Class JlAliil Book-^JaA Copyright)^!' COKfRIGHT DEPOSIT. Ireland's Woes and Britain's Wiles by ANDREW GERRIE 1922 THE STRATFORD PUBLISHING CO. Boston, Massachusetts u^^ ^ Or Copyright, 1981 The STRATFORD CO., Publisher* Boston, Mass. The Alpine Press, Boston, Mass., U. S. A. JUL 10 1922 ©CI.A()74 8 71 Contents Chapter Page I Sinn Fein 1 II English Perfidy .... 10 III Agitators 19 IV The Man in the Red Hat . 28 V Hate . 41 VI Humor ...... 49 VII The Child and the Moon . 60 VIII Propaganda 72 IX Admissions and Contradictions 83 X Sinn Fein and the Senate . 95 XI John Bull and Uncle Sam 105 XII Jealousies 121 XIII National Characteristics 137 XIV Militarism 165 XV A Presidential Election . 184 XVI Is There a Cure for the World's Unrest 199 Foreword THE following sketches were written in the first instance, with very little thought that they would ever see light from the printed page. Some of them are the substance of memoranda and diary jottings set down from time to time. Others are the gist of letters written during the storm and stress of the World War, and in the chaotic period subsequent to the Armistice and the Treaty of Peace. These letters were written indeed, for the most part, to my medical friend out west, who bears the significant patronymic of 'Dowd.' I tell him that his ancestors, five or six generations ago, dropped the prefix *0' from their name. This he stoutly and indignantly denies, but his protestations fail to be altogether con- vincing, for he is possessed of that grace and charm of character which the Irishman almost invariably ac- quires when at length he has been carried into the on- flowing stream of Civilization. These effusions in the midst of disturbing and for- bidding National and World conditions, constitute in some measure, an effort to preserve a balance and a sanity of mind, not only in the writer, but in those upon whom they were inflicted as well. To steer a straight and steady course and keep an even keel in the storm of German frightfulness and barbarity, when one's own flesh and blood was being choked with poison gas and torn to tatters by cruel FOREWORD shrapnel, called not only for a firm hand but also for a cheerful and jocund heart. To 'carry on' in these post-bellum days, when the whole atmosphere is rank with the fetid exhalations of hate and prejudice, — of unreasoning spite and malicious misrepresentation of fact, requires an equal courage and a like buoyancy of spirit ; for it would in- deed seem that the sullen bitterness and suspicious dis- trust of peace is more alarming and disconcerting than the violent antagonisms of war. To wish to help in lifting a little of the depressing load, is an ambition not altogether unworthy, and gives some excuse for even the most modest endeavor. We passed through a Presidential campaign in the summer of 1920, perhaps altogether unprecedented in the sordid selfishness and baseness of its appeal. It ought to be the purpose aud determination of all good citizens, that no such election will ever be possible again in this our beloved land. Hate and prejudice, ignorance and suspicion, malignant and racial animosi- ties were capitalized to a degree that hardly could have been thought possible three hundred years after the Pilgrims signed their historic compact in the cabin of the Mayflower. It has been our custom to brush aside with a wave of the hand and a toss of the head, nauseating charges and countercharges as so much election bluff, — as the necessary ammunition of the political spell-binder, but which mean nothing and are soon forgotten when all is over. But is this statement true ? Is it not rather true that while men easily forget in a literal way, it takes FOREWORD more than a wave of the hand or a flippant jest to brush away the spirit of ill-will and spite that has been branded upon the hearts and souls of men? Does this come to an end when the campaign is over? We may think it a harmless pastime to pour vials of vitriolic spite upon some nation or race across the sea. We may even imagine it to be something of an advantage to have the vitriol spued upon the further shore of the Atlantic rather than upon this ; but the heart that hates, that has been taught to hate, — that has been encouraged and countenanced in its hate, stays with us to become a plague-spot in our social and governmental life. If we are beginnning to reap the result of this thing — • and we are, — we have ourselves, through our politicians, chiefly to blame. If serious minded investi- gators tell us that our country is rapidly becoming the most lawless among the nations, — that crimes of violence are on the increase, and in proportion to popu- lation, are more frequent than in any other civilized land, — if the city of Chicago has more than one hun- dred homicides in one year, while London a city of more than twice the population of Chicago, has only fourteen murders in the same twelve months, it is surely time to put smug complacency and conceit aside and set ourselves assiduously to search for a cause and a cure. One wonders sometimes if it is this same inordinate conceit that starts some of us out to prate about win- ning the war. Of course we won the war; but so did little Belgium and gallant and unconquerable France. And so did Australia from the far away antipodes win FOREWORD the war. It would do us all good to sit down and con- template the fact that Australia with her six or seven million of population, laid upon the altar of civiliza- tion as large a sacrifice of her young manhood as we did out of our hundred millions of people. It is surely almost time we had ceased to pray the prayer of the Pharisee who said : — "Lord, I thank Thee that I am not as other men are." The mills of God grind slowly, but they grind ex- ceedingly small, and what is more, — and more easily forgotten as well, — in the last long run, they do not go far a-field to get their grist. When a Greek or an Italian King is assassinated by one of his people, or a mis-guided Irish youth fires a pistol at Queen Victoria, we hold up our hands in holy horror and talk about the fruits of monarchial systems of government; and yet what civilized country, in modern times, has a record equal to our own in the killing of its rulers? The bitterness and unwarranted abuse of party politicians, together with the gutter press of our yellow journalists has sent out madmen to shoot three of our Presidents ; and yet not one of these assassinations, nor the total of all of them combined, has exceeded in brutal cruelty and pathos, the martyrdom of Woodrow Wilson. To try to place a finger lightly and gently here and there (and at the same time, without malice prepense,) upon some of the processes and considerations that underl}^ these things, is the purpose for which these pages are written. CHAPTER I Sink Fein WHEN Irish Paddy determined to pool issues with German Fritzie, he sailed away on an unknown and uncharted sea. To hobnob and forgather with the Super- man was a new role for the man from the Emerald Isle to assume. No wonder men asked them- selves, how will Patrick bear himself when he wipes his chin and proceeds to sit in counsel with the Kultur of ^'Deutschland Uber Alles." Will Cork or Coblentz dominate the situation? Will Potsdam or will Limerick impose its dictum upon the amalgamation? Will Fritz assimilate Pat and turn him into a helmeted warrior with a fierce mustache pointing sky-ward, or will Pat instead of doing the goosestep, train Fritz in the proper handling and use of the shillalah, alike in times of peace as in times of war? The experiment could not fail to be an interesting one and the outcome of the proposed compact problematical in the extreme. Whether the exigencies of the situation de- manded it or not, it may be impossible to ascer- tain with any degree of certainty, but it is true that when our old friend had himself inoculated [il IRELAND'S WOES AND BRITAIN'S WILES with the vaccine of German Kultur and refine- ment, he took to himself a new name. He called himself Sinn Fein. Whatever may have been the terms and secrets of the alliance however, it very soon became evident that Pat was to remain Pat in all the essentials that go to make up a man of free and independent judgment and mind, for the interesting old chap is more interesting than ever before. '*A rose by any other name would smell as sweet, ' ' and the odor of Limburger is not impaired by a change in the nomenclature. Just at this period in human affairs however, the thing we have in mind seems a little more pungent when we call it Prussianism. Neverthe- less it is much the same entity wherever you find it or by whatever name you designate it. You may deck it out in any one of half a dozen fine phrases. It is the theory that might makes right, — that the end justifies the means. It is the con- viction that my place in the Sun is occupied by some other fellow and I must club him out of the way. It is the belief that true freedom is never found in equality, but only wiien the other man is on his back and I am on top. It is the dogma which declares that if there is a dollar in my neighbor's wallet there is one less in my pouch, and it is my business to see that it is transferred where it belongs. The Prussian hacks his way through while Sinn Fein whacks his way through, — that is the chief distinction. The gait is much [21 SINN FEIN the same whether you find it on Courtmacksherry Bay or on the Spree. Of all created things, the human is the most interesting and by far the most surpassingly queer; and among that elect portion of the fauna that creeps about upon the earth, — in pugnacity and perturbility, — in periodicity and physiog- nomy, the Prussian and Pat have all the rest of us their nearest competitors, skinned a mile in sup- plying the truest type of the missing link. Hibernian spell-binders are accustomed to ex- patiate upon the 750 years of England's oppres- sion and tyranny in Ireland, and the picture is not a cheering one. John Bull would do well to take note of the charges that are thrown upon his door step. But we also would do well to remem- ber that 750 years form but a brief span in the tale of Ireland's woes. At the earliest dawn of history, Ireland was the abode of anarchy and strife, faction fights and tribal wars. The Donny- brook Fair is a national institution whose begin- nings are lost in the mists of antiquity. They do indeed claim that King John brought it over from London. He probably only tried to improve it, but what Englishman could do that! It seems clear that the troubles of Ireland began when the second Irishman was born. Well do I remember my first timorous excursion from home when I went to attend school in a big city. I had hardly made sure of my bearings, when my peace of mind was upset by an [3] IRELAND'S WOES AND BRITAIN'S WILES unhallowed commotion in the street back of the house where I was staying. To my rustic and un- accustomed ear it seemed that a massacre of the innocents was in progress. I feared that a can- nibal feast was in preparation, and I made ready to hasten to the rescue of some bleeding and mutilated fellow-being. My new-found friends in the boarding house however laid a restraining hand on my shoulder, and I discovered that it was only a little bit of Ireland transplanted to this side of the sea. Had I meddled, it would have been a faithful and true epitome of the Irish prob- lem set down in the streets of a young city in the New World. I soon learned to sit on the balcony with my fellow boarders to enjoy the show, and to applaud as heartily as they when Bridget ad- monished Barney: — ''You may bate me if you like, but no whalp of a son you ever raised, will ever lay hands on me again. ' * Seven hundred and fifty years carry us back to the time of Henry II., who was the great- grandson of William the Norman who conquered England. Henry ventured into Ireland about one hundred years after his great-grandfather invaded England. It was an age of invasion and conquest; and the Irish were not averse to doing a little invading on their own part, as the experience of Wales and Scotland and the Isle of Man can tes- tify. The man from Erin was neither better nor worse than his contemporaries in this respect. [4] SINN FEIN That he did not continue his depredations and aggressions nor hold his conquests, was not because he had reformed or had come to respect the rights of his neighbors any better than they did his, but partly because they proved stronger than he, and chiefly because he found cracking skulls at home a sufficiently lively and engaging occupation, without going abroad to seek for the sport. So it happened that Henry Plantaganet invaded Ireland at the request and invitation of one of the warring factions that had experienced the worst of it in a recent scrap. Then too, the Pope of the day had given him a commission to look into the matter and see if he could do anything to help in bringing peace to the troubled land. It was a great mistake. Henry and Strongbow should have remained upon the balcony as spec- tators of the show, but they didn't. Armed with the Papal Bull and the pressing invitation of Dermod MacMurrough, — not a very savory char- acter by the wa;;^, — the Norman-Saxon king crossed the Irish Sea, and as Harry Lauder would say: — ''Then the fun began." But it didn't begin then. It only became more varied and pic- turesque. Had England kept out of Ireland, the process of extermination might have gone on to its culmination, and Ireland and the world would have had peace; for the O'Connors of Connaught and the 'Brians of Munster, and the O'Neills of Ulster, seemed bent on making away with one [5] IRELAND'S WOES AND BRITAIN'S WILES another. This solution would have been effective, but it would have been deplorable and I shudder even now to contemplate it, for it would have robbed me of some of the best and warmest hearted friends I have ever known. Then too, the the world after all would have been a somber enough place if the music of the harp and the stac- cato of the shillalah had been silenced in the land. England to be sure, has not been altogether a saint in her relations with Ireland, but we might as well recognize the fact that England has done more for Ireland than Ireland has done for her- self or ever would do in a thousand years. To mention one or two things that might be noted, — the British Government which of course includes Ireland, has given Ireland what is probably the best Land Act existing anywhere in the world today. There has also been provided one of the best old age pension systems, and it is financed by English money. Then too, undoubtedly Eng- land would have granted Home Rule long ago, if the Irish could have agreed among themselves as to the thing they would be pleased to accept. One has only to read of the bitter contentions into which the two great exponents of the Irish cause, — Grattan and Flood-fell, or to catch an echo of the passage at arms that such champions as Daniel O 'Connell and Grattan now and again indulged in, to understand how much Ireland's woes, and how much the failure to realize her dreams, have been [6] SINN FEIN due to the racial characteristic of steering into the inevitable fight. There is no conception of peace or freedom in the thought of a Sinn Fein Irishman any more than in that of a Prussian, in equality of position or privilege. It is here that the settlement of the Irish Problem comes to grief every time, — not in the opposition, stubborness or tyranny of the Parliament at Westminster in the last analysis, but in the failure of the Irish to agree among themselves, and that apparently, from the strange twist in disposition which sees no way of coming to terms, but by the utter extinction of one faction by the other. My own experience and observation however, has led me to feel that if a brood of agitators and demagogues, bitten by the rabies of a senseless hate and having neither love nor loyalty for any land or thing save their own gain or glory together with a mania for gratifying their enmity and their envy, had only left Ireland alone, long ere now she would have been a peaceful and happy land, and would have occupied a position of leader- ship in some measure like to that of Scotland in the counsels of the Empire. To be sure Ireland did not find herself in a position to make available the advantages that attended the Reformation. It is not for me to argue or affirm the causes of this failure; but it is an incontrovertible historical fact, that those peoples and nations that were most profoundly [7] IRELAND'S WOES AND BRITAIN'S WILES touched by the Befonnation movement, leaped forward in all lines of learning, in scientific inves- tigation and industrial activity. Naturally when she found herself lagging behind, Ireland became dissatisfied and ultimately suspicious and bitter towards those who were outstripping her. This is altogether natural. Step by step, individuals and communities under such conditions, if they are not careful, easily become envious of their more fortunate neighbors and will come to per- suade themselves that they are not getting fair play, and that these same neighbors are in some way guilty of blocking their way to success. One cannot but feel deeply sympathetic towards the dear old land, when the volcano that has been more or less active for twice 750 years breaks out in eruption, and he does not wonder that men of old said feelingly: — ''The old sod is the trembling sod." It would seem that with one quarter of the pop- ulation, and that the most progressive and ad- vanced portion, bitterly opposed to, and ready to fight to the death any scheme that would separate them from that equal partnership in the Empire which they feel to be, not only their privilege, but to their incomparable advantage, — all the other factions would go slow, at least, until they are quite sure they can agree among themselves as to what they want. And most of all, it would seem as if the policy of, — ''Hands off!" would dominate the agitators [8] SINN FEIN on both sides of the sea, who know little or nothing of* the situation, and who do not care to know anything beyond how to coddle and keep alive an ancient grudge that has become mouldy and rancid through the passing of the years. It is astonishing my son, how much sweetness some folks can extract from a well-masticated mouthful of calico. [9] CHAPTER II English Pebfidy NOT long ago a legal luminary of Sinn Fein proclivities was declaring in New York, that there can be no freedom in this old world till the monarchy of England has been put out of business. Some such sentiment was the burden of his oratory. Indeed a Sinn Fein pro- tagonist would hardly be true to type if he failed to expound in fiery rhetoric, this proposition so evidently bound up with the well-being of the human race. He and the Prussian are twin brothers in their conception of freedom and of the causes that would hinder or that would help in the accomplishment of its attainment. The one would sweep into oblivion every Belgian who would presume to get in the way of his goose- stepping to his place in the sun, and so to that wide freedom that is his right; the other would club into submission every native of the Emerald Isle who gets in the way of his struggle after the democratic ideal, and iDoth together they would annihilate John Bull for daring to prevent. One wonders however, if after all there may not be some truth in the contention, for surely pesky old England has long practised the un- [10] ENGLISH PERFIDY pleasant habit of butting in to hinder persons and peoples from securing freedom to take away the freedom of other folk. With a strange and strik- ing regularity, at intervals of a century or so, this arch-conspirator against human freedom has had to meddle in matters beyond her own domain. Taking a glance backward over the years, we discover that our liistories tell us that four cen- turies ago, the ablest monarch in Europe was Philip the Second of Spain. This ruler had an exceedingly Kaiser-Sinn-Fein-like disposition, and wanted his place in the sun, as who does not ? He knew that he was the All-highest, — the anointed of God, and destined to rule the earth. He earnestly desired freedom to accomplish this, his mission. Therefore with the benediction of the Pope, he set out upon his humanitarian enter- prise. The growth of democracy in his day, was a menace to the well-being of humanity. Not only was Philip the ablest, but he was the most powerful prince in Europe. He was the super-man of four centuries ago. He had the greatest army and the most efficient equipment. It mattered not that he was cruel and tyrannical. Those were cruel and tyrannical times. With the aid of the Inquisition as his agent, he planned to make his word the only law to which men should give heed. The last vestige of any pestilential free institution, was to be extirpated in the interest of that broader freedom which he sought. Old England had the bad taste and the bad IRELAND'S WOES AND BRITAIN'S WILES grace to object and get in the way. The navy of England, that instrument of Anglo-Saxon tyranny, even at that early date got on the job, and the Invincible Armada was overwhelmed in calamitous grief. Philip was denied the freedom he set out to secure, and England was to blame ; but Philip had probably no more ardent sympa- thizers than those to be found in the Emerald Isle. It must be admitted however that England in spite of her disrespect for Philip and his am- bitions, had saved the world and democracy; but for so doing she could never be forgiven, especially so in Ireland. Moving forward one hundred years, we find another able man, the strongest and most powerful ruler in Europe, in the person of Louis XIV, of France. He also was a faithful prototype of the Hohenzollern. He also had the biggest, best drilled, best equipped army in Europe. He too was the All-highest and he was accustomed to speak of himself as 'The State.' The Divine Be- ing and he were in league and the end to be ulti- mately attained, was the submission of all peoples and races to his beneficent rule. He sought free- dom to attain this laudable end. Here again meddlesome England had to put in her oar. Her navy was again at hand to interfere with the free- dom of the seas, and she sent her contemptible little army to measure swords, in presumptuous arrogance, with the finest troops in Europe, and with their king who because he had the might, [12] ENGLISH PERFIDY unquestionably had the right to subdue Europe and in that way, bring to her freedom and peace. In some unaccountable manner, England again blocked the way, and of course, exasperated all true lovers of freedom. Perhaps it may be true that the spirit of the meddler had a little extra pep infused into it on this occasion, for it was but a short while previous to this that one of her own kings set out to be a pocket edition of Philip and Louis, so they chopped off his head ; and when his son, still more foolish and stubborn, refused to learn the lesson, they chased him out, and nat- urally he went to Ireland for sympathy and com- fort in his woe. Even there obstinate old England followed him, and finally he had to seek refuge in the bosom of Louis, that superlative defender and seeker after freedom. So it happened that England blocked Louis as she had blocked Philip and in so doing saved the world and democracy, but for this too, she never could be forgiven, especially in the Emerald Isle. Moving forward another century, we find Napoleon Bonaparte emulating Philip and Louis. With a genius as a soldier and a diplomat seldom equalled in history, he surely possessed the might that is right, and should have been allowed the freedom to dominate the race for the race 's good. His army in turn, was the strongest and the best equipped on earth, and he set himself to his heaven-appointed task. Once again England had the temerity to meddle in the affairs of other folk. [13] IRELAND'S WOES AND BRITAIN'S WILES Her navy tampered with the freedom of the seas, and her diminutive skeleton of an army began to array itself in flesh and blood, and in the accoutre- ments of war. Soldiers from Ireland not a few, flocked to the standard of the great war-lord of the day ; but it was all in vain. The thin red line of hated Albion, presumptuously hurled back the legions of Bonaparte, and the ambitions and pur- poses of the greatest man on earth, in quest of freedom to exercise his own will over the wills of other people, were baffled and brought to naught. So it chanced that England had saved the world and democracy a third time. For doing so, she could never be forgiven, especially so, in Erin. Moving forward still another century, we dis- cover "William of Germany the greatest war-lord of them all, on the field of action. Where others have failed he will not fail; where others have yielded to circumstances, he will compel circum- stances to yield to him. Might is and must be right, and the freedom others failed to attain, he will conquer with his good mailed fist and shining sword. The armies of Philip and Louis and Napoleon all put together, would barely serve as a nucleus for the mighty host which this latest exponent of Divine Right, has at his command. The supereman must rule the earth in order that freedom may be enjoyed, and with God as an ally, must brush aside every obstacle in the way. Will England have the assurance to attempt to cheat the world once more, out of the boon of freedom so [14] ENGLISH PERFIDY greatly desired by those who really wish the world well ? The world does not wait long for an answer. No sooner has William stepped across the borders of Belgium, than England on the pretext of a treaty and a scrap of paper, and her assumed obligation thereto, pushes herself with meddle- some audacity, into the arena, where she has no business to be. Her fleet once more gets busy and her army begins to march. Sympathy with and support of William as is natural, at once becomes the dominant sentiment in the circles of Sinn Fein on both sides of the sea. His and their ideals are one and the same. One is as autocratic and domineering and intol- erant as the other. The weak should perish, only the strong should survive. The man whose skull can 't stand to be cracked, ought to have it cracked in the name of freedom and progress. So together they see the speedy downfall of the tyrant nation that has always stood in the way of the ambitions and aspirations of the superman. But somehow obstinate England weathered the storm. By all the rules of the game and by every principle of fair play and justice, it ought not to have been so, but so it proved to be. Once again England had saved the world and the democratic ideal, and the superman and all his satellites of every name and race and creed were furious, for why shouldn 't the monarchy of England be put out of business, and the most efficient and strong possess the freedom to rule all the rest? Of course for this [15] IRELAND'S WOES AND BRITAIN'S WILES England could not be forgiven, and never will be in Ireland. Two significant considerations emerge from a glance at these four incidents in European his- tory. First, it was not the monarchy but the democracy of England that in each case, blocked the game of