churches sheweth fight, woe to him that would contend with them, giving cut for cut. But he had little knowledge of Irish books or poets. Even Moore he had quoted but once, and then wrong. Only in the religious orders were any clerical supporters of Parnell to be found, and they gave their help by stealth. Ireland split into warring factions, leaving enough Parnellites to put up a fierce but losing fight. Ulster re- mained aloof and triumphant, privately sym- 54 THE IRISH ISSUE pathising with ParnelL When he saw that his star of destiny was sinking he became careless. Travelling to and fro between England and Ireland, he fought election after election. He endangered his health and ate away his heart. In bitterness he told his deserting followers to sell him, if they must, but to sell him for a price. But angry Celts cannot see clear enough to drive bargains and they sold him for nought. The Scotch at least had cleared a historical groat when they sold their Charles Stewart to the ancestors of these same Puritans. In Octo- ber, 1891, the month he always associated with his destiny, he returned to England and died in the arms of the woman he loved. To make her his wife he had laid down both life and kingdom. The late Lord Morris, a grim old Catholic Unionist, remarked that since Joan of Arc, Mrt, Parnell was the only woman who had ever saved her country. There followed a gloomy apotheosis. A faithful few brought back his body across the Irish Sea. There was a dramatic landing in Ireland, as mournful angry men tore the outer casing of his coffin to pieces for relics. He lay in state in the City Hall of Dublin and was borne by an immense wailing crowd to the Catholic Valhalla of Glasnevin. They had THE MEMORY OF PARNELL 55 killed him, but they gave him a wonderful funeral, did the Irish people. Parnell ' had perished, to use a phrase of the Irish mediae val- ists, by the "envenomed spittle of men." When it was too late, it was remembered that he was irreplaceable. His name became a symbol and a shibboleth, and his statue by St. Gaudens was later added to the monuments of Dublin. One by one his scattered followers came together with the years and recommenced the warfare in which he had first instructed them, and by long weary roads came again within sight of the promised land, to which his sceptreless hand still pointed from the grave. ParnelPs character has remained something of a paradox. Though his heart was finally torn in twain its secrets were never read. His natural sensitiveness he crushed out in order to present a harder front to the foe* Friend no less complained of his iciness. He could be gracious to supporters and dependents, when he wished, but his uneasy leadership forbade him to be overkind or intimate. In 1885 Jus- tin McCarthy wrote of him: "I don't know how it is, but he has in his manners as a host the sweetness of a woman as well as the strength of a curiously cold, self- contained masculine nature." 56 THE IRISH ISSUE And in the following year: "One of our men complained to me of his manner; said that he was growing terribly dictatorial. The fact is that Parnell is nervously afraid of anything being done just now which might give our enemies the slightest chance of handle against him, and he is quite right." He was not Irish enough to be magnanimous like Butt on the one hand, or treacherous on the other like O'Connell, but he allowed others to sacrifice themselves for him without a word. For some such reason it was that Davitt com- plained he could be mean. Two critics have left severe criticisms of Parnell from very different points of view — Davitt, an agrarian revolutionary, and F. Hugh O'Donnell, an old-fashioned Catholic home ruler. Both con- demned him in character and policy in the most massive books which have been written on the Irish movement. Yet Parnell lives un- scathed in the memory of the race. His love for a woman is pardoned in his hate for Eng- land. His love of animals was probably his most Irish trait. He was once seen to be more con- cerned over the fate of a dog running under a crowd than in the feelings of the said crowd. Horses he generally preferred to men. He was THE MEMORY OF PARNELL 57 English enough to be without humour. He read Alice's Adventures in Wonderland without being amused. Occasionally he could chaff a too serious follower. He used to joke about making Davitt inspector of Irish prisons under home rule, and the Fenian O'Kelly head of the Irish police. During the agonies of the split in his party he could chaff Justin Mc- Carthy on his chances of succession. He af- fected mystery in all things, partly out of the necessities of his life and partly to retain the wonder of the Irish people. He wore an ob- vious disguise in the London streets and was fond of disappearing from cabs. His knowl- edge of the motives of others was on a par with their ignorance of his. "I wish I knew what Parnell's politics are," said a close fol- lower. He was described as a conservative in feeling and as a revolutionary in action. Cecil Rhodes called him the most reasonable and sensible man he ever met. He led the most Tory people in Europe and in the name of democracy destroyed the most feudal of aristocracies. His distrust of the English was total, but he did not always trust the Irish either. A superstitious fringe lay under his fatalism. He was much upset by the fall of a picture of the Irish party just after the 58 THE IRISH ISSUE Phoenix Park murders. He detested the colour green, which he intended one day to change from the national colour. He believed Ireland's bad luck was due to it. He could hardly be said to worship a God. He never swore, using only the mildest expressions. Like most men of destiny, he believed in Fate in the way that most men of thought believe in Providence. In the Middle Ages he would have been an alchemist. He spent long hours and consider- able moneys on his laboratory. From time to time he extracted minute particles of Wicklow gold on his estate. When human politics seethed about him he took consolation in his quarries or in sweeping the heavens with his telescope. He seems to have had a vague belief in star life, but the only human immor- tality he could conceive of was in children. To a race of orators he delivered himself in early years by what sounded like controlled hissings, but later in the shortest and most frigid of speech. His longer speeches left the "impression from a grey and sunless day in which everything shows clear but also hard and cold." But he had a softer voice which he used when addressing children or animals. The idol of an intensely religious race, he be- lieved perhaps in their idol but in little else. THE MEMORY OF PARNELL 59 In the supreme moments of his life he was liable to appear dumb or indifferent. He ac- cepted the Parnell tribute without one word of thanks. To the ovation of crowd or House of Commons he was contemptuous. His lead- ership he regarded with a sensitive pride, which was also strong enough to carry him through disaster unto death. As a boy it was said he was fond of playing the game of "fol- low my leader" as long as he himself remained leader. It was the same in his after-life, for when he could no longer be leader he was not unready to die. It is interesting to compare him with the only contemporary Englishman occupying as great a hold on popular imagination, Randolph Churchill. Both were aristocrats by birth and breeding, who aimed at wielding great demo- cratic power. They were the only two of their generation to stand up to Gladstone in debate. His eloquence they met with scorn or ribaldry, but he lived to see them both laid in early graves. Both died at forty-six, under the clouds of disaster. It was only natural that they should have attracted each other at one time almost to the extent of coming to an understanding over the Irish question. Each in his time had revolted against an "old gang" 60 THE IRISH ISSUE and set a devoted following towards pastures new. After a short conversation they broke, Parnell claiming that he had got more out of Churchill than the latter out of him. In the day of his ruin Churchill regretted that he did not possess ParnelFs "dogged and sinister resolution." In the end both were betrayed by their own colleagues and finally cut down in the house of their friends. Whatever mis- takes they made they paid the price before they died. Both had striven to lead their parties into new paths and both were cast out to die alone in madness and despair, IV THE TREASON OF THE REDMONDS John Redmond succeeded to ParnelPs chair and fate. The majority of Irishmen in Amer- ica believe or say that the Redmond brothers betrayed Ireland in the first and vital stage of the war. That they gratuitously gave Ire- land's aid to England and that they got noth- ing for it, not even a staff billet for Willie Redmond or an Order of Merit for John. It is felt that they made a political blunder of the first magnitude and all but compromised the honour of their country. That Ireland only succeeded in recovering herself by a miracle and her honour by an insurrection, while the Redmonds went their downward way and were appropriately paid for trusting England. That one of them lies dead in France and the other is politically dead in Ireland. John Redmond's political work has turned to ash and his twenty years of leadership is accounted for nought. No doubt his brother found German steel softer to bear than he has 61 62 THE IRISH ISSUE found Irish reproaches. Betrayed in all his hopes for Ireland, but serene in conscience, he awaits nevertheless the judgment of history. Once John was venerated of all men Irish and Willie was the idol of the race, the D'Artagnan of Irish politics. But nations as well as indi- viduals must ofttimes kill the thing they love. And for the time being Ireland seems to have put them both out of mind and out of love. The root of the accusation is that John Red- mond made a colossal blunder in offering the Irish sword to the allied cause without stop- ping to take counsel of his people first and without insisting on the immediate delivery of home rule upon its tip. As a nationalist poli- tician his failure must seem lamentable to all lovers of a close deal. He had a wonderful chance to bargain. England's fierce and sud- den need was Ireland's miraculous opportunity. More than the word of any other single man in the world, England needed Redmond's word of approval and allegiance to the principle un- derlying the war. Germany had declared war, implicitly trusting in the information that Ire- land was divided from England and divided against herself. There was only one man in a position to give the United Kingdom the ap- pearance of unity in face of war. It was John TREASON OF THE REDMONDS 63 Redmond, and from higher considerations than the mere political he spoke the word which gave Germany the severest jolt that any un- official individual may be said to have given her during the war. He took his chances as every national leader who has come into this war has had to take chances. There was the chance of a long war and there was a chance that all his people would not follow him all the time. Fate but not honour failed him. He did not betray Ireland in theory or in practice, but he may be said to have betrayed himself, for both English politicians and Irish critics took ad- vantage of the side which he so generously bared. It was apparent that he gave his pound of blood and got nothing for it. He seemed to have failed to perform the first duty of a politician in not seizing his advantage. The political opponents of a lifetime would have been at his mercy if he had privately bargained for home rule before he made his speech. Ireland has come to regret and assail his action. Only the winds of history, which make havoc of subterfuge and policy, can make plain his position as a statesman and a European. The war has become a severely altruistic war. Nobody dares to fight for sheer conquest or revenge. Moral principle and self-sacrifice 64 THE IRISH ISSUE are the only permissible pivots of action. From this point of view, the point of view from which the participants in the war will be judged, it is better to forego one's rights than to imperil those of others, better to be cheated than to cheat. It is not so in politics, but it is so in a war waged for the moralities of the world. The higher that one appraises the ethics of the Allies, the higher one must rate Redmond. He represents principle undone by facts. Facts have destroyed his political value, but if he no longer represents Ireland in poli- tics, he comes near to representing something in national relations, which since the blight of Machiavelli had been lost to Christendom. And yet it is hard to see how he could have acted otherwise. He had always been insist- ing that if England gave Ireland home rule, the Irish would help instead of embarrass the empire. He was accused of saying one thing in Westminster and another thing in America. Yet thirty years ago in Chicago he was saying, "We have given England the most convincing proof that on the concession of liberty we can be trusty friends." He and his whole party had been elected and re-elected without re- pudiation of this promise by their constituents. The Irish had implicitly accepted the saying TREASON OF THE REDMONDS 65 from Redmond's lips and Carson had explicitly ridiculed it to Ulster's huge assent. Whether Redmond was a weak man leaning to the line of least resistance or a strong man exercising that moderation which only strong men can, others may decide. For the moment he seemed to have united Ireland, to have broken the feud between England and Ireland and to have played a successful game in the open. The hour of penetrating and unrelent- ing test, which visits every individual and every nation in such a war, came to Redmond as it came to the King of the Belgians. It was equally a case of betraying the material advan- tages of his position that a principle might live. On the moral issue in Europe Redmond re- versed the domestic policy of Ireland. He ap- pealed to the Ulster and National Volunteers to unite in the defence of Ireland. He turned to the government with the cry: 'You may remove your troops from Ireland!" Out of a moment of epic he seemed to have snatched the Irish millennium, but all three to whom he appealed were to fail him. The Ulster Volun- teers had no wish to make up a United Ireland. They kept aloof. The government showed no desire to trust the honour of the Irish people or the words of their leader. Redmond's sup- 66 THE IRISH ISSUE porters discovered that they had not sent him to Parliament to decide moral issues on the Continent, but to extort home rule. It was probably as much his duty as a politician to win home rule out of the crisis as it was his duty as a European statesman not to make confusion in the one spot to which Ulster action had directed the eyes of the All Highest. As a result of his action Ireland became the one bright spot — momentarily. Home rule was put on the statute-book, but with a proviso that it must await the end of the war to come into effect. To have made Redmond Irish premier would have hastened the end of the war. Supreme and enlightened policy would have led England to pay the poli- tician's fee in return for the statesman's sacri- fice. Had he used England's plight to play a political game, Ireland's plight might have been worse in the end. He who acts in such days as a mere politician shall perish as such. Redmond threw politics to the wind and politi- cal death cannot harm his name. There is no doubt that Redmond saw a great opportunity to place Ireland on the proper level she should occupy in relation to neighbouring countries like France and Eng- land. This was obvious to many of the Sinn TREASON OF THE REDMONDS 67 Feiners, who were ready to enter into any mili- tary scheme which guaranteed the national honour. Only, some form of national govern- ment to sanction and control any national sac- rifice in the field was a sine qua non. Unfor- tunately Tory political influence was strong enough to insist that Ireland's contribution to the defence of France should pass as strictly British. The green flag was denied in the field and every proposal of the Irish party was scorned by the callous war office. What the imperial politicians failed to see was Redmond's unique value to the empire. Here was a war for small nationalities and here was the proffer of a small nation's sword ! Here was a war between two military imperial Powers and a free Ireland better than any propaganda would have distinguished the qual- ity of the one from the other ! Here was a keen tussle for public opinion in America, and Redmond installed as an Irish premier would have been in a position to appeal for it. The cry went out later and the research magnificent was made for the man who would save the empire. Hughes was discovered in Australia, Smuts was hailed in South Africa, and Borden boomed in Canada. The blinded Cabinet never realised that nothing would have sooner closed 68 THE IRISH ISSUE fissures in the empire or insured the co-opera- tion of the self-governing colonies better than an Irish premier in their councils. It would also have encouraged America during the thirty months she required to make up her mind. But it was not to be, and Redmond was strand- ed between two seas, between the unimagina- tive inanity of the government after the dec- laration of war and the savagery of sorrow which swept through Ireland after the rising. Such was the tragedy which befell the Red- monds. Locally and through the blundering of others they have fallen into disregard, but the day will come when Irish historians will be glad to take refuge amidst the after-war controver- sies in the first and solemn stand which the Irish leader made in the name of his people against the destruction of Belgium, though for the time he was stranded, a spectacle to Celtic deities and to all political mankind. The death of Willie Redmond in the field was one of the most dramatic and pathetic events in the war. For a quarter of a century he had represented the stony hills of Clare in the stonier wastes of Westminster. In the old days so many of the men of Clare went to fight in France that France was spoken of as the graveyard of Clare. The ancient and honour- TREASON OF THE REDMONDS 69 able doom of Clare befell Willie Redmond. By an irony of fate not unknown in Ireland he was carried back to die by the men of Ulster, whom he had so long opposed in politics. Death in Ireland was not granted to him, as it was not granted either to O'Connell or Parnell. O'Connell died in Genoa, broken by the famine, overthrown by the revolutionists. Parnell also crept away from Ireland to die, because the people who were to weep over him dead rent him living. Ear from Clare and apart from the men of Clare, Willie Redmond died, tast- ing the doom which is the doom of the leaders of Ireland. Those who serve Ireland have found that her service leads to disappointment and even to death, but that if the service of Ireland is bitterer than death it is also sweeter than life. The Irish themselves will always be a good excuse for God's goodness to their dead leaders. So it fares with the Redmonds. One has died as a soldier and the other shall one day live as a statesman with Venizelos and Lieb- knecht, the prototypes of a new era when lead- ers shall have learnt to sacrifice themselves rather than pass over the infringement of the higher law. Ireland has wished to forget John Redmond. The day will come when the Irish 70 THE IRISH ISSUE will find his name as great a slogan upon their lips as " Remember Limerick/ 5 the city of the broken treaty. It will be the English who will wish to forget him then, for the historians to come will remember him, whatever the poets may utter of malediction against him to-day. V THE ETHICS OF SINN FEIN Few words have incurred such wide-spread in- terest as a result of the war as the hitherto ob- scure password Sinn Fein. A word which a few years ago was known to only a comparatively few thinkers and propagandists in Ireland has since been canvassed by the press of the world. Sinn Fein is still a stumbling-block to philolo- gists as well as to politicians. Sinn Fein is simply the Gaelic for "ourselves," which, after all, is the working motto of every government and corporation in the modern ring. Trusts and tariffs are Sinn Fein applied to the indus- trial world. The workings of empires and chosen peoples are pure Sinn Fein. But there is a Sinn Fein of the conquered as well as of the conqueror. If Moses led a Sinn Fein offen- sive into Palestine, the Ghetto was no less a hotbed of mediaeval Sinn Fein thrown back upon itself. Applied to nationalism Sinn Fein is the expression of personality in a people, but whether as a means of defence or offence — 71 72 THE IRISH ISSUE there lies the rub of modern history. As Wash- ington said: "I want an American character that the Powers of Europe may be convinced we act for ourselves." The small nationality is a Sinn Fein propo- sition. It is curious to think of old John Huss as the grandfather of all Sinn Fein. Yet he told the Council of Constance that "Bohemians should have by right the chief place in the offices of the Kingdom of Bohemia, even as they that are French-born in the Kingdom of France and the Germans in their own country, whereby the Bohemian might have the faculty to rule his people and the Germans bear rule over the Germans." The importance of the Bohemians in Europe has always been that they form a Slavic wedge between two branches of the German people, just as Ireland's strength or weakness as a world factor depends on her geographical position in the Atlantic between the two great branches of the xAnglo-Saxon race. Bohemia is an inland Ireland. It is interesting that both countries should have been strongly pro-French in the war of 1870, when left to their own instincts. The modern Czech asso- ciations correspond largely to those of Gaelic Ireland. The Sokols, for instance, a Pan-Slavic athletic society, is exactly what the Gaelic THE ETHICS OF SINN FEIN 73 Athletic Association is to Ireland. During the war Sinn Fein in Bohemia has been crushed with a ruthlessness that we can only be thank- ful was not applied in Ireland. The Bohemians have refused to be conscripted for other than Bohemian ends, and regiments have been deci- mated to order. War likewise has been made on the literary men and the poets, for the poets have always been on the side of the small na- tionalities. The muse of the Jingo has run sterile during this war. Kipling's reputation has shared that of the generals, but Verhaeren of Belgium, Macdonagh of Dublin, and Machar of Bohemia, their song shall endure. Sinn Fein is definitely the policy of all small nationalities. It moves by laws which are common to different countries. It has invari- ably the poetry of the lost cause attached to it and the menace of a greater nation to secure it the sympathy of the rest of the world. Poland has practised Sinn Fein as well as it has been able ever since the partitions. Belgium is the Sinn Fein in the German ointment. Greek Sinn Fein enlisted Byron and brought about the battle of Navarino. Italian Sinn Fein was incarnate in Garibaldi