the autocrat. It was the democracy of England that was guilty of the crime, the type of which the Sinn Fein orator suggests and deplores. Second; It has been the misfortune of Ireland that the vociferously articulate portion of her population that has claimed to speak for the whole, has always been on the side of the autocrat. Hence the Sinn Fein orator, with adroit and cunning sophistry distorts the facts of history, and dupes his unthinking followers by putting forth the claim that the people and principles of which he is at once the successor and the exponent, have been the supporters and defenders of freedom and democracy; whereas, invariably, consistently and persistently, they have given all the sympathy and help in their power to the autocrat in his assault upon freedom and the democratic ideal. One wonders what will be the story when another century has run its course. Will another struggle on these same lines mark the close or the beginning of another hundred years! There are those who hold that the two ideals that locked horns in Europe in the late war, must somewhere, sometime, fight the fight out to a finish. God for- [i6] ENGLISH PERFIDY bid that it should be on the battlefield ; but it may- have to be so. Signs are not wanting that tyran- nical England is getting a bit weary. Most of all perhaps, she is weary of being maligned and misrepresented. Heretofore she has gone her own way, rather independent and indifferent as to praise or blame. She has tried to be just and fair, and has succeeded almost as well as the rest of us would have done. In her old age I think, she is becoming just a little sentimental, like other folks, and I imagine, shrinks a bit from taking up the burden and responsibility that the rest of us selfish people have left her to shoulder, and when she did shoulder it, have scolded her for doing so. When next the Prussian and Sinn Fein combin- ation makes an assault upon the world 's liberties, the weight of the blow may fall somewhere else, and the struggle, if struggle there be, will make the recent war seem like a summer holiday. I do not believe that the effort of autocracy can ever permanently succeed; but that it will make one more titanic attempt, is not beyond the bounds of probability. Indeed propaganda is already fever- ishly at work in that direction, especially perhaps in an effort to isolate and weaken England, so she will not be able to interfere another time. If this comes to pass, however, I take it the gauntlet will be thrown down to Anglo-Saxon-dom on this side the sea, and the spirits of Philip and Louis and Napoleon and William of Hohenzollern, ^vill look IRELAND'S WOES AND BRITAIN'S WILES down in anticipation of seeing secured for the world the peace and freedom for which the Sinn Fein orator sighs. Whence the outstanding autocrat of a century hence will emerge, it is not for me to predict. In the past as we have seen he has not been confined to any one race or nation. The great civilizations of the world, good and bad, have usually been associated with the river courses that traverse the surface of the planet, and the struggles for and against autocracy, have been characterized in their measure, by the same phenomenon. Moses the foe of autocracy in his day, the greatest states- man in human history and the founder of a civili- zation the most unique that has arisen among men, was floated out upon the Nile ; and this last aspi- rant for autocratic power, has surely made famous an insignificent little stream in central Europe called the Spree. Some other river in Europe, perhaps elsewhere, known or to be made known by the development of events, may furnish the autocrat of the coming day. When that final struggle of the superman and the autocrat, to secure his place in the sun and to give the world freedom, is on, I think I would like to be there. May I not wish for both you and me, my son, that our first re-incarnation will take place some twenty years before that date, so we may have the chance (denied us on this occa- sion,) to go over the top with the rest of the boys. [i8] CHAPTER III Agitators NO CAUSE nor country has ever been so unfortunate in its champions as Ireland. Conscienceless agitators seem to thrive and grow fat, inventing and expatiating upon wrongs and cruelties perpetrated upon the Emerald Isle. One is often led to wonder what crimes the dear old sod could have been guilty of, to have foisted upon her as defenders, such moral imbeciles, such marvellous exponents of antediluvian morality as these spell-binders prove themselves for the most part to be. For grotesque exaggeration and mis- representation ; for picturesque fluency in mistate- ment and distortion of facts, these men are surely the blue-ribbon product of all the ages. It is diffi- cult to understand and harder to explain the phenomenon; but it seems reasonably certain that men of the Sinn Fein type, like the Germans become paranoic, especially, when they catch a glimpse of the ' flag that braved a thousand years, the battle and the breeze.' Ethically and psycho- logically, like the Prussian, they are true morans and seem to think the situation demands and jus- tifies the unlimited use of slander and falsehood. Why the cause of Ireland should attract this type IRELAND'S WOES AND BRITAIN'S WILES of propaganda and propagandist, it is difficult to say. One is at times compelled to think that they are as short on mentality as on morality else why should they put forw^ard charges of cruelty and oppression on the part of England towards Ireland, so manifestly false, that almost invariably they convey their own denial. Thinking people by them, are compelled to feel that Britannia's course must be reasonably fair and just or her critics would not need to fabricate the vitriolic nonsense they pour upon her devoted head. No cause is ever permanently advanced in this way, and one does not know what to marvel at most, — the brazen effrontery and moral degeneracy of these agitators, or their crass stupidity. One of these freaks has recently been speaking to large audiences in various parts of the country, and stirring them to frenzy over the tyranny and cruelty practiced by England upon Ireland at the present day. His righteous anger has been spe- cifically directed against the exploitation of Ireland. England with brutal selfishness is keep- ing Ireland as a preserve for her own trade. Com- pelled to carry on all her trade with England, Ireland is kept in commercial bondage. She is unable to sell her products anywhere but in Eng- land, and she can supply her needs from English factories and no other. A terrible state of things to be sure, and a condition of tyranny and oppres- sion well calculated to stir resentment and indig- nation in the breast of every lover of freedom [20] AGITATORS the world over! Why should Ireland be called upon to suffer and endure in this way? Why should England gobble up with avaricious and gluttonous greed everything Ireland can produce ? — and that before she has had a chance to offer it to anybody else. What boots it that most of us would be glad to have a market at our door ready to snap up whatever we have to sell? With Ireland it is different. The Scotchman, the Welsh- man and the Ulsterman, are rather pleased that they are not compelled to seek a market at the ends of the earth but with the Sinn Fein Irishman it is an altogether different matter. These others lack ambition and aspiration, and it is the repres- sion of aspiration that constitutes cruelty. With Paddy it is different. He does not enjoy at any price, the feeding of greedy England. Why should he not sell his over-plus of carrots and spuds in North Greenland where such things are scarce, and why should not Bridget be permitted to sell her surplus butter and eggs in Patagonia, where the hens do not get time to lay between sun-up and sun-down and where the temperature is rather inimical to the product of the chum? In both cases, Bridget and Pat would not only enjoy the inalienable right of commercial freedom, but would have a chance to exercise that altruism to which they so ardently aspire, as well as to cul- tivate the friendship of peoples capable of under- standing and appreciating their aspirations. It is too bad altogether; but it may alleviate somewhat [21] IRELAND'S WOES AND BRITAIN'S WILES the outraged feelings of Sinn Fein to know that there are other people in other lands, who are in exactly in the same predicament. Exploited and in bondage to hard hearted and exacting aggrega- tions of population, they surely if they knew it, would come to have a comradeship and a fellow feeling for Pat, that would go far in the waj^ of soothing his lacerated and bleeding heart. Take for example the dairymen of southwestern Connecticut. These men for the most part, are compelled to sell their milk in New York; and the frugal housewives in the northeastern comer of the State, who try to make an honest living by producing eggs and chickens find that haughty and over-cultured Boston swoops down upon them and carries off all their hard earned products, giving them only dollars in return. Thus at both ends, the independence and dignity of Connecticut is invaded, and neither the erudition of Yale Uni- versity nor the financial acumen of all the Insur- ance Companies of Hartford, can avail in any way to prevent. It is a bad business all round, and there is little doubt that both New York and Boston have learned to be tyrannical and auto- cratic because of uninterrupted ocean traffic and intercourse between themselves and Liverpool and London. If the Sinn Fein agitator was as patri- otic as he claims to be, he would endeavor to induce Congress to pass an act forbidding the Cunard and White Star S. S. Lines to dock their ships at New York and Boston, and compelling [22] AGITATORS them to establish terminal facilities at Waterbury on the Naugatuck. Alas for the selfishness of human nature, the Sinn Fein Irishman has no thought for the suffer- ing and oppression of anybody but the Irish — this especially if he belongs to the hyphenated brigade on this side of the sea. If he would enter- tain an equal amount of consideration for the suf- fering and oppressed fellow citizens of his adopted country that he does for those of his ancestral home, we would count him a more patriotic citizen and take a deeper interest in the cause he fights so desperately to push to the front, and perhaps after a while we might grow to hate just a little bit, the people and institutions he insists we ought to hate, if we are good Americans. In the mean time if a rampageous Irishman would stand still long enough to listen, I would like to address him in some such words as these : — ''Dearly beloved Jerry, we don't hate you. In fact there are some things about you, we rather like, but for the love of St. Patrick, please let us choose for ourselves the objects of our envy and hate." Not only do these moral and intellectual acro- batic contortionists, in the interest of Ireland, pour forth an unstinted volume of made-to-order cruelties and atrocities that Ireland is compelled to suffer, at the hands of England, but any word of commendation of Britain or anything Britain has done, sets them chattering like half a hundred [231 IRELAND'S WOES AND BRITAIN'S WILES guinea hens. The conspicuous part England played in the war against Germany is particularly exasperating, and in itself constitutes an atrocity against Ireland, and anybody who dares whisper the facts, is a poltroon and an assassin of the demo- cratic ideal. Not long ago General Haig, in a rather matter of fact way, made some statements about the army he commanded during the war, and forthwith he became the target for a broadside of vituperative mustard gas, thrown by a battalion of hyphenated projectors, that ought to have silenced that garrulous Scotchman from now till the millenium dawn. What does Haig know about the war anyway? He was only in the fight four years and three months and he spent the whole time fussing about in France and Belgium. What does he know compared with the men who did their fighting from the top of a soap box, along the curb on Broadway, or some equally exposed and dangerous platform in New York or Boston or Philadelphia, — or in close consultation and cooperation with Bernsdorf, as how best to cripple American factories that were furnishing supplies, or how to strike terror into the heart of Britain by bombing to death women and children in the defenceless towns and cities of England? Haig had better keep his mouth shut. Then too there is that make-believe American Admiral called Sims! Wliat does he know about the part England played either on land or sea? He was hobnobing with the Poobahs of London, AGITATORS when he ought to have been on board his ship. Besides all this he is a Canadian bom, and that ought to disqualify him from knowing anything, and especially from being a true American Citizen. The only true Americans are those of Irish blood or birth. No wonder seventeen thousand of them hissed and booed the President of our country together with Admiral Sims, in Madison Square Garden, for drinking tea and eating jam, made in King George 's kitchen. Of course it comes mighty near to bringing on an attack of appendicitis in one of these spell- binders, to have anybody call attention to any of the achievements of England in the war, to some of the rest of us however it is a very interesting story. Intelligent people in every land, — all but Sinn Feiners and they like the Prussian, are super- intelligent, — marvel at the part played by the tight little Island and her down-trodden dependen- cies. A million volunteers, without compulsion or conscription, without even a request, flocked from every point of the compass, to help the Mother Land when the Prussian and Sinn Fein sprang at the throat of civilization. Of course if they had been alive, as are the Irish, to the tyranny under which they grovel, they would not have done it. Nearly twenty million souls transported in safety, to and from the various scenes of conflict by the British navy, was of course a put up job just to make the friends of Irish freedom feel bad. But strangest and most intolerable of all perhaps, [25] IRELAND'S WOES AND BRITAIN'S WILES was the fact that when England had been fight- ing with desperation for four years and ought to have been exhausted, and of course was down and out, according to the rules of logic and the hyphen- ated brigade, she was still able to plug along to the day of the Armistice. With insolent arro- gance, in the last three months of the war, of the 808,000 prisoners taken, the British armies bagged 350,000, leaving the balance to be parcelled out among the other armies of the allies. Even in the last throes of dissolution, her selfish grasping disposition had to assert itself. Some 10,000 field guns and heavy cannon were captured during these months, and of these the English took 4,000 — nearly twice as many as any other army, while her modest — or — immodest bag — of 40,000 Machine guns, piled on top of all, at a time when by rights she ought to have been taking the count, was a crowning impertinence, amounting almost to an atrocity laid upon the burdened shoulders of patient Paddy Fein. It used to be better than vaudeville, my son, — to listen to the orators on Broadway in the early years of the war, and many a time I wished you had been by my side to enjoy the show. One of the stock-in-trade subjects expatiated upon was the ''cowardly slackers" of Great Britain. If by any chance the United States should get into the war on the side of the Allies, one of the first duties the American army would have to perform, would be to drive the several hundred thousand cowardly [26] AGITATORS British troops up to the front line trenches, and make them fight. So far as I have been informed, none of these brilliant spell-binders of the Sinn Fein aristocracy has claimed that this is the task the American army had to undertake and carry into execution during the last months of the war. When they wake up and get on their job as they ought, this is undoubtedly what they will discover. The report of General Pershing that the American force fought a brilliant campaign in the Argonne up in front, is all poppy-cock. Our doughboys were in the rear, driving the British forward and making them fight. Pershing! Wliat does he know about the war? He too has been over drinking King George's tea. After all however, you and I my boy, and every- body else who has read a bit of history, knows that the Britisher while he seldom provokes a quarrel, will fight at the drop of a hat and will hold on till his opponent is on his back. Then when he cries enough, Johnnie Bull picks him up, brushes the dust off his clothes and feeds him on tea and gooseberry tart. A queer strange fellow is this John Bull, — tyrannizing with brutal cruelty over Ireland and treating all the rest of the world to marmalade and chocolate bars. [27] CHAPTER IV The Man in the Red Hat IT IS reported that over in Boston Town, the other day a red-hatted man declared that for seven centuries, Ireland had stood out against the world. This is a more than usually interesting affirmation, is it not! We have been more or less familiar with the attitude suggested by the protest, — *'I'm agin the government;" but so far as I know, this is the first time the proposition has been expanded so as to include the whole earth. Something of a scrap this to be sure, both as to bulk and duration ! To learn from good authority that Pat has been scrapping with the entire race and for such a length of time, is a matter of lively interest. We can hardly doubt the capacity and willingness of the man from Erin, but hardly feel prepared to admit his ability to camouflage so successfully, as to hood-wink everybody into believing that his feuds were merely faction fights, or at best no more than furious onslaughts against the tyranny of Westminster. It is perhaps well to know that he is and has been for long enough, out for the scalp of the entire race. It is of an Irishman I believe, that the story [28] THE MAN IN THE RED HAT is told, that by some chance he got a bit of Lim- burger cheese on his lip, and ever after he swore the whole world smelt bad. Possibly that is the explanation of the matter, and makes clear that the problem of Paddy is a perennial and hopeless one. The Boston orator or some other, com- plained that the world had long enough laughed at the claims and demands of Ireland. It is doubt- less true that the world has indulged somewhat in levity in days gone by, and the world laughed again and went on with its work, when the man in the red tile sent forth his pitiful wail, but then the world has humor and the red-hatted man hasn't any. Men who wear red hats never have. It was Henry Ward Beecher I believe, who said when a good and pious female of his con- gregation, chided him for his levity and his readi- ness to break into a laugh; — '*If the Almighty doesn't want us to laugh why does He let so many funny things happen?" If Pat would have us preserve a grave and serious demeanor why does he keep reminding us of our simian ancestry — his and ours? Monkeys in a cage sometimes become furious when spectators laugh at their antics, and the boys laugh all the more, because they can't help it. I'm afraid that is somewhat the way with the world, when Pat goes into con- tortions over his pains and his woes. But to speak with a seriousness becoming the situation, it is too bad that the sorrows and sufferings of Ireland have been ignored and [29] IRELAND'S WOES AND BRITAIN'S WILES laughed at for all these long years. No other people would have held out as long or have had any breath left to cry out with in protest against their wrongs. The vigor and vitality of the race are in no way more clearly shown than in this matter. Seldom does he forget what it was he had for a grievance, but when he does he always has mentors ready to remind him as to where he was at. I once knew a family in which was a little girl who was something of a tarmagant, and when things didn't go to suit her she made the whole house fairly sizzle with her passionate outcry. On one occasion she had been the center of a cyclonic outburst of fury for half an hour or more and when the storm began to abate and the calm to return, she noticed another little child sitting on the floor playing with a toy. She held out her hand for it and smiled as her little friend gave up her plaything. It was only for a moment or two however, for she suddenly remembered that she had business of graver import to attend to than playing with toys. Dashing the object to the floor, she screamed ; — ' ' Mamma, Mamma, what was it I was crying about just now?" It seems to the rest of the world that Pat is sometimes like the little girl, and when he does forget I notice that a delegation of hyphenated Americans is always sure to be ready to go over and recall to his mind what it was he was whining about. It is indeed well that there are broad and [30] THE MAN IN THE RED HAT capable minds on the alert to discover and drag into light of day some at least of the multitudi- nous wrongs and oppressions that the Irish are constantly being subjected to by the other races and nationalities of the world, especially the Anglo Saxon. Unable to protect and defend them- selves, they ought to have the privilege of crying out to high heaven, in some such language as the Boston orator is reported to have used, against the cruel burdens that are laid upon them. It is astonishing when one thinks of it, just how harsh and cruel the human household can be towards an unfortunate member that has in some way incurred the displeasure of the rest. All the pigs in a pen and all the pullets in a coop will poke and peck at what the Scotch folk call a shargar, but humans are not pigs or chickens and it ought not to be so among them. It is little wonder that when big-hearted Germany began a crusade against the rest of the world in order that she might enjoy the rights that she too was denied, Sinn Fein resolutely and bravely stepped out and stood by her side. There seemed some chance at last that the aspirations of liberty- loving people would have recognition, and such as were not liberty-loving would be assigned to their proper place under the domination of those who ought to be given power and control. Discrimination against the Irish has far- reaching ramifications and it is remarkable to discover how much of it is traceable directly or [31] IRELAND'S WOES AND BRITAIN'S WILES indirectly to British tyranny and oppression. There are few people for instance, upon whom the principles of Anglo Saxon jurisprudence press as heavily as upon the Irish. The law courts everywhere and with vindictive frequency, are to be found making attacks upon Paddy and laying their heavy and tyrannical hands upon him. This oppression makes itself felt not only in his own land and because of English rule, but in this land of the free and the home of the brave. Would it not seem as if there was hardly a prison or peni- tentiary from one end of the land to the other which does not appear to exist for the purpose of meddling with Paddy's freedom? Everywhere it would seem, both in the old world and the new, he is being attacked and I for one would never have had my eyes opened to the iniquity, if Sinn Fein and Mr. Red-Hat hadn't spoken out so fear- lessly at the present time. It is little wonder that a cataclysmic rumpus broke out in the Bolshevistic menagerie in Madison Square Garden some time ago, and worse riots than that will ensue, unless the world ceases to impose its repressive and tyrannical laws upon a patient and long-suffering race. No wonder there are periodic brain-storms among the Friends of Irish Freedom. At this point it might be worth while to notice, that when Irishmen fly at one another's throats, which they almost invariably do when there are no other throats to fly at, as instance the happy Sinn Fein family after the Anglo-Irish treaty was THE MAN IN THE RED HAT signed and the Britisli forces were withdrawn, — they themselves are never to blame. It is only when somebody else incites them to it that they do this thing. To try to be serious for a moment, however, this statement that the Irish race has been in conflict with all other races for centuries, has a startling and significant appropriateness when one recalls some facts connected with the American Civil War. Large claims are made for the part men of Irish blood played in that great conflict and these claims are amply justified. Americanized Irishmen were among the most valiant defenders of the Northern cause. They fought bravely and loyally for the flag of their adopted country; but forty thousand or more of them fought as valiantly in the armies of the Confederacy, and against the flag of the country in which they had chosen to live. Not all of the Irish by any means, were champions of freedom and the Union. Still more significant in the light of our own day, is the unquestioned fact that the greatest menace to the success of the North, was produced by the attitude of Irishmen in the Northern States. One has only to read the files of New York papers of the summer of 1863, to realize that the Draft Riots of that year did more to bring the cause of the North face to face with possible defeat than any other single incident during the four years of the war. During these riots not only was New York City the scene of [33] IRELAND'S WOES AND BRITAIN'S WILES wild barbarism and bloodshed, but in every city- all over the North where any considerable popu- lation of Irish was to be found, similar outbreaks against the government and the war, were staged. It is interesting and perhaps (in the nature of things) quite reasonable to discover that while Irishmen were the chief actors in this exhibition of loyalty (?), Germans were their chief allies. In 1863 as in 1914 and following years, Paddy and Fritz clasped hands in an effort to maintain their personal freedom at the expense of everybody else. The leading rioters and lawbreakers of that day were of the primitive typical Irish race, and they stabbed Uncle Sam in the back when he was struggling for his life in defence of liberty and justice, in exactly the same way that Sinn Fein in our day, stabbed John Bull and the Allies in the back when they were at death grips with the autocracy and brutal tyranny of the Kaiser. Admiral Sims and our gallant seamen met with the same spirit and attitude in Cork, claiming to represent Ireland in 1917, that General Nugent, himself a man of Irish blood and whose house was burned by the mob, met with in New York in 1863, and in both instances the cause of civiliza- tion was trembling in the balance. Evidently true, it would seem, is the statement that it has been the Irish way to stand out against the world in its struggle for liberty and freedom and the true democratic ideal. It is quite clear that in the 60 's, Irishmen were [34] THE MAN IN THE RED HAT not in any way exceptional in their loyalty to the cause of the Union. They were as good as any but no better than citizens of other racial stocks. Irishmen however, were exceptional in precipi- tating these brutal Draft Riots that nearly wrecked the Northern Cause, and they obtained an unenviable record in swelling the volume of desertions from the Union Army. Men were shot down in the streets of New York just as at a later time and in the same way, they were shot down in the streets and lanes of Ireland. It was the same old tragedy acted out in 1863, that was staged anew during the world war, and in the period that followed the signing of the Armistice. It is estimated that in New York alone, the rioters numbered in the neighborhood of forty thousand. Mobs of them are said to have chased Negroes as hounds would a fox, for of course it was inferred that the war was carried on in the interest of freedom for the black man. Factory workmen were terrorized and compelled to quit work, and every enterprise looking to a vigorous prosecution of the war, was well-nigh brought to a stand-still. Paddy runs true to type wherever and whenever he has a chance to map out his own course and follow the bent of his own mind and spirit. There has been no struggle in defence of democratic liberty, during the last four hundred years at least, the success of which, he has not menaced. Army officers and officials of the [35] IRELAND'S WOES AND BRITAIN'S WILES government declared that the Draft Eiots tested the United States Government almost as greatly as did the Southern Rebellion itself. New York State troops had to be called home from the battlefield to cope with the situation, at a time when every available man was sorely needed at the front. The Archbishop of the day sought to pacify the mob by telling them that he did not see a single man among them that looked like a rioter, but he succeeded no better than did a dignitary of our day when he crawled into a beautiful hole and pulled it in after him, by referring the riot of Thanksgiving Day 1920, to the ** Psychology of the Crowd. ' ' When the Irish problem has been settled in Ireland, and has been transferred to this Continent where it rightly belongs, will the United States have to fight the Irish some day! The malicious activity of the propagandist and the intriguer, seems to make the proposition look like a possi- bility, if not a probability. Americans are a patient and long-sutfering people, but if patience ever gives way, then woe-betide these meddlers and mischief makers, both lay and clerical. They will be put in their own place with a thud that will be heard round the world in company with the shot that was fired at Concord Bridge. Did you ever think how this undemocratic Prohibition movement hits Paddy? There can be little doubt that it presses and was designed to press more heavily on the Irish than upon any [36] THE MAN IN THE RED HAT other race. Their personal liberties are being invaded to an intolerable degree. Then too, is there not more than a suspicion that England has a hand in it, and that it is only another example of her vindictive cruelty in trying to keep poor Paddy Fein down? Selfishly keeping her own beer and gin, is it not more than likely that England is at the bottom of this whole movement in the United States? It is sufficient to suggest that England as well as everybody knows that if prohibition of the liquor traffic can be enacted and enforced in America, it will strike at Irish liberty almost as hard as a similar enactment would do in the homeland itself. So why should we refrain from laying some of the blame on England? We suspect her of less likely things. She keeps her own public houses open and protects their owners in the profitable business of trading in rum, while taking satisfaction in the fact that multitudes of honest, industrious, law-abiding Irish-American saloon keepers and bar-tenders are being turned out of house and home, to beg their bread from door to door, or perish with cold and hunger in the gutter. To be sure England will take an added satisfaction in being assured that not a few German-Americans will share the fate of their fellow martyrs of Hibernian extraction. Once again we can understand the close and tender feeling of brotherhood that exists between the Prussian and Pat, when it is discovered that to- [37] IRELAND'S WOES AND BRITAIN'S WILES gether they are the victims of a tyranny as cruel and vindictive as this. But to speak with sober seriousness, — it would perhaps ease some of the heavy load the Irish- man has to carry because of the attitude of the rest of the world, if in some way he could be per- suaded to take a broader outlook on life. I fear the dear fellow is a little bit childish in this re- spect, and lacking in a sense of brotherhood. Like his pig he is tethered to a stake in his own door- yard, and to him the conditions that prevail within the radius of his string are the conditions that should obtain wherever humans live and move and have their being. There is no other possible environment. In politics and religion, as in other things, his horizon never lifts itself beyond the circumference of a circle drawn with geometric exactitude, at the end of his tether. The conse- quence is that, as the rubicon rotundity in the scarlet head-dress, reminds us, he is not only anti- British but anti-everything that fails to give atten- tion when he begins to whine and whimper. This is doubtless why the name and motto — * ' Sinn Fein" — 'Ourselves Alone' — has come into vogue. It stands for an egoistic primitiveness that has been so largely outgrown elsewhere. It is surely an interesting fact that here again the German and the Sinn Fein Irishman are so much alike. They manifest the same kind of a narrow and extreme individualism. There is no place in all the world where the like of it is to be seen — only [38] THE MAN IN THE RED HAT in Ireland and Germany, — save that it crops up now and again in the Senate of the United States of America. It is the attitude of the child mind that can not reason, and with which there is no possibility of argument. It sees only one end to be sought for and attained, and that an immediate and selfishly personal one. Of course this attitude inevitably comes into contact and conflict with in- terests that it can not conceive of as having any existence at all. No interest has any business to exist except its own. It was this spirit that brought on the European war. It was this spirit that made it the most brutal and atrocious war that was ever waged. It is this attitude of mind that makes the German unable to understand why the whole world looks upon him with horror and disgust. It was this spirit that made Sinn Fein throw in his lot witli the German. It is this spirit that made him excuse and paliate the un- heard of atrocities of the Kaiser. It was this spirit that made him do the thing that was most contemptible of all, — desert the Kaiser when he saw the Kaiser's jig was up. It was this spirit that made him wheel into line, and then claim that he it was, and nobody else that won the war for the allied cause. It was this selfsame spirit that after all, made him spue vitriol upon President Wilson because he didn't secure for him a chair at the Peace Table. Of course Sinn Fein should have been represented at Versailles, but his place was behind the palings with the Boche. The Allies [39] IRELAND'S WOES AND BRITAIN'S WILES mercifully saved the Boche from that humiliation. The Boche is a gentleman of dignity and worth contrasted with Sinn Fein. Yes, my friend of the red sombero, you did an unkind and unjust thing when you suggested that all the Irish people have put themselves where Sinn Fein has put himself, — up against and out- side the civilization of all the earth. [40] CHAPTER V Hate THE Prussian and Pat are the supreme expon- ents and devotees of the cult of hate. No nation nor race has ever been able to bring to such perfection the exercise of this faculty as they. They seem to have reduced the whole thing to an exact science. At least, in the case of the Prussian, with his bent of mind and his predilec- tion for efficiency, this would seem to be so. With Pat the thing appears to be rather a matter of heredity coupled with an education and espe- cially an environment, in which iteration and reiteration has been so insistent and persistent from infancy, that hate has become a sort of a second nature to the man from Erin. The main distinction would seem to be, that hate with the Prussian, as is invariably the case with all his pos- sessions and attainments, is a machine made affair, while with Pat it is a growth, — a disease if you will, which he can not help any more than he can help the color of his hair or the length of his lip. When hate becomes chronic the case is a well- nigh hopeless one, and the condition is pitiful in the extreme. The far-reaching and disintegrating effects of hate upon individual and national char- [41] IRELAND'S WOES AND BRITAIN'S WILES acter, are often of the most tragic kind. As some one lias intimated, those who snffer most from hate, are not the hated but those who hate. Few things there are that dwarf and shrivel and burn to a cinder the souls of men and women as hate. As some wise man has put it, — ' * Hatred is heavier freight for the shipper than for the consignee." The truth of this principle was forcibly demon- strated in Germany during the war. The culti- vation and development of hate was well illus- trated by a cartoon in Punch representing a German family taking its morning hate. The in- culcation of hate in home and school, was a part of the preparation by which Germany expected to subjugate the world. Without the pretext of a cause save that which she imagined and con- jured up, the nation taught her youth to hate, with the expectation that when the time was ripe for her to spring at the world 's civilization, teeth and claws would be so whetted by the malevolence of hate, that they would rend and tear until nothing was left. True enough a carnival of brutality sucli as the world had never seen, was the result; but the reaction was swift and sure, and the brand of Cain is on the Prussian's brow. If the maxim of the great Master Teacher; — "They that take the sword shall perish with the sword. ' ' — has been vindicated, it is no less true that those w^io em- ployed hate to help in bringing to pass their selfish and wicked ends, have become the wretched and pitiful victims of their own spite. This I fear, is [42] HATE more certainly and more frequently true than men realize. Tuniing to Ireland, — it is an appalling spec- tacle to contemplate a people who for centuries, have cherished and cultivated hate as a cardinal and peculiar virtue. To inoculate generation after generation with the virus of hate, may be and undoubtedly is a menace to the objects of that hate; but its contagion draws within its blighting blistering touch all that it can reach, and in the end eats like a cancer the heart in which it has its abode. Hate distorts judgment, sears and deadens conscience and assassinates truth. It perverts all sense of proportion and is as unreason- ing as a pack of wolves; and this is certain to be the case when it is implanted and securely fixed within the breast, before reason has become mature enough to play a part in thought and conduct. Permeated by hate the heart can be played upon by the most vindictive and malevolent passions, and easily becomes the sport of the unprincipled and the depraved. Truth — the plain facts of his- tor\% — the mighty movements that betoken the progress of men and nations, can not appeal to nor be understood by a mind and heart choked with hate. Men shut themselves out from the influence and benefits of all democratic uplift and advance, when they cherish spite and hate towards those institutions and principles that everywhere have produced and developed and upheld the demo- cratic ideal. [43] IRELAND'S WOES AND BRITAIN'S WILES The matter of hate as related to the problems of Ireland, is rather complicated and painfully dis- concerting from the fact that so many Irish peo- ple pride themselves in the possession and exer- cise of their hate. This I suppose is the natural and inevitable outcome of a hate that has been persisted in long enough to become something of a racial characteristic. A hate that lives on for centuries after the provocative cause that called it into being has been as extinct as the dodo, is I suppose something to be proud of, especially because of its tenacity and vigor if for no other reason. This pride is exemplified most of all in the spell-binders and champions who presume and assume to speak on behalf of the Irish people. They seem able not only to churn themselves and their hearers into froth over the real or imaginary woes of the Emerald Isle, but they puff themselves out like pouter pigeons with pride over the fact that the specimen of hate that lies in their hearts and dominates their spirits, is as lively and vicious as anything their ancestors of several centuries ago could boast. It is this I fancy, that enables them to distort and falsify the facts of past history and the plain meaning of current events without blinking an eye or turning a hair. I presume it was pride in their hate more than anything else, that enabled our Munchausen Triplets who visited Ireland lately, to bring back a whole cart load of atrocities that had no existence save in their own diseased and distorted imaginations. The only [44] HATE thing approaching an atrocity in connection with this incident, was constituted out of the atrocious falsehoods these men brought over for circulation in America. It is doubtless this same spirit that produces that strange brand of patriotism the chief ingredient of which, is hate and that leads the possessors and exponents thereof to insist that the patriotism of all the rest of us, is faulty and weak because it does not rest on a substratum of hate. To speak with all seriousness, is it not time that a patriotism that is made to hinge on hatred of some other countiy or people, or a friendship that depends on the same principle, should be recognized to say the least, as a brand of these two virtues not greatly to be desired or to be proud of, — constituting together a rather ignoble and nauseating thing. That patriotism or friendship that has to be bolstered up by the exercise of hate in some other direction, is an insecure thing to tie to, and is pretty sure sooner or later, to pierce the hand that leans upon it. I am glad my son, that your friendship whiich I value highly, is not a reward for my hate in some direction in which you have cause for offence. I can not imagine your friendship towards any- body, to be a commodity to be bartered in this way. It is this kind of barter however that the Sinn Fein Irishman ever insists upon. It is in this way that he seeks to involve in his own deg- radation and condemnation all with whom he comes in contact. Some daj^ the world will [45] IRELAND'S WOES AND BRITAIN'S WILES awake to a clean, sweet, fresh morning in which all that bastard type of patriotism and friend- ship will have been banished from the earth, and when the motto, — * ' Ourselves alone ' ' — will be unthinkable among any people. All true lovers of Ireland, may well wish for her that with the pink of a new youth on her cheek and the light of a new hope in her eye, she may stand with all the rest of the forward-looking folk, to greet the sunrise on that day. To this end may grace be given her to repudiate the malevolent agitators who are ever seeking to re-infect and fasten upon her the leprosy of hate. The hate and spite and falsehood that is being sown broad-cast in our beloved country at the present time, is worse and a greater menace to the free institutions of America, than anything the Potsdam gang ever thought of before the war. The menace of the propaganda of hate is that it creates suspicion and distrust and prejudice. It is the inveterate foe of that brotherhood for which the world is hungry and which is to be looked for, first of all among those people who speak a com- mon language, and possess a common heritage in literature and religion and law, and whose free institutions flow from a common fountain head. Peace and concord do not find in hate, a friendly soil in which to grow. It was the sporadic patches of this soil handed down from revolutionary days and fortified by the school histories of a genera- tion ago that made the German propaganda a [46] HATE menace to the peace and security of this nation's life before we entered the war, or that would have made that propaganda a most dangerous menace had there been more of that kind of soil in which to plant its seed. The will to think ill carries in its bosom a poison that may paralyze and destroy within as well as without, and it is an evil spirit to be exorcised by every means within our power. There is possibly, nothing that has as much potency in the direction of counteracting hate, as the possession of a healthy and lively sense of humor. Hate can not live long in a heart where humor dwells. One of the best antidotes for the poison of hate, is the presence of a generous supply of the saving grace of humor. It is indeed the best antitoxin the world knows anything about, and it has saved men and nations from many a black and threatening storm, — from many a crushing disaster. Well might all the nations in these days, long and pray for a mighty increase of it everywhere, I feel sure, my good doctor friend must have many a phial of it on the shelves of his office. It is a cure for more of the ills of life than the doctors realize. Early in the war I was taking dinner in a hotel in a New England town. I was belated and the other guests filtered out, until all that was left was another gentleman and myself seated at either end of a long table. Some pleasantry among the waiters arose at the other end of the room, and we two men made commonplace remarks about [47] IRELAND'S WOES AND BRITAIN'S WILES ♦v the value and health of a joyous and hearty laugh. Passing from one thing to another we spoke of the saving grace of humor in human life and ex- perience ; when I ventured the suggestion that pos- sibly there would have been no European war if the Kaiser had had a little bit of humor in his make up ; but, Whew ! I was swept off my bearings in a trice. Unconsciously I had uncovered a Pro- German. I was informed that England and Eng- land alone, was responsible for this war. She was its sole and only cause. If England had only spoken the word, both Prance and Russia would have pulled in their horns. Of course I had noth- ing to say. The argument was unanswerable. I felt provoked at myself because I had run the risk of opening up a debate with a stranger in a public place. At the same time I was glad of an opportunity to study at close range, the psychol- ogy and perhaps also, the physiology of hate; for since that afternoon, when I took charge of your office and at your request, told your patients you would be back soon, when I knew you wouldn't, I have become something of a diagnostician. At any rate I discovered that hate is not only a serious malady in itself, but is especially troublesome because of the complications that are likely to develop, and the evils that are almost certain to follow in its wake. Anyway I found out that hate is accompanied by at least two diverse and dis- turbing maladies, — to wit ; Astigmatism on the one hand and Colic on the t)ther. [48] CHAPTER VI HUMOB SO YOU think I do Paddy an injustice when I suggest that he is lacking in humor. Far be it from me to rob Pat of any of his per- quisites. I would be tlie last man to do that, and Pat would be the very last person I would think of practicing such brigandage upon. It is true that the world has given the Irish credit for being a humorous folk. It is one of the things we have taken for granted and have never thought to question. But it has come to be a puzzle with many of the most ardent admirers and well-wishers of the man from Erin, how it possibly can be that when it comes to a consideration of the wrongs to which he has been subjected and the rights of which he is being deprived, he persists in failing to show a single trace of the possession of any such faculty. We have come to feel that the Prussian, in the egregiously serious way in which he takes himself, is the outstanding example of a man in whose make-up the grace of humor finds no place. His claims to superiority, his .demands for special and unusual recognition, his strut- [49] IRELAND'S WOES AND BRITAIN'S WILES ting about in military boots with a warrior's helmet on his head and a sword on his thigh, makes the normal human laugh and nudge his neighbor; but Fritz goes through the motions without cracking a smile. He is entirely with- out any sense of the incongruous and the ridicu- lous. Hence if the world does not take him at his own valuation, he fails to recognize the fact, or if he does he attributes it to the world's stu- pidity or its jealousy, and quite often he seems to entertain a mixture of these explanations to account for the world's attitude. The Prussian can never put himself in the other man's place, — can never see the other side of a question, can not indeed imagine for a moment that there is or ever could be any other side. He is bound by tradition and the letter of things, and when he ventures out of the beaten track, it is to slavishly imitate with apparently no conception of the possibility of desirability of adaptation to new conditions or needs. When he does depart from his model, it is to follow some geometric or mathematical conception that manifests no flexi- bility of mind or spirit. Brute force coupled with a primitive animal cunning and a super- ficial veneer, are the things he relies upon to carry him to the front. He is childishly eager to be rated as interested in, and able to do the things other humans take to naturally, but which he laboriously flounders through. He is an eagle that would swim like a duck, and a duck that [50] HUMOR would run like a hound. He rows a boat with his spurs on so to speak, and insists that is the only way a man of Kultur should row a boat. In like manner he plays tennis in evening dress and a top hat, that is if he ever plays the game at all. He can imitate the gayety of Paris and dress like a gentleman from Bond street, but he pushes wife and children off the pavement into the gut- ter, and eats his dinner while they wait and look on. When at length he took time to look over his own garden wall, he saw other nations pos- sessed of colonies and he thought it would be a good idea for him to have colonies too, but his colonies and their system of management were turned out on a lathe. Tliey didn't grow as col- onies to be colonies must do. He saw other nations with navies and he had one made to order for himself. When he got it he didn 't know what to do with it. He surrendered it without a fight and then grew brave and sunk his ships when he thought nobody was looking. Most of these things Fritzie does or fails to do in his own way, and with his head where his heels ought to be, and for the most part because he is destitute of the sense of humor. That I'addy is not in all respects a counterpart of his illustrious friend and preceptor, is largely due I tliink, to the fact that he has a better heart and a poorer head. In his own way however and to a degree in keeping with his insularity, he runs the Prussian a close second, and yet the [SI] IRELAND'S WOES AND BRITAIN'S WILES world says the Irisliniaii has humor. I'm afraid I will have to assume the ungracious attitude of disputing the world's opinion. Just as Paddy and Fritz have similar conceptions as to free- dom and liberty, — of democracy and the prin- ciples on which democracy rests, so I fear we will have to put them in the same category in the matter of humor. Pat has a nimble wit and this often saves the day for him, while the Prussian flounders and lumbers along, even to the extent of frequently falling over himself. Pat has wit. He is probably the wittiest man on earth; but wit is not humor. It may indeed exist where not a trace of humor is to be found. The two qualities are often confounded and mis- taken for one another, and perhaps this is not to be wondered at, seeing that the distinction is rather a subtle one and somewhat difficult to make clear. It is however true as I have said, that wit may exist apart from humor, but the problem is complicated when we realize that humor does not exist apart from wit. There may be wit without humor, but not humor without wit. Wit depends for its effect upon the rapidity and brilliancy of the point, and is mainly if not altogether, an intellectual product and for the most part, plays with the resemblance of ideas. Humor is a broader, deeper thing. It may indeed act with as much spontaneity as wit, but it has a more delicate quality and as Lowell points out, sug- gests more remote analogies and essential incon- [52] HUMOR gruities. Wit by itself is superficial — it sparkles and effervesces and is soon spent. Humor runs on and is pervasive and diffusive, for it is a thing of the spirit and soul, which wit of and by itself, is not. Humor has a deep sense of the incongruous and the ridiculous. Wit accomplishes its purpose and gives surprise and delight apart entirely from the exercise of any such sense. It deals with resemblances in words and ideas perhaps, rather than with differences. The less obvious the resemblances of course, the more startling the effect and the greater the delight. The pun is a species of wit, — it is less frequently an example of humor. De Quincy has said: — ''While wit is purely an intellectual thing, into every act of the humorous mind there is an influx of the moral nature; rays direct or refracted from the will and the affec- tions, from the disposition and the temperament enter into all humor, and hence it is that humor is of a diffusive quality, pervading an entire course of thought: while wit, because it has no existence apart from certain logical relations of thought which are definitely assignable and can be counted even, — is always punctually con- centrated within the circle of a few words." This statement suggests the nature of the Ger- man mind and personality, in the utter absence of any sense of humor, and at the same time sug- gests that it is wit the Irish as a race are pos- sessed of and not humor. [53] IRELAND'S WOES AND BRITAIN'S WILES Primitive and backward races are singularly devoid of the faculty of humor and D 'Israeli goes as far as to say: — ''The ancients indeed appear not to have pos- sessed that comic quality that we understand as humor, nor can I discover a word which exactly corresponds with our term humor, in any lan- guage ancient or modern." It is certainly quite safe to affirm that the German has no such word in his vocabulary. The language he uses is essen- tially a barbarous language and the status of a race as to its advancement in civilization, is fixed in no way as well perhaps, or with as much cer- tainty, as by its language, and one of the char- acteristics of the barbarian is that he is without humor. Another safe venture is the assumption that the Irish Gaelic that Sinn Fein has been seeking so frantically to revamp and galvanize into life, has no word that even in the remotest way would serve as a synonym for our word humor. You may wager your new