and thrust Austria out of Venice. The British have always fostered and applauded Continental varieties of Sinn Fein. 74 THE IRISH ISSUE Pro-Ally propaganda describes the case for Sinn Fein in Bohemia to-day. The programme of the Czechs is apparently not very different from that of the Irish Nationalists. Doctor Kramarz, the leader of the young Czechs, seems to have occupied a similar position to John McNeill, the Sinn Fein leader in Ireland. Kramarz had no wish to be disloyal to Austria, provided Bohemia was recognised. He was willing to be pro- Austrian in an Austria which gave freedom to the Slavic ideal, just as Irish Nationalists were always ready to make their peace with an empire that did not disparage the ideal of the Gael. Kramarz, a successor of Huss, realised sadly that "a foreign policy focussed in Berlin leaves no room for the Aus- trian Slavs." Curiously enough, both Kram- arz and McNeill were condemned to penal servitude within a few days of each other for the crime of treason on perfectly general grounds. In releasing McNeill the British realised their mistake. The Austrians have not. In Ireland the Sinn Fein movement was in- dustrial, linguistic, and ethical. Valiant efforts were made to grow Irish tobacco and to enjoy it with the aid of Irish matches. Every class and profession was touched by an almost re- THE ETHICS OF SINN FEIN 75 ligious desire for native productions. Scribe and poet demanded Irish paper and Irish ink, There arose a passionate request for Irish cloth and fabric and even for Irish rosaries. Char- women charred happier with native soap, and Celtic characters on the sign-posts became equally the source of travellers' joy and per- plexity. The most ambitious point in the pro- gramme demanded that English goods should be excluded and that the Irish representation should remain at home. The root idea was not Irish in origin but was frankly based on the similar movement which led to a national res- urrection of Hungary. Those who cradled and pioneered it were laughed at for a "green Hun- garian band" with that fatal facility for nick- name in Irish life. Such a movement, however vague and mean- ingless to English understanding, had quite a comprehensible analogy with such ripples in English life as the Ritualist, ^Esthetic, or Christian Socialist movements. The form may be different, but the matter, the wine of youth, the enthusiasm of idealists, the desire for bet- ter things, the revolt from conventional stale- ness and mediocrity, was the same in both countries. It would have been curious to know what would have happened to such sweet 76 THE IRISH ISSUE but impatient spirits as Hurrell Froude, Kings- ley, and Morris had they been born in Ireland. Cardinal Newman confessed that he would have been a rebel had he been an Irishman. So with song and high hope the Gaelic move- ment swung under way. At most it did not lead to more than a battle of the books in those days of boyish defiance and literary contro- versy. Only a few among the Sinn Feiners brooded a warlike application of the ancient dream. Yet this movement under normal con- ditions should no more have led to bloodshed than the Oxford movement have terminated in a gunpowder plot. But Ireland is never nor- mal. Before the rising the Sinn Fein were unable to win an election. Their solitary appearance in a Leitrim constituency met with a signal defeat from the Nationalist machine. As they were by their very programme destructive of the Irish party the attitude of the latter was perhaps excusable. The Irish party was then slowly satisfying that national ideal which only when in extremis and desperation assumes the revolutionary colour. But the estrangement with the old leaders came. They broke away from Redmond's constitutionalism and from Douglas Hyde, who resigned the presidency of THE ETHICS OF SINN FEIN 77 the Gaelic League when he refused to make it political. During a long quarter of a century Parliament had afforded a safety-valve to na- tionalism, but the defeats and delays of home rule proved an irritant of gathering force. Time is never on the side of sedative or solution in Ireland. Event must keep pace with emo- tion, and result must feed demand. "Home rule at no distant date" became a byword synonymous with the Greek or Celtic kalends. Only Redmond's handling of the lightning con- ductor in Parliament averted the bolt. But time and destiny and bureaucracy, an inexora- ble trio, tended to neutralise his gallant efforts before and after the outbreak of the war. Meantime the Sinn Fein went under the im- pulse of an overriding idea, leaderless. The men who had inspired them were constitution- alists, but were incapable of adding direction. What is not yet known for the purposes of his- tory is when the Irish Revolutionary Brother- hood rose like a ghost out of the past and as- sumed control. Long after the cordiality of settled peace has been restored to Europe men may perhaps become agreed as to what were the real causes and incidents of the Irish ris- ing. We only know that the Sinn Feiners rose swiftly and blindly, but for the local ideals 78 THE IRISH ISSUE which Germany is elsewhere trying to crush. They died wantonly and superfluously on behalf of their liberty. They met and slew men, who also after their manner had enlisted in the cause of liberty. They went out and threw Ireland into confusion for a generation to come, but with suicidal gesture and distorted phrase nevertheless they were pleading for the life and right of a small nationality. Once again the Nameless One that presides over the mortal side of Irish history had min- gled the woof with direst tragedy. Fortunately indeed, there is an immortal side as well, which no tragedy can touch, no politics embitter, and no madness destroy. The original dreamers of the Sinn Fein who had remained aloof from the rising came out of the wilderness. They carried before them into battle the dead martyrs, and the electorate was theirs for the taking. In Celtic Ireland armies carried the potent bodies of dead Kings in their battle-front and attributed victory to them. In like manner the Sinn Fein can now sweep an emotional majority in any two seats out of three in Ireland. For the time even the historic feud with England waits while the Sinn Fein settle their long score with the Irish party. Irishmen of the most different brand THE ETHICS OF SINN FEIN 79 can take pride but never pity in each other. It is grim how Celt can fall upon Celt, and all to make a British holiday. One remembers Carson dissecting his unhappy fellow Irishman, Oscar Wilde, in the witness box, and Russell of Killowen closing pitilessly on Piggott the forger of the Parnell letters. Yet they were Irishmen all. When there is a great Irish triumph there is too often Irish suffering in the background. The slow agony of the Irish party began at the unabsolving hands of the Sinn Fein. Woe to the politician who did not discern the signs of the time ! for his place shall be made vacant and his bishopric given to another. Woe to the man of letters who at the time misjudged the rising of the Sinn Fein ! for he shall be cut out of the soul of his own people. As Rolland Romain by his neutrality above the clouds of battle lost the love which would have been added to the admiration which his fellow countrymen feel for his writings, so it is with the Irish writer whose pen did not beat to the agony of Easter week. The Sinn Fein is not an abortion but is in symbolic relations to the whole labouring earth. The time has come, as Henry VIII said on being told all Ireland could not govern the Earl of Kildare, "then let the Earl of Kildare 80 THE IRISH ISSUE govern all Ireland," that the Sinn Fein prov- ing ungovernable should be placed in a posi- tion to govern themselves. Responsibility alone can anchor idealists to earth. Sooner or later they will come to terms with Ulster. Already they have destroyed the power of the Irish party, and in the future they promise to check if not annul the political power of the priest. Just as the Ulster sedition was led by "loyal- ists," so the anticlerical movement in Ireland is led by curates. But Sinn Fein has reached its day, and for long there will be neither quarter or compro- mise. Sinn Fein is a fever, against which there is no appeal, terrorising and exalting the emo- tions of a whole generation with something be- tween the psychology of a race riot and of a religious revival. Only the judicious and the middle-aged and the uninspired can afford to stand aside. The riffraff and the rowdy of Ireland are of it, but so also are the radiant and the righteous of soul, some of the best that a nation can contain. Time only can show whether the sediment from the troubled waters will yield the base of a nation or of a faction only. Even so the faction of to-day is the nation of to-morrow. VI THE PRESIDENCY OF PEARSE The presidency of Patrick Pearse in the Irish republic was one of the most sudden and sifting events of Irish history. There have been other bolts from the green, but in the memory of man none so startling in origin, so piteous in end, or so far-reaching in result. The Phcenix Park murders and the Parnellite split, which in other countries would not have caused more than a nine days' wonder, were sufficient to dash Irish hopes and to affect remote parts of the earth. The presidency of Patrick Pearse during a blood-shot week in Dublin has changed the course of Irish history, and in its far- thrown ripple proved only second to the Rus- sian revolution in the extraneous interest it roused. Pearse will be remembered for the last week and especially for the last minute of his life, and less for the patient, faithful years when he laboured as a journalist in what was to him a strange tongue, and later as a pioneer among 81 82 THE IRISH ISSUE Irish schoolmasters. As many books will be written on the subject as there were hours in the life of the short-lived republic. Historians will collate the incidents and philosophers ex- pound the ethics. Controversialists will con- trovert the facts and idealists conflict over the ideals. Few will open the Gaelic files in which so much of Pearse's writing was done or give themselves over to the study of the education- alist. Yet his greatest work was done in the schools. Before he revolutionised the Iri^h capital, Pearse had revolutionised the Irish school. In a moment of inspiration he left his desk as editor of the Cleeve Sholuis, or Sword of Light, and founded Scoil Enna or St. Enda's School, in which he proposed to carry on the education of Irish boys, as though the centuries of English occupation and culture had never been, and Irish Ireland were a reality. The Irish language, dress, customs, and traditions were made part of the school life. It came as a distinct shock verging on astonishment to the other school curricula of Ireland. For the boys were not taken to be stuffed like birds for the examination market, but were fostered rather as children were in ancient Ireland, who were placed in the suites of well-known heroes THE PRESIDENCY OF PEARSE 83 or Kings, that the best might be brought out in them through emulation of their hosts. The head master of St. Enda's compared his boys to the boy corps at Royal Emania, who prac- tised for heroics in war and literature under the eagle eye of the King of Ireland. "The King is with his foster children," we are told, was a frequent answer at Court in those far-off Gaelic days. While the clan lasted, fosterage played its part in Ireland. To revive it in edu- cational guise was a step of genius that could only have occurred to Patrick Pearse. Boys arrived from all over Ireland and for very small fees were initiated into the whole gamut of Gaelic living and dying, in fact into the long- lost art of the heroic life. The intellectual up- rising of Dublin was then at its height, and masters and boys entered into it not only as students but as performers. Such first-class lit- terateurs as Thomas MacDonagh and Padraic Colum joined the staff. The school indulged in pageants and plays. Literary Dublin, in- terested in the Gaelic revival, attended their pageant of heroic Ireland in the city suburbs. Another day a kind of passion play was given in the old language. Nobody believed that the school could last. John McNeill and Stephen Gwynn sent their boys. Others de- 84 THE IRISH ISSUE murred at the sacrifice to be made to the an- tique. There was a melancholy expectation that for a few months Pearse's talents would be spent with a few kilted boys translating a book of Euclid into Connact Irish. But the school continued in spite of every financial diffi- culty, and even flowered into larger premises. Pearse made one flying visit to America, whose streets he trod, meeting with as little recogni- tion as Rupert Brooke, who soon after passed unbailed through the same land, where each was to find posthumous hero-worship. With such funds as his friends and lecturing produced he kept his school in the front line of Irish education. To politics and to home rule bills he was indifferent, believing that no act of alien Parliament could restore a nation's soul. His school not only taught but it also made history. St. Enda's began as a pastoral idyll in the suburbs of Rathmines and it finished as a fiery epic under the burning ruins of the Dublin post office. Pearse was a man of a single dream, of a single life, of a single heart, of a single ideal. He became historical through a single decision and famous in a single week. Simplicity and straightforwardness was his policy in the face of fact and the assaults of absurdity. He al- THE PRESIDENCY OF PEARSE 85 ways made the extreme course the short cut to his soul's desire. He did not mind being singu- lar, even to the extent of making Irish theo- retically his single speech. There was no turn- ing or influencing him once he had chosen his path. He was as poetic, as revolutionary, and as wayward as Shelley, but with a sombre touch that took the place of passion in his life. What atheism was to Shelley's youthful en- thusiasm, Fenianism was to Pearse. In a mind otherwise so gentle, it was the one terrible and besetting strain. The theme of death, disaster, and suffering for Ireland never left his thought. Whether he worked as a barrister or as a schoolmaster, while his vocation was religious or journalistic, he seemed to be haunted by an icy breath from the coming years. He was never in love ex- cept with his abstract goal of a free Ireland. He enjoyed the sadness of meditation and was expectant of shame in the Irish cause. In his poems this was darkly shown to those who could interpret them. Death was his familiar, and he coquetted with the grave. Alan Sea- ger's " rendez-vous with death," found its exact Gaelic parody in Pearse' s lines: "a rann I made to my love, to the king of kings, ancient death," *\ 86 THE IRISH ISSUE Death was not his only devotion. He was passionately fond of children, and he cared for all small creeping things. His pupils were placed under stringent oath never to hurt bird or butterfly. Poetry, folk-lore, and symbolism possessed him. He that loved so many un- substantial things from the God, who in a moment of fantasy created Ireland, to the songs that Gaelic beggar men sing at the cross- roads, needed to find one object of enmity. And he found it in history, out of which he dug the Englishman of the penal days, and against whom he set his heart with unrelenting zeal. As he wrote once: "I will take no pike. I will go into the battle with bare hands. I will stand up before the Gall, as Christ hung naked before men on the tree." With such a prophet what was there to be done? For he prophesied his own death and took the first opportunity to seek its fulfilment. In St. Enda's used to hang a mystical picture of a mourning woman, under whose cloak clustered thickly the little naked manikin souls of men. It looked like some very doleful virgin salving the sons of earth in purgatory. It was a rep- resentation of the dead who died for Ireland, whom Pearse had vowed to join. Though the school lived in an atmosphere of THE PRESIDENCY OF PEARSE 87 past rebellions and Pearse sometimes spoke of the enthusiasm with which he felt he could lead out the boys, yet there was never the slight- est attempt to drill the boys or to secrete arms. Revolt was purely academical and, besides, the whole trend of the Gaelic movement was to save Ireland by books rather than by the blunderbuss. By ballad and not by bullet would MacDonagh have preferred to train boys to free their land. So in those delightful early days there, was more trouble with the tradesmen than with the British Government. The school lived a happy-go-lucky life of its own, becoming in a few years one of the set- tled institutions of Dublin. Archbishop Walsh gave it his sanction and wondering visitors never failed it. In the background Pearse was for ever conspiring with the phantoms of his own mind. With the Carson episode and the Ulster gun- running, Fenian dreams began to take concrete shape among the dreamers and poets of Dub- lin. Thinkers were quick-witted enough to see that Carson had played indirectly into the hands of the physical-force men. While the Ulstermen stood within their undoubted rights and defied Redmond or the government to ad- vance upon their homelands, unprotected save 88 THE IRISH ISSUE by Bible and covenant, they were playing a winning game, which would have won them sympathy all over the world and turned the polls in England. It was essential for their policy to provoke the Nationalists to take the offensive and strike the first blow. Redmond's statecraft counselled patience, and secure in their constitutional triumph the Nationalists bore every contumely that was hurled at them. If riot or trouble occurred, the Ulstermen had everything to gain by them. But in their anger and pride they made the huge blunder of creating the trouble themselves and carry- ing out a serious arming. It hurt them politi- cally as much as it lost the Kaiser to take the offensive against France. Had Ulster and Ger- many waited to be attacked in their own homes they would not have each lost the sympathy of the American people. The state of the chess-board in Ireland is such that a really bold move by either side leads to consequences that can never be over- taken. Destiny enters to play her gambit. The arming of Ulster led to the semi-arming of Dublin. Carson sowed the wind in the hills of Ulster and the Fenians went out with bloody blades to reap the whirlwind. The signing of the covenant in Belfast led indirectly to the THE PRESIDENCY OF PEARSE 89 mobilisation of St. Enda's school. The head master became a soldier, a conspirator, and finally in the dark of night was elected a president. From that moment until he faced the firing squad he stood on the edge of burning limelight. Every order he gave made Irish history, and every word he wrote passed direct into the dark scroll of Ireland's story. It is curious how schoolmasters and professors have played more striking and world-stirring parts than the professional earth and cloud compellers in this war. There is Professor Wilson. There is an old scholastic professor of Louvain, who an- swered Bissing in deed as bravely as he had answered Kant in philosophy. And then we have the head master of St. Enda ? s. When will the world be wise enough to follow Plato's ad- vice to make philosophers king ? There is no need to canonise or excoriate Pearse. He saw and took his chance. Living under the shadow of Dublin Castle, stung by the differential treatment awarded to Ulster and Irish rebels, he and his companions had little occasion to think out the international problem from their own premises. Their sense of thwarted nationality was so intense that they could not see Europe. And Europe, it 90 THE IRISH ISSUE seemed, had forgotten that Ireland was a na- tion. Clinging to their broken tree, they could not see the wood. Had some miraculous change in British statesmanship assured Ireland of national rights at the outbreak of war, it might have been otherwise, for Pearse was susceptible to the miraculous. But it seemed that the mighty wings of the empire rushing to war were extinguishing the Irish lamp. And Nationalists, in their determination to keep alight the flicker of Gaelic Ireland upon their own hearth could not trouble about the forest- fire outside. So the revolt took place. It was inevitable. It was not glorious but it was salutary. It was the only important event in Ireland since the death of Parnell. It seemed as though Dublin had risen like a hysterical woman and stabbed a man in armour with a broken bod- kin to avenge some far-off unhappy thing, and was summarily suppressed. There were things done on both sides which both would prefer to forget, but which the politicians on either side will never allow to rest. It was a rough-and- tumble duel with as much honour and chivalry involved as either side care to extract. It was brief, unbrotherly, sudden, and spectacular. It was not war — but it made history. There were THE PRESIDENCY OF PEARSE 91 genuine traits of humanity shown. Soldiers called on Sinn Feiners to clear out before they turned on their machine-guns. A Sinn Feiner recognised an officer on whom he had fired and ran out to apologise. Pearse was insistent on the kind treatment of the prisoners. It was his intense susceptibility to the suffering of others that brought the rebellion to a close. He had steeled his heart to the killing of sol- diers or of his followers, but he was broken down by rumours that civilians were enduring the peine forte et dure of war. He surrendered and caused others to surrender, "in order to pre- vent the further slaughter of unarmed people." Otherwise the revolt might have lasted for weeks. His heart was stronger than his head. But in surrendering he was unconsciously put- ting the authorities into a quandary. Were they to be executed as criminals or imprisoned as prisoners of war ? Up to this moment there had only been a half -sympathetic, half-sorrow- ful feeling for men waging a fight that was lost before it was begun. As for those who were killed in the fighting, they slew and were slain. They took up the sword and perished by the sword. But the execution of Pearse and his fellows, however approved by the authorities, was playing into their dead hands. What they m THE IRISH ISSUE were unable to achieve alive they had succeeded in doing dead. They had roused Ireland ! England might have done otherwise than exact her pound of flesh, if she had been wise, but to individual officials it must have seemed impossible. With their limited outlook they could not be expected to understand what these men meant to Ireland or in the world at large. Like Pontius Pilate, or the American authorities who hung John Brown, they could but con- demn idealists who were also revolutionary. John Brown had hurled himself against slavery as Pearse had hurled himself against British rule in Ireland. There is nothing in the Bible against either of those institutions, against slav- ery or imperialism, but the consensus of civili- sation has long decided that they are obsolete, in spite of all arguments as to the benefits of slave or imperial power. Pearse can only have died in the best of hu- mour with life, for