Ford on that proposition, my son! There have been many funny happen- ings in the struggles of Ireland, but nothing could be much funnier than the scene in Dublin when the so called Irish Republic was inaugurated. The acrobatic contortions of the representatives trying to spell out their set pieces and prepared, resolutions in Gaelic, with the serious demeanor of graven images, was prodigiously funny to everybody but Pat. By the use of a dead lan- [54] HUMOR guage, (anything but English would have done,) on this momentous and historically important occasion, the whole world was to be profoundly impressed and made to realize that a new era in world history had begun. No other human beings, save perhaps, the Prussians, would have taken this course. When, in order to invest with dignity and serious gravity an occasion which they feel to be of vital importance to themselves, a group of men only succeed in placing on the stage a farcical comedy, they surely can not be credited with any very highly developed sense of humor. A like procedure, we are told, has been followed by DeValera in marking his com- munications to Lloyd George as "official transla- tions." This would indeed be funny if it were not so childish. This of course is a part of the insistent and juvenile clamor that peevishly claims for the Irish a separate nationality and a separate and distinct language of their own. Lloyd George is as much a Celt as any of the Sinn Fein people, and he probably knows more about Celtic language and literature than DeValera and his entire "cabinet" put together. It is un- doubtedly true that there are as many people of pure Celtic stock in Great Britain as there are in Ireland and a larger percentage of them use a Celtic form of speech in their everyday life. What of that, wails the hysterical propagandist ? These people are not Irish. The Irish and their Gaelic are different; and that is true. A lack of humor [55] IRELAND'S WOES AND BRITAIN'S WILES more than anything else leads them to insist upon going back to the Tribal stage of human exis- tence. One cannot but think of Emerson in this con- nection when he writes: — "What an ornament and safeguard is humor; far better than wit for a poet and writer! It is genius itself, and so defends from the insanities." Unquestionably then, one of the most signifi- cant facts connected with the Irish Problem, is the utter absence of any sense of humor in all its ramifications and developments. The eternal in- sistence that the Irish people are being discrim- inated against, that they are being cheated and robbed and oppressed whenever the essential principles and laws that obtain in all existence, begin to operate in their direction, surely bears out this statement. The utter inability to see why they should not be an exception to every other people, supports our contention that they are without humor. The inability to give and take — the childish unreason and stubborn insist- ence upon having their own way, — the juvenile predilection for making mountains out of mole- hills and the capacity for creating the mole-hills in the first place, pronounce the same verdict. Somehow Pat is a master hand at discovering slights where none was intended, and he has no equal in magnifying those slights until they become the most grievous and intolerable wrongs. Equally efficient is he in discovering special [S6] HUMOR privileges and rewards which it is his exclusive right to enjoy. This paranoic bent of mind is especially in evidence among the agitators and demagogues, who claim to speak on behalf of Ireland, and its presence compels us to question either their mentality or their humor, and we re- fuse to believe them insane. A genuine sense of humor would have saved Ireland untold suffering and unrest, and would have unravelled the tangled problem centuries ago. The individual who has a true sense of humor, enjoys a joke at his own expense. This Pat sel- dom if ever does. It is perhaps particularly true of the Scotchman, that he takes keen delight in poking fun at his own peccadillos and peculiari- ties. As a rule he extracts as much fun and en- joyment out of it as do those who caricature him. If however you value your peace of mind my son, do not dare to caricature an Irishman within a hundred miles of Kinsale Head or a block of Tammany Hall. I had scarcely written down these observations on the subject of humor however, when my con- victions on the matter received a bit of a jolt. There came into my hands the following mes- sage, sent by the Hierarchy of this country to Cardinal Logue in Ireland: — "Your Eminence: In this solemn and porten- tous hour of Ireland's history, we, the Bishops of the United States gathered in annual confer- ence, feel it a duty incumbent on us to extend [57] IRELAND'S WOES AND BRITAIN'S WILES to your Eminence and your brethren of the Irish hierarchy the assurance of our sympathy, our prayers and our united good wishes for the happy outcome of the conference in which the repre- sentatives of your people are now engaged. Particularly at this time we are not unmindful of the tremendous debt the Church in this coun- try owes to Ireland and its people. For more than a century the millions of your race have come to our shores and by their strong faith and their loyal and generous help they have built up a church which has become the pride of Christen- dom and the glory of the country in which we dwell. And even though they have become loyal Americans, faithful to the flag under which they dwell, time has never been able to extinguish in their souls the love they bore to the land of their fathers, to the little island from which they parted as exiles destined never to return. And particularly during these recent years, with anxious and expectant hearts, they have watched the trend of events, ever hopeful that Providence in its wisdom might ordain that at last Ireland was to take its place among the nations of the earth. And indeed during these latter weeks their hearts were filled with pride when they saw the representatives of their race conduct themselves with a statesmanship that has challenged the admiration of the world. Therefore in this fateful hour when the future [58] HUMOR of Ireland trembles in the balance, it is not our desire, your Eminence, by any word of ours to peril tlie outcome of those deliberations upon which a world waits with bated breath. Eatlier in the true spirit of our holy faith, united with our people from every race and every station, our prayers ascend from every altar in the land that God in His wisdom may bring Ireland's misery of seven hundred years to an end, that this most apostolic race among all of God's peoples may receive the reward for what they have done for the Church of America and elsewhere by obtain- ing the fulfillment of their national aspirations. And finally that God may grant you and your colleagues to live to see Ireland's golden age, and find your people even more faithful to their Church in the sunburst of their new freedom than ever they were in the years of their exile and expectancy." Your Eminence's devoted servants in Christ. The Archbishops and Bishops of the United States. Is this an example of humor, or is it an evidence of its lack? It might be either. [59] CHAPTER VII The Child and the Moon 10NCE saw a little child try to blow out the light of the moon, and when the moon slipped in behind a cloud, he clapped his tiny hands in glee over the success of his effort. It was a little pantomine so charming, that I love to recall it to mind now and again in order that I may enjoy the pretty scene once more. When, however, a grown man with a stubby beard on his lip, and a short pipe in his mouth, in all gravity and seriousness persists in doing the same thing, it becomes a grotesque and rather ridiculous farce. We laugh at the child with joy- ous appreciation. Our laughter over the per- formance of the man inclines to be irreverant, and do what we will, barely escapes falling into a tone of derision. Defenders of the rights and claims of Ireland are forever putting Paddy in the position of do- ing this thing. After-thought is one of the most striking char- acteristics of the mentality of these champions of the cause of Ireland. If a Sinn Fein Irishman had fore-sight equal to his hind-sight, he would surely represent the most marvellous intellectual [60] THE CHILD AND THE MOON development that has been produced in any race since time began. Two things this marvellous intellect is ever discovering. The first is the forgotten achieve- ments of Ireland, — her unrecognized and un- requited contribution to the advance of civiliza- tion ; — and the second is, that the unwarranted and unmerited credits that other people have had and are having placed to their account, always disparage and detract from the glory of the cause and people, this same intellect seeks to champion and defend. Some people can never hear another glorified without feeling that they are being robbed of some of their own well- deserved glory, and in the Sinn Fein Irishman, this attitude of mind has become a disease. He sits up nights discovering and polishing up grievances of this type, to be employed by himself or to be handed out and urged upon anybody he thinks may need them or ought to use them. A legal luminary somewhere, presumably of some eminence, for he occupies a position of high honor among the Knights of Columbus, has discovered since the war ended that the letters — A. E. F. American Expeditionary Force, — stood in doughboy parlance for ''After England Failed," but the doughboys had to come back from France to find out that they ever used the term. The brilliant advocate is greatly grieved to discover that the Y. M. C. A. with the connivance [6i] IRELAND'S WOES AND BRITAIN'S WILES of the War Department, prepared and circulated a pamphlet designed to introduce Tommy Atkins to our doughboys, and to tell them what kind of a chap they would discover him to be ; and that this same pamphlet omitted to introduce and tell with equal lucidity, what kind of a fellow the doughboy would discover himself to be. This omission of course, was nothing short of treason to America and the American Army; and the high official gives one the impression that he thinks he ought to be rewarded with Knighthood or a SenatorsMp, for discovering and promul- gating such an able-bodied grievance as that. If the real American would only stand up for his rights as fearlessly as the hyphenated variety does, he would see that to allow or accord credit to another, is to barter away his own birthright, and at the same time prevent his country from occupying the commanding position in inter- national affairs which is her right. The Sinn Fein advocate need not worry how- ever, for the real American is too big-hearted and broad minded to feel that he must pull somebody else down in order to lift himself up, or that when- ever anybody else is lifted up, he is correspond- ingly pulled down. Agitators and narrow minded politicians to the contrary notwithstanding, this is the true American spirit that Sinn Fein is ever, consciously or unconsciously, trying to insult, and thank goodness, it is the spirit that dwells in the breast of multitudes of American citizens [62] THE CHILD AND THE MOON with Irish blood flowing in their veins. Sinn Fein, whether of the Simon pure stock or of the hyphen- ated brand, would have all the rest of us descend to their level, and regard every word uttered in commendation of another, especially of a Britisher, as a stab in the back for ourselves. The disposition to lift one 's self up by pulling another down, and to feel that a good word spoken in behalf of another, is a disparagement of one's own worth and importance, and is always a confession of inferiority. We refuse to acknowledge infer- iority to any race whatsoever, and for that reason we refuse to come under the tutelage of Sinn Fein. An interesting after-thought of the Sinn Fein spell-binders, is the discovery that Ireland has a local and racial kultur that she ought to be per- mitted to develop and bestow upon the rest of the world. Of course no obstacle has ever been placed in her way of doing this through all the centuries ; but the amusing fact is that Ireland would never have known that she had a Kultur, if these wonder- ful representatives of hers had not entered into partnership and association with the Boche. It has been discovered recently that Ireland gave America her freedom, and made possible the great Republic of the Western Hemisphere. The Independence of the Thirteen Colonies was prac- tically purchased by Irish blood and treasure. It was Irish love of freedom that laid the founda- tions of democracy in the New World. [631 IRELAND'S WOES AND BRITAIN'S WILES Unfortunately this discovery and the claims founded thereupon, suggest the possibility of other claims. The argument proves too much, but no Irish agitator could be expected to recognize the fact. If Ireland is to have credit for the part played by men of Irish blood or ancestry in the Eevo- lution in America, then of course by the same rule, every other country or nation is entitled to credit for the share taken in the great struggle, by men who could trace their ancestry back to them. Give each country fullest credit for the effort and achievement of its emigrants and their descend- ents, and the place of Ireland falls far down the list in the rating. We are compelled at least, to give liberty loving Holland a much more prom- inent position than Ireland, in the contribution she made in the liberation of America. It is just possible that a correct estimate of the compara- tive contributions of Sweden and France and even Germany, would put them in successful compe- tition with Ireland as to the part they played in the historic conflict. But then, what shall we say of England herself? With her usual arrogance and presumption she edges her way to the front, and points with pride to the men of British blood who fought for American freedom. We don 't like to do it, but if Ave admit the claim of one we must admit the claims of all; and England persists in coming out on top, — another instance of her cruel oppression and tyranny over Ireland! [64] THE CHILD AND THE MOON In the Revolutionary war, from first to last, there was enrolled an army of possibly 250,000 men. Some say more, some say less. In round numbers, 230,000 might be considered a fair esti- mate. Of this army, the four then existing New England States or Colonies, — New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Connecticut and Rhode Island, supplied more than half, — or 120,000. The colon- ists of New England at the time of the Revolution, were almost exclusively of English or British ex- traction. Some were from Ulster, and as such were almost as British as any, — certainly far enough away from the Sinn Fein type. This gives England a good start in the contribution of man power which she made on behalf of freedom in America. If we add to the 120,000 New Englanders the cavaliers of Virginia and the Carolinas and the very considerable groups of men from the other colonies, whose ancestry was British, we discover that the Continental Army must have been English in the proportion of at least five or six to one, and St. Patrick himself only knows what excessive proportion of Englishmen to Irishmen there must have been. Thanks to the line of argument which defenders and champions of the claims of Ireland have suggested, it seems we are compelled to admit, that it was Englishmen who licked English- men and liberated the Colonies from English rule. Perhaps we ought to be grateful to Irish investi- gators for bringing to light this interesting fact ; for undoubtedly it would have been advantageous [65] IRELAND'S WOES AND BRITAIN'S WILES to both America and Great Britain, had both of them thought of the war of the American Revo- lution as a Civil War, which in truth it really was, and that the principles for which the Colonists contended, were the Anglo-^axon principles of justice and liberty — the common heritage of Americans and Englishmen alike. Poor Paddy had a part, but a very incidental part, in the struggle. He tagged on to the movement in the direction of freedom and democracy, — a move- ment which he not only did nothing to originate, but which originated in the land and among the people he insists we ought to hate. This is the usual habit of Ireland as represented by her noisy and windy champions and defenders. In a similar way, the Sinn Fein agitator has discovered that the Irish more than any other race, saved the Union and freed the slaves in the war of the Rebellion. Of course no one for a moment would seek to deny or belittle the splen- did part played in the Civil War, or in any war by men of Irish ancestry; but if Ireland as a national entity is to have the credit, then in exactly the same way, England should have credit for what men of English ancestry accomplished. I have read somewhere that 100,000 Canadians crossed the border and fought in the Union Army during the Civil War. This is probably an over- statement, but undoubtedly a good many thous- ands did so, and if to the number were added all the Americans of Canadian ancestry who marched [66] THE CHILD AND THE MOON under the starry flag, Canada might if she were as ambitious and self -centered as Sinn Fein, put in a claim for no inconsiderable amount of credit for the preservation of the Union. Perhaps it is not to be expected that the clamorous propagan- dist should in this connection, speak of the forty thousand or more Irishmen who fought against the Union as units of the Confederate Army, or of the like number who nearly wrecked the Union cause by resisting the Draft. Again we find ourselves travelling over familiar ground when we come face to face with the de- mands and claims of the spell-binder when he points to the large proportion of men of Irish lineage who fought in the American armies in France, and because of which asks for Ireland the credit and the rewards these men worthily earned. Of course here again, to follow the Sinn Fein mode of argument to its reasonable and logi- cal conclusion. Great Britain should have credit for all the achievements of the doughboys who were descendents of British and Canadian emi- grants, from the time of the Mayflower Pilgrims until the present moment, and they probably out- numbered the descendents of the Irish to a very considerable degree. This mode of reasoning which the brilliant champions of Ireland insist upon following, is I admit, rather hard upon the American and gives him little place in fighting for his own flag, but then he should have taken [67] IRELAND'S WOES AND BRITAIN'S WILES the precaution of making sure that no blood ran in his veins save only that of the native Indian. Truly Pat insists when the moon gets behind a cloud, that he puffed it out with his own breath. In this connection it is interesting, not to say amusing, to note the presumption with which these people assume sometimes the task of speak- ing for and representing America. Take for example the incident shortly after the war, when several hundred of them crossed over to France and proceeded to set up a statue of Lafayette in Metz, and to thank Marshal Foch for leading them to victory in the World War. They pres- ented the great Frenchman with a gold baton as a token and recognition of his leadership. It was a stupendous bluff and a superb bit of playing up to the galleries. Something of course had to be done to make their attitude right and assure for themselves a place in the van as the chiefest of all the champions of liberty, for it is hardly too much to say that in all probability there was not ten men in all the group who did not in the first two years of the war, wish and pray and hope for the defeat of France and the success of the German cause. When Joffre and Foch were setting their beleagured forces in array to beat back the enemy from the gates of Paris, at the first Battle of the Marne, these people were giving their sym- pathy and such help as lay in their power in order that their efforts might be rendered futile. Childish arrogance, you say! Yes, but it is more. When [68] THE CHILD AND THE MOON imposture and treachery and intrigue stalks forth in the guise of philanthropy, it is time for other folk to hold themselves ready and keep wide awake. The insistence on the part of Paddy that he is the man by whose word and will, the moon waxes and wanes, does not always carry implications like this. For the most part it simply serves to differentiate Pat from the major portion of man- kind. The chief distinction between the Irishman and the Scotchman for instance, is this. The Scotch- man quietly assumes the management of every- thing within sight. Without saying anything about it, he takes over the government of all the earth, or all that is worth taking over, and he does not greatly care whether the world knows or does not know who it is that is running it. The Irish- man on the other hand, pours it into the ear of all creation and sundry, that he is the chap who does things, — that he is the fellow who rules, or would be and ought to be, if all the rest of the folk would only get out of the way and cease from preventing him from assuming the position of superiority which he, of all men, is best fitted to assume. The hen that cackles the most does not always lay the greatest number of eggs. Sometimes the rooster does a lot of cackling. The Irislmaan does the same. I have often wondered why Washington him- self has not been claimed for the Irish. This claim [69] IRELAND'S WOES AND BRITAIN'S WILES established, and it might easily be done, Ireland would be able to silence forever her jealous de- tractors, and make good her right to be regarded as the originator of democracy and the demo- cratic form of government. It is true that 'Jarge' suggests English ances- try for the Father of His Country ; but Washing- ton had a brother named Lawrence, and from Lawrence to Larry is only a step. Larry is pure Hibernian, and there you have it. A little investi- gation would doubtless establish the fact that Washington was not an English Gentleman at all, but a genuine Paddy from Limerick or the Hill o' Houth. True the portraits of Washington rep- resent him as having Anglo-Saxon features, and he had straight legs ; but little incidental matters like these could easily be brushed aside. If the Munchausen Triplets from this country who recently visited Ireland, would only go over again, they could speedily clear up the whole question. It would be a much more rewarding line of investigation by way of propaganda for these famous hyphenates, than to spend time try- ing to establish the charge that Johnnie Bull tore Pat's trowsers when he arrested him for stealing his neighbor 's pig and for setting fire to the pig's abode, and it would give Ireland the credit that of right belongs to her. That this matter has not been attended to long ago is only one more evidence of English tyranny and op- pression in Ireland. This is indeed a serious [70] THE CHILD AND THE MOON matter and ought to be set right, and coupled with it is the insufferable conceit of England in claim- ing that her Patron Saint killed a dragon, while the Patron Saint of Ireland is given credit for nothing bigger than a snake. Ought not this in- justice to be attacked and persistently fought until it, too, is set right, and the achievements of the respective Saints reversed, as they ought to be. The opportunities for bringing to light the un- recognized claims and achievements of Ireland are multitudinous and insistent, and we wonder why the brilliant advocates and agitators turn aside so constantly to quarrel about non-essential things. Why should they spend so much of their breath trjdng to convince us that green is not red, and that the two colors should never appear together on the same piece of tartan cloth ? Every- body knows that it is an outrage to make tartans of any color but green. [71] CHAPTER VIII Peopaganda ONE of the most laborious undertakings of the Sinn Fein agitator, is the effort he makes to establish the claim that the age- long struggle in Ireland, is a conflict of democ- racy against autocracy, — that the inherent love of freedom and democracy which is characteristic of Irish thought and spirit, is in perpetual revolt against class rule. Painfully and persistently, we are informed that the principle at stake in Ireland is the principle for which the American Colonists contended in the war for Independence. With painful and perspiring assiduity, he strives night and day to induce a wheel-barrow to negotiate the rails and the over-head wire of a trolley line, and he becomes mightily peeved if we fail to take passage in his omnibus. He can not understand why things that melt in the same heat or freeze in the same cold, should not be of the same nature and composition, or why a porous plaster should not serve the same pur- pose as a postage stamp, in carrying a letter through the mail, seeing that one is as adhesive as the other. He insists that it is the label that determines [72] PROPAGANDA the contents of a package, and not the contents that determine the label. He makes toilsome journeys to the shrines of American Independence and lays sheaves of shamrock, tied with the Kaiser's colors, on Lex- ington Green and Concord Bridge, and at the base of the monument on Bunker Hill. He sings the '' Wearing of the Green" and the ''Watch on the Rhine" to the tune of the "Star Spangled Banner," and wonders why the name of New York isn't changed to New Cork, as it ought to be. When he shoots arrows into the tough hide of Johnnie Bull, he does it from the balcony of Inde- pendence Hall, Philadelphia, or from the ambush of the Liberty Bell. Wlien in the early days of the war, he threw his arms in tender and fraternal embrace around the neck of the Hun, he chose the same old Quaker City in which to stage the soul-stirring and freedom-teaching drama, in which Paddy and Fritz clasped hands in the presence of a host of hyphenates, and swore eternal fidelity to those principles of democracy which they have always held in common. This Philadelphia gathering, by the way, in the early stages of the war, was surely an occasion of historic interest, my son! I wish you could have been there, not only to catch the inspiration, but to make for yourself a reliable diagnosis of the reactions that might have been observed. [73] IRELAND'S WOES AND BRITAIN'S WILES Speaking after the manner of the wise men of our day and generation, (who are mostly doctors and chemists,) the outbreak of the war and the attack upon Belgium, was the 'acid test' of the democracy of Paddy Fein; and the Philadelphia meeting registered with unerring certainty the resultant reaction. With cruel and merciless logic, the Irish conception of autocracy and dem- ocracy, was disclosed to be identical with that of the Hun. At the very time when Belgium was being crushed under the iron heel of Prussian autocracy — when all the world beside was stand- ing aghast at the hellish cruelties of autocratic lust, these lovers of freedom and democracy joined in a demonstration of ardent and outspoken sympathy with the perpetrators of these devilish things. Hyphenated Americans of different breeds, some of them Judges from the bench, who disgraced not only the office to which they had been elected in a democratic country, but also the citizenship to which they had been admitted or into which they had been born, — expressed their joy and satisfaction over the success of the German arms. Fraternal eulogies were pronounced, the songs of Ireland and Germany intermingled, and banners representing the two countries, inter- twined, while at a given signal there marched upon the platform from either side, an armed and uniformed company of men. One company represented the Hun who at that moment was raping Belgium, and the other represented Sinn [74] PROPAGANDA Fein, spilling out of his package, and smearing the label he had placed upon himself. When the leaders of the two groups clasped hands on the center of the stage, the symbolism was complete, — Irish democracy and Prussian autocracy were seen to be one and the same, — inseparable and indivisible now and forever more. It may mean little or it may mean much, but in this connection it is an interesting fact, and pos- sibly it is more significant than we think for, that the only citizens of the American Republic, who claim and appropriate the title of ' Prince ', — who demand and have accorded them the homage that is supposed to go with the title, are men of Irish birth or blood. These men claim, or it is claimed for them, that they occupy the position of foreign princes of the blood, and that the United States government is under obligation to do them honor as such, — that they are entitled to honors and salutes from the navy of our country in exactly the same measure as those given to royal per- sonages from abroad, — and further that their right of precedence is second only to the President of the Nation himself. Of course all this is only another way of ex- pressing democracy, of the kind Paddy Fein and Fritzie Hun approve and support. Perhaps we might as well say little or nothing about it, for the tag is glued tight upon it, if it is upside down. However, when the Sinn Fein orator, in an effort to enlarge the letters on the label, protests his [75] IRELAND'S WOES AND BRITAIN'S WILES repudiation and detestation of all kings and their kind, we can hardly forget that it is not by any means an unheard of thing for men of Irish line- age, on both sides of the sea, to kiss with becoming submission, the hand of a prince. Another suggestion presents itself in this con- nection with the experience through which the world has been passing in recent years. The war in its final outcome, has played havoc with autocracy, for the time being at least. Autocracies have been tumbling from their thrones in all direc- tions. AVith the Hohenzollerns and the Hapsburgs gone, there are no national autocracies left. A lesser breed of autocracies still remains, however ; but these may well begin to tremble in their shoes, as they evidently are commencing to do, — from the boss of a New England hill town or chapel, or the ward boss in Boston or New York, to the silent, sullen old man who sits on the banks of the Tiber, nursing the petulant fiction, that he is kept in prison within the four walls of his own palace. Of course it is true that the autocrat of whatever degree or kind, is always lonely and is always a prisoner when he is surrounded by his equals. Democracy automatically puts him in prison, and as the world moves forward towards the democratic ideal, this becomes inevitable. There is no escape from the inexorable law. This my son, is really the trouble with dear old Ireland. The autocratic bent of mind and spirit which the agitators label democracy and love of [76] PROPAGANDA freedom, is ever at war against the impact of equality of privilege and opportunity. Divine right dies hard, whether it is the Divine right of prince or priest or Pat, and it is of one texture wherever you find it, whether on the Liffey or the Tiber or on Charles Eiver, flowing into Boston Bay. Special privilege is always the enemy of univer- sal privilege. It constantly assumes an attitude of bitter intolerance and aggression against any en- croachment upon its prerogatives or its domain. Special privilege, however, is steadily giving way to universal privilege, all the world over; but it seems likely to survive and keep kicking in Ireland till Gabriel 's trumpet blows. Has it ever occurred to you my son, that the Irish are never pioneers? Paddy has never blazed a way through the forest nor made a trail across the plain. Multitudes have emigrated from the old sod, but never to become pathfinders or explorers. Thousands have come from Norway and Sweden to America just as thousands have come from Ireland; but the Scandinavians in large numbers, have pushed on to the frontiers. Pat has usually remained in the cities, or in the regions already settled or occupied by either the farm or the factory. In spite of the wailing moan of the agitator to the contrary, Ireland has been depopulated in exactly the same way and for the same cause, as many a rural town in New Eng- land; but the New Englander or his progeny, is {77^ IRELAND'S WOES AND BRITAIN'S WILES to be found at the outposts of civilization. Such we do not discover to be the case with the man from Erin. It is interesting to note the races that have been voyagers and explorers on this Continent. The Dutch pushed out into the wilderness. The French moved on and on, till they found a river, and then traced either to its mouth or its source. The Spaniard braved the dangers of unknown seas and water courses, while Englishmen and Scotchmen led the van into the mountains or far into the frozen regions of the north. Strange is it not, that here again, we discover that neither the Prussian nor Pat seem to have taken any chances, by pushing into the unknown; moreover one can scarcely recall an invention or a discovery that has added to the world's wealth or comfort in which either of these gentlemen had a share; but each of them has a ready faculty for adapting and exploiting what others have discovered or created. Given a million milleniums, Pat never could have founded or built a city like New York ; but finding it already built, he could take and exploit it to the tune of six or seven million dollars a year, if the presentment of a Grand Jury in the year 1892, is to be relied upon. Perhaps it isn't altogether kind to say it, but one is forcibly reminded of the hermit crab when he tries to make a study of Pat. The crab never builds a shell for himself, and he would not know how to do it, if he tried. Finding the cast off shell [78] PROPAGANDA of some fellow creature who has gone to the happy hunting ground, the crab backs into it, and makes himself at home. He is as happy as a clam and as the day is long, ever after. He worries not at all over the high cost of living or of rent, and has little fear that the Bolsheviki may possibly invade his native heath. In like manner Pat finds the shell of some fellow creature, who has not indeed, migrated to the realms of bliss, but who has gone on a yachting trip, or is too busy sawing wood to keep the home fires burning, greatly to care who occupies the ingle-nook, when the hearth begins to glow. So he wakes up some fine morning to discover that Pat has backed himself into the shell and has taken possession. Whether this rather distinctive and interesting characteristic has any bearing upon the situation when Paddy puts on the war-paint of Sinn Fein, I do not pretend to say ; but the propagandist and agitator is ever setting forth the Irishman as one who looks backward, and not forward. He takes him out of the stream of evolution and progress, and compels him to shiver and complain on the bank, while all the rest of the universe rolls on- ward to the goal. For him the golden age is in the past, and he not only insists for himself, but for everybody else, that the race must retrace its steps or it is doomed. If he would insist pleas- antly we wouldn't mind, but when he brandishes the tomahawk and the war-club, we have mis- givings. [79] IRELAND'S WOES AND BRITAIN'S WILES This backward looking attitude is seen in the wild efforts that are being made to resurrect and resuscitate the ancient Keltic language of Ire- land; and in the hope that some day it will be said and sung in all the valleys and on all the hill-tops in the land. The English language has been the vehicle of democracy, and that is per- haps the chief reason why Sinn Fein would have it displaced. English speech has carried parlia- ments and parliamentary usage to the ends of the earth, and that is why it should be suppressed in Ireland. We are told that the Irish Gaelic is a sister language to Latin and Greek, and this I dare not deny; but why one sister in the trio of graces, should escape the application of the law of evolu- tion and progress, I am at a loss to understand. I suppose, like so many things in Ireland, it is a law unto itself. Nor can I understand why the ancient Hebrew is left out of the argument, for my Highland Scotch friend tells me that his Gaelic is possessed of many points and characteristics that suggest a kinship with the Hebrew. I am told that the Hebrew language reads and is writ- ten from right to left, instead of the opposite direction, as is the case with modern forms of expression. This would seem would it not, to be the natural method when men first assayed the task? I do not know whether the ancient Irish follows this course. Judging from the antics of the members of the parliament of the late lamented [80] PKOPAGANDA *' Republic," I should say it is written in circles or spirals and not in straight lines at all. Be that as it may, it is quite evident that these languages are primitive, and belong to the early stages of human civilization. Indeed my Scotch friend Sandy, insists that his Gaelic is the language in which Adam and Eve enjoyed their first court- ship in Eden; but there is a twinkle in his eye that indicates his appreciation of the humor of the assumption. If Paddy Fein put forth a sim- ilar claim, he would do it with every hair sticking straight 'up ready to fight anybody who would dare to dispute, — or who would suggest that he might be a little more companionable to the rest of the human race, if he would wallv with his face looking forward and not backward. Paddy! Paddy! Paddy McFein! For the love of Mike, will you not go to school for a few weeks to Sandy McNab and learn to laugh at the agitators who crawl backward like a crab and want you to do the same. 1 have an idea my son, that the woes of Ireland could be cured if a laughing propaganda could be inaugurated and pressed in the Emerald Isle. I would send over a band of genial men, whose sole occupation for ten or twenty years, would be to teach the Irish people to laugh at themselves and their foibles ; and if the Society for the prevention of cruelty to animals didn 't get after me, I would take over the celebrated Munchausen Triplets from this country, and compel them to travel [8i] IRELAND'S WOES AND BRITAIN'S WILES incessantly, from one end of the land to the other, in order that the good Irish folk would have a concrete object to practice upon. T feel satisfied that if this thing could be done, a score of years would not have rolled by, before Sinn Fein would have had decent burial, and Paddy would need no label with letters a mile high, to proclaim the era and the class to which he belongs. r82l CHAPTER IX Admissions and Contbadictions THE frantic and hysterical propaganda of hate which the Sinn Fein people have been engaged in, ought in the long run, to have a certain educational value, and probably will have. It is bound to defeat its own purpose by its virulent excesses. Its stupid and petulant exaggerations not only lose their force and cease to have any convincing power, but increasingly have a tendency to discredit the cause they seek to advance. The animus and malevolence that lies back of this campaign, disgusts thoughtful and intelligent people, and clears the way for an unprejudiced and reasonable appreciation and understanding of the whole problem. The spirit and character of the agitation and the agitators, are all the while being disclosed, and the contra- dictions and admissions into which they are for- ever floundering, let in the light better than any counter propaganda could do. As already intimated, the predilection and bent of mind of the Irish, was well illustrated when Germany with a mailed fist, spiked and riveted, struck civilization full in the face. I speak of course, of that noisy and combustible part of the [83] IRELAND'S WOES AND BRITAIN'S WILES race on either side of the ocean, that insists it has the right to speak for the whole. We must remem- ber and recognize the two hundred thousand loyal Irishmen from the north, who fought the brutal autocracy of the Prussian, with a valor and a steadfastness unsurpassed by the soldiers of any army, and who disown and repudiate Sinn Feiners as traitors to freedom and democracy, as strongly as loyal Englishmen or loyal Americans do. These splendid sons of the Emerald Isle live and fight and die for democracy, while their traitorous countrymen in both hemispheres only vapor and mouth about it, and put forth laughable and pre- posterous pretentions, which in spirit and in prac- tice they constantly contradict, while uncon- sciously proclaiming themselves domineering autocrats in every fibre of their being. It was this spirit that automatically placed them in the camp of the Hun. The two were made to travel in the same team, and Paddy Fein can no more talk himself away from it than he can camouflage the twist of his tongue, at any rate not until one or the other treads on his yokefellow's toes. Perhaps it is this effort to claim an interest and an attitude of mind that is entirely foreign to his nature, that leads the Sinn Fein agitator to make the admissions and contradictions into which, inadvertently, he falls. As the exigencies of debate require, the one set of circumstances produce diametrically opposite results, and two or more facts or circumstances that are hostile to [84] ADMISSIONS AND CONTRADICTIONS one another and mutually exclusive, contribute to establish one and the same proposition. Of course the one outstanding proposition to be demon- strated and maintained is that England has been the sole and only cause of Ireland's difficulties and woes. Always and everywhere it is the same old unreasonable spirit against which the parable makes remonstrance: *'We have piped unto you and ye have not danced, we have mourned and ye have not lamented." If the British Parlia- ment, which, of course has always included Irish representatives in equal proportion, encouraged and developed some agricultural possibility of the island until the result was abundance and pros- perity, it was in order that England might enrich herself at Ireland's expense, and so that her manu- facturing industries might be discouraged and suppressed in the interest of English factories. If some manufacturing industry was encouraged by the tariff laws of the Empire, and British capital added to Irish capital made it a success, then it was done that the coal barons of England might grow rich at Ireland's expense, while seeing to it that the Irish coal deposits are left unde- veloped. When Railroads are built in order to enable the Irish farmer to get his produce to market, it is in order to get the natural wealth out of his country, away from him and out of the land, while at the same time and on the other hand, the Rail- road management steers the lines as far away [8s] IRELAND'S WOES AND BRITAIN'S WILES from the coal and mineral deposits as possible lest Irish coal should compete with English coal. If the potato crop is abundant, England gets rich on it, and she encouraged the planting of potatoes for that express purpose. If a blight strikes it and suffering and famine ensue, Eng- land did not indeed send the blight, though to hear some of the spell-binders you would think she did ; but she is to blame for leading Pat to put all his eggs into one basket, and when that basket gets smashed he has nothing to fall back upon to keep the wolf from the door. England is keeping Ireland in poverty and pri- vation, we are told in one breath and in the next, in order to show the natural wealth of the country, in spite of English oppression, we are informed that the trade between Ireland and Great Britain bulks larger than that between Great Britain and any other country with the single exception of the United States. It isn't kind of the U. S. A. to do more to make England rich than Ireland does. Do these agitators think that all the Irish are fools'? Is it necessary to tell Pat that if John Bull doesn 't stand by and tell him when and where to plant a hill of beans, he isn't giving him a fair chance, and if he does so advise him, then he is interfering with his freedom ? The Englishman found his coal and dug into the earth to get it, and then he built a Railway to carry it where he wanted it. Is the Irishman any less intelligent and enterprising? These demagogues [86] ADMISSIONS AND CONTRADICTIONS and agitators keep insinuating that he is far less so. The Englishman, the Scotchman and the American decide whether they will plant potatoes or oats or sweet corn, — any or all of these, or whether they will discard all and build a cider mill and go into the manufacturing business. Sometimes these fellows are wise and right in their decisions and sometimes they are dead wrong, but they take their chances; and not one of them has any more freedom to do as he likes than Pat has. Is Pat any less independent and wide-awake? These spell-binders are forever in- sulting the Irishman by saying and insinuating that he is. They try to make out that Pat is a helpless baby, which is not true by any manner of means. One would think that the next time a hyphenated delegation goes over from this coun- try, all Ireland would rise in anger and ride its membership out of the land on a rail, and tell them to go back where they belong and stay there. God save Ireland from her friends ! Here is one of these champions of Ireland's cause, presumably a leading one, for he has writ- ten a book heralded far and near as one of the strongest appeals on behalf of the Sinn Fein point of view. In this ardent defence of Ireland and attack upon England, we are told why the ''revolution" of 1916 failed in the attainment of its purpose in setting Ireland free. The day set apart for the outbreak was Easter Sunday, but as in the past, something went wrong. It was the [871 IRELAND'S WOES AND BRITAIN'S WILES old tragedy of blunders, divided purposes and conflicting orders. The game was played out to the bitter end as it had always been, with divided counsels and a divided command. All this is the fullest possible admission of the fundamental con- tention of the British Government, and of the conviction arrived at by thoughtful and unpreju- diced students of the problem, namely, that the chief difficulty in the whole matter centers in Ire- land and not in England, — in the failure of the Irish to come to some reasonable agreement among themselves. Surely England was not to blame for these blunders and cross-purposes that per- sisted to the bitter end. The Unionists of Ulster can not have this tragedy laid to their charge. Even the Nationalists must be acquitted of all blame for the sad and disastrous outcome. No defence of England's position could have, put forth a more convincing argument than is embodied in these statements. Surely these ad- missions proclaim that the woes of Ireland spring from the absolute inability of the Irish to unite on any policy, or to stay united long enough to carry it into effect. Morover the age-long tragedy was re-enacted at Easter, 1916, not because the recognized age-long factions were pulling against one another on this occasion, but because a sup- posedly united faction developed within itself these counter-orders and cross-purposes that wrecked the enterprise. Too bad ! Too bad ! One can not but sympathize with the champions who [88] ADMISSIONS AND CONTRADICTIONS arrive at the mournful but inevitable conclusion. This is an example of the way these agitators contradict themselves and one another, and for- ever keep making admissions that give away their whole case. One moment we are told that the insu- lar character of Ireland and the almost total diver- gence of its Geology from that of England, proclaims the fact that nature intended them to be two separate nations, next moment we are given the interesting information, that the proximity of the two islands makes it certain that the great coal fields of Britain must assuredly be duplicated in Ireland, and of course England with cruel and reckless selfishness, is preventing their develop- ment. One wonders why England exploits the agricultural wealth of Ireland, and yet stupidly fails to exploit the superior wealth of the island, as represented in her mineral deposits. The Peck-sniffian President of a Peck-sniffian Republic who honored our country with his pres- ence for a time, denounced the people of Ulster for standing out against the rest of Ireland in the matter of separation from the Empire. Minorities should be reasonable, we are told, and so indeed they should. This is exactly what most folks who have looked into the matter, think of Ireland as a whole. If the minority of one in four which constitutes the Ulsterites is expected to be reason- able, why should not the one in ten of the popu- lation of Great Britain and Ireland, or the one in one hundred of the whole Empire, be expected to [89] IRELAND'S WOES AND BRITAIN'S WILES manifest a similar reasonableness. If the one in ten or the one in one hundred want to be by them- selves, and want to revert to a tribal state of civil- ization, why can't they go off without insisting upon dragging out of the family any of the others who are contented and happy to remain by the old fireside ? Moreover, why can 't they go off and set up quietly for themselves without developing within their own little circle the age-long blunders, the contradictory purposes and the petty antagonisms that play the game out to the bitter end. This however I presume is inevitable, and can not be helped, when the backward march is begun and insisted upon. The upward progress of civilization is marked by the elimination and amalgamation of tribes and it is natural that the reversion to type should mean the multiplication of tribes, and this all unconsciously perhaps, Sinn Fein is bound to achieve if it only can. We are told that the government of Ireland by England has been a cruel and tragic failure for centuries. In the first place it is well to remember that it isn 't England, but the Parliament of Great Britain and Ireland that has governed Ireland, — or misgoverned it if you like the term better. Granted for the sake of argument, that the latter proposition is true, then we are face to face with the fact that one of the marvels of all history is that this same government has been a remarkable success in every land, and among almost every race of people under the sun. The one and only [90] ADMISSIONS AND CONTRADICTIONS exception is Ireland. Surely we are forced by this consideration to look for the difficulty not in Eng- land, but in Ireland. Every imaginable and legitimate grievance hav- ing been redressed long since, the agitators are compelled to manufacture new ones or expatiate on ancient ones, as if they were still alive. We are told for instance, that the forcing of a state church on Ireland, and the collection of tithes for its support, constitutes a grievous wrong upon the Irish people, the majority of whom are of a different faith. We have no quarrel whatever with the statement. But there has been no state church in Ireland, and no tithes collected on be- half of any state church, for more than half a century. Moreover the most interesting and sig- nificant fact in connection with the matter, is that it v/as not the Irish, but the Non-conformist citi- zens of England that secured this reform. With pen and voice and vote they compelled the govern- ment of the day to redress this wrong; and from that day to this. Irishmen of the Sinn Fein type have given no sign of appreciation or gratitude, but have gone on complaining and whining and snarling at the heels of their benefactors. In this particular matter, the chief difficulty centers in the fact that while the Non-conformists of Eng- land opposed a state church on principle, — as much for themselves as for anybody else, the Irish simply wanted to substitute one state church for another. IRELAND'S WOES AND BRITAIN'S WILES Again we hear much about the disabilities under which Roman Catholics in Ireland have labored because of laws discriminating against them on account of their faith. To have their civil rights taken away from them on this score, to be sure is a grievous wrong, and a wrong that is not miti- gated in any way by the fact that their co-religion- ists in England suffered in a similar way. This latter fact does, however, tells us that there was no discrimination against Ireland. Moreover while it does not justify, it may explain the existence of these oppressive laws, to know that in the days of their enactment, the very foundations of free parliamentary government, were threatened and in great danger of being undermined and over- thrown ; and the statesmanship of the time seemed unable to devise any other safe-guard. Perhaps for the time there was no other. However that maj'' be, is it not petulantly childish on the part of demagogues and agitators, — not to say anything of the unreason and dishonesty of it, — to go on raving against this ancient wrong and constantly implying that it still presses upon the people of Ireland? It is nearly one hundred years since this repressive legislation was repealed. For almost a century the Roman Catholics of Ireland have enjoyed absolute equality before the law, with their Protestant neighbors. It surely shows the difficulties encountered in discovering a pres- ent day grievance to complain of and denounce, when the champions of Ireland are compelled to [92] ADMISSIONS AND CONTRADICTIONS go on setting up and knocking down over and over again this man of straw. Of course, all of us, — Anglo-Saxon, Irish, American, — have grievances against our forbears for putting debtors in prison, and for making it hot for poor old women accused of witchcraft; but it is hardly worth while to start a revolution or go to war over the matter at this late date. Once more and in like manner, our Sinn Fein orators perspire and grow red in the face until threatened with apoplexy, as they denounce England for her tariff enactments and navigation laws which discriminate against Irish industry and Irish commerce. I suppose it constitutes a crime on the part of England that she did not dis- cover centuries ago and put into practice the prin- ciples of Free Trade. It is indeed a dark blot on the pages of her history that she failed in this thing. It is only seventy years or there-abouts since England abolished all tariff laws and re- pealed all navigation enactments that hampered