it had given him the death he had lived for. Seldom, indeed, it comes to a dreamer to find himself in the midst of his dream coming true. He cannot even have felt out of humour with the hereditary enemy, for it, too, had given him the tragedy and the set- ting of the tragedy he had so often imagined in his mind's eye, even unto artillery and a THE PRESIDENCY OF PEARSE 93 blazing capital. He may have felt a little out of humour with the Irish, for they had not re- sponded to his appeal. Even Dublin was out of sympathy with his revolt, until it was all over. But for a century he will be the national hero of Ireland. In time his relics will be picked out of the quicklime, and his fellow- townsmen will even give him a statue, though there is no doubt that he would be more grate- ful for the quicklime than for a crumbling image. For the shroud of quicklime makes immortal raiment — in Ireland. VII THE KILLING OF KETTLE In the great flood of literature which has car- ried the names of the Sinn Feiners out of the obscurity of their local fight into written his- tory, there has been slight mention of Tom Kettle. Yet of all the Young Irelanders he was perhaps the most brilliant, and his end was certainly more tragic, for he passed from the scene of his beloved Dublin, lying with her heart blown out, to his own grave in the less dramatic but more terrible field of France. He was ever the brilliant boy, the coming man of his generation in Ireland. All his gifts, impulses, and ambitions were of the highest order. In his short, well-rounded life he made good equally as a ballad writer, as a member of Parliament, as a professor of political econ- omy, and finally as a soldier. He was the per- fect type of the Dubliner in the new century. He was a pessimist in philosophy and an opti- mist in politics. Of the crowd of young men who were trying to sound the new channels or 94 THE KILLING OF KETTLE 95 sipping the new wines of Irish life, some were poets and some were dreamers. Kettle was both, and he was in addition a first-rate meta- physician. He had plunged deep in Schopen- hauer and had dallied with Nietzsche, whom he attacked with passionate violence in his last book. His charm was that he was a primitive Celt grafted to modern culture. He had read Nietzsche before most of his modern assailants had even heard his name as a symbol, and ad- mitted that " he made German dance as before him only Heine had done." Nevertheless he summed him up as "the mysticism of the mad- house" and the "metaphysics of bullying." But the dark philosophers had steeped his soul, and there were moments of wrestling and de- spair. It was a miracle of intellect that he kept the Catholic faith. Ireland is one of the few countries where successful examinations can lead to a political career. For some abstruse reason the pale and nerve-racked student was pressed into the ranks of the Irish party. Overwork, oversensitive- ness, and his peculiar brilliance of mind made him in many ways unsuited for the rough work of Westminster, where sordidness is the only relief from the background of tedium. His speech was quick and nervous, but it was 96 THE IRISH ISSUE packed with thought, and occasionally there rose a bitter sense of fun to play upon the sur- face. As a speaker in the debates he could always claim Mr. Balfour as a ready listener. The bons mots that crept into all he said were reminiscent of the age of wits. When the tariff reformers thrust the unwilling and un- witting Mr. Balfour to the front, he remarked: 'They have nailed their leader to the mast." As brilliant was his distinction between the two great parties in English politics. "When in office the Liberals forget their principles and the Tories remember their friends." And his conversation was built up out of similar stuff. He possessed that pretty mordancy that flicks conversation along like a tennis-ball. England could not understand and even Ireland, alive to genius, had not fully appreciated this por- tent in the unimaginative ranks of the party. The Irish party is too clever or is understood to be too clever for the English parties, but Kettle was too clever for the Irish party. His cleverness was a little too much out of the ordinary, and he was given a pedestal, but equally a dead weight to his winged feet in the professorship of economics at the new Univer- sity of Ireland. But the "dismal science" was not dismal in his keeping. In intellectual Dub- THE KILLING OF KETTLE 97 lin he came into his own. It was becoming more and more the resurgent capital of the country at that time. By right of intellect Dublin was asserting that position which in political fact she did not possess. Shortly be- fore the outbreak of the war it was possible to spend a morning at St. Enda's School and dis- cuss the ideals of Irish education with Pearse and MacDonagh, to catch a vivid minute with George Russell in Plunkett House, in the after- noon to see Yeats and Lady Gregory moving down the quays to a rehearsal at the Abbey Theatre, and in the evening to hear a Synge play and pass a late hour with Kettle. An ambrosian night and day. Kettle soon formed a circle in which young men sharpened their wits or darkened their philosophies. For he was one of those terrible pessimists, who are always saying dark sayings in an illuminating way. He was most upset- ting in his constructive moments and vice versa. On the whole he was the greatest loss in his time endured by the intelligentia of Ire- land. He seemed destined to fulfil a vital but never quite attainable part in Irish life, to reconcile the old generation of Parliamentarians with the new Ireland which had arisen to demand bet- 98 THE IRISH ISSUE ter things. His father, Andrew Kettle, was one of the veterans of the Parnellite movement, and his friends were the Young Irelanders, who were already breaking in sympathy with the Irish party. He alone could have wrought a reconciliation and possibly averted the terrible revolt which buried so much promise in the ruins of Dublin. He was early aware of the restiveness of the young men and of the neces- sity of supplying them with a place in the National movement before they chose one for themselves. He became the first president of the "Young Ireland" branch of the United Irish League, a brave attempt to avert the im- pending destiny. Again he was chairman of the committee, which endeavoured to establish peace during the great Dublin strike, and once more found himself treading between the very meshes of Fate, for the unsettled strike proved to be the seed of the rising. He was trying to bring together threads that the Inexorable Shears had already divided. Release from Parliament afforded him further leisure for literature, for which we may be thankful. We have only his words now, whether in prose or verse, to remember him by. But his poems have a different ring to that we usually associate with the Green Muse. THE KILLING OF KETTLE 99 There was a tenderness and a deep sentiment in all that he wrote, though his wine was stirred with an iron spoon and his pen distilled a drop of gall on the sweet froth. As a professional pessimist and amateur optimist he probed depths and pricked superficialities in a way that was disturbing to the ordinary reader. Themes of doom and the vagaries of disaster pursued him as one who was not unglad of them. Tragedy he could endure but not ennui. He had come to the conclusion that the twenti- eth century, " which cuts such a fine figure in encyclopaedias is most familiarly known to the majority of its children as a new kind of head- ache." Nevertheless as an Irishman he was always true to the sacred and ever-failing cause of Utopia. He was hopeful that as Ireland was a country, where the unexpected invariably happened, that something really good might occur. And he wrote: "That a wise man soon grows disillusioned of disillusionment. Cyni- cism is in life the last treachery." He was always fighting for lost causes, but he was never at a loss in thought or speech. He had a wonderful gift of spontaneity. He could always say something that was already unexpressed in the minds of others. He took the political platform with a serious apprecia- 100 THE IRISH ISSUE tion of the wit of his hillside constituents. He could be sarcastic, ironic, amusing, and com- plimentary by turns. Once he was met by a poor populace who had improvised a mountain band and some home-made torches of turf and paraffin. "Friends," quoth Kettle, "you have met us with God's two best gifts to man, fire and music !" What more could be asked ? It was as instantaneous as graceful. In political balladry he could not be beaten. He replied to the Jingo effusions with which Kipling and Watson stepped into the Irish arena with an amusing sarcasm. He ridiculed Kipling for trying to put the sunrise out with "a bucketful of Boyne." But a savage in- dignation could tear his breast, and nothing equalled his outburst when he compared Dub- lin's torchlight reception of Asquith with the last days of Parnell: "As you filled your streets with your comic Pentecost And the little English went by and the lights grew dim, We dumb in the shouting crowd, we thought of Him!" Only Kettle could have divined a "comic Pen- tecost" in that orgy of tongues and torches. The war came, and Kettle took the point of view not of the Britisher or the Sinn Feiner, but of the European. He immediately stated: THE KILLING OF KETTLE 101 France is right now as she was wrong in 1870. England is right now as she was wrong in the Boer War. Russia is right now as she was wrong on Bloody Sunday. The interest of Kettle was that he was an international Nationalist, which is as rare in Ireland as elsewhere. Much as he loved Ire- land he also appreciated Europe, and he would not willingly allow western civilisation to be twisted from its hinges without some protest be- ing made by Irishmen. Six years before the war he had laid down: "My only programme for Ireland consists in equal parts of Home Rule and the Ten Commandments. My only coun- sel to Ireland is that to become deeply Irish she must become European." Young Ireland did not follow him into the trenches, but he never felt he had made a mis- take. Yet his heart never left those who had followed other counsels than his. He appeared to give evidence in favour of John McNeill at his court martial, and his last request from France before he fell was a plea to release the prisoners of Easter week. Out of the shadow of death he cried: In the name, and by the seal, of the blood given in the last two years I ask for Colonial Home Rule for Ireland, a thing essential in itself, and essential as a prologue to the recon- struction of the Empire. Ulster will agree. 102 THE IRISH ISSUE And I ask for the immediate withdrawal of martial law in Ireland, and an amnesty for all Sinn Fein prisoners. If this war has taught us anything it is that great things can be done only in a great way. He died and the prisoners were set at liberty. Many of them had bitterly maligned him as a platform soldier. He could always have had an appointment on a staff or at the base, but he insisted on his due and decent wage of death. Like Willie Redmond later, he must have felt that a time had come to die, when the angry and mocking cries of his own people reached them overseas. Bravely they both died and perhaps with a smile of bitterness at the end, as men encompassed by the treachery of their high doom, but whatever bitterness they felt they kept for themselves, and their smile was for the Ireland out of whose earth they were to lie. Kettle must have suffered terribly between the Dublin rising and his death. The mur- dered Sheehy Skefrmgton was his brother-in- law. Others of the executed were his friends. To his sensitive nature death in France must have seemed sweeter than continuing to live in Dublin of haunted and unhappy memory for all his generation at least. From the atmos- phere of intrigue, meanness, and misery he THE KILLING OF KETTLE 103 was doubtless not sorry to get away into the cleaner winds of war. He died for no imperi- alist concept, for no fatuous jingoism. Politics and all the shams and disappointments of life had slipped from his lithe soul. He had put away small things and his last and death-wrung demand was that great things should be done in a great way in Ireland. The failure of the little ways had proved so complete. He did not resent the littleness that had dogged his life and left him lonely at the last, but he re- called and hated the pettiness and duplicity that had injured Ireland, that had fooled her leaders and led out her children on false prom- ises. Out of the greatness of war he asked for that touch of greatness by which alone great things are achieved. Like a thousand ardent spirits in Ireland at the time he had been ready to leap to a new era by the bridge of great things greatly done, even if the bridge was to be the bridge of death. Disappointed but undismayed, Kettle stood with nought but a mystic's dream between him and the great horror. He felt afraid for Ire- land but not for himself. Then indeed the irony of his life and the bitterness of it all must have come home to him. Stripped of all, his career, his chair, his ambitions, his 104 THE IRISH ISSUE friends and his lovers, with his back turned to Ireland and his heart turned from England, he threw himself over the mighty gulf, where at least he could be sure that all things good or evil were on the great scale that his soul re- quired. With earth's littlenesses he was done. So amid the wreckage of a world and the carnage of a continent fell Tom Kettle. Many when they heard that tragic news all over that Irish world, on which the sun never sets, must have remembered the grief of Gavan Duffy when confronted by the death of Thomas Davis in his prime. Ireland has never ceased to be haunted by the promise, the pathos, and the possibility of that life and death, and now men will look back on Kettle likewise. Irishmen will think of him with his gentle brother-in-law, Sheehy Skeffington, as two intellectuals, who after their manner and their light wrought and thought and died for Ireland. What boots it if one was murdered by a British officer and the other was slain in honourable warfare by Ger- mans ? To Ireland they are both lovable and in Irish mind their memory shall not fail. What though Skeffington sleeps nigh Parnell and O'Connell in holy Glasnevin, while Kettle's ashes are left in the shell-torn trenches of France? Ireland knows that they were both THE KILLING OF KETTLE 105 men of peace and that they both offered their lives for her. In death they were divided, but in the heart of Ireland they are as one. There is a beautiful picture by Burne-Jones of the knight who met and yet forgave his worst enemy. As he turned aside he knelt before a wooden crucifix of the wayside, and the figure on the cross bent to kiss him. Who can doubt that Kettle, who had forgiven the English, who had murdered his brother, and went to France to defend the homes of English- women from outrage and sudden death — that as he passed some village Calvary he was not suffered to pass comfortless upon his way. VIII CARSON AND CASEMENT No pair of Irish names have been more cir- culated, contrasted, and queried than those of Carson and Casement. For months in the past and now probably for years in the future the politician will batten on their antithesis and the pamphleteer parade the iniquity of the one or the righteousness of the other, as he may happen to view them. The capital to be made out of their exploits is tempting to the partisan but of doubtful interest to their country. How long is Ireland to be forced to bandy their names as catchwords? No more considerable omen of good-will and common sense could have been found in the Dublin convention than the omission of both names from the list of members. It was as well, for their names are as firebrands and their memories make men see red. For obvious reasons neither was invited to the gathering. Since their military escapades on Irish soil one has gone into the next world, while the other 106 CARSON AND CASEMENT 107 went Into the next Cabinet. To all practical purpose it is to be hoped that both have passed for ever from the Irish scene, leaving only the wake and wash of the tragic parts each tried to essay gradually to settle. Their careers are already legendary and their names symbols. Let them both be as ghosts and their future influences as phantasmata vainly crying out of the past. Neither could have appeared at the Dublin convention except in the guise of a veritable spectre at the feast of good-will. All that is moderate and fair-minded in Ireland has decided to leave their achievements with the dead, no longer to return and plague the living. The time is approaching when historians must take the place of journalists and deal with Irish reputations as frigidly and impar- tially as the officials of a German corpse-sta- tion deal with their callous duties. At present both Carson and Casement hang in the glim- mer of a pseudo-apotheosis, Carson as the in- carnate and incomparable soul of Ulster, and Casement as the martyr of a race of which, indeed, the majority had not heard his name before his arrest. The popular view of both is probably mistaken. Neither really repre- sented what they believed themselves to repre- sent. Casement was an Ulsterman and the 108 THE IRISH ISSUE exact type of adventurous and quixotic official that turns up in English bureaucracy, suffi- ciently to persuade most foreigners that all Englishmen are insane. Carson was also an adventurer, but a Galway boy, who only took up the Orange cause as Casement took up Fenianism late in life. Each had already made his reputation and very good reputations, one at the bar and the other in the consular service. But the Irish casino tempted them and both set out to play for exceedingly great stakes. Though history will probably decide that each lost, they acquired a world-wide notoriety, composed for them equally by the execration and adulation of the press. In America Carson is thought of as the cold, lantern-jawed Junker, whose power and pull enabled him to import arms into Ulster without incurring any more serious consequences than being caged in the Cabinet, while Casement is arrayed as the fer- vid Celt who followed his example, but was arrested and hung before he could get a single gun into Ireland. Cool students of Irish history will not see much difference between them as conspirators, except that one was wholly disastrous to him- self, while the other came near to being disas- trous to his whole country. To Irishmen their CARSON AND CASEMENT 109 actions were not incomprehensible. Each of them was in his way playing the great game that never ends on Irish soil. The game that is never won, but fascinates its players. They made themselves the pivots of ancestral pas- sions and immemorial hatreds, and as pivots they were responsible for automatically un- loosening fatalities that proved beyond their control. The civilised world was amazed and amused when Carson armed his followers. The Na- tionalists were not shocked, for they knew he was playing for high stakes, and they rather admired the chances he had taken in such devil-care fashion. If it had been for his coun- try that he was acting and not for the sake of a broken-down English party he would have become a national hero. Even so, the Fenians bless his name for having made it possible for them to acquire the munitions and induce the conditions that made the Dublin revolt. felix culpa! Some of them it is believed even assisted his gun-running in the hope of trouble. They knew that he was taking up two-edged weap- ons, and that he was sowing a wind that might just as easily whirl him away as Redmond or themselves. Time has shown that they were 110 THE IRISH ISSUE correct. The interest taken in his exploit was not confined to Ireland or America. The Kaiser seems to have thought it worth while at one time to obtain a first-hand account of Ulster. A little flattery doubtless drew as much as he wanted to know, unless Carson was shrewder than the Kaiser. It would be inter- esting to know the secret diagnoses under which Carson and Casement were ticketed in the German archives. No doubt each man was appraised at his exact value to the German calculations. Each was watched and followed all those months, for neither side can have been quite certain of Casement until his execution, and each in his blindfold, impetuous way played the game Germany hoped of them. Which served Germany best or worst the calculators of history will have to decide. Casement no doubt served Germany in bringing about direct relations between the Irish- Americans and Ber- lin, but his failure to recruit Irishmen for the German army made them glad to get rid of him. He was thwarted in his attempt to post- pone the rising, but his direct arrival from Germany obscured the sympathy which would have met the Sinn Fein in a world becoming more and more suspicious and intolerant of German schemes. CARSON AND CASEMENT 111 Carson and his friends would seem to have played into the hands of the German staff in underlining the unique opportunity of entering a war in which England would be too occupied at home to engage. As John Quinn wrote from America: Carson, Smith and the English Tories who backed them are more responsible for this war than any other body of men in the world except the German General Staff. That is the be- lief of people in this country generally. On the other hand, the German staff can never be sufficiently ungrateful to the same for having unconsciously lured them into a disas- trous war. And as it was probably the world's last chance to smash Prussianism, the score may stand quits. The most the historian can aver is that Carson made it as tempting to the Germans to go to war as he later made it diffi- cult for America to enter earlier than she did. Casement's tragedy is still obscured in mys- tery. His play was more difficult and daring than that of Carson, and it led to death with- out at any moment admitting a gleam of suc- cess. The most he could have staked his ac- tion upon was that Germany would win the war. His whole career had been eccentric and brilliant. As far as it has ever been achieved, 112 THE IRISH ISSUE he associated the British consular service, which is a dummy diplomacy, with genius. He dropped into it by accident, remained in it out of chivalrous purposes, and passed out of it not into retirement but into a frantic attempt to adjust the Irish problem by one fell deed. His life, if it is ever told, will be no unin- teresting one. Some early trouble sent him to sea and as a young man he served as a purser on the South African Line. In this capacity he was picked up by Sir Claude MacDonnell and made a roving commissioner in the Oil Rivers. Here he developed unusual capacities in deal- ing with the natives, and made a number of treaties which are still in existence. He entered to an extraordinary degree into native thought and was always as much at pains to help and elevate the protected as to establish the pres- tige of the protector. At times he would dis- appear from civilisation and be absorbed in the Dark Continent. He received appointments at Lorenzo Marques and in the Congo. There he threw himself into the work of inquiry and denunciation. In doing so he had to forfeit the friendship of Leopold, King of the Belgians, the same monarch who had wished to employ Gordon in his Congo scheme. Gordon and Casement had many points in common. Each CARSON AND CASEMENT 113 was a religious mystic and far more interested in religious work than imperialism. At one time Casement seemed on the point of throwing up his position for missionary endeavour. Like Gordon he acquired his ascendancy over the native by his detachment from wealth and women. Like Gordon he was intractable to his superiors and believed in a vaguely inspired mission. He had an itch for fomenting official troubles with the highest and noblest aims in view. He was a perpetual crusader on behalf of the under dog, wherever and of whatever colour he found him. Had he died in Africa he would have left a legend that would be cher- ished by Englishmen to-day. "Congo" Case- ment would be mentioned in a breath with "Chinese" Gordon, England's martyrs in Af- rica. It is very curious that each took up one very hoary and evil cause in utter blindness of what it meant. Gordon's military reputa- tion was gained in upholding the dead hand of the Manchus, and Casement by an even more fantastic step passed over to the Germany, whose methods among the natives he had had sufficient cause to detest. Casement only went on the Irish platform in the year before the outbreak of war. Then it was to declare that "There is only one Ire- 114 THE IRISH ISSUE land, one a*nd indivisible. And the more we love Ulster the more surely we should love that greater Ireland that owns us all." To his love of Ireland was added that fatal sense of thwarted achievement, which has em- bittered so many Irish careers. When the Cunard liners left Queenstown out of their call, Casement negotiated for the Hamburg-Ameri- can Line to take their place, but he was under- cut by a move from the British Foreign Office. Henceforth the path to German intrigue was easy and he set himself among those who were trying to wean the American sympathies occu- pied by England to Germany. He claimed that England was doing just what it is apparent that Germany was. "Every tool of her di- plomacy, polished and unpolished, from the trained envoy to the minor poet has been tried in turn." In Germany he took the disastrous step of trying to enlist Irish prisoners in an Irish regi- ment for the Kaiser. This and the alleged ill-treatment, which befell the Irish prisoners who refused his proffer, led to his execution. Everything repeats itself in Irish history, and it is curious to read in the diary of Captain Milman, who was taken prisoner in the Penin- sular War, as follows: CARSON AND CASEMENT 115 Burgos 1809. A sergeant of the Irish Brigade who had belonged to our 50th and deserted, an Irishman by birth, came into the prison to drink with a parcel of soldiers' wives and wanted to enlist the prisoners into the French service. Passing from cold facts one is bound to re- cord Casement's solemn assertion that he was not responsible for any ill-treatment to those who refused his offer. Nevertheless the two Irish prisoners who were shot were not less martyrs than he. It has always been Ireland's fate to tempt those who love her most into disaster nethermost. On this occasion it seems possible to say in the words of Shakespeare's "Cymbeline" that she "let her beauty look through a casement to allure false hearts." His action in going to Germany was dictated more by despair at the plight of the Irish cause than by desire of German triumph. In a letter to John Quinn from Germany he wrote: I should have thought it was abundantly clear that I was not acting for Germany but for Ireland. No action of mine since I arrived in Europe has been an act for Germany, any more than, say, to cite a very notable case, Wolfe Tone acted for France when he tried to get French help for Ireland in a pre- vious great Continental war. 116 THE IRISH ISSUE Casement cannot be called a lunatic. He was suffering from one overwhelming and ab- sorbing idea, on which his mind was not only truly and terribly set, but even racked. He felt that an injustice had been committed against Ireland by political sleight of hand. He felt that Ireland had been side-tracked to her annihilation as a political entity, for he was accurately informed of Germany's power to resist and crush any small nations thrown in her track. He determined to forestall any possible invasion of Ireland by obtaining a declaration of German good behaviour should troops ever reach the country. It was as safe a declaration for the German Foreign Office to make as one promising immunity to the public buildings in Nova Zembla. What is not known is whether the German War Office made any illusionary promise to send troops to fight for an Irish republic. On the whole the Dublin rising seems to have been only vaguely con- nected with any direct German plan. It would have taken place under the circumstances, any- how. If there was a bargain, which heaven forbid, it was a very unequal one. The Sinn Feiners risked and gave everything. The Ger- mans only jeopardised a tubful of old Russian rifles. Casement was literally marooned with CARSON AND CASEMENT 117 a handful of men. American friends, aware that he was sick, were anxious that he should be retained in Germany until the end of the war. There is some reason to believe that he intended to postpone the rising, but was de- layed by premeditated repairs and delays to the submarine in which he had embarked. Neither the German nor English authorities allowed him to communicate in time with the Sinn Feiners. The rest is history. It was not for the defence of the realm so much as to afford a Berlin holiday that the subsequent executions took place. Casement had foreseen and welcomed his death. He was given the opportunity of play- ing his part to the bitter end. In order to call world attention to the Irish question he had passed out of his way, out of his peace, out of his retirement, out of his rank, out of his coun- try, and out of his life. Against such Quixotes no bribery, no persuasion can avail. He had lived his ideal of Wolfe Tone as far as it could be lived under modern conditions. With de- liberate haste and wilful ecstasy he threw him- self into the seething pot on the chance of stir- ring up an eddy, and he fell straight to the bottom of the boiling broth. Leagued only with his own desperation, he attempted the 118 THE IRISH ISSUE impossible and bearded the great Power he had long contemplated in his dreams as a Cartha- ginian might have seen the Roman Empire. When he wrote the strange lines: "Eagle of Eryx ! when the iEgatian shoal Rolled westward all the hopes that Hamio wrecked, With mighty wing unwearying, didst thou Seek far beyond the wolf's grim protocol, Within the Iberian sunset faintly specked A rock where Punic faith should bide its vow" — was he thinking of the rock above Cave Hill, where Tone made his vow to free Ireland? Was the wolf's grim protocol the British Em- pire ? Was it a Hibernian sunset clothed with sanguine ruin against which he saw himself faintly specked ? It is a poem which lends it- self to the mystic interpretation of Casement, which is only charitable when his political one is condemned. Part II IX THE WINNING OF THE UNITED STATES To many, not excluding herself, America has shown herself an unfathomable problem. Es- pecially has it been so during the Great War, when reliable guides were able to dispute whether she was pro-Ally or pro-German, and the only destiny that the majority of her chil- dren could agree upon was that she had no des- tiny, at least no destiny that would make her partner or decider in the European debacle. To herself she was the great unworried, un- wearied, unwarrior country, desiring nothing better than that her hemisphere should remain hermetical in the name of Mr. Monroe. To her enemies she seemed a comedy, but to her friends it was always America's tragedy that she had no tragedy. But the Americanism which so passionately demanded that America should be passive, neutral, and static was not the Americanism of the people who in a century had decupled their original acres, who drove the aborigines before 121 122 THE IRISH ISSUE them, penetrated the country of others with armies, and even gave a semblance of imperial- ism to the American eagle. The same "mani- fest destiny" of the United States led her to subjugate the northern and to protect the southern continent and, in spite, of a cherished tradition of isolation, to dominate the Pacific and gradually become a world power. No sooner had the revolting colonies set adrift than they commenced to grow. Ripe fruit from the rotting trunk of Spain fell to them for the plucking. Until the Civil War America was a great imperial and conquering country. Pioneers and prophets did the work which traders and missionaries accomplished for European Powers desirous of expansion. Republics broke out in her path before they merged in her federal system. For a while there was a Texan republic and California was preceded by the Bear Flag republic. The pos- sibility of a Mormon republic effervesced into the Great Salt Lake. All the while the Ameri- can was advancing and driving remorselessly the Indian and the bison, the Spaniard and the elk before him. He pulled down equally the Spanish and British flags. Jackson hung Brit- ish subjects in Florida, Pike of Pike's Peak fell trying to snatch Toronto from Canada. Mex- 'WINNING THE UNITED STATES 123 ico was pierced to the gates of her capital and the Pacific slope wrested from her control. The great annexations were made in obedience to the law that the United States could not be hemmed in from their natural outlets. The States are organic and not static. The Civil War came as a great setback during which the red man gathered his breath and the French were able to enter Mexico. While enjoying expansion on her own lines, America remained, thanks to the Monroe Doc- trine, immune from the expansion of others. On the one hand, she was determined that no European foothold should be allowed in the new hemisphere, and on the other hand she had isolated herself from all such far-off un- happy things as European wars. Yet in the fulness of time it was the former doctrine that brought her intervention in the latter. Politi- cal withdrawal from the planet proved impossi- ble, owing to the Monroe Doctrine itself, which implied not only rights in one hemisphere but responsibilities towards another. The Monroe Doctrine was not merely an anti-British or anti-Spanish policy, blocking their ways in the New World. It made Amer- ica responsible for the freedom of Cuba and for meeting any European menace to the American 124 THE IRISH ISSUE hemisphere in advance. It was from a devel- opment of the same doctrine that America left her moorings at one time to wage war with Spain, and on another to become an ally of England against Germany. Monroe had fore- seen the time when England would have to take her place with the monarchs of Europe or with the American republic, with despotism or with liberty. By a fortuitous inspiration England had approved the birth of the Monroe Doc- trine. Though German aggression was un- dreamt of at the time, Monroe had started the train of events which was one day to confront America, also, with the choice of siding with despotism or liberty. During the Great War the United Kingdoms and the United States became allies. During the century of peace between the Treaty of Ghent and the out- break of war in 1914 they had never been united. Whether the military co-operation brought about by the high-handed conduct of Germany will form the basis of a permanent entente, one in many ways vital to the world of democracy, remains to be seen. For the present the Anglo-Saxon schism is healed and it is interesting to recall the historical trend by which with many deviations the two com- munities, whom Mr. Wilson has now joined WINNING THE UNITED STATES 125 together, have been so long making their way. In British eyes the United States represent the lost tribes, the political irredenti of the Anglo-Saxon, but which, like the territory lost to the French and Spanish in the New World, eschewed the idea of any union with the mother country. England has several times in hei» history had to relinquish conquered country, but only once her own colonised offspring, earth of her earth, blood of her blood, in the New England colonies. She lost them because her bonds were selfish and commercial instead of being sentimental and maternal. Only the most colossal ideal could ever rebridge the chasm. Only an England equally remote from Georgian imperialism and greed and contemp- tuous of Victorian commercialism could ap- proach the great statue of liberty at the gates of America in the proper spirit of reconciliation, for the statue is as much a symbol of the na- tional religion as one of the deified abstractions of the Roman world. Great is Liberty of the Americans ! The American Revolution taught England to study the rights of her own settlements, but the lesson was only learnt at a price, for the unity of the English-speaking world had passed 126 THE IRISH ISSUE away. In vain the growing empire proceeded to gather the ends of the world into its lap and to add the tropics to the arctics. In vain seemingly were great imperial growths and federations forced or fostered in India, Aus- tralia, and South Africa. The American col- onies into which the adventurous heart-blood of England, Scotland, and Ireland had been at different times poured remained aloof, es- tranged from what they denied had been a mother country and to which they became sar- castic, contemptuous, and bitterly hostile. In his gigantic stride to possess himself of the earth the Anglo-Saxon had fallen asunder. Ambitions good or evil are liable to overreach themselves, and in taking Canada from France England laid the train which was to lose her the New England colonies, whose loyalty would otherwise have been strengthened by a jealous French neighbour, just as Asiatic pressure strengthens that of New South Wales. But when Canada was conquered the necessity of defence in New England was replaced by a possibility of defiance. The Revolution came, but after the Anglo-Saxon rather than French pattern. It was not intellectual or doctrinaire, but practical, with a sober religious motive thrown in. The Quebec Act practically estab- WINNING THE UNITED STATES 127 fishing Catholicism in Canada, filled the Puri- tan colonies with fear lest Catholic or Anglican prelates might be set over them. In revolu- tionary New England the anti-British and anti- Catholic sentiment coalesced. A century later, owing to the Irish immigration, the anti-British feeling was largely Catholic. The colonial dis- like of Catholicism was neutralised by a rebel contingent from Canada and by the coming of the French. But the French Revolution was more appreciated by American Ulstermen than by French-Canadians. The Fathers of Amer- ica made practical liberty rather than theoreti- cal reason their goddess. The French Revolu- tion bred an empire which perished by snow and fire in Muscovy. The American counter- part created a republic which came to stretch from the fiery plains of Texas to the snows of Alaska, and to prove one of the few enduring institutions upon this earth. The United States immediately began to breed the transatlantic type of the white race, so continually misunderstood and unappreci- ated by Englishmen. The new American, po- litically republican and racially aristocratic, was the most promising type on earth. The awe and reverence of the Puritan refugee, com- bined with the audacity and daring of the 128 THE IRISH ISSUE younger son in his blood, and both the traits may be traced in American psychology to-day. Some kind of a super-Anglo-Saxon seemed to loom on the horizon of the virgin continent. But this dream of the ethnologist was cut short by the Civil War between North and South and by the unrestricted arrival of other types of emigrant. It was a dream which is reflected in the kinder caricatures of "Uncle Sam." The wiry-limbed awkward giant, with blue eyes and a light goatee, for whom bewildered visitors vainly search the New York streets, was once a predominant type. Hardy and magnificently uncultured, it was he who tore up colonial tyranny, broke the Hessian hirelings, won the naval war of 1812 on points and largely suc- cumbed during the ghastly epic of the Civil War. Cobbett, on his ridiculous mission to fetch Tom Paine's bones from America, remarked: "This country of the best and boldest of sea- men and of the most moral and happy people in the world, is also the home of the tallest and ablest-bodied men in the world." And during the Civil War Meredith was alert enough to comment on the Yankee generals: "They are of a peculiarly fine cast and show the qualities of energy and skill and also race. They are WINNING THE UNITED STATES 129 by no means vulgar. Place our best men, headed by the (German) Duke of Cambridge alongside them and start." Though his stock in trade was a continent, Uncle Sam had to make his way in the world, for he was without friends. His assets were a republican idealism taken from France, a knowledge of seamanship and an aptitude for exploration inherited from England, and a visionary connection with Ireland, which made that admiring island an early and spontaneous contributor to filling his waste places. The American took to hard work and scant liveli- hood, and nevertheless worked out a culture of his own. In certain stages the straight American seems to have been pretty aggravat- ing to the European, but at his best he produced the type which merited the celebrated descrip- tion as one that "could calculate an eclipse, survey an estate, tie an artery, plan an edifice, try a cause, break a horse, dance a minuet, and play the violin." Though the United States started with a bitter family grudge against England, the forms of law, religion, and politics remained Anglo- Saxon under their republican husk. Talley- rand used to say that, notwithstanding the aid of France, England was the natural ally of ISO THE IRISH ISSUE the United States. Distance and occupation for some time kept any antagonism apart. Each was deeply engaged, the English in a struggle with Napoleon, the Americans in a tussle with nature. In the end the Anglo- Saxon prevailed against both. But in 1812 a clash occurred. England found herself at death-grips with the French and needed sailors of the old stock. Necessity had made the English adopt the closed sea of Selden, while the Americans upheld the free- dom of the seas of Grotius. England claimed the right of search and impressed some two thousand American seamen, some out of the best families, into her ships. It was true that deserters often concealed themselves under false papers, but more often real Americans were flagrantly kidnapped under false pre- tences. The Americans were without redress until they fitted out frigates capable of winning some of the most famous duels in naval history. The English Orders in Council were revoked, but not in time to avert war. It is a curious fact that had the electric cable been in existence it would have prevented war in 1812, as surely as it would have precipitated it between Eng- land and America in 1862. As to the war, every American schoolboy WINNING THE UNITED STATES 131 knows how Decatur riddled the Macedonian, and how the Constitution sank the Guerriere. English schoolboys only remember the exploit by which Captain Broke of the Shannon de- stroyed the Chesapeake off Boston, although "The people of the port Came out to see the sport With the music playing Yankee-doodle-dandy-oh!" which most Britishers still believe to be the American national anthem. The American frigates, like the yachts of later day, challenged the mother country and more than carried off the naval honours. The Anglo-Saxon, after littering the sea with Spanish, Dutch, and French wreckage, was hoist by his own petard, whipped at sea by his own whelps. If many American citizens were serving impressed on English ships, Decatur had old tars of Nelson on his. The last English survivor of these sea duels died so lately as in 1892. One of the most successful of the American commanders was Commodore Stewart, the grandfather of Parnell. If the war did not quench bitterness, it evoked a mutual respect. Henceforth Eng- lish sea-captains had to admit an equality of quality. On land the English were successful in taking the capital, and an Irish family added 132 THE IRISH ISSUE the Bladensburg victory to their name; but at New Orleans the victory went to the Americans also under Scotch-Irish leadership. The Treaty of Ghent initiated the peace between the two countries. It was interesting that an Adams sat on each side of the table. English states- men were to learn respect for that shrewd but courteous family, old-fashioned heralds of the future, who faced them in each Anglo-American crisis. England, with Waterloo on the horizon, soon forgot the war; but for two generations the ogre of American nurseries remained the hated "Britisher." American nationalism de- veloped a violent hue against the background of British rivalry. Madison was the last Presi- dent to be actually at war with England. Monroe, his successor, devised a far subtler weapon against European interference, the Monroe Doctrine. Originally shafted at a hint from Canning against Spain, it was in coming time to check England herself — an arrow tipped with her own feathers. Though English statesmen would only consider it "the dictum of its distinguished author," and Lord Salisbury was to deny its international legality, the doctrine has proved stronger than the sword. At the time Brougham declared that "No event has dispersed greater joy, exulta- WINNING THE UNITED STATES 133 tion and gratitude over all the freemen of Europe." It saved South America from the "holy alliance" of Romanoff, Hapsburg, and Hohenzollern. Henceforth there were to be bitternesses enough, disputes many, threatenings some; but bloodshed never again. The Monroe Doctrine was the pledge. However popular and politi- cal it was to "twist the lion's tail," there re- mained a subconscious reservation against war. Mill gave it expression, "A war between Great Britain and the United States would give a new lease to tyranny and bigotry wherever they exist and would throw back the progress of mankind for generations" — a corollary to the dictum of Monroe ! If a common tongue was a constant adjuration against war, it was not the less provocative of quarrels. And quar- rels there arose in plenty about boundaries and ships, about seals in the Behring Sea, about Fenians in prison, about Oregon and Alaska — and even about yacht races. Every now and again a treaty cleared off outstanding difficul- ties. The Maine boundary was settled by treaty between Daniel Webster and Lord Ash- burton, but the joint occupation of Oregon raised a party cry of "Fifty-four-forty (lati- tude) or fight." Pakenham foolishly refused 134 THE IRISH ISSUE President Polk's offer of the forty -ninth lati- tude. Secretary Buchanan entertained the original idea of making the Pope arbitrator as between two heretical governments. In the end Aberdeen compromised on the forty -ninth latitude, which gave Vancouver to England. Buchanan became a successful and the first popular minister at St. James's, though Palm- ers ton, the jealous foe of America, at one time threatened his dismissal. It was Crampton, however, the minister in Washington, who was dismissed for recruiting during the Crimean War — "offered as a sacrifice to the Irish vote," says Lord Newton in his able Life of Lyons. Though he had become a personal friend of Victoria, Buchanan returned to become Presi- dent. He invited the Prince of Wales to visit the land of his ancestors, so to speak. By planting a tree at Washington's grave the prince was believed to have buried "the last faint trace of discord" between the two coun- tries. But the Civil War, to which Buchanan's feeble policy to the South largely led, destroyed the good feeling at its best and left behind the resentment of a generation. America originally quarrelled with King and Tory, not with Radical and people. Liberalism always remained a tie between the countries. WINNING THE UNITED STATES 135 Catholic emancipation and Chartism were re- garded as complementary to Americanism. This accounts for the division of English opinion during the war, though the perplexed republic believed Christian civilisation was involved in its cause. England would not realise slavery was at the bottom of the war. The irony was that England by one of the few disinterested acts in history had already freed her own slaves. Slavery had been previously forced on the col- onies by the mother country, but slavery exacted its final retribution of blood from America alone. Yet Bristol had deserved the fate of Richmond. The North believed that her cause was divine, and that her legions were treading the wine-press of the Lord. Yet she met with less than sympathy from the land whose flag was pledged to the ethics of her cause. The issue was as Rhodes, the American historian, puts it. The South was "the only community of the Teutonic race which did not deem human slavery wrong." However, Eng- land practically recognised the South as a bel- ligerent, rather than as a rebel against a friendly Power, and showed a hostility to the North that even Lincoln's emancipation of the negro did not wholly remove. It was true, Lincoln did not interfere with slavery at the outset, 136 THE IRISH ISSUE and it remained indefinitely guaranteed by Congress; but it was for those with eyes to see to be sure that slavery and the Confederacy must perish together. Unfortunately, Russell preferred to think the North was fighting for empire, and the South for independence; and Gladstone by a serious mistake declared Jeff Davis had created a nation. The result was that the friendly North became hostile, and the South, which had disliked England as presum- ably Abolitionist, reversed her feelings. The English aristocracies of blood and letters followed the politicians. Freeman began the History of Federalism until the "disruption of the United States." Carlyle thought the war of liberation "a smoky chimney which had taken fire." The surrender of Lee was felt as a tragic sorrow by Lord Acton. Nevertheless, the North had friends strong, stern, and stanch in England — Argyll, Whewell, Leslie Stephen, Milner Gibson, and chiefly John Bright, who smote "the devilish delusion that slavery was a divine institution." Lincoln pardoned a British privateer "as a mark of the esteem held by the United States for the high charac- ter and steady friendship of John Bright." It was a pity that Bright could not afterwards have visited America as envoy, where he was WINNING THE UNITED STATES 137 promised "flowers from Chicago to the sea." His is the only British bust to be placed in the White House. The religious democrat is the type of Englishman who has always appealed most deeply to the real American people — Bright, Shaftesbury, Gordon, or Havelock, at whose death in India the flags in New York harbour were lowered. Bright' s name still does service in America. The corresponding heroes of the North made no appeal to Englishmen until after their death. John Brown, whose soul the Northern armies invoked on the march, seemed a mixture of Pilgrim Father and mad dog, for whose ecstasy the noose made the best muzzle. General Grant was far from seeming the ideal of the Horse Guards. By descent "a hard Scotch pebble," with a Kelly grandmother, he was inexorable without bra- vado, and patient without complacency; but he looked seedy and scrubby beside the cavalier Lee. Lincoln was only seen in a haze of cari- cature. He came to the White House "a backwoods Jupiter," and his own knew him not. The genius it took America four years, England may be pardoned for taking forty to realise. She saw him only in W. H. Russell's descriptions, the "tall, lean, lank man," with "pendulous arms" and the "strange quaint 138 THE IRISH ISSUE face and head covered with its thatch of wild republican hair." Punch caricatured him as Brutus, as a billiard sharp, as a card gambler, as a coon in the trees, as a Phoenix rising out of war's horrid flames. Uncouth and unedu- cated and unbred, Abraham Lincoln became the truest and the greatest of Americans. Walt Whitman observed that whereas "Wash- ington was modelled on the best Saxon and Franklin was essentially a noble Englishman, Lincoln was far less European." Europe in- deed underestimated him, while America has been trying to live up to him ever since. During his administration Lincoln learnt with lonely pain the arts of war and letters. The burden of the state rested on those shoul- ders knotted by rail-splitting. The resources of that mind untilled by pedantry, unfettered by precedent, served equally his people and his generals. His daily anguish he concealed under a mask. The quaint stories he told to hide his heart might be likened to the grotesques with which the medisevals relieved their cathe- drals dedicated to divine tragedy. When hu- mour failed him, Lincoln fell back upon mys- ticism. Under his tortured strength of purpose grew that "charity towards all with malice to none," from which the American soul still WINNING THE UNITED STATES 139 draws in its great moments. It was truly from Lincoln's chair, and spiritually in Lincoln's blood that Woodrow Wilson wrote the words of his address to Congress, bringing America into war. Far removed from the jangling bit- terness and overweening hatred of the present, seemed to speak the dead Lincoln, sacrificing all save honour, forgiving all save the unpar- donable, unswerving because deliberate, and remorseless because just. The common language has long made jour- nalism the dangerous and very undiplomatic diplomacy between the United Kingdoms and the United States. During the Civil War the London Times and the New York Herald laid up a harvest of hate between two peoples who had every intention to respect and love each other. Even Lincoln's Proclamation of Free- dom seemed to The Times only "a very sad document," to be answered with "a hiss of scorn." The English people believed the Proc- lamation justified the war, but there was no popular press to say so. Under the influence of press and prejudice, unthinking Englishmen preferred to champion the astute and aristo- cratic president of fortune, Jeff Davis, the slave-owning Anglican bishop and general, Leonidas Polk, and the peerless Lee, with Marl- 140 THE IRISH ISSUE borough, the greatest strategist the Anglo- Saxon race has produced. To such men the Feudalists looked to prick the great bubble of democracy with their swords. But the English working men realised that the failure of the North would postpone their own franchise, and they believed in Lincoln. Idealists in Liver- pool and Manchester preferred to starve for lack of cotton than allow the Northern cause to be imperilled. Aristocrats all over the world favoured the South, Liberals the North. Material reasons, even cotton, "the Dagon of Dixie," and Davis's strongest plenipotentiary, did not play so great a part as class idealism. Lincoln sent flour up the Mersey to relieve distress, but his real gift to the English came after his death. His victory in 1865 made a reform bill practicable and even imperative two years later. The Civil War drew out its piteous length. The Southern chivalry and the Northern crusade agonised on battle-fields that few Englishmen have known well enough to name with pride or grief. At Gettysburg and Chickamauga, at Vicksburg and in the Wilderness, the North carved out the future of democracy. Had they not been fought and won America would not have been united to enter the war to-day. But what has Freder- WINNING THE UNITED STATES 141 icksburg or Shiloh meant to Englishmen? What happened at Appomattox — ask? Too late was Grant saluted as conqueror. During his struggle to conquer he had no sympathy from Palmerston's England or Napoleon the Third's France. But he had Sherman, who said "War is hell," and he had Sheridan, who was Charles O'Malley risen glorified. Too late was Lincoln recognised by England. "Is it nothing to you?" he might have asked visitor s. who came and saw and idly passed by. In spite of his guest's expressed Southern sympa- thies, he received Lord Hartington at the White House, but with some humour insisted on ad- dressing him as "Mr. Partington," serene in the rising tide of a democracy that no mop could push back. English and American spitfires threatened each other; but real trouble was not slow in coming at sea. The terror of the North and the hope of the South lay in intervention from Europe. The Confederacy sent envoys. To the delirious enthusiasm of America they were taken off the British Trent by a Yankee cap- tain, after a preliminary shot across the bows. Oddly enough he was claiming the right of search against which his country had fought so passionately in 1812. Fortunately there 142 THE IRISH ISSUE were no Atlantic cables to precipitate an in- stant explosion. But England, no less moved, gave seven days for the return of the envoys; and the Guards were sent to add a Canadian winter to their Crimean experiences. Delane of The Times wrote: "The whole army, navy, and volunteers are mad for service in America." Mad indeed ! In the American Senate prayer was made, mentioning "foreign arrogance" to the Republican Jehovah. But behind the men of patriotic impulse wrought the men of inter- national character. The prince consort sof- tened down the draft of the English ministers, of Russell, "the great little man," and of Palmerston, "the little great man." Adams moved fearlessly and lonely in London. The pink of democratic diplomacy, he never gave what would have been an aristocratic war a chance. Bright wrote, bidding Lincoln "put all the fire-eaters in the wrong." Secretary Seward had the cunning, or the Christianity, to turn the official cheek by offering an Ameri- can port for "landing and transporting to Canada troops, stores, and munitions of war of every kind without exception or reserva- tion." "There will be no war unless England is bent on having one," said Lincoln. Brag- gartry at home or abroad Lincoln never an- WINNING THE UNITED STATES 143 swered. He was too high and remote not to include a wish for what was best for both Con- federate and Britisher in his service to his own people. At heart he loved the South, and he desired no less that England should love him. He could no more hate than Washington could lie. He used other weapons. With a wintry smile he let the envoys, or "white elephants," as he called them, proceed to Europe, where they continued to damage their own cause until further notice. In spite of Seward's accompanying rhetoric, the surrender pacified England. But the psy- chological mischief stayed. As Lowell wrote afterwards: "It is not the Alabama that is at the bottom of our grudge. It is the Trent that we quarrel about, like Percy and Glendower. That was like an east wind to our old wound." The Alabam% though fitted out in England, was at least an American enterprise, of which Americans could feel proud. But the Laird Rams brewed war. One was launched at Liv- erpool the same day that the North drove back Lee at Gettysburg. Leslie Stephen wrote wisely: "If Laird could be hanged for getting two great nations into a quarrel to sell his ships, I should be heartily glad." The Rams meant breaking the blockade of the South, but 144 THE IRISH ISSUE the English people were innocent, unaware even of the fell work of individuals. The Ala- bama had slipped to sea, while the Queen's advocate was enjoying a fortuitous nervous breakdown. The Laird Rams would have fol- lowed, had not Adams mentioned with old- fashioned correctness to Palmerston: "It would be]superfluous in me to point out to your Lord- ship that this means war." The Rams were quietly passed into the British navy. Mr. Adams had given another right turn to the world's helm. The peril had passed, and an Anglo-American tragedy had been averted. But the scars remained; and Lyons reported the next year from Washington: "Three-quar- ters of the American people are eagerly longing for a safe opportunity of making war with England." But a safe opportunity, at least safe for the democratic future of the world, never came. After the war the old reverence for England was replaced by suspicion and an excusable elation. The national outlines had been welded. The biggest army on earth had taken the field. The ironclad had been born. Enormous damages were assessed on the Ala- bama, whose ghost long flitted the seas. Sum- ner, as a reprisal, demanded "the withdrawal of the British from this hemisphere." There WINNING THE UNITED STATES 145 was a popular cry of "Canada for the Ala- bama." Lord Clarendon's treaty with Minis- ter Johnson was thrown out by the Senate. The Treaty of Washington brought apology and arbitration. The Alabama cost England three million pounds, which was a very cheap way to discover that England and America had found, in arbitration, a permanent and better way than war. The new tendencies, however, involved in America intense dislike for English statecraft, increased influence of the Irish, who had paid their footing with their blood, and a movement towards domestic corruption as a reaction from the moral uplift of the war. The war ended nobly, so that Meredith said later: "Since the benignant conclusion of the greatest of civil wars, I have looked on the American people as leaders of our civilisa- tion." But reaction had followed. The South was not plundered, but the sense of plunder found a channel in pension-fraud, graft, and unscru- pulous finance. The noblest had perished, and the "carpetbagger" took his place. Peace be- came no less furious than war. Never again could Thackeray call New York a cathedral town, "grave, decorous, and well-read." Mili- tarism was applied to industrialism. Trade 146 THE IRISH ISSUE only favoured the survival of the cheapest. Firm fought firm, and trust was reared upon trust until, in our day, the "malefactors of great wealth" sat in unseen power. Episodes like the impeachment of President Johnson and the Tweed Ring saddened the friends of the republic. But the country was far too young to become decadent. The national life ran sweet, noisy, and adventurous all the while. A new American sprang up, cosmopol- itan, childlike, optimistic, a quick moneymaker but a cheerful spender, devoid of all the big- otries, tolerant of the past, greedy of the pres- ent, sure of the future. It was the type Eng- lishmen inconsistently term irreverent, while smiling at its eager reverences offered to Old World objects — the type that only a Haps- burg or a Hohenzollern could drive into war. Good relations with such could be maintained only by treating Americans as Americans, and not as ex-Englishmen. Render to the Yankee the things that belong to the Yankee, and to God the things that are God's — would have been a wise social provision. The mistake of insular Englishmen has been to conceive both after his own image. Not without reason Lowell protested against "a conviction that whatever good there is in us is wholly English, WINNING THE UNITED STATES 147 when the truth is that we are worth nothing except so far as we have disinfected ourselves of Anglicism." Providence rather than diplomacy seemed to safeguard the relations of England and Amer- ica. A cousinly carelessness and a fraternal contempt prevailed. Three times was a Brit- ish minister to be dismissed from Washington for undiplomatic conduct. Anglo-American diplomacy has been unique in not needing a use of foreign tongues. Can- ning told Charles Bagot that "the hardest les- son a British minister has to learn in America is not what to do, but what to bear." Bagot concluded with Mr. Rush that agreement which secured a century of unarmed peace between Canada and the United States. On the Great Lakes both agreed to burn their boats of war behind them. The Canadian frontier remained a perpetual plenipotentiary of peace. As Sir Charles FitzPatrick recently reminded the lawyers of New York: "The longest frontier on the earth's surface has at the same time been the most defenceless and the most safe." But the early diplomatists were contemptuous. Relations were odd. The British minister, Merry, complained officially that President Jefferson received him "in slippers down at 148 THE IRISH ISSUE the heels," and revenged himself by entertain- ing Tom Moore, who wrote obscene squibs against Jefferson from the British embassy ! Jackson, Pakenham, and Crampton were in- sulting at Washington, apparently not realising they were in a foreign country. Jackson roundly accused the government of lying and was sent home. Bulwer was the first to adapt himself to the situation, realising that English diplomacy had been made rather to win over despots than to conciliate democracies. "Di- plomacy here is electioneering," he wrote from Washington; and he achieved the success of the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty. The contemptu- ous school was followed by the pompous. The stately figures of Lyons, Sackville, and Paunce- f ote dazzled the official scene without approach- ing the heart of the republic. Leslie Stephen described the embassy in the sixties of the last century as "a small knot of British swells with no employment but that of cursing the coun- try from morning to night." It was obvious at least that they felt at home; but good rela- tions must have languished. A period of offi- cial laudation and mutual admiration followed, variegated by tentative arbitrations, and by quick exchanges on Irish points. The heyday of reconciliation was reached under the demo- WINNING THE UNITED STATES 149 cratic school initiated by Bryce. Fifty years before, Delane had wished a popular speech- maker to be sent to Washington. Bryce' s lit- erary tribute to the American Constitution marked him as more American than most Americans. His acceptance of a peerage caused a little sadness, as though they had lost one of themselves. America herself hon- oured St. James's with men of letters like Bancroft, Motley, and Lowell. When their Americanism was their chief charm, Anglicisa- tion must be regarded as a besetting sin. An American minister is liable to merge his na- tionality in a manner impossible to a real foreigner. Better, however, he should remain aloof than not keep a clear idea of the Ameri- can before English eyes. If English diplomatists were crude and un- conciliatory toward Americans, the tourists and travellers were worse. Writers like the Trol- lopes and Dickens recorded their unforgiven impressions. The mutual ridicule which a common tongue afforded reads as ridiculously as Matt Ward's scoffing at English factory chimneys for "kissing the clouds" to a genera- tion which has found America guilty of a little skyscraping herself. The burden of British abuse was that the Americans spat, and in 150 THE IRISH ISSUE reply Scripture was seriously adduced to show that the Saviour had also done so! The history of English visiting in America does not afford a lesson in perfect tact or de- portment. It is unjust to take liberties in the land of liberty. American manners are based on good nature, not on etiquette. God's gen- tlemen are frequent in " God's own country." The Victorian frankly disliked America, and said so. The lionised Dickens offended her mortally. Thackeray, also a success as a lec- turer, wisely promised to write no American Notes, reserving his satire for the Georges. He reached the wise conclusion that "the great point to ding into the ears of the great, stupid, virtue-proud English public is that there are folks as good as they in America." As lec- turers Matthew Arnold was inaudible and Free- man unintelligible. The Stanleys, both the explorer and the dean, were a success. The dean's eulogium of the Anglican divine, Hooker, was taken as a shrewd compliment to "fighting Joe Hooker," a popular general. Froude was mischievous enough to attack the Irish in a series of lectures, which were no less fiercely answered by Father Tom Burke. Diplomacy was embarrassed before he could be induced to drop his tour. One of his taunts was never WINNING THE UNITED STATES 151 forgotten: "Free nations are not made by- playing at insurrection. If Ireland desires to be a nation, she must learn not merely to shout for liberty but to fight for it." Now this was unfair in a land where Irishmen had three times taken up arms for liberty. The Civil War was fought to its bitter end mainly by the three types, Anglo-Saxon, Irish, and German, whose survivors might have com- bined in time to come to produce an ideal American blending of the Celtic and Teutonic elements. But the Civil War cut very deep into the original stock. The Anglo-Saxon gen- try of the South perished. No modern pros- perity has made up for the loss of the old blood. The German and Irish have been reinforced by immigration in a way lacking to the Anglo- Saxon. He has fallen behind in a country which recognises numbers, but not caste. In a book recently published in America, The Pass- ing of the Great Race, Mr. Madison Grant says what is probably true enough: "If the Civil War had not occurred these same men, with their descendants, would have populated the Western States instead of the racial nonde- scripts who are now flocking there." It has been those Western States which at the begin- ning decided American attitude towards the 152 THE IRISH ISSUE present conflict. A matter of national honour is not likely to appeal except to the Celtic and Teutonic stocks of America. Of these the most vivid of Celtic and Teutonic strains, the Irish and the German, outnumber their fellow, the Anglo-Saxon. "Two great families of men are in the American field, the Teutons and the Celts," wrote D'Arcy M'Gee in 1851. As Froude sorrowfully recognised, seven years after the Civil War, "the Anglo-Saxon power is running to seed." The life of equal oppor- tunity, unhampered by privilege, has shown that there is no race superiority between Aryan peoples in America. Influences and riches go to the numerous and industrious. While the law, language, and legislature can be called Anglo-Saxon, the Celtic leaven and the huge foreign communities have undermined the Anglophile instinct, except in social circles. The Irish have become, at any rate, as Ameri- canised as the original colonists; and in another generation the Germans, who now retain their language, will follow suit. How far the original type is surviving is becoming doubtful. Per- haps Mr. Madison Grant concludes his volume a little pessimistically: "If the melting-pot is allowed to boil without control, the type of native American of Colonial descent will be- WINNING THE UNITED STATES 153 come as extinct as the Athenian of the age of Pericles." Yet no Irish- American would wish to see the Anglo-Saxon as rare on the banks of the Hudson as the Redskin on the Mississippi. The Celt and the Saxon in America have rec- ognised their kindred stock in the Aryan heri- tage. They have mixed in the professions and in every social circle, and in blood when reli- gion would permit. It is in Ireland herself that the Irish have not received Aryan recog- nition. The antagonism of the Celt and the Saxon passes beyond the dead hand of the antiquarian, and even out of the livelier grasp of the poli- tician, when considered in its results to world- politics. The Irish driven out of Ireland have become something between a lever and a leaven in every single part of the empire. Never in the majority, they are always the strongest amongst minorities. The casting vote and the balance of political power comes to them by chance or by right. This is even more so in the United States, where dwell a majority of the whole race, estimated between fifteen and twenty millions. The United States were origi- nally an extension of the Anglo-Saxon world. The English Colonials with strong Irish back- ing (chiefly from Ulster) laid down the great 154 THE IRISH ISSUE republic on lines which have since been strained, though not sapped, by the incoming hordes from east Europe and west Asia. The Anglo- Saxon, the Irish, and to a lesser extent the Ger- man, have proved the most ready to assimilate Americanism. But, to the hordes of Slavs, Mediterranean and Levantine types, America is little less than a golden caravanserai. Owing to them, the tone of national consciousness has changed since the Civil War. The American "melting-pot" has not yet yielded a corporate x\merican nationality. The mistake of regarding the Irish as inferior at home has been extended into considering them negligible when scattered abroad. In spite of a generation of signs and warnings, England has never made any genuine political move or diplomatic advance towards the Irish- Americans. This Irish influence runs stiller and deeper than any superficial examination would show. Few governors of States, few elected judges, or representatives, or senators, but have to feel and consider at some time the weight of the Irish vote, or at least the latent strength of Irish opinion. If they reckon the Irish press and the professional Irish politicians as negligible, they know that Irish opinion is not. It runs in the marrow of the United WINNING THE UNITED STATES 155 States. It is the ever=ready force that strength- ens her arm when she wishes to oppose Eng- land, and that slows her hand whenever it is proffered in friendship. Washington has never countenanced any direct Irish attack on Eng- land; and men like John Boyle O'Reilly have always been ready to carry through a states- manlike bargain between Celt and Saxon. Though O'Reilly suffered penal servitude, he adopted a wise attitude in the most brilliant of Irish- American papers. In 1885 he wrote in the Pilot: "One magnanimous statesman in England, one leader with the wisdom and cour- age of genius, would solidify the British Em- pire to-day with a master-stroke of politics. Such a policy would silence the dynamiters and radicals, satisfy and gratify the Irish people throughout the world, strengthen the British Empire, and make America thoroughly sympa- thetic." It is sad that this is the very cry which lovers of Ireland and would-be admirers of England felt compelled to reiterate to-day. It has been said that Irish nationalism stands between Ireland and the light of the world. It also stands between England and the love of the world. Envoy after envoy has found his work at Washington checked and checkered. The history of British diplomacy in the United 156 THE IRISH ISSUE States has been one long struggle against Irish influences in the dark. The important convention agreed upon by Reverdy Johnson and Lord Clarendon in Lon- don was thrown out in the Senate. Bancroft in his Life of Seward clearly traces this to its source. "The Fenian movement had increased the strong public sentiment in favour of wait- ing for an opportunity to retaliate. This was such an opportunity." The play and counter- play of Irish sentiment in American politics be- came more and more marked. Each President had to deal with it. President Johnson was much at a loss what to do with Fenian raiders of Canada. The government could only let them down as gently as possible without offend- ing England. President Grant was much em- barrassed by the Irish mission to the American centenary under Parnell, who refused to be introduced by the British ambassador. We find Alexander Sullivan interviewing President Arthur on Irish emigration, and causing diplo- matic action thereby which Parnell character- ised as "the best slap England had from Amer- ica since the War of 1812." Sackville-West, whose every move was watched and foiled by an intensely active Fenian party, actually took refuge, during the WINNING THE UNITED STATES 157 time of the Phoenix Park executions, on the presidential yacht; and indirectly he owed, in the end, his abrupt dismissal to the force of Irish opinion. An indiscreet letter from his pen at election time gave the Irish Democrats a distinct breach of etiquette to work upon, and Cleveland handed Sackville-West his pa- pers. It was an act of unprecedented rigour, but the Irish-Americans were strong enough to insist. The Times laid it to Boyle O'Reilly's credit, just as Mr. G. W. Smalley gave Senator Patrick Collins credit for keeping the Anglo- phile minister Phelps from the Supreme bench. The nineties brought the Venezuelan crisis. The British boundary was based on old Dutch rights, and the Venezuelan on Spanish. Eng- land refused to arbitrate and Cleveland de- manded a commission as an alternative to war. Bryce says his motives have never been under- stood. The truth is, America had come of age, and a reassertion of the Monroe Doctrine was in her mounting blood. The Democrats had returned to power for the first time since the Civil War; and the Irish among them were nettled by the rejection of home rule the pre- vious year. The Irish and Cleveland found their antagonist was the same. Salisbury, the postponer of Irish freedom, was an easier and 158 THE IRISH ISSUE welcomer target than Gladstone, whose Civil War indiscretions had been forgotten in his subsequent liberalism. Cleveland spoke firmly in order to avert the possible occasions of war. He refused all "supine submission"; and the boundary was adjudicated without disturbing the rest of Mr. Monroe or the peace of the world. As the Bayard-Chamberlain Treaty had been rejected by the Senate in 1888, so the same levers were used by Michael Davitt to work the defeat of the Anglo-American Treaty of 1897. A passage is worth quoting from the late Mr. Sheehy Skeffington's Life of Davitt, not so much as a missile against England as a matter of rumination to those who are most concerned with the safety of America or Eng- land or Ireland to-day. In 1897 the oft-mooted project of an Anglo-American Alli- ance was prominently before the public. It was Davitt who defeated it. He felt that a special responsibility lay on him in this matter. It was largely owing to the movement that he had initiated that the minds of Irish- Americans were altered so as to make it possible for such a proposition as an alliance with Great Britain to be even entertained. In the changed situation created by the Gladstone offer of peace and goodwill he had rejoiced to find in 1886 the temper of Irish-America so friendly towards this measure of conciliation. But England had turned her back on Gladstone and had disowned his noble efforts to heal the breach between the two nations. Had it WINNING THE UNITED STATES 159 been otherwise Davitt himself might have been an ambassador of peace making a free Ireland the link between the democra- cies of England and America. As it was, he felt that the occa- sion was one in which no opportunity ought to be lost of show- ing England that she really had something substantial to gain from the freedom and friendship of Ireland, apart from the intrinsic value of having a contented nation at her side. It was the time to teach the world that Irishmen in the United States were true to their motherland. So he crossed to the States and in a brief campaign in the proper quarters secured that the Anglo-American Arbitration Treaty, which was ex- pected to be the germ of a formal alliance, should be rejected by the United States Senate through the Irish influence in that body. Cleveland thought it a "wicked thing," but it was a transatlantic riposte to the jubilee coercion act in Ireland. Nor was it the last time that Irish pressure prevailed against American friendship for England. The in- tensified feeling in America would not permit McKinley even to present a flag to the Anglo- American hospital ship Maine during the Boer War. The celebration of the centenary of the Peace of Ghent was largely discounted by Irish irritation over the situation in Ulster. However anxious the friends of England were to oblige her with an official token of alliance, it was frustrated on the ground that the Irish question remained unsettled. For a hundred years, directly or indirectly, 160 THE IRISH ISSUE and unsuspected by their blinded diplomatists during most of the time, England and Germany had been competing for the winning of America. The unforeseen history of the world was yet to turn on her # alliance, and there was often as good a chance of an understanding with one as with the other. Each in turn had contrib- uted enormously to the population of the re- public, but each in turn incurred its most bit- ter hostility, which in Germany's case was to prove fatal. England had the American tra- dition and the Irish immigration in the scales against her, but she had in her favour what Bismarck truly called the greatest political fact of modern times, "the inherited and permanent fact that North America speaks English." From the time of Frederick the Great Prus- sia manifested a traditional friendship for the United States, which might have survived more than one European cataclysm. Germany had no ambitions in America. German professor- dom looked on the American republic as a kind of cloud-cuckoodom, to which, however, they were very glad to migrate after the revolution of 1848, leaving the German people to the Junker. The German idealists fought well for American idealism in the Civil War, as is brought out in the chapter of The Crisis, by WINNING THE UNITED STATES 161 Winston Churchill, entitled "Richter's Scar." German public opinion and German finance were not hostile to the North, In return New England feeling favoured the Germans in the war of 1870. A great German wedge had penetrated the Continent and had proven its worth and value. During the nineteenth century there were five million German immigrants, four million Irish and only three million from the rest of Great Britain. They combined to turn the scale of rivalry against the Anglo-Saxon, who at the time of the Revolution had amounted to a million and a half, while German and Irish were roughly half a million apiece. F. J. Turner says of the German settlers: 'With their Scotch-Irish neighbours they formed the outer edge of the tide of pioneers." With the end of the century Anglo-Saxon stock was reck- oned twenty million, German as much as eighteen, and Celtic, including Scotch and Irish, fourteen. The Irish and the German did not come into contact, except under church auspices. As a rule their settlements did not coincide. In his work on the Germans in America Fa.ust describes how in Pennsylvania "the Germans are most numerous where the limestone appears, while the Irish are settled 162 THE IRISH ISSUE on the slate foundations, the Irish taking land well-watered near the big rivers arid the Ger- mans with a better eye for good land choosing that on which there grew the best trees." In parts the German overran the Irish. McAll- isterstown, an Irish settlement, became Han- over. In his History of Virginia Kercheval gives a curious account of the German settlers caricaturing St. Patrick's Day, while the Irish retaliated with a burlesque of St. Michael's. But the Celt and the Teuton combined in their disregard of Puritanism and Sabbatarianism, from which they largely delivered the Ameri- can continent. The German influences were strictly divided into a purely secular and an ecclesiastical line. The former developed socialism in America, while intellectually it affected the centres of American education. As Andrew D. White said: "Although Great Britain is generally re- garded as the mother of the United States, Ger- many has from an intellectual standpoint be- come more and more the second mother of the American republic." The interchange of pro- fessors with Germany and the planting of a Teutonic museum at Harvard marked the last stage of this tendency. Ecclesiastically the Germans threw out great WINNING THE UNITED STATES 163 Catholic communities throughout the conti- nent, with a tendency to clash with the Irish- American hierarchy. Milwaukee produced the first German bishopric. Other more or less German sees followed. The chief difference between the German and Irish Catholics was that the former retained their language. From the day of their arrival the Germans struggled to retain their language in pulpit and school. The nationalist movement initiated by Ke- hensly, acting from a European source of in- spiration, brought it to a crisis. Language was opposed to language, churchman to churchman, and Pan-Germanism to Americanism. The English-speaking Irishmen at the head of the church, led by Cardinal Gibbons, opposed and defeated the movement as an anti-American tendency in the heart of the church. From that moment the German language was doomed in America. The conflict was too short and decisive to leave scars. German Catholics be- came the best of citizens in the second and third generations. But even in a united church it is interesting to trace the racial trenches of Irish and German. Of the archbishops as a rule some eleven are Irish, three German. Of bishops threescore are Irish to ten of German name. Of the whole Catholic clergy it is 164 THE IRISH ISSUE claimed that a third have a German name, but the great majority of the remainder carry a Celtic denominator. The German- American would have been glad enough to merge himself into America, retain- ing the same memory of the Germany which had no room for him as the French-Canadian does of France. But an unkind destiny had turned both America and Germany at about the same time to a future on the water. At the same time that American fleets were reliev- ing Spain of her colonies, German fleets were waiting for the chance to gather them up. From that moment a tragedy was in store for the German- American. Prince Henry of Prus- sia administered a friendly warning to Admiral Dewey as he left Hong Kong for Manila, but Admiral Diedrichs made himself as unpleasant to the American fleet as possible. The war with Spain was a severe blow to German ex- pansion and German-Americans felt that the interests of the Fatherland had not been served. Carl Schurz wished America to decline the Philippines because it meant accepting British protection. "British friendship is a good thing to have but perhaps not so good a thing to need." Holleben induced Pauncefote to sign a general plea against the war, which was WINNING THE UNITED STATES 165 used afterwards against Anglo-American senti- ment. But the war with Spain was the occasion of restoring the long-lost relations with Eng- land. The delivery of Cuba appealed to Eng- lishmen, and the unpopularity of the United States in Europe drew Americans to their glo- riously isolated cousins. While Germany an- grily fumbled with her uncompleted fleet, Eng- land held the ring in the Far East. The sea battle of Manila seemed an echo of the Armada, as the last of the "Indies" fell from the hand of the Hapsburg. The good feeling engendered might have brought about an agreement, had there been some common cause or crusade. Chamberlain had already meditated the matter with Secretary Hay. "Shoulder to shoulder we could command peace the world over. I should rejoice in an occasion in which we could fight side by side." Had it not been for the Boer War, England and America might have scented a common foe on the horizon. Ger- many was intriguing equally with Kruger in the Transvaal and Aguinaldo in the Philip- pines. But the unhappy Boer War raised a torrent of denunciation in America. To a re- public, a republic is always a republic. Boer commandos seemed conspicuously kin to the 166 THE IRISH ISSUE Revolutionary farmers. Hay wrote mournfully in 1900: "If it were not for our domestic poli- tics we could and should join with England, whose interests are identical with ours, and make our ideas prevail. But in the present morbid state of the public mind that is not to be thought of, and we must look idly on and see her making terms with Germany instead of us." There was considerable insight in Hay's words, for the great unspoken question in English diplomacy for a century was whether America or Germany was to be her eventual ally. The shortsightedness of politicians and dynasties favoured the latter. In 1814 Prus- sia was an ally, and America a foe. A century later began the war which was to reverse the situation. Chamberlain had wished to have both as allies, but this was not to be. Prussian- ism and Americanism cannot dwell together. As a result of the defeat of Spain Germany had discovered that America was a force in the offing of the world to be reckoned with. In 1899 Secretary Hay wrote: '''The Emperor is nervously anxious to be on good terms with us, on his own terms, bien entendu." The Boer War had dissipated the friendship for England which had sprung up in America. There had arisen what Hay called "a mad-dog hatred of WINNING THE UNITED STATES 167 England" and he lamented, f6 that we should be compelled to refuse the assistance of the greatest Power in the world in carrying out our own policy, because all Irishmen are Demo- crats and some Germans are fools, is enough to drive a man mad." Before the Boer War was ended Germany took the opportunity to send Prince Henry on a visit to America to fish dis- creetly in anti-British waters. The attitude of Germany to her exiles had previously been as unto apostates. A great attempt was now made to rally their numbers into political sym- pathy with the Fatherland. To the German- American, Prince Henry appeared in the light of a travelling anachronism, but results did fol- low his visit. The objects of German diplo- macy in America seem to have aimed at over- riding the Monroe Doctrine in South America in Germany's behalf and checking British influ- ence through a resurgence of Irish animosity. The Boer War had revived Fenianism, and very soon German sympathy began to extend itself to the Irish cause. This curious development was appreciated at the time by the Irish sage, Mr. Dooley, with the combined wisdom of saloon and Solon: 'Twas not long after when I heard a man singing The Wearin' of the Green down the street and in come Schwartzmeister. 168 THE IRISH ISSUE "Faugh a ballagh, get out of the way," says he, meaning to be polite. "Lieb vaterland," says I, and we had a drink together. "Glory be," meditated Mr. Dooley, "who ever thought the Irish'd live to see the day when they'd be freed by the Dutch?" It was quite possible for the American tradi- tion to be hostile to England and her policy to be otherwise. This has often been the case in modern times, and accounts for the extraordi- nary differences of opinion between Washington and the American people as a whole towards England. The American Government and peo- ple have been unitedly hostile against England in occasions of stress, during the Venezuela cri- sis, during the Civil War, and during the Na- poleonic conflict. Otherwise the government has not fostered the popular dislike. Napoleon had never levied taxes in the States, and American feeling was with him against England. By the War of 1812 America prolonged and intensified the struggle. Yet as Mr. Wilson wrote in his History: "Napoleon was the enemy of the civilised world, had been America's own enemy in disguise and had thrown off the disguise. . . . England's policy had cut America to the quick and had become intolerable and it did not lessen America's exasperation that that policy had been a measure of war against the Corsican, not against her." WINNING THE UNITED STATES 169 To substitute "the Brandenburger" for the Corsican gives the exact historical parallel with which the historian was himself called to deal as a maker as well as a writer of American his- tory. After the Civil War America felt little stom- ach for expansion, though the home demesne was completed by the purchase of Alaska. But the Senate would not allow Seward to ob- tain possession of St. Thomas or Grant of San Domingo. Only gradually it was realised that Cuba and Hawaii were vital strategic points, but American interference could only be sanc- tioned at home in the guise of humanitarianism. The manifest destiny was not yet. With the passing of the world drama from the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, it seemed as though the supreme struggle in the future must be for the mastery of the Pacific. Amer- ica had touched the Japanese power to birth. Russia was hasting towards her faraway out- let to the ocean. America and Germany found themselves picking up stations in the South Seas. Under President Harrison Samoa was the scene of some high-souled administration on the part of America, which made the subse- quent German control particularly bitter to the natives. Under Harrison the Queen of Hawaii was overthrown and replaced by a pro- 170 THE IRISH ISSUE visional government. The ethics were those of a peaceful usurpation, and Cleveland coming into office repudiated the action. But the war with Spain forced Hawaii into American con- trol. It was seen to be the very door-step to the Pacific. Cuba brought America into the realm of world politics. For half a century Cuba had lain like Lazarus at America's gates, until her sores overflowed, and America intervened. As many Americans tried to avert as to precipitate the war, which was duly declared and sum- marily finished. McKinley was able to claim that "no nation was ever more fortunate in war or more honourable in negotiations for peace." America stood like a Lochinvar among nations. At the same time the negotiations taught Americans that they had few friends in Europe, disclosing to those who had eyes a possible ally in England and an incipient enemy in Germany. American imperialism and pacificism both took tremendous root as a re- sult of the war. Corresponding to the "Little Englanders," the lesser Americans waxed strong, convinced that the whole of the Philip- pine archipelago was not worth the life of an American boy. As a people Americans were still nervous of WINNING THE UNITED STATES 171 playing any international role. It was a daring advance for Secretary Hay to proclaim "the open door" in China, especially as it entailed an expedition in company with other Powers more predatory than Christian. It was in China that American and British troops first took the field together, England being the first to respond to Hay's idea of an "open door." There, too, they shared a com- mon revulsion at the atrocities committed by the German contingent on the hapless Chinese, atrocities hushed up by discreet diplomacy. America had become imperial, but with philan- thropic reservations. She took over the Pan- ama Canal (which incidentally she had dug) for the benefit of mankind. She conquered Cuba, and to give Cuba freedom she captured the Philippines and paid for them afterwards. She sent troops to China, but alone of the ag- gressive Powers returned her share of the in- demnity for educational purposes. She paid handsomely for the friars' lands in the Philip- pines when confiscation was the European precedent, and she has superfluously turned the other cheek in Mexico. The fact is that the American Government is more Christian than any other in its dealings with alien peoples. Whether she willed it or not, America had 172 THE IRISH ISSUE become a world Power, Her foreign relations by the end of the century bore traces and streaks from the international mangle. Mr. Dooley brilliantly described them at the time, and it is doubtful if the historian could better summarise them: You will be glad to know that the friendship of this country with Germany planted in Samoa and nourished at Manila has grown to such a point as to satisfy the most critical German- American. With England we are on such terms as must please every Canadian but not on any such terms as would make any Irishman think we are on such terms as we ought not to be! The symbol of American imperialism was the Panama Canal, which appealed to the Ameri- can people as a mystic fulfilment of the original dream of Columbus, desiring to sail west to the East Indies. The overnight recognition of the republic of Panama in the teeth of dilatory Colombia and the organised dictatorship under which the work was completed struck the note of a progressive and imperial Power. Later in the year of Prince Henry's visit had come a joint challenge to the Monroe Doctrine in South America, engineered by Germany, which the English Foreign Office must bear the discredit of adopting. The attempt of Ger- many, France, and England to bring pressure WINNING THE UNITED STATES 173 in Venezuela did, however, cause as much anger among the English as among the American people against the officials of Balfour's govern- ment. Before long England began to see the necessity of making renunciations and even of jettisoning interests to avoid a clash with America in any part of the world. In 1896 Roosevelt had said the Monroe Doctrine would be asserted "if Germany sought to acquire Cuba from Spain or St. Thomas from the Danes." The threat to Venezuela had been made to enable Germany to occupy the Mar- garita Islands, but though England was acting like a blind dupe America was awake in the person of her President. Before Roosevelt's private ultimatum to Holleben, the German ambassador, the threatening warships were withdrawn. On the other side, the German foreign service defeated every effort of America to purchase the Danish West Indies in the Danish Parliament, while the Hamburg-Ameri- can Line began to pave the way towards a Ger- man occupation. But American policy was fixed, and by taking over the administration of revenue in Nicaragua, Haiti, and San Domingo, American officials cleverly prevented the in- gress of German creditors. Curiously enough, Germany could not har- 174 THE IRISH ISSUE ass America without bringing her closer to England and vice versa. Germany's gesticula- tions in the open or subterraneous diplomacies found England and America in unconscious partnership. Germany's efforts to acquire a base or a colony in South America were equally checked by the Monroe Doctrine and the Brit- ish fleet. It was difficult to distinguish the line where the opposition of each began or ended, so imperceptibly did they coalesce. By 1911 Maximilian Harden had realised that "Great Britain and North America tend to form a community of interests. On the two oceans the Anglo-Saxons of the two continents group themselves together in unity of will." A life-and-death struggle now arose in which destiny played a stronger part than any diplo- macy in fixing or laying the train of America's undeveloped international policy, whether it should take a hostile or indifferent or co-opera- tive attitude towards the British Empire. What the British Foreign Office had failed to achieve, German militarism brought about. Henry Adams could not help remarking: "The grisly terror which in twenty years effected what Adamses had tried for two hundred in vain — frightened England into America's arms." WINNING THE UNITED STATES 175 The winning of America was no slight thing in the course of the world's history, and it is interesting to quote the clearest prophecy on the subject, made by Professor A. B. Hart in 1901: "If there is to be in the coming century a great battle of Armageddon, once more Europe against the Huns, we can no more help taking our part with the hosts of freedom than we can help educating our children, building our churches, or maintaining the rights of the individual." It may be inferred that what won America to the cause of the Allies was not even friendship for France or unity of interest with England so much as innate Americanism. Nothing is more marked in the thought of modern America than the discovery that she was being gradually won or induced or tempted to enter the international vortex. Europe had for so long been thought of in the guise of another planet or other world that Paris was humorously mentioned as a place where good Americans went after death. Like England, America had developed an isolation theory. England's had broken down under the com- bined influence of German pressure and Ed- wardian diplomacy, while Olney's algebraical equation that "American non-intervention in 176 THE IRISH ISSUE Europe implied European non-intervention in America" was found as impracticable as all mathematical dicta in practice. American in- tervention in Asia was a prelude to the same in Europe. It was a long way from Nebraska to the summer palace of Pekin, but American arms had reached there. Under Hay America had begun to protest against the treatment of Jews in Russia and Roumania. Every small nation in distress tended to appeal to America and not to Caesar. The President of the United States and not the German Emperor began to be hailed as the universal referee. Roosevelt once expressed the very proper wish that "our questions could be settled on their own merits and not complicated by quarrels between Eng- land and Ireland or France and Germany." In the present crisis of the world America has taken a pacificatory part in the former and the part of a belligerent in the latter of these his- toric quarrels. Their final settlement seems to depend more on American intervention than on any other element. The United States have finally entered the circle of the Powers not merely as a co-Power, but as the deciding and world-compelling one. The bolts of war and the branches of peace are equally in the grip of the American eagle. X IRISH AMERICA DURING THE WAR The sentiment of -Irish America during the world war, and in particular towards England, varied enormously. At moments it was pro- nounced, and at others it was impossible to define. During the first year it was uncertain and, until the Dublin rising, pro-Ally. After the executions it was anti-British and with Amer- ica's entry into the war it resolved itself into a set pro- Americanism. But cross-currents and complications, both of history and of psychol- ogy, made it as clouded and uncertain generally as it was vivid and frank on stirring occasions. At the commencement of the war the Celt showed himself instinctively anti-Teutonic. The bulk of the leading and assimilated Irish- Americans, though with violent exceptions from the outset, were satisfied at England's entry into the war and gladly expectant that Irish regiments would share in a speedy redemption of Belgium. As regards Ireland, Irish America paused. It was realised that the destiny of 177 178 THE IRISH ISSUE Ireland was in one man's hand. The near ap- proach of home rule had left the extremists in America in a minority. The apparent political triumph of Redmond had placed a huge con- stitutional sentiment behind him, which only its actuality in the form of an Irish Parliament was needed to make amenable to fair diplo- macy and reasonable propaganda throughout the American continent. But the question was whether he would succeed in wresting home rule from England or whether England would succeed in wresting his prize from him. One of the golden hours of history was present, in which the silver minutes slowly passed, never to return. Subsequent hours were to be of iron. As soon as it was seen in America that Red- mond was recruiting Irishmen as a member of the British Commons and not as an Irish pre- mier, the position of the extremists became clear and their propaganda made way. But the great Irish financiers and industrial- ists were pro-Ally and with the bulk of Ameri- cans of Irish name remained so. The hier- archy, chieftained by three Irish cardinals, oc- cupied a variety of positions within the largess of neutrality. The great German element in their flocks naturally proved a counterweight IRISH AMERICA 179 even to the Belgian tragedy, and after the Dublin rising the Irish element passed out of control, not that the American hierarchy affect any political control of their spiritual subjects, but that they are generally made responsible for any widely expressed view among Catholics. There can be no doubt that at times a passing view was pro-German or at least pro-Austrian, with modifications in favour of Belgium and France. That of the Irish rank and file was the curious but not inconsistent one of being anti-British but pro-French. Admitting dif- ferences in degree and circumstance, they were equally opposed to Germany in Belgium and to England in Ireland. But conclusions were liable to be as mixed as motives, some declaring they were pro-Ally because they were pro-Irish and others that they were pro-German for the same reason. Some said they were pro-Ally because home rule was a fact, and others that they were pro-German because it was not. Casement's description of the Home Rule Bill as "a promissory note payable after death" made it immediately a disintegrating object of dispute. The first ominous sign was when the Irish World withdrew its support from Redmond. Under the editorship of Patrick Ford it had 180 THE IRISH ISSUE been to the Irish party what the London Times was to the Tories. John Devoy, the editor of the Gaelic-American, came out of the wilder- ness after obscure but consistent years and undertook the championship of Germany. Amiable to meet, vitriolic of pen, he came back from the past, the last of the real Fenians, but as an old soldier of France he must have felt a pang that he and Germany were become each other's tools. But the iron of the British fet- ter had gnawed into his strong soul and he made himself the most anti-British editor in America. Though the Irish-German press became a reality, it was not a genuine growth of Irish America. It was obviously an attempt to in- fluence rather than to express Irish feeling. A naively preposterous book called The King, the Kaiser, and Irish Freedom was typical of the whole attempt to distort Irish sentiment. It was written by Mr. McGuire, a previous mayor of Syracuse, and figured in the literature of the prison camp in Germany, though the statement that "Prince von Biilow was a very devout Catholic" must have considerably astonished any German who chanced to read it. It was followed by another volume of which the alle- gorical frontispiece seemed to convey as Ger- IRISH AMERICA 181 many's message to Ireland: "All this efficiency I will give unto you if you will bow down and worship me." If the candid historian records such comfort and help as the Germans have gleaned from some Irishmen in America, it is only fair to em- phasise the great silent outburst of loyalty of the mass to America after the entry of their country into the war, of which the perennial testimony will be the impressive and heartening manifestoes of the three cardinals and the thousands and thousands of Irish- Americans in the regular and drafted armies, amounting to between 20 and 30 per cent of the whole, whose only international politics were the two words, "America first!" It was their silent devotion and their trustfulness in the meaning of the President's message that made American opin- ion insistent that Ireland should be included among the small nationalities, whose place in world democracy was to be made safe. The Irish-American press must largely be dis- carded as an indicator of the opinion of the Irish in America before or after the entry of America into the war. Amid this flood only the New York Advocate can be said amongst Irish papers to have re- mained independent, With the new year of 182 THE IRISH ISSUE 1916 the sympathisers with Mr. Redmond's policy started a weekly organ called Ireland, which was brilliantly edited by J. C. Walsh. It very soon attracted the intellectual and con- servative attention of the race. It was re- sponsible for a famous article by Cardinal Gibbons, who in giving his recollections of Archbishop MacHale stated: He had absolutely no faith in armed rebellion. The Young Ireland movement of '48 nearly broke his heart. He wanted the people to get the land, to have Catholic schools and to preserve and love their own language, literature and music. He saw the necessity of the Repeal of the Union. He was as we should say now, a Home Ruler, but he thought of it rather as something which would aid the preservation of Irish na- tionality, and he ever believed that Ireland must help herself, and that she should not be and ought not to be dependent upon any foreign power. As to his attitude to England, it was of course, as was to be expected of all Irishmen at that time, hostile. But he never thought separation from the Em- pire practicable, and he never disliked the English people. He ever believed that the English people were neither cognisant of nor assented to the acts of the English Government nor the English Garrison in Ireland, and he had the warmest affection for many individual Englishmen. He would have rejoiced to see the day when England should ally herself with France and Ireland. But the delays and indecisions at home gradually sapped the Redmondite position in America. The president of the United Irish League, Michael J. Ryan, drew aside, and, IRISH AMERICA 183 though Mr. Redmond in loyalty to old friend- ship refused to allow his deposition, the League wasted away as a popular force, and its place in the popular eye was taken by the Friends of Irish Freedom and other Sinn Fein organisa- tions. The great bulk of the Irish remained aloof, as suspicious of Germany as their fathers had been of England. German propagandists over- did their mission. The Clan-na-Gael had an able and, because fanatical, a disinterested leader in Judge Daniel Cohalan, who showed himself ready to go to any length and to make any alliance in furtherance of an Irish repub- lic. With John Devoy he even welcomed German assistance to the rising in Dublin, which owing to typical duplicity on the part of the Germans was barely forthcoming. It is now customary to charge such men with receiving German money, but it is to be observed that they would have just as eagerly assisted France had there been a war with England twenty years previously. Painful as their action must be to the majority of Irish- Americans, it was not done out of love or ad- miration of the Germans. As one of them ex- cused himself in a phrase that the Germans did not particularly appreciate, they would have 184 THE IRISH ISSUE declared themselves pro-Hell had they sufficient proof that the devil was anti-British ! At different times the greatest variety of cooks lent a hand to stirring the Irish-American broth. Kuno Meyer, professor of Irish in the University of Liverpool, appeared in America as though by schedule, in order to proclaim German scholarship in the Celtic field. Shortly before the outbreak of war a more exciting character turned up in New York in Sir Roger Casement, who came over for the perfectly ex- cusable and open purpose of buying arms to counteract Carson's gun-running in Ulster. The war carried him off his feet and he could only murmur to his host for some days, "Oh, the poor Kaiser," from which he settled down into an obsession that he was Wolfe Tone redi- vivus. Finally he went into Germany as the ambassador of the Irish- American extremists. From Ireland he carried no commission. After his exploit his lieutenant, Captain Monteith, escaped to America in the most picturesque style of adventure. A more damaging person- age to the British empire was Mrs. Sheehy Skeffington, who arrived by the underground route from Ireland after the murder of her hus- band, an incident which if atrocious was not condoned. He was a pure intellectual and one IRISH AMERICA 185 of the most advanced thinkers in modern Ire- land. He was a man of critical and brilliant parts and one of the few convinced pacifists who have ever been born in Ireland. He was a Dublin Socrates, and like Socrates he was unjustly put to death by the militarists, but that should hardly have made him an object of veneration to the pro-Prussian. Lord and Lady Aberdeen courageously toured America in Irish interests and were chiefly responsible for a translation of the Ford industry to Cork. The Sinn Fein were better represented in America than the Irish party. In Seumas MacManus they had a caustic and lively pen, and in Padraic Colum one of the surviving poets of the Dublin pleiad. But Colum was a poet before a politician and he hymned the dirge of Casement and Kettle equally. The chief propagandist of the Redmondite persua- sion was Patrick Egan, who in his remarkable career from an Irish conspirator to a United States minister had won the confidence of three remarkable men- — Parnell, Blaine, and Balmaceda. He issued a direct challenge to the Irish-German entente to which there could be no reply. The extremists received less encouragement from Ireland than in America herself. Apart 186 THE IRISH ISSUE from the old relentless Fenians, there were powerful groups in America who for reasons often widely unconnected with Ireland were disposed to encourage a strong anti-British sentiment amongst the Irish. But the German propaganda amongst the Irish drew its strongest support from English politicians. The entry of Carson into the Cabi- net was a climax to many minds and took off the edge of any Irish desire to avenge the sink- ing of the Lusitania. Thanks to the press gib- betings of several years, Carson had come to appear to the Irish-American in much the same light as the Kaiser appears to the London cock- ney. It was taken as a sign that home rule would be scotched if not nullified. During the next twelvemonth Irish opinion was wallowing as heavily in the trough of the waves as the official opinion of America, equally irritated, irrational, and irresolute. Irish- Americans, in spite of their press, did not know what to think or do. In the spring of 1916 an Irish race convention was staged by huge and galvanic effort in New York. Its effect was slight, except so far as it may have ministered to the smouldering embers in Dublin. The presence of pro-Germans caused it to be avoided and ridiculed by leading Irishmen, who a few IRISH AMERICA 187 weeks later, on the suppression of the rising, were openly and intensely anti-British them- selves. There was always a large and inde- pendent party of prominent Irishmen, who viewed Ireland artistically or historically rather than politically. They disliked to think that their citizenship could be compromised or hy- phenated by a group of men who had assumed a dictatorship over Irish opinion in America. It was only on rare occasions that such a group showed itself. Between the rising and the executions the first professor in the new Dublin University to visit America was entertained by the really leading Irishmen to a banquet in honor of "intellectual home rule." Of the five hosts, John D. Ryan, of Butte, Mont., rep- resented the Irish millionaire, the type of silent, indefatigable business man that the Celtic race is supposed to be unable to produce. John Quinn, described as the most anti-Prussian in- dividual in the States, yet a personal friend of Casement, epitomised the Gaelic culture, the battles of whose poets and playwrights he had fought in America. James Byrne was a leader of the Irish-American bar, and Judge Keogh a lifelong friend of Redmond. Bourke Cockran represented Irish eloquence. His three ora- tions during the war were delivered in consis- 188 THE IRISH ISSUE tent sequence on behalf of Armenia* Ireland, and Belgium. The effect of the Dublin rising was, of course, to put the Clan-na-Gael into the saddle. A great anti-British outburst took place, followed by a grim suspicion that Germany had not played quite fair. The Clan-na-Gael organised a famous meeting in Carnegie Hall, to which prominent and moderate Irishmen went on the understanding that the meeting was a memo- rial and not a political one. However, the German anthem was played before they reached the platform. In the course of his speech Bourke Cockran was interrupted by cries of "Down with England," to which he replied: "I say not down with England but up with Ireland." The meeting was as much misrep- resented by the champions as by the enemies of Ireland. There could be no doubt but that the shots of the firing-squad in Dublin were heard all round the world. As Lord Acton once wrote of the Phoenix Park murders, "the true moral of this catastrophe can never be made visible to the average Englishman." The bungled ne- gotiations which followed did not assuage the bitterness. Then it became obvious why the cynical Bernstorff was the strongest anti- IRISH AMERICA 189 home-ruler in the States, and why the generous wisdom of the British ambassador shared the distress common to all Irishmen of good-will. The episode of Dublin afforded an interlude to the drama of Verdun in the American press. The features of the Irish leaders swam into the glass, blurred by a halo of blood. The Irish section of America then was straitly and fiercely roused. Thousands and thousands made them- selves heard, to whom Dublin was still a lost Zion and the fallen capital of their race, and to whom Ireland acts as a magnet, a lodestar, a dream, an inspiration, a blood-madness. During the week of the Dublin revolt, when news was coming in uncertain scraps, the voice of Irish America was lifted not unlike the chorus of a Greek tragedy, given over to ap- prehension, memories, and query, while some foredestined crime is occurring within. It was possible to know Irishmen in the streets of New York by their expression. Sorrow, anxi- ety, exaltation, and a tangle of atavistic feel- ings were struggling in their features. The his- torical dislike of the Sassenach was struggling against a certain distrust of participation with the German. The effect of the rising was one thing. The effect of the executions was an- other. Then the Irish remembered Robert 190 THE IRISH ISSUE Emmet and knew where they stood. They were roused on a sensitive point and an out- burst of lyrical anger swept through the con- tinent from New York to the Golden Gates. It all hinged on the question of the executions. It was felt that only Irishmen had the right to put down a rising in Ireland. That only a con- stituted Irish government had the right to con- demn Irishmen to death. And there was none except on paper. There would have been no fierce outburst of horror had the insurgent leaders been shot down in hot blood behind their own barricades. A government in pos- session is bound to meet arms with arms. Those who were slain in the fighting slew and were slain. They had taken up the sword and they perished by the sword. The event sur- passed all hopes of the extremists who were watching from America what looked like a fiasco. They had launched a rising of franc- tireurs and they reaped a harvest of martyrs. What need not have been more than an ex- tended riot was raised to the dignity of a revo- lution. The suicidal folly of the rising as an appeal to arms was entirely forgotten in the dramatic deaths of the leaders. Sinn Feiners limited in numbers and officials limited in imagination had combined to play the German- IRISH AMERICA 191 American game beyond German dreams. Sat- isfaction was not unexpressed at the timely arrival of a fresh batch of Irish martyrs on the horizon just as Manchester and Mitchelstown were retreating into the past. Deep in their mugs German- Americans toasted British rule in Dublin ! But in a thousand American homes Irish women and children cried themselves to sleep. The great swing of Irish sentiment actually amounting to pro-Germanism might seem one of the most illogical and harebrained moves even to the credit of the Irish, but it can be explained on psychological grounds as easily as it can be regretted for national reasons. Each nationality in the States had from time to time found a vent for their hyphenated emo- tion, except the Irish, who had waited and waited, pained by the casualties, impatient for home rule, and irritated by German sugges- tions. They yearned for heroics, for Irish vic- tories in the field and for the restoration of a national parliament. Generals failed to give them the one and statesmen hesitated to per- mit them the other. When the Dublin revolt broke out, the inevitable occurred in America. The Irish snatched at the husks of a week's disastrous victory and in place of the promised 192 THE IRISH ISSUE parliament to sit in the Bank of Ireland hailed the republic in the post-office. The nature of the connections between Ireland and America were seen to be more than sentimental. They were subtle, telepathic, and even hysterical. Ireland is liable to act under certain circum- stances as bravely, as fiercely, as illogically as a woman, and her exiles are liable to act as immoderately as those who are in love with a woman. Celt and Saxon had long been grappling with each other in the American arena. The prize was public opinion. In time of peace, English diplomatists could dally with the famous pass- word that blood was thicker than water, but in the day of his supreme test the Anglo-Saxon needed American opinion and even American support behind him. The German was power- less to affect American opinion without the in- valuable help of the Celt. "Prussia fears the Celtic political will in America more than she fears the English of England," wrote Francis Grierson. Bernstorff had realised the strength of Irish America and made a clumsy attempt to harness it to his schemes through the Clan-na- Gael leaders, whose messages he despatched to Germany. The ultimate failure of the "Bar- bier de Sayville," as he was known in diplo- IRISH AMERICA 193 matic circles, was not displeasing to Irish opinion, which was much more appreciative of Spring-Rice's undemonstrative sympathy. As an American cardinal remarked, "while carry- ing out his duty as a British ambassador he has not forgotten he is an Irishman." If the "Celt and the Saxon" was the oldest of feuds in British history it is also the last and latest. The Irish trouble has ceased to be merely a local sore or latent affliction. It has become a world-wide and pronounced irrita- tion, which the past year has seen intensified in every limb of empire. Gardiner once wrote of Anglo-Irish relations, that whereas "the Eng- lish sovereigns had been confronted by a con- geries of Irish tribes, the English common- wealth was confronted by an Irish nation." To-day the British Empire is met and queried by a great and international brotherhood of Irish blood within and without her borders, upon whose undiminishing devotion to Ireland the sun never sets. Let none set aside as an obscure domestic quarrel the crisis that came simultaneously in the relations between Eng- land and Ireland as well as in the relations be- tween America and England. Diplomatists do not like to admit, and politicians for equally obvious reasons seek to conceal, the real heart 194 THE IRISH ISSUE of controversy between England and America. "By our methods in Ireland we have sown dragon's teeth in every quarter of the world," wrote T. W. Russell, member of an adminis- tration which has since sharpened rather than blunted them. The aftermath of the rising was the pro- tracted and painful trial of Roger Casement, on which Irish attention in America was closely fixed until his execution. The most strenuous efforts were made by both his friends and critics in America to obtain a reprieve. Owing to conflicting accounts as to his motives, both extremists and moderates were for different reasons in favour of his pardon, except a few who gave the painful impression of feeling that it would be best for his reputation as a patriot to suffer the extreme penalty. In this as in one or two other matters the British Govern- ment showed themselves willing to oblige. A petition bearing the very best names in Irish America was forwarded in vain. After his ex- ecution a judicial but striking article from John Quinn appeared in the New York Times. It was strongly written and it smote friend and foe. After bearing witness to the Quixotic chivalry of Casement, he commented: "His ex- ecution was just what Germany then needed to IRISH AMERICA 195 offset the execution of Captain Fryatt." Un- sparing of the English methods of treating Casement in the press, he had a word to say, also, of Germany: England sprang the trap that took his life. Germany pushed him into that trap. Germany needed a diversion then and so like Judases they betrayed the man who had trusted them. If England was pitiless, Germany's act was infamous. An attempt was made to bring some moral charge against Casement after his death, which the American press declined to handle, and owing to private protests the matter was ended. But the echoes and counter-echoes in Irish America were lasting. Casement had made a sorry mess of his career, but the British Government seemed to have blundered even more, was the summary of American opinion. The arrest of John McNeill, after doing a man's share in heading off the rising, was a cause of varied opinion in America. Owing to the resentment of the extremists at the part he had taken, many of his friends thought it best he should remain in prison for a while and dree his weird. In view of his unique attainments as a Celtic scholar, a movement was made for his release. A report of his trial was obtained 196 THE IRISH ISSUE privately and an application for pardon made on his behalf by John Quinn and the present writer. The British Government were ap- proached and found amenable, but their clem- ency was negatived from Dublin unless Mc- Neill should give a pledge to take no further part in politics during the war, which he was unwilling to do. After the entry of America into the war, suggestions were brought to bear by Lord Shaughnessy and Sir Charles Fitz- Patrick from Canada and by the British embassy in Washington. The Cabinet then decided to release all the political prisoners. The execution and imprisonment of Sinn Feiners in Ireland proved the ruin of the Red- mondite organisation in America. Soon after the rising Mr. Redmond had taken the ground that the affair was an attack on home rule and had cabled to the editor of Ireland: The attempt to torpedo Home Rule and the Irish Party has failed. Damage has been done, life has been lost, but the ship has not been sunk. The whole thing has been organised by those in Ireland and in America who have always been the open and irreconcilable enemies of Home Rule and of the Irish Party. Though the hand of Germany was in the whole thing, it was not so much sympathy for Germany as hatred of Home Rule and of us which was at the bottom of the move- ment. It was even more an attempt to hit us than to hit England. IRISH AMERICA 197 Whether Germany had a hand in it or not, there could be no doubt of his further words : that the one security for good order as well as good gov- ernment in Ireland is a native executive and Parliament backed by Irish opinion, and that if such an executive had been in existence during the last six months there would have been no Dublin riot. Though individual friends stood by Mr. Redmond, headed by Judge Keogh, Stephen McFarland, Michael Jordan, and men of similar integrity, there was a clean sweep of Redmondite popularity, chiefly on the ques- tion as to whether the Irish party were respon- sible for the executions. The statement that they had cheered the news in the House of Commons was disproved, but it is difficult to say who succeeded in averting the further executions which were contemplated by the authorities. Mr. Redmond did his full share. Sir Francis Vane's prompt action against or- ders had its effect as well as the cable message which Cardinal Gibbons sent through Sir Cecil Spring-Rice to London. Mr. Roosevelt's frank opinion that the mishandling of Ireland was not a blunder but a crime became known to friends of the Allies. The Irish party failed to be represented in America until an Irish commission, consisting 198 THE IRISH ISSUE of T. P. O'Connor and Richard Hazleton, M.P., made its appearance, when Irish America was no longer on speaking terms with the Irish party. On the evening of their arrival the friends of Mr. Redmond held a public meeting in memory of Major Willie Red- mond in New York, which though in the nature of a funeral service, was interrupted by Sinn Feiners. Mayor Mitchel delivered the eulogy of the dead. To the Sinn Feiners he addressed himself in words which received loud applause, and epitomised real Irish-American feeling: I want to say to those who in sincerity are so blinded by a prejudice for which God knows I cannot blame them, for it is the product of 700 years of mistreatment, that they cannot see into the present situation and understand it. I want to tell them that here is an issue so vital to the world that preju- dice must be sunk and all who love liberty must band together. The bitterness felt towards Mr. Redmond was assuaged in a great degree by his brother's death. As an Irish writer wrote to him from America: That he has died for Ireland and effectively for Ireland, there is no doubt in this country, even among those who have been most opposed to the Irish Party. Prayers for his soul have been frequent in the churches and his singularly beautiful will has touched the wayward heart of our whole race. As IRISH AMERICA 199 an event it has electrified America. It is felt that you have paid the price of liberty in your own person and in the blood of your own kin, and the sympathy for you is greater than you can imagine. The entry of America had brought the Irish question to a climax, as Lord Northcliffe was astute enough to realise, for the London Times was thrown open to American opinion. Roose- velt, Taft, and Cardinal Gibbons were among those who answered. Roosevelt felt that "both permanently and as regards this particular war it would be an immense advantage to the em- pire to give Ireland home rule." Taft believed "It would much help to solidify and hearten American public sentiment in the great cause." Cardinal Gibbons compared Ulster to the American South and added: "Separate nation- alities must be recognised, but no nation can be permanently divided. Since I have been asked, then the only way I see out of the diffi- culty is the way of guarantees. The present position is impossible. Ireland cannot be sac- rificed to a few counties in Ulster. These few counties cannot be sacrificed to the rest of Ireland." American opinion seriously confronted the British Commission, which under Mr. Balfour visited the country. Northcliffe's cable that 200 THE IRISH ISSUE Mr. Balfour had it in his power to settle the Irish question raised little less than an agita- tion in Washington. A hundred representa- tives in Congress cabled to Lloyd-George in Ireland's behalf. Mr. Balfour received a depu- tation which may be described as representing the cream of the Irish contribution to America. It consisted of Justice Morgan O'Brien, of the New York Supreme Court, Colonel Robert Em- met, a descendant of Emmet's brother, a Prot- estant and a West Pointer, former Mayor John Fitzgerald of Boston, Lawrence Godkin, of the New York bar, son of the veteran Irish cham- pion yet friend of England, and John Quinn. Mr. Balfour stated that it was a mystery to him how Irishmen whose sympathy with the Poles was traditional, could be pro-German in this war, when they contrasted Germany's treatment of Poland during the last century with England's actions in Ireland during the same time. He added that while he had no authority to speak for the Cabinet on the ques- tion of home rule, he had been profoundly im- pressed by the representative character of the delegation and the moderation of the views ex- pressed, and that he believed that they repre- sented not merely Irish -American opinion gen- erally, but the desires of the vast mass of the IRISH AMERICA 201 American people, that the Irish question should be settled to the satisfaction of Ireland, and that he would cable to the Cabinet the opinion of the delegation that a prompt settlement of the home rule question, without excluding any part of Ireland, would be hailed with satisfac- tion not merely by representative Irishmen but by Americans generally. A somewhat mysterious element had been the President's attitude towards home rule in spite of his explicit sentiment in favour of the small nations. Himself both of Scotch-Irish and Celtic stocks, he cherished the normal American view as to Irish freedom. In spite of the old Irish alliance with the Democrats, he was bitterly attacked by the extremists before his second election and so violently even, that he administered a public rebuke by telegram to one of their number. The voting at the presidential election was very confused. Many of the Irish fell away on the Mexican question. A number of the old Democrats, like John Crimmins, supported the President and later found themselves in a position to do Ireland a conspicuous service. Mr. Crimmins, as the doyen of loyal Irish- Americans, addressed a private letter to the President, in which he wrote: 202 THE IRISH ISSUE It would be most timely and would have the heartfelt grati- tude of millions of people in this and other lands, who have long hoped, and many prayed, for Ireland as a small nation to have autonomy, thereby establishing peace with England and among English-speaking people. Then if an emergency should arise there would be all for one, and one for all. Mr. President, you have gone a long step in that direction in de- claring the rights of small nations — another step may be the means of reaching the goal for the Irish people. The reply from the President's secretary was to assure Mr. Crimmins "of the President's keen interest in this matter, and of the fact that in every way he properly can he is showing his sympathy with the claim of Ireland for home rule." The keen-sighted extremists seem to have calculated that Wilson by carrying the solid South and the West would be in a position to enter the war with a united country in a way difficult if not impossible to Hughes should he be elected, with only the East and a part of the West. That a Democrat President in his sec- ond term was an approximation to war un- doubtedly induced the extremists among the Irish to approach Hughes and work for his election. On the other hand, it was clear that Bernstorff and his American friends desired Wilson's re-election, as usual reckoning with- out their host. IRISH AMERICA 203 However, just as many Irish and Germans voted for Wilson, on the ground that he would keep the country out of war, as for Hughes, on the ground that whether he wished to or not, he would be unable to do otherwise. The entry of America into the war did not cut the ground from under the Irish-German press, for they skilfully altered it to an extreme pro-American attitude demanding that Ameri- can interest could be best served by an imme- diate peace. The President's statements in favour of democracy roused a most agitated Irish comment, which found vent in prolonged but representative correspondences in the New York Evening Post and the Jesuit w T eekly America. The protagonists on the constitu- tional side were Doctor Sigourney Fay and the present writer. They received pulverising re- plies from Judge Cohalan, John Devoy, and Mrs. Sheehy Skeffington, on the Sinn Fein point of view/ In a rejoinder the present writer suggested: I believe it would be a masterstroke on England's part to accept an Irish republic, for the first business of an Irish re- public would be to effect a defensive alliance with England against the occupation of Ireland by any foreign foe. A Ger- man coaling-station, for instance, would be excluded from Ire- land out of friendship for the United States, as well as from the practical consideration that it is not to Ireland's advantage 204 THE IRISH ISSUE for England to be conquered by Germany. To be frank, it is undeniable that England's losses and difficulties during the war have led her to take a more serious view of Irish claims. But her total defeat would prevent any view being taken at all favourable or unfavourable, for Ireland would be engulfed in her collapse. The reduction of England from the position of "Premier Power" to an equality with France and America in the world's democracy is good for both Ireland and Eng- land herself. But a conquest of England or the payment of indemnity to Germany would fall as unpleasantly on Ireland as on the United States. Miserable as it is to think of an English army of occupation in Ireland to-day, a German army of invasion would be far worse. In his remarkable article replying to mine, Judge Cohalan, whose extreme devotion to Ireland Dublin Castle has certainly tried to justify, gives the impression that his mind tends towards the Apocalyptic view, common to all the Messianic nations, in regard to all Power Imperial. Just as the broken Jews and the persecuted Christians ever harped on the com- ing overthrow of Babylon and Rome, much of Irish mystico- political writing foreshadows the destruction of England. However, this has been postponed by the action of the United States and it is well to consider the more practical necessities of the situation. Judge Cohalan recalls the interesting fact that the submarine which has all but imperilled England to-day, was reduced to a practical form by Holland, an Irishman. Possibly its origi- nal aim was that winch it has only just, and I think happily, failed to accomplish. It is equally curious that Lord Acton, when occupying the history chair of Cambridge, was asked to name the moment of England's greatest peril and answered with one of those brilliant impromptus of which his learning was capable: The day that Fulton offered his steamboat to the French Government. It was refused by the latter, but the moral lies in the fact that Fulton's father was born in Kilkenny. The moral of to-day is that the submarine jeopardises Ire- IRISH AMERICA 205 land just as much as England. The rightful solution of the Irish problem is as vital to England to-day as to Ireland. In conclusion Ireland's greatest international asset has been and always will be the feeling which Americans have for those who have be- come Americans without losing their Irish qual- ities. To make the most of this, Irish opinion in America should be mobile. It should not be nailed to certain words and phrases contain- ing the maximum of exasperation and the mini- mum of placability. It should be as capable of accepting the olive-branch as of administer- ing criticism. It should be a force sensible of results, open to justice, fluid, amenable, inde- pendent, generous, yet stern — above all, un- swerving in the interest of the Irish cause as an international and not merely as a local ques- tion. To such a force statesmen and diploma- tists would listen — if not with agreement, at least with attention. Irish America is not the blinded, brainless stratum of society that her enemies would have us believe. Eyes she hath, and seeth. Brains she hath, and thinketh. But she goeth her own way — which is a thousand ways — and her strength and influence as a legitimate force in international questions are dissipated. Few Irish writers in America have perceived this 206 THE IRISH ISSUE vision as well as John Boyle O'Reilly, who wrote in the Pilot: "Irishmen exercising in America the power of their moral force are a leaven to be heeded more by English statesmen than the armed rebellion of the same men or of their fathers in Ireland." From America Sir Horace Plunkett sped to Dublin to assume the chairmanship of the Irish convention. EPILOGUE So winds the woof. So sags the skein. If Ireland cannot be separated from England, she cannot be isolated from America. Out of the American Revolution and Civil War was bred an Irish-American issue, which Mitchel and Parnell did no more than shape at the time. Sinn Fein has since caused convulsion to the Irish cause but not collapse. It abides decision. No great American has felt other- wise than Motley when he wrote fifty years ago: "Justice, Truth, and Faith are immu- table. Imagine that Ireland had been always dealt with since the days of the Plantagenets in accordance with those principles. Would there have been an Irish Question at this mo- ment striking down to the foundations of the Empire ? " Few great Englishmen but feel the same to-day. America will not pass over the Truth. England cannot allow her own Faith to be questioned, and Ireland can only do that Justice to the allied cause which is not out- side of justice to herself. Fiat Justitia> mat Germania ! 207 Vd \ 6 t>35