Ireland's commerce; and seventy years form only a drop in the bucket of a nation 's history. England should have repealed these laws a thousand years ago, but even then it would not have saved her from criticism and denunciation now ; for Ireland has not been able to enjoy through these three score and ten years, the absolute freedom of trade and navigation between the two Islands and the world, secured to her by Great Britain, because she had to remember and fret over the ancient [931 IRELAND'S WOES AND BRITAIN'S WILES years in which little of that freedom existed for anybody. It is facts like these that make vital and forceful the clamorous appeals of agitators and demagogues. No wonder they feel that the world should suspend and interdict all its activities for a time, in order that it may gaze with horror and amazement upon wrongs and grievances as ap- palling as these. [94] CHAPTER X Sinn Fein and the Senate YES, I think you are right my son. There does seem to be some points of resemblance between the U. S. Senate and the Irishman. One of the sad misfortunes that dogs the steps of Paddy Fein, is that he seems everlastingly ap- prehensive lest somebody is going to put some- thing over on him. He seems to take it for granted that all persons within sight, as well as some that are out of sight, are waiting to take advan- tage of him. He is suspicious and distrustful, and ever on the alert to resent some real or fancied attack upon his rights. It has been said that he carries a chip on his shoulder. I doubt however if this is true. At best I fancy, it is only a half truth, and fails to explain fully or in a satisfactory way, this striking characteristic of the man from the Emerald Isle. Possibly the attitude is less an aggressive one, and much more a posture of defence, than the world has generally supposed it to be. It may be that it is indirectly and not otherwise, that he invites a scrap. The child-like, or rather perhaps I should say, the childish nature which makes him petulant and peevish and [95] IRELAND'S WOES AND BRITAIN'S WILES unreasoning, develops in time, into a disposition abnormally suspicious. It is this that makes him something of a marplot in every factory and shop from Maine to California. Ask any factory boss or superintendent who has under his direction men of different nationalities, who are the people hardest to get along with ; and I '11 wager my cow against your cat, that nine times out of ten, the answer will be that a certain class of Irish are the most impossible of all. They are the chief kickers, not because they are independent, but because they lack independence. Childishly irritable, they are ever afraid somebody is going to take them unawares. Accustomed in some way, to look upon every bargain and trade as a one-sided affair, where if one party profits, the other is bound to lose, Paddy seems obsessed with the idea that everybody is trying to jockey him into a posi- tion, where the short end of the transaction is sure to be his portion. Singularly enough, this seemed to be the atti- tude of some of the members of our House of Lords at Washington in their fight against Presi- dent Wilson and the League of Nations. Many of us are inclined to resent the implica- tion that this Great Nation is a babe in the woods, with all kinds of wild things leering and grinning at us from behind every tree trunk. We don't like to think we are afraid to venture with our Limousine out upon the world's high-way for fear some saucy little Ford will spatter us [96] SINN FEIN AND THE SENATE with mud or rub some of the varnish off. We hate to be made to refuse to play the game for fear somebody takes advantage of us; and we hardly relish the imputation that we won 't go to the pic- nic because we feel sure all the rest of the kids want us to be there, so they can get a chunk of our pie. Really, my boy, if we are in such danger of getting our immaculate wings soiled, as some of our togo-clad advisers seem to think, is it not time we began to preen our white feathers, preparatory to flight into some far-away realm, where the wicked cease from troubling and the weary are at rest? If all the rest of the fellows are nothing but a pack of crooks trying to stack the cards or load the dice against us, would it not be well to put up the shutters in our shop windows at once, and turn the Capitol at Washington into a Temple with a shrine and an altar, on which to offer incense and adoration, to Mary Baker Eddy, the female deity of the Back Bay and the New Hampshire Hills ? In this way we could at least, escape con- tamination, for we could demonstrate either our- selves or the rest of the world out of existence, and as it seems at this distance, it would not greatly matter which. It is indeed too bad that the President should have tried to induce a timid, shrinking and de- fenceless maiden like our beloved land, to step into a cage among a lot of treacherous carnivora, just to get glory to himself, by showing how he [97] IRELAND'S WOES AND BRITAIN'S WILES could hold the blood-thirsty brutes with his hyp- notic eye. But this is by no means the worst of it. Phy- sical alarm and nervous tension induced by fear of bodily or material hurt, are very little things compared with the mental anguish into which the Senate was thrown, in presence of the imminent danger that the simplicity of our democracy might be debauched and corrupted out of all sem- blance to the comely dream which our fathers entertained. I wondered at the time why a commission was not appointed to examine the President 's baggage on his return from Paris, to determine whether or not it was true that he had brought over a whole trunkful of crowns and coronets, picked up in the pawn shops of Europe; and with which it was his purpose to reward his followers, when his ambitions as dictator had been realized. I venture a bet too, that he had already engaged three or four of the most impecunious dukes and grand dukes of the central empires, to come over here when all the smoke of the war had been blown away, in order that they might teach the Senate how this particular kind of head-gear ought to be worn. Moreover it is a safe proposition to sug- gest that a number of your Western Senators to- gether perhaps, with one or two down this way, might be induced to vote as they ought, provided they could have their pick from the contents of that trunk. Of course it goes without saying that [98] SINN FEIN AND THE SENATE some of our blue-blooded Eastern Legislators would not wear a second-hand coronet if it was filled with sovereigns as a reward. Nothing short of new and made-to-order diadem could ever be permitted to adorn their brow. Your Western Pro-consuls are less particular. Even though the Treaty was not ratified nor the League of Nations endorsed, the bitter and prolonged discussion was not without its value, for the principles involved in this historic debate are principles that constantly obtrude in all leg- islative action in a democratic country such as ours. I had hoped to see emerge from the room of the Foreign Relations Committee, a stiff and drastic amendment providing for the recognition and per- petual maintenance of the right of Self Determin- ation for the Senate of the United States of America. The opportunity ought not to have been permitted to slip by, without making every possible effort to secure and assure the contin- uance of the independence of this, one of the greatest law-making bodies in the world. You will remember that when Sergeant Paddy Fein twirled his swagger stick and gave the com- mand, — "Eyes Forninst" — the Senate clicked its heels and came to the salute quicker than the Prussian Guard ever did ; and it passed with mili- tary promptitude a beautiful resolution to which Paddy gave gracious and unanimous approval. With becoming deference and respect, the Senate [99] IRELAND'S WOES AND BRITAIN'S WILES in well-chosen words and with hand held steadily at salute, expressed the rare pleasure it gave to request that the Hibernian friends of the Kaiser, should have an honored place at the Peace Con- ference in Paris. The Senate Chamber echoed with oratory of which the following sentence may serve for substance and type ; — ^' We have always desired as a Nation that all people should go on peacefully under a government of their own choice." One wonders if these eloquent Solons ever heard of a people as numerous as the Irish and occupying a territory more than twenty times as great, who wished to go on peacefully under a government of their own choice, and the United States of America waged a bitter and determined war of four years' duration, to prevent any such thing. What doughty champions of the Con- federacy some of these brilliant statesmen of our day would have been ! Presumably most of them were still in the kindergarten, possibly some of them had not reached that point in their educa- tional career at the time the Civil war was in progress; but why they should have remained stationary at that stage all these years, it would take more than the perspicacity and acumen of a Pittsburg lawyer to elucidate and explain. Of course when votes and not liberties are at stake, large allowance has to be made because of the emergency of the case ; and when a Presiden- tial bee begins to make its nest in somebody's [lOO] SINN FEIN AND THE SENATE bonnet, self-determination isn't likely to be the first tiling a politician thinks about; and besides if he gets bitten with some kind of a hyphenated bug, I doubt if even you my friend, know of any antitoxin that will counteract the virus or render the victim immune. Speaking with all gravtiy, we are not a little concerned these days, over the hyphenated citi- zen in our midst. President Wilson himself never uttered a truer sentiment than when he said that the man who carries a hyphen about with him, is an enemy of the Republic. But who is it that is chiefly to blame for the perpetuation of the hyphen? Is it not the party politician? He has petted and coddled and humored the hyphened voter, till he has become convinced that a hyphen is one of the most valued and precious commodi- ties any citizen of this nation can possess. We have ourselves to blame if the hyphenated citizen has become arrogant and a dictatorial nuisance in our land. To please him, we have thrown bricks and dead cats at the targets he has set up, and now he tells us we are afraid of him, and I guess he is right. The tragedy and the menace of the hyphen is that it is home-made, and is here to stay. We have wished that dilatory old England would settle the Irish problem, and we have cared less than a continental, how, if she would only do it, so the thing would be eliminated from Ameri- can politics ; but it is a vain wish. We might as [lOl] IRELAND'S WOES AND BRITAIN'S WILES well cry for the moon. In the first place we forget that we have done much to make the task of England an all but impossible one; and in the second place we fail to realize that the question settled on the other side of the sea, would not settle it on this. Home Eule or no Home Rule, — Republic or no Republic, on the old sod, we would still have a hyphen to reckon with here; and for that favor we can chiefly bestow our thanks upon ourselves. It is the mixing up of all this miserable spite and unreason, with a great International Question, like the Treaty of Peace and the League of Nations, that disgusts so many thoughtful American citizens. Of course it would never do to permit the President to have the credit for negotiating a World Peace and a World League. Of course that would put him in line with the two outstanding figures in the nation's history, and the world's advance towards the democratic ideal; and that would never do. Washington, — Lincoln, — Wilson, — would not look well in jaundiced eyes, so any weapon is good enough to use. How- ever if party interests do demand that the Presi- dent should be sat upon, why can not the matter be debated and accomplished without casting slurs and affronts in the face of nations and peoples who have been our loyal and splendid Allies, through a terrible war, and who most of them have made sacrifices which in the nature of [102] SINN FEIN AND THE SENATE the case, we have not been called upon to make? Have we no generosity ? We were told that we had our Allies at our mercy and that we could dictate our terms as to the Treaty and the League, and these sentiments were applauded as an evidence of supreme states- manship. To some of us poor mortals, after we as a nation had an equal voice at the peace table, it seems not only the grossest selfishness and in- gratitude, but at the same time has the effect of placing the good old U. S. A. in the position of asking for special privileges. Are we not big enough and dignified enough, to stand squarely on the same footing with all the rest of the folk in the game? We had one of these Solonesque orators telling us that our nation was the only solvent, going concern on the top of the earth, and that we ought to beware of entering into a partnership with a lot of bankrupt countries. Are we such a feeble, spineless folk that we need that kind of Senatorial piffle to put backbone into our Americanism and punch into our patriotism? Does the school-boy politician not know that at the very time he was speaking, the Bankers of the world were rating the four chief bankrupts in about the same class with ourselves, and in some instances their securi- ties had a higher rating than ours in the markets of the world? Did he not know that while he was speaking, England with leaps and bounds and in a perfectly legitimate way, was recapturing the [103] IRELAND'S WOES AND BRITAIN'S WILES world's trade ? No sooner had the Armistice been signed, than England began reaching out with marvelous success in the direction of securing and maintaining her old supremacy. Trade ex- ports at the time, were showing a gain of more than a hundred million a month. An amazing position for a bankrupt nation to be in ! If instead of chasing after a six to one vote in the League where it does not exist, some of the ferret-like scrutiny had turned its gaze upon the six to one body of common sense and business sagacity that Great Britain seems to exercise in her commercial relations with the rest of the world, some of these legislators of ours would have been doing their country a better service. The day has gone by when bigness is disclosed and enhanced by distrust and abuse of other nations. It may be that we need the rest of the world almost as much as the rest of the world needs us ; and it might be good business as well as good manners not to turn up our noses too high, when we are invited to drink a friendly cup of tea with the rest of the folks, even if they don't live on Fifth Avenue or on Eiverside Drive. [104] CHAPTER XI John Bull and Uncle Sam THE reapproachment of America and Great Britain, and the more intelligent and gen- erous understanding of one country by the other, that constitutes one of the bi-products of the war, has been accompanied by a recrudescence of a particularly virulent type of Anglophobia in our midst. That John Bull and Uncle Sam should be seen out walking together arm in arm, while it has been a source of gratification to many people, has been to others something like the proverbial red rag to a bull. The well-organized and well-timed propaganda of hate, pushed by the professional spite-mongers, doubtless has had much to do with this thing ; but one is rather surprised to discover that even with that bellows to do the blowing, so much of the dead ashes of generations ago could have been fanned into a flame. Many are the causes no doubt, that have con- tributed to this result, but it is evident that the itch of party politics at Washington, localized at first, has been scratched until large sections of [105] IRELAND'S WOES AND BRITAIN'S WILES hitherto apparently healthy epidermus have been infected and inflamed; and with their cuticle on fire men have run amuck in an effort to escape from the irritation and to account for their dis- tress, and have spread the contagion far and near. The other night I ran across a man far out in a country place, who was raw all over, and he came at me like an angry canine tormented by a million fleas. I had never spoken a word to this man nor in his hearing, that could have given him any clue as to my feeling towards President Wilson or the League of Nations. There is no imaginable way in which he could have known how or in what direction my sympathies lay save that I sometimes try to look intelligent, and it may be that possibly I succeeded better than common on that occasion. Anyway he batted me all over the ring until I was groggy and hanging on to the ropes. Golly! I thought he was going to eat me up, suspenders and all. '^ Didn't I know this and didn't I know that?" ''Isn't it true this and isn't it true that?" The whole panorama of History and Geography was laid before me from the time of the Boston Tea Party to the recent guzzling of that self-same beverage at Bucking;ham Palace and Downing Street. Wilson thought he was something of a diplomat until Lloyd-George and Clemenceau got hold of him, and when they were through with liim, lie looked like a pair of ancient galluses with the buckles broken off. Modestly and meekly I [io6] JOHN BULL AND UNCLE SAM tried to assure the man that I didn't bring up the President nor place him in the White House, and that I had never seen Clemenceau nor Mr. Lloyd- George. It was no use. It seemed like rubbing red pepper into the excoriated integument. I withdrew from the field of action, to adjust my collar and to take off a necktie imported from Picadilly during the war. Well, it is all very interesting and very funny, my boy ! But it has sent a lot of us to investigate afresh the basis of our prejudices, to examine from a new angle our histories, together with the passing national and international movements of recent generations as well as of our day; and to study the portly carriage of John Bull from a closer and more intimate vantage point than we have ever ventured or cared to do it before. One thing I think, we have discovered beyond the pos- sibility of dispute is that the tenant of the tight little Island beyond the sea, is neither angel nor devil, but human — intensely* and interestingly human, and that in spite of all preconceptions to the contrary, there is much that is likeable about the old fellow after all. Furthermore, not only has our liking grown with our study but with a fuller and better realization and understanding of the kind of enemies he has made, for it is certain that many of the criticisms and adverse judg- ments passed upon England, rightly appraised are seen to be to her credit rather than otherwise. A prominent German is reported to have said [107] IRELAND'S WOES AND BRITAIN'S WILES to a distinguished Englishman long before the war, — ''You Englishmen talk about justice and humanity, — we Germans think you are a set of damned fools," and it was a German who re- marked, — ''A German can never become a gentle- man, and an Englishman can never be anything but a fool. ' ' There is much philosophy and much truth in these statements, and the truth strikes deeper into the heart of things, than the formu- lated expression at first thought would seem to indicate. To the German mind there is a higher law than the law of humanity and justice, and that is the law of self interest ; and what grieves the Teuton and makes him impatient and angry with his neighbor on the other side of the North Sea, is not only that he holds an opposite theory, but is ever upsetting the orderly and logical course of things by trying to put that theory into practice. And what is most exasperating of all, by some strange fate, he seems to make a success of things and in nine cases out of ten, comes out on top in the end. That self interest in the long run, should lie in the line of doing unto others as you would have others do to you, is all very well, but it is slow and idiotic when you have a chance to do something else and something bigger. To possess the power to exploit and yet to fail to exploit is to play the fool, and to muddle through on that principle is to proclaim one's self a prince among fools. It is this muddling through and on the level, when he has such con« [io8] JOHN BULL AND UNCLE SAM spicuous opportunities to do otherwise, that above everything else, constitutes the Englishman a fool. To tell the truth, one is in a quandary sometimes as to whether this course may not lead close to the boundary line of fool-dom now and again. We rather admire a great Mastiff or Newfoundlander stalking nonchalantly among a yardful of little tikes barking and biting at his heels, but we would like to see him, once in a while send one of them yelping home with his tail between his legs, if only to give us a chance to clap our hands and say, — 'It serves you right.' Some of us who are disposed to be friendly and sympathetic towards John Bull, have a wicked streak in us, and we sometimes think, deserve a little consideration at his hands. For instance, when our precious Munchausen Triplets came back from Ireland, their baggage bulging out with made-to-order atrocities, John Bull for a time, declined to deny their preposter- ous charges, saying, — ''only those who want to believe such things will pay any attention to them at all." Dog on it ! Is the old man in his dotage, in that he doesn't know that there are several million people scattered about this old planet, who are jealous enough and petty enough to believe any lie that anybody likes to put in cir- culation about him? We think too, John might have dropped a few bombs on German fishing villages and watering places, just to let Fritzie know how it tasted, [109] IRELAND'S WOES AND BRITAIN'S WILES especially when this same Fritzie was calling him a fool because he didn't do it. Then again we think he might have let us take a look at some of his own achievements as the war went on. We had to send our men over to France to find out what he was doing and then crack even a Yankee vocabulary in trying to des- cribe what they saw. It would have cheered us in some of the dark days, if he had done a little bragging; but that is not John's way, and that it isn't is one of the things that helps the Teuton to make up his mind that John is a fool. Perhaps the Teuton is partly right, for John should not be too proud to learn some things from the Teuton, — and from us. If there is one ambition more dear than another to the heart of a German in his own private con- ception of things, it is that he should achieve the distinction of being rated a gentleman, and in spite of his 'Hymn of Hate' the one model that he slavishly imitates, is the Englishman. He dresses like him, walks like him, lifts his hat and bows like him, and if he can speak his language with a proper Cockney accent, his education on this line is regarded as complete and the tag of the gentleman is tied into his button-hole. Some of our own folks do the same thing, and then a lot of us get quite as vexed with John Bull because of it, as we do with our own country- men for being possessed of a vaulting ambition as extravagant as that. [no] JOHN BULL AND UNCLE SAM Nevertheless and alas however, the German at length, becomes conscious that it is evident even to himself that there is still something lacking. The spirit within can not be successfully camou- flaged by the trappings from without. The Englishman is a gentleman not because he dresses well, but he dresses well because his instincts as a gentleman prompt him in that direction, and there is a whole world of meaning in this dis- tinction. It is a principle that works itself out in a multitude of ways in the relationship that John Bull maintains towards the rest of man- kind. John Bull and his Island get many a compli- ment from the folk that hate him and are preju- diced against him, and one of the funny things about it all, is that those of us who don't hate him are dubious as to his worthiness to receive many of the tributes that the Anglophobist all unconsciously, lays at his feet. A certain type of petty provincialism never tires berating any of our folk who allow them- selves to fall under the spell of Mr. and Mrs. Bull 's hypnotic eye. To have one 's name on their calling list indicates a craven and fawning spirit, that has been over-ridden by a more masterful will, and the only way to make sure that you don 't have the wool pulled over your eyes, is to stay on your own side of the sea. With these people it is always John Bull that wheedles Uncle Sam and never Uncle Sam that wheedles John Bull. [Ill] IRELAND'S WOES AND BRITAIN'S WILES What forceful and superior intellects these Britishers must have! The only way to make sure they won't get you, is to keep away from them altogether. I for one, feel inclined to resent the implication that John Bull is always the stronger character and that Uncle Sam is ever the weakling, whose mother doesn't know he is out. He is a pretty bird to be sure, to permit salt to be put on his tail in that fashion. These good people who nurse and cherish so ardently their prejudices and their ignorance, must be hard pressed for material out of Avhich to construct argument or they never would cast such aspersions on their own country as they do. Another bouquet as unwillingly and uncon- sciously bestowed, as it is undeservedly received, which the Anglophobist pins on the swelling bosom of John Bull, is the insistent demand and expec- tation that he discharge all his national and inter- national obligations, and maintain a relationship towards all peoples under his flag, in such a way as to present neither spot nor wrinkle nor any such thing. Mistakes and failures are to be expected and excused elsewhere, but for the British to fail is not for a moment to be thought of. To err is human, but to err is not British, and is sufficient to have any government or governmental official, masquer- ading under the name, consigned to perdition by the very first caravan going that way. If to ex- pect and look for high efficiency and high honor [112] JOHN BULL AND UNCLE SAM on the part of an individual or nation, is an incen- tive to heroic endeavor and sacrifice, then Eng- land ought to measure up in a superlative degree, to the highest ideals national and international, that the mind of man has conceived. Even her bitterest enemies and calumniators look for and expect it of her. There is nothing quite like it in all the earth beside. We don't look for infalli- bility elsewhere, not even in the United States Senate. With the best of intention and manage- ment, even there an ignoramus will now and again slip by, but that there should be ignorance in India or Ehodesia or Ireland, admits of no exten- uating excuse whatsoever. The managers and leaders in educational work among our soldiers in France, tell us that of all tJie allied armies in Europe, ours was the most illiterate. We think, however, that in intelligence our force would compare favorably with the best, for there is a difference between illiteracy and ignorance; but if the worst comes to the worst, and these men can make good their startling assertion as to illiteracy in all its bearings, we still feel that there are extenuating circumstances that prevail to the same extent in no other land. Our Anglophobist, however, insists that circum- stances could be ignored or overborne where the British flag flies, and that all ignorance and super- stition and fanaticism should vanish, even in Ire- land, and if they do not, some official has blun- dered and ought to be hanged. We do not look [II31 IRELAND'S WOES AND BRITAIN'S WILES for such miracles anywhere but under British rule. There, we feel sure, the impossible can be made possible. What compliment or credit could be more genuine and sincere than that? One of the meanest and most contemptible lines of propaganda, that the British haters have been pursuing, has been the effort to stir up ill feeling over the part England took or failed to take in the matter of conveying our troops to and from Europe. When it was a matter of getting our men over and into the fighting we are told, she was eager enough to supply us with ships, but when the fighting was over and we wanted to get our boys home, she had other use for her boats. In the first place one wonders why it is that some of our people persist in pushing Uncle Sam into the position of being a spectator, standing on the side lines watching the game. So far as my obser- vation goes, that has never been the way our Uncle has gone to war. What did we get into the war for if not to fight, and how could we fight two thousand miles away from the firing line? Was it not as urgent and as necessary for our own sakes as for the sake of the Allies in general or of England in particular, that our soldiers be gotten over to France in as large numbers, and as quickly as possible? We were all in the same boat. Would we not have expected then, that every man among us would off with his hat in admiration and gratitude towards the nation that was not only able but willing, in the face of her JOHN BULL AND UNCLE SAM rapidly decreasing tonnage, to take the risk of interrupting the flow of supplies that meant death or life to her own people, in order to give us a lift ? John Bull in effect, said to his own fighting men standing on the firing line all the way from the North Cape to the Cape of Good Hope ; — ''Hold the line. Make the most of the supplies you have got. Our ships are needed elsewhere. We know you will do it, for England expects every man to do his duty. ' ' To his men at home he said; — ''Prepare to take in your belts another hole," and to his women and children; — "We know the stuff you are made of. Your heroic spirit is the admiration and wonder of every chivalrous soul the world over. We may have to make another cut in rations, and take the risk of running a bit closer to the border line of hunger and want, but our ships are needed to bring a new army across the sea." This was the spirit in which England gave us the use of her ships, and when she had given us the help and had turned to take up again the interrupted and all but super- human task of carrying supplies and conveying her own people, it was in the same spirit of cheer- ful co-operation and good will, though she could not hope to catch up and make good the interrup- tion in many months, — not indeed till long after the time at which the Armistice was signed, for the carrying of supplies had to go on, Armistice or no Armistice. One blushes to think that there should have been a single soul between the two IRELAND'S WOES AND BRITAIN'S WILES oceans, so lost to honor and decency as to dig into the muck in search of some foul charge to fling in the face of our ally in connection with a service as magnificent as that. When the Armistice was signed, there were several thousand Canadian and Australian troops in France and Flanders. All caked and crusted with mud and blood they had been fighting like devils for four years, — fighting for themselves and their own countries, of course, but fighting for us and our country, too. They were homesick and when the fighting stopped, they wanted to get back to the folks they had left behind, but England could not spare the ships to take them home, and her inability was due in part at least, to the fact that she was straining every nerve to let us have what ships she could to fetch our boys home. There were English Tommies in Africa and Asia and on all the battle fronts of Europe who had been away and in the thick of the fight for more than four years, and England couldn't bring them home. If our big hearted boys over in France, — God bless them, had had the matter put up to them as it really was, I think I know pretty nearly what they would have said. Ninety-nine out of every hundred would have expressed themselves in some such language as this : — ''0 Gol darn it, we aint hogs ; — Take the Canucks home first. They have earned the right to the first chance. "We can wait. And the Anzacks too! They are farther from [116] JOHN BULL AND UNCLE SAM home and have been away longer than we have. Ship them off to the land of the kangaroo. We'll wait. And Mr. Thomas Atkins, away for four years from 'ome and native land! Lord bless 'im, 'ow can 'e stand it? Give him our compli- ments. Tell him, we aint just falling all over the neck of his tea and his gooseberry jam, but we found out what we never knew before, — that he is game and a sport and a gentleman of honor. Ship him back to Blighty. We'll wait. Dammit there aint no Sinn Fein about us." It is in some such way as this that our lads would have expressed themselves in France, but when they got back and the slimey, crawling dis- seminators of spite and suspicion began to din it into their ears, that the reason why they were so long in getting home was because England, while she could give ships enough to cart them over and dump them into the trenches to be shot to pieces by the Hun, had no ships to spare when we wanted to bring them home again, what wonder that some of them began to feel they had, a griev- ance against John Bull ! The thing looked plaus- ible enough, and plausible lies are the most malicious and wicked of the breed. Sad to say, we have some folk and there are Legislators and Editors and News Paper Proprietors among them, who are experts at manufacturing this par- ticular brand of falsehood. It is reported that the Father of Lies himself, is so jealous of them that he sits in a blue funk IRELAND'S WOES AND BRITAIN'S WILES half the time in his den, and without reading them, throws into the fire the reports that Mun- chausen brings in. This Anti-British and Pro-German spirit mani- fested by some of our people, is very hard to understand. It usually displays a gross and lamentable and wholly inexcusable ignorance, but that seems hardly sufficient to account for the in- tensity and bitterness of it. That it should have existed of and by itself, is bad enough, but that it should have assumed the form of taking to its bosom the treacherous and brutal enemies of man- kind against whom we had been compelled to draw the sword, seems altogether beyond belief. Sinn Fein allied himself with the Boche and fought on his side through the war, in the only way this kind of craven coward knows how to fight, — from ambush and by assassination, and when a bunch of them came over to this country, their hands dripping red with the blood of our own people that they had helped the Hun to do to their death, and yoked up with a band of hyphenated traitors here, who long ago, ought to have been lined up against a wall in front of a firing squad, — Legislators and Legislatures, Governors of States and Mayors of Cities, received them with open arms and tumbled over one another in an effort to do them honor. Such pusillanimity would have been incredible of belief if we hadn't seen it acted out before our eyes. Thank the good Lord, there are Mayors and public officials out your [ii8] JOHN BULL AND UNCLE SAM way, who have something other than a bit of cartilaginous shoe string for vertebrae, and who were courageous enough to put their whole poli- tical future in jeopardy by refusing to recognize or give countenance to the representatives of people, who if they only could have done it, would have sent every transport load of our boys to the bottom of the Atlantic. But don 't be so vain, my son, as to think that all the backbone in the country resides west of the Mississippi. There were officials here in the East, that these oleagin- ous assassins of human liberty did not dare ap- proach for fear of being thrown into the gutter. In this connection I notice that some of the Sinn Fein agitators in search of sympathy, are trying to squirm out of the position in which they placed themselves as enemies of America, by the effort they made to help the Hun win the war. They frankly admit and rather boast that they were eager and anxious that Germany should come out on top at first; but that the war is divided into two periods in their thought, — one preceding and the other following our entrance into it. At the beginning of the second period they became con- vinced that the Central Powers could not win with our country against them. Just what these bril- liant expounders of truth and honor, would have us infer from this peculiar mode of reasoning, does not seem exactly clear. Do they mean to imply that out of respect for us they turned against the Hun, or at least deserted him and IRELAND'S WOES AND BRITAIN'S WILES assumed an attitude of neutrality, — that over night the leopard changed his spots, so to speak? Or do they wish us to know that if there had been a ghost of a chance for the German to beat down his foes, they would not have played the part of traitor to their ally, but would have fought to the bitter end, irrespective of the position we had taken 1 Or more simply, is it just a matter of fact way in which Sinn Fein tells us that the rats came to the conclusion that it was high time for them to begin to leave the sinking ship? We do not forget however, that it was in the former period of the war that Belgium was raped, that Louvain and Dinant were burned, that nuns and other women were brutally assaulted, that priests and other civilians were murdered in cold blood and that the Lusitania with many of our o"v\ai people was sent to the bottom of the ocean. To run with the hare and hunt with the hounds is an accomplishment that other people as well as Sinn Fein, have found it rather difficult to acquire. [120] CHAPTER Xn Jealousies NO DOUBT there is much truth iu the sug- gestion that Great Britain is the victim of her own success, and that this fact lies close at the bottom of much of the ill-will and hostile criticism directed against her from many quarters. Laying aside for the moment the ques- tion of merit or demerit, the good or bad uses to which she has put her wealth and her power, there can be no question as to the fact that Britain is the greatest Empire that has ever existed in the history of mankind; and when some of the keenest and most competent students of history and of governmental affairs, in other lands and particularly in our own country confess and affirm, whether they are willing to do so or not, that the greatest Empire is at the same time the great- est Democracy that the world has ever seen, the paradox is so astounding and the facts so stub- born and assertive, it is little wonder that many people who have made up their minds to believe the opposite, are rendered impatient to an extent that is hard to restrain and keep from boiling over the top. When a yacht that we are satisfied, is built on [121] IRELAND'S WOES AND BRITAIN'S WILES lines that ought to doom her to failure and defeat, persists in showing her heels to her competitors, and time and again leads the field home, we are apt to feel that she isn't dealing fairly by us, especially if we have bet our money on the other craft; and, if we are not careful, are in danger of cherishing a secret wish that something may hap- pen that will send her speedily to the companion- ship of Davy Jones. For the last twenty-five years Ave have heard it repeated so often, that we have simply taken it for granted as a fact, that Great Britain was a decadent nation and on the down grade. Then there came the world war and Britain simply as- tounded the world when it began to dawn upon mankind, that with a vigor and force such per- haps as she had never exhibited at any previous time, she quietly refuted her critics by doing and more than doing what they said she could never do again; and at the end of four years fighting was going stronger than ever. There is a certain type of mind that cannot forgive that kind of thing. Burdened by a national debt before the war, that we all said was a mill-stone about her neck, she was able to finance her own end of the war and that of her allies until we came in, and at the end came out a creditor to other nations quite up to if not beyond her indebtedness to us, — thus showing a perversity that some folk find it hard to forgive. That in less than four years, she should have [122] JEALOUSIES overtaken Germany's lead of forty years in the matter of production of war munitions and equip- ment of all kinds, was the salvation of her allies including- the United States, but it was an achieve- ment rather exasperating to jealous folk. That she should have laid upon the altar of human liberty a holocaust of young manhood so great that if every one of the two million in the American Expeditionary Force in France, and every one of the one and one-half million ready to go across, had become a casuality, the total would have fallen short by more than fifty thou- sand of the sacrifice Britain made, led multitudes of us to bow our heads in amazement and grate- ful admiration, but at the same time seems only to have added fuel to the hate burning in jealous hearts. One is almost compelled to suspect that the underlying reason for the unkind and manifestly unjust criticisims passed upon England in con- nection with the carrying of our troops, has its roots in the same principle. What a tonnage England must have had to begin with, far more than any nation had any business to have, if after months of submarine warfare, when she was losing at the rate of many thousands of tons every week, she was still able to convey more than half our men for us. Big hearted men thought it was great and grand. Pigmy, provincial men could hardly forgive England for being able to do as much. Whatever may be said of these things, one can [123] IRELAND'S WOES AND BRITAIN'S WILES not read nor listen to the bitter denunciations of England which the Sinn Fein people indulge in, without being convinced that the greatest griev- ance they have in these days, is that long ago she redressed and did away with every legitimate grievance and left them the necessity of dragging to the front ancient wrongs, or of manufacturing out of whole cloth, new ones to expatiate upon. When we have made all due allowance for the mis- takes and blunders incident to the solution of a difficult problem, one of the most conspicuous facts that presents itself, is the fair dealing and patience that the government of Great Britain and Ireland, has displayed towards the malcon- tents and fanatical mischief makers, whose busi- ness it has been to make trouble for poor old Ireland. In reality, in the minds of many of these trouble makers, England 's greatest crime has been her patience and her fair play. Indeed to them it has been anything but fair play, to rob them in this way, of their most efficient weapons and their most effective amunition. It is in this quiet but telling way that England often disarms her critics. It is this habit of quietly doing the things we all said she had long since lost the ability to do, and of succeeding where she has no business to succeed, that is so exasperating. It is this more than anything else perhaps, that leads prejudiced minds to conclude that some crooked or underhanded method must have been employed to bring to pass these results. [124] JEALOUSIES This type of mind sees no other way in which the thing could be done, and so of course, England succeeds because she oppresses, coerces and ex- ploits. This type of mind knows nothing of the principle, that the individual and the nation that serve others most, serve themselves best in the long run. The self service can be seen and it awakens jealousy, but the service of others, out of which it grows, jealous folk can not or will not see. England of course is selfish like the rest of us, grossly selfish at times no doubt, but long ago she discovered that to exploit and despoil other peoples, is not the way to permanently profit by association with them. She has learned what is difficult for some people to learn, that the more prosperous she can help another people to become, the larger the volume of trade she is likely to be able to carry on with that people. The more she can help them, the more they can help her. The more she invests in their interests, the larger the returns will be that accrue to herself. Her critics very quickly see the profits she enjoys by dealing with these other peoples, but with their way of looking at things, and I fear we must con- clude, with their way of doing things, can not see hoAv it could happen apart from exploitation and double dealing. These are some of the things that it would be well for people to ponder in these days when the hate breeder and spite monger is abroad in the land. Coupled with these things, is the still more [125] IRELAND'S WOES AND BRITAIN'S WILES significant fact, that wherever England goes, other peoples and nations are as free to go as herself. There is no harbor nor port in all the wide world under British rule, where the ships of other nations are not as free to go as British ships and on precisely the same terms. The British trader takes an even chance with the trader of any and every other nation, no more and no less wherever his own flag flies, and the people under that flag, no matter what their stage of civilization may be, are as free to trade and bargain with another as with the Englishman himself. What they have to sell they may sell to whom they please, just as they may buy from whom they please. This too is something that narrow minded jealous folk find it hard to understand; and not a few I fear are too ignorant and too prejudiced to recognize it as a fact. It is much easier to go on cherishing and cultivating suspicion and ill-will. It is easier to fix attention upon one side of the problem, than to examine it from every side, and so to keep on insisting that England is ever advancing her own interests at the expense of other people. This is the thing the Anglophobist likes best to believe and so of course to him it is true, — all the more true, I fear, because consciously or unconsciously he knows that this is what he would do if he were in England's place. Here again, as in the case of so many things connected with the perfidious British Empire, facts controvert theories and pre- conceptions and by so doing throw a few more [126] JEALOUSIES liaiidfuls of fuel on the fires of hate. It is true that England enjoys preferential rates at the Cus- tom Houses of some of her Colonies, and to this extent has an advantage over outside competitors. This however is not the act of England but the voluntary act of the particular Colony, and Eng- land is able to avail herself of the preference because of the liberality of her own tariff laws. Any other nation giving the Colony like privileges, could avail itself of the rebate on exactly the same terms as England, so that even in this exceptional case England has no advantage under her own flag that another nation may not have if it so desires. When the great war broke out, the exploited and oppressed Dependencies of England of their own free choice expressed their pent-up feelings over the matter as to England 's taking advantage of them, by sending a million or more volunteers of almost every race and clime, to help fight the battle of the mother land. Most significant of all perhaps, in this connection was the attitude of India, — that wonderful country held in subjec- tion and oppressed by a conquering power, — seething in ignorance and groaning under in- human taxation, — and in whose interest a band of philanthropic Anglophobists recently called into being an organization, bearing some such original name as the ''Friends of India's Free- dom," and in the ranks of which, when first organized, there was not a single native of [127] IRELAND'S WOES AND BRITAIN'S WILES Hindustan. The answer that India made like so many other answers coming from the ends of the earth, must have been very disconcerting and exasperating to the apostles of hate, if indeed they took the trouble to inform them- selves about it; for we are told by those who know and who emphatically affirm it, that if she had wished to do so, England could have recruited without conscription, an army of several million men in India to fight for human freedom under her leadership; and what India actually did do was to insist upon being represented on the west- ern battle front by an expeditionary force of her own, equipped and financed at her own expense. I suppose that is another example of England's ability to pull the wool over other people's eyes. What else could it be? One wonders why the ramshackle old Empire doesn't fall to pieces as it ought to do. Today those who are looking for this to happen, are sure it is held together by nothing stronger than a rope of sand, — tomorrow the same people are certain that by the brutal coercion of military force, helpless and hopeless people are held in subjection by the dominant race. The growth of the British Empire and the methods by which that growth has been secured constitute a matter as full of melancholy as the toothache to the average hater of Britain and British institutions and no contact with ice on the one hand or hot air on the other, seems to have much effect in reducing the fever or allaying [128] JEALOUSIES the anguish. I'm afraid much as I would like to do it, I find no word of defence to offer for a people who have shown such a propensity for appropriat- ing odds and ends of territory found lying loose in all quarters of the globe. True, she usually gets there first, but that is no excuse. She ought not to get there first. Indeed I do not like the idea that Britain should have been almost as success- ful as ourselves in dispossessing aboriginal tribes of their ancestral heritage and of relegating them to a convenient corner of their appropriated domain. Moreover it helps matters little to be told that a large percentage of her accumulated plunder is made up of loot that she compelled other thieves to disgorge. Her success in this par- ticular line of operation only adds to her crimi- nality and her condemnation and increases the number of those who would like to assist in robbing her in turn if they only could, and anyway the beauty of the landscape is in no way enhanced by the kettle telling the pot that its countenance is as Ethiopian as her own. There are however, some side lights thrown upon these problems by certain incidents in the world war, that have considerable interest for the student of world problems and international rela- tionships, at the present time. At the beginning of the war Germany possessed Colonies in Africa, embracing a territory of nearly a million square miles; at the end of the war, Germany found herself shorn of these African [129] IRELAND'S WOES AND BRITAIN'S WILES possessions. This vast territory many times as large as the Fatherland, and nearly a third as large as the United States, constituted one of the spoils of war that passed to the account of the allied side. There are some considerations that have a peculiar interest in connection with the conquest of this Africo-Germanic territory, and the first is that it was practically an achievement of British arms and of British Arms alone, and a second consideration is that Britain turned over the cap- ture to be disposed of by the Peace Commission at Paris. Of course you say this is what she ought, to have done, but the question may be fairly asked, is there another nation that under the circumstances, would have done it? I hope and firaily believe that our country would have done exactly the thing Britain did, but it is mor- ally certain that the men who made the most noise over Shantung, would have protested most vociferously against the idea that any nation should have a say in the disposal of this territory except ourselves, had our army made the con- quest. Quite a stir was being made in those days over the sale of certain German ships. Some of the watch-dogs on Capitol Hill were barking pretty loudly, because it seems, they saw what looked like a burglar in the habiliments of John Bull, ringing the bell at the White House door. It seems the portly gentleman from across the sea wanted to buy some of these ships. Most of [130] JEALOUSIES us like to go into the open market to buy the best that is going at the lowest possible price, but John Bull ought not to do that. It only shows the grasping and selfish disposition by which he is controlled. He always wants the best. Let him dig up his own old ships from the bottom of the Irish Sea. I don't know much about this ship business, and I may be altogether wrong. It seems however that the disposal of the ships taken in our ports, went before the Peace Com- missioners, and we insisted that after our ship- ping losses had been made good from the total tonnage, the balance should remain under our flag and the value of the same be credited to Germany on reparation account. So then the whole situation looks a bit as follows, does it not? Britain by herself and alone, made capture of certain German Colonies in Africa and when she had them well secured, she hauled down her flag and left them to the disposal of the Allies in con- ference. Japan by herself and alone captured from Germany the Shantung peninsula, and when she had it well secured, she gave the promise that at some future time she would haul down her flag. We also of and by ourselves made a capture. To be sure ours was not territory, but ships, but when we had them well secured we ran up our flag; and certain of our Super- Americans kept demanding that it shall not be hauled down till the Last Great Day, well on in the afternoon, and then only, if judgment has been already passed on [131] IRELAND'S WOES AND BRITAIN'S WILES John Bull and lie has been assigned to his proper place in the final assize. Of course, patriotism is a vital principle and needs to be encouraged but one wonders if it is necessary in the process of encouragement, to stick pins into the trousers of other folk. How international good manners might be improved if all nations and races could see themselves as others see them! What a fine thing it would be if in this old world we could keep in mind that there are good and bad among every people, worthy and unworthy citizens in every nation. That for instance, some of the men who happen to be our misrepresentatives at Washington at the present time, do not constitute America; that the fire-eaters of Japan are not Japan; that the Junkers and flannelled fools of England are not England and that dear old Ireland is a whole lot bigger and better than Sinn Fein. This capture of the German Colonies in Africa is of interest from another point of view. It was no part of the allied plan to dispossess Germany of these Colonies at the outbreak of the war. Indeed the Allies had no thought of dis- possessing her of anything, since it was Germany that planned and inaugurated the conflict. The capture of this territory was simply an incidental and in a sense, an accidental occurrence in the prosecution of the war. It was a side issue so to speak, a later development and an after- thought in the campaign. This fact sets us won- [132] JEALOUSIES dering, if in this we have the only instance in which territory came into the hands of Great Britain, not because she set out with the purpose of taking possession, but as a bi-product of a war which had its cause and inception in prob- lems of a more or less different kind. To what extent and in wliat degree if at all, did this prin- ciple hold sway in the building up of Britain 's colonial Empire in days gone by? There is, it seems to me, a line of investigation suggested here, that holds the promise of considerable inter- est for any one who has the ability and the taste for it, if they would take it up. The Eighteenth Century was full of wars that are usually designated '^ Colonial Wars;" for Colonial problems to a greater or less extent, entered into most of them. It was natural, when new worlds were being discovered, that virile, active, enterprising peoples should push forward to explore and to possess. This was inevitable and gives no just cause for censure. Circumspect people, staying at home, not because they were virtuous but because they lacked enterprise, then and now might thank Providence that they were not as other men are; but in the main it could not be helped, unless there had been some ex- ternal force strong enough to compel pioneers to stay at home, in which case there would have been no America, and no hyphenated Americans to breed trouble for ourselves and for others. It was just as inevitable that pioneers of different IRELAND'S WOES AND BRITAIN'S WILES races and nations should come into conflict, and that the several home governments should espouse the cause of their own folk, so that strife starting at the circumference of things, soon worked its way towards the heart of the parent nation; but it is also true that wars originating in fundamental claims and problems at the cen- ters of national life, in time, reached the circum- ference by a more or less protracted course of events and resulted in the transfer of territory from the dominion of one power to another. Often times of course, there was a mixture of these pro- cesses, so confused and intricate that it is most difficult to determine in what direction the dominant motive and purpose is proceeding. If however, all the cases in which Britain has added to her possessions after the manner in which the German Colonies in Africa came into her hands in the late war, were counted in with the very con- siderable number of peoples and territories who have petitioned to be taken under her care, it miglit be discovered that a goodly portion of England's Colonial Empire has been accumulated by pro- cesses not so greatly deserving of censure after all. The conquest of Canada is a case that might be examined in the light of this consider- ation. To be sure the expedition under General Wolfe was dispatched expressly for the purpose of taking Quebec; but that undertaking was only an incident in the progress of the ** Seven Years War, ' ' a war which had its inception and primary [134] JEALOUSIES cause in the Old World and not in the New. More- over this war had run nearly half its course before Wolfe appeared on the St, Lawrence, and in any case it would become us not to be too harsh in our condemnation of Britain for this particular bit of robbery, for it was undertaken and carried to success largely at the instigation and in defense of the American Colonies, soon to set up an independent government of their own; and besides it settled for all time the dominance of Anglo Saxon civilization in North America, a thing the colonists were especially anxious to secure. It was in tliis same Seven Years War, originat- ing in Europe and in European problems, that the foundations of British Rule in India were laid, and it is very difficult to see how it could have been avoided, or that anybody is so very criminally to blame, seeing that to keep tilings straight, the day had not fully come for the evolu- tion of the fighting pacifist, the hyphenated American, or the bellicose gentleman called Sinn Fein, — the day moreover and alas, in which there should blossom forth aspirants to the Presidency bent on capturing the hyphenated vote by giving the lion's tail a vigorous twist. If any or all of these defenders of justice and honor had been on the field of action in those days, the story of human history might have been differently writ- ten, morally as well as geographically and in other [135] IRELAND'S WOES AND BRITAIN'S WILES ways; and I don't see but they are the ones who should lie under the heaviest condemnation for being so tardy in coming to the help and defence of the world against the arrogant and aggressive A;nglo Saxon. [136] CHAPTER Xm National Chakacteeistics PERHAPS I shall be taken to task for trying to discover reasons for thinking well of other folk, or at least for making some little effort to find excuses and palliations for the crimes and misdemeanors and excesses of John Bull. Doubtless there are those who would think I might be better employed searching for some- thing to say on behalf and in defence of Uncle Sam. I claim however that I am a better patriot than any such possible critic, in that I do not see that my beloved Uncle is greatly in need of such defence. When a propaganda of hate sets itself in his direction, there may be something doing. Then it might be well for interested parties to telephone for an ambulance in advance. More- over it seems to me but a poor brand of patriotism that fears lest it be abridged or weakened by a fuller knowledge and appreciation of other coun- tries and peoples, or by a deeper interest in their well-being. A patriotism that packs itself away in moth balls, may be and apparently is the ideal of some people, but give me the kind that can live out of doors, sharing the sun and the winds that are the common possession of all the nations IRELAND'S WOES AND BRITAIN'S WILES and races of men. Intelligence makes a better foundation upon which to erect a superstructure of patriotism than ignorance; and the man who with something of a sneer in his voice towards other peoples, proclaims his own country good enough for him, might gravely concern himself with the question as to whether his country en- tertains or has cause to entertain a like opinion of him. It is just possible that we may fall into the habit of rating ourselves as citizens a bit higher than our country cares, or has any cause to do. Pride in our country is a fine thing, but that our country should have a chance to take pride in us, is something equally to be desired, and this juvenile clamor about the Americaniza- tion of a Peace Treaty in which a score or more nations have an equal interest with ourselves, does not help to any great extent in that direc- tion. The day is rapidly approaching, if it has not already come when callow, immature claptrap like that, will have no more effect in winning votes than the claim that governments can change the course of the seasons, or modify the move- ments of the moon. Uncle Sam is getting a bit restive under the constant implication that he hasn't grown up yet. Leaders of public opinion who misconstrue and befog the issues, whether it be from pure ignorance or common cussedness, are going to get short shrift my son, in this our beloved land before many decades have rolled by. There is abundant reason in this connection for [138] NATIONAL CHARACTERISTICS a larger and more cordial fellowship between America and Britain, not only for their own sake but for the world's sake as well, and this can be fostered in no way to such an extent, as by a wider and more accurate knowledge and under- standing of one people by the other. When facts and reasonable inferences displace prejudices and suspicions as a basis for forming opinions and judgments, a way will be open for cementing a friendship, in the benefit of which all mankind will share. May we not suggest at this point, that a new organization be called into being to be known as the Knights of Washington and Lincoln, and in whose membership could be enrolled citizens of every racial stock and of any or all religious affilia- tions. Among other objects perhaps, the purpose of this organization would be to combat every kind of propaganda that seeks to perpetuate racial animosities and ancient feuds; to inculcate and cultivate a patriotism based on intelligence and good will, and most of all to promote and foster good fellowship and mutual understanding be- tween this Nation and all other English speaking peoples. I am sure that multitudes of Americans dis- covered during the war, that deep down at the very center of their being, there existed a thank- fulness and a pride in the fact that the basis of our civilization and of our governmental and other institutions, is British and not something [139] IRELAND'S WOES AND BRITAIN'S WILES else. Conceivably it might have been something else. It might have been Rooshan, or Prooshan, or Portugee, and if the antecedents of Sinn Fein had their way, undoubtedly it would have been Spanish. More than once I have heard ardent New Englanders with six or more generations of that kind of ancestry back of them express a pride that the war had awakened and in which they gloried, namely, that not a drop of blood ran in their veins except that which had its fountain head in old England across the sea. This natural and wholly to be expected coming together then, of the English speaking Nations in mutual understanding and good will as a result of their cooperation on the battle fields of Europe, constituted a challenge to the traffickers in hate. It threatened their dominant influence on the one hand, and their revenues on the other, and so had to be headed off at all costs. This is largely the meaning of the arrogant and intolerable Sinn Fein agitation that has been going forward so vigorously, especially since the war came to an end. It is now or never for these people. That is evidently the way they feel about it. If the two nations that have been the chief champions and exponents of civil and religious liberty, can be kept apart and induced to become more and more envious and suspicious of one another, there is hope that autocracy may even yet survive and reassert itself notwithstanding the smashing blow it received in the world war. Far better than the [140] NATIONAL CHARACTERISTICS rest of us, and especially better than those he manipulates and exploits, the reactionary knows that his chief hope lies in setting at variance the two powers whose enlightened and forward look- ing spirit he both hates and fears, hence the most unscrupulous and unprincipled methods and agen- cies are employed to drive a wedge between America and England. The marvel of it all is that so many of our people lend themselves to be duped by the greatest menace that has threatened our liberties since the very beginning of the na- tion's life. To strain at the Peace Treaty and the League of Nations and then swallow the Sinn Fein camel, would provoke mirth if it did not awake pity and sadness in the hardest heart. Impatience and disgust with Sinn Fein methods and practices, we may not be able to restrain, but when our own folk try us beyond endurance, by the way they fall down before such brazen mendacity, we simply rub our eyes and silently wonder if this can be the land of Washington and Lincoln after all. Two recent examples of the Sinn Fein way of carrying out its unhallowed purposes, come to mind at the present moment, — not indeed as having much weight when related to the matter involved, but as fairly good examples of the whole Sinn Fein method of attack and defence. When the seventeen thousand brave men and women hissed the President of the American Republic in Madison Square Garden, it slowly dawned upon [141] IRELAND'S WOES AND BRITAIN'S WILES their leaders that a mistake had been made, and so at a later meeting, — as the course of the em- pire held its westward sway, — it was thought l3est to make some kind of an explanation, and the usual but peculiar working of the Irish agitator 's mind was disclosed, when the speaker charged that the enemies of Ireland's cause were the real offenders, in that they had stolen their way into the Garden and had started the booing in order that the people in whose interests the meeting was held, would have to bear the blame. Later in the year, when an attempt was made to assassinate Lord French in Dublin, a spell- binder in this country announced his assurance that the whole thing was framed up, and that the friends of French pulled off a bluff in order that the cause of Sinn Fein would bear the odium and appear before the world as an organization of as- sassins and thugs. It is only the lowest type of mentality, morally as well as intellectually, that ever descends to this kind of argumentation. It would seem, however, to be a very natural mode of procedure for Sinn Fein, since at one of their mass meetings, a brilliant idea took possession of the mind of somebody. A Canadian Uniform was secured in some way and an enthusiastic Sinn Feiner clothed in these honored garments, vig- orously led the cheering in order to send abroad the impression that Canadian soldiers gave their countenance and support to the Sinn Fein propa- ganda. The childish ruse was discovered and [142] NATIONAL CHARACTERISTICS shown to be absolutely as I have stated. Anybody who saw the Canadian troops capture Vimy Ridge and Passchendael and break through the Hinden- burgh Line, will find it hard to believe that a single member of the force could be found who would so disgrace and dishonor his comrades, who by the thousands lie sleeping their last sleep in those historic places, as to give encouragement for a single moment to the people and principles they gave their lives to defeat. Would it be any won- der, if after this insult to their uniform every man in the Canadian Army is aching to meet these people in fair fight on Flanders' Field. Be well assured, my dear boy, they would make short work of them, and incidentally would settle the Irish problem for a generation at least. These incidents have little interest save that they show the spirit and manner in which this vile propaganda is carried on. Sinn Fein never struck a clean blow in all its life. It would be hooted out of the ring in every arena where men of honor measure against one another, their strength and their skill. Sad to say however there are Ameri- can politicians and legislators who do not dare refuse to listen to what it has to say, and the abject pity of it all is that the Senate at Wash- ington, or the Foreign Relations Committee of the same, have spent many precious hours listening to rodomontade such as that to which I have re- ferred. It would seem that this is what some of our wise men like best to hear, for there has come [143] IRELAND'S WOES AND BRITAIN'S WILES reverberating from under the Capitol's dome, in a sonorous monotone, a denunciation of England for her treatment of India and Egypt, — * Seeth- ing in ignorance and groaning under inhuman taxation, ' — whatever that may mean. These men seem to feel safe in venting their spleen in the direction of India or Egypt, thinking evidently that other people know as little about these coun- tries as they do themselves. ^Ignorance !' About the most aggravated example of ' Seething Ignor- ance' that exhibits itself for the delectation of fallen humanity, in these days, is to be found not many feet away from certain desks in the Senate Chamber at Washington. Of course there is ignorance in India, as there is alas, in every country, altogether too much of it, but side by side with it there is an intelligence at which well-informed people marvel, and that needs to ask no odds of us in this favored land, and this intelligence is emphatic in its commen- dation of English rule. In a vast population com- prising more diverse races than are to be found in any other geographical unit on the globe, — speaking thirty-eight or more different languages, a fact in itself sufficient to preclude the possibility of any stable national unity at the present time, — the coming of British rule was the greatest bless- ing that ever descended upon India. That rule has been a marvel of efficiency and justice. Peace and order and even-handed opportunity and privi- lege to all classes among the people, — these [144] NATIONAL CHARACTERISTICS things are the increasing fruits of British rule in India, and the men who tell us so, are our own American Missionaries who have spent their lives in the land and in the service of the people. 'Inhuman taxation,' is a fine phrase to conjure with, for none of us greatly enjoy being taxed; and it sends us harking back to the days of stamped paper and taxes on tea and painter's colors. I suppose it is meant to imply that Eng- land is enriching herself upon the revenues she extracts from the pocket of the pocketless Hindu. Men who presume to be fit to legislate for us, ought to possess general intelligence enough to make them aware that not a penny of India's taxation goes into the exchequer of the British Empire, — that every rupee is spent in India and for the benefit of the Indian people. The nearest approach to the inference that the Anglophobist would have us draw, is the up-keep- of the small military force that serves as an efficient police to preserve order and to protect the people from the depredations of maurauding tribesmen upon their borders. Moreover when this force is used in any other part of the Empire as sometimes happens, it ceases to be a charge upon the Indian treasury and becomes a demand upon the ex- chequer of the Empire itself. As to the mal-treatment of Egypt ! It may not be known to certain Anglophobists in Washington and elsewhere, but other people know that Britain saved Egypt from being over-run and submerged [145] IRELAND'S WOES AND BRITAIN'S WILES by the fanatical Mahdists of the Soudan. If it had not been for England there would have been no Egypt today over which these people could shed their crocodile tears. Great Britain taught and aided the Egyptians to protect themselves and brought to them a prosperity greater and more widely distributed among the people than any- thing they have enjoyed since the days of Joseph. The rank and file of the natives know that Britain is the best friend they have ever had in that she has shown them the way to an independent human existence, and has protected them from the ex- ploitation of their selfish and tyrannical masters, and intends so to protect them. But our Anglophobist asks why Britain didn't wait till she was asked to do these things. Possibly for the same reason that we didn't. Within easy recollection, two great nations, Spain and America, — made the Philippine Islands a matter of barter and trade after their conquest by the United States, and did not say, 'by your leave.' The principle of 'self-determination' did not ob- trude. I'm one of those folk who believe that it was a great day for the Philippines when they came under the control of the United States, and that it was as great a day for the United States, in that it was the first step out of that selfish and provincial isolation, into which some of our Self- Americanized Americans would pull us back ; but the fact remains that we forced our government upon the Philippines and against their will. We [146] NATIONAL CHARACTERISTICS did the same thing in Porto Rica and in Panama or Columbia, and our conduct was not far different in Hayti and Cuba, for we told the Cubans if they didn't toe a certain mark and keep order among themselves, we would come in and see that they did. We did go in, and will do it again if need be, and while we abridge the independence of Cuba in so doing I can not see that we are criminally to blame. Yet there are some among us who would wring the neck of John Bull, when with equal if not greater interests at stake, he seeks to do a similar thing in India or Egypt. It is helpful too, to take a look sometimes at England's treat- ment of backward and exploited races who have no national life to meddle with. I refer particu- larly to the Black man and the Red man. The record has not always been clean, — far from it, and yet it presents some aspects that are not alto- gether to be ashamed of. We boast, and rightly enough, of the Emancipation task that Abraham Lincoln carried to a successful issue, but Britain emancipated her black slaves through all her do- minions, thirty-five years before we did, and she accomplished it without a war. Then the story of England's dealings with the Red man is much pleasanter reading than ours. As we compare notes after this fashion, we discover that Eng- land's course with weaker and less advanced peoples, does not differ greatly from our own. I know that these analogies are not always fair. Some of them may be unfair to the United States ; [147] IRELAND'S WOES AND BRITAIN'S WILES but they are exactly in line with much of the adverse criticisms and judgments that we indulge in with reference to our neighbors in Europe, and particularly as directed against the people that speak the same language with ourselves. Human nature is much alike in both Hemispheres, and in neither is it overmuch given to make allowance for those ''circumstances that alter cases." Not a little has been said about the treatment of the South African Republic by the Empire of Great Britain, and, as usual, prejudice and pro- vincialism have settled the question adversely to Britain. One of the contestants was called an empire and the other a republic and that is enough; and possibly no better example can be found in all history of the extreme danger of per- mitting mere literalism to determine judgment. The primary cause of the conflict between Britain and Boor had to do with the enslavement of the Black man. Long before Majuba and Colenzo and Ladysmith, this was the bone of con- tention between the two peoples, and when the so-called Eepublic, which was perhaps the most corrupt and tyrannical oligarchy in all history, got strong enough and wealthy enough as it thought itself to be, it determined to pay off old scores with the British Empire. yes ! I know all about the Rand and the Diamond Mines and the Jameson Raid and am not trying to enter a defence or procure an alibi for John Bull, but the bald fact remains that the Boor had made all his [148] NATIONAL CHARACTERISTICS preparations and thouglit the opportune time had come for driving the British into the sea. I fear we would have been ashamed of Uncle Sam if he meekly submitted to a thing like that. The more one studies the dealings of Britain with her colonial and dependent peoples, the more interesting it becomes and the more he discovers that there are two sides to most of the contro- versies and quite as often as not, these two sides are John Bull's side and the wrong side. One of the outstanding facts connected with Britain's relation to the various partnerships within her Empire, easily recognized by those who are willing to do so, is the way in which she has refrained from imposing her own customs and laws upon other folk. She not only never tries to make Englishmen of the diverse peoples under her care, but she encourages them to develop along the line of their several racial character- istics. In this she has acted diametrically in an opposite direction to the method employed by Germany, and this I suppose, is one of the reasons why the German calls the Britisher a fool. Fool or no fool however, it goes a long way in the direction of making look rather foolish, the Anglophobists who are fond of condemning Britain for oppressive tyranny and coercion in dealing with the peoples within her power. A good example of this attitude on the part of England, is the way she dealt with the con- quered French people of Canada. That story goes [149] IRELAND'S WOES AND BRITAIN'S WILES pretty far back in history, for it is more than 150 years since the taking of Quebec, and it reveals that even at that early date, England was capable of showing a generosity and fair play that might well give pause to some of her jealous and unfair detractors in our time. The French colonists were not only permitted to retain their own lan- guage and customs, but were granted in perpetuity the privilege and the right of doing so. Many people no doubt, think a mistake was made in this matter. It would seem as if it would have been wise to devise some plan that would have required a gradual but necessary use of the English Language so that by this time in their country's history, the average citizen of French extraction would have been able to speak and read not only his mother tongue, but also that of the majority of his fellow-countrymen as well. This would not have been a very unkindly tyranny had it been required, and it would have been greatly to the advantage of the country as a whole, and to the French people themselves. But this Britain did not do. It would seem that in an effort to be fair, she leaned if anything a bit backward. In any case she revealed a very different spirit from that which is so often credited to her. Of course no Anglophobist would ever think of anything like this. It is easier to nurse the old prejudices and misconceptions and to give expression to judg- ments based thereupon. There were men in the uniform of the American army, after we became [150] NATIONAL CHARACTERISTICS an ally of England, who kept saying, — I suppose because they couldn 't help it, — that if England were in Germany's place, she would carry on the war in a similarly barbarous and brutal fashion. This attitude seems inexplicable, seeing that it is a well-known fact that after the battle of Waterloo more than a hundred years ago, when Paris was at the mercy of the allied arms, Blutcher the Prus- sian proposed to sack the city and give it over to the pillage and outrage of his men, and Wellington gave him to understand that if he made a move in that direction, the British can- non would be trained upon his troops. That was the spirit of England one hundred years before Louvain. Anybody ought to know that it would be an utter impossibility for any people, — American, British, French, Italian or Japanese, to have acted as Germany did in Belgium. Anglo- phobia however, makes it inevitable that its vic- tims should believe the impossible. O yes! I know very well that the Eed Coats and the Hessians were cruel and brutal in the days of the Revolution, and the Briton is about as much ashamed of it as we are ourselves, but I wonder if I dare whisper it, even in your un- prejudiced ear ; — there is a story that some day we may be able to read with equanimity, but it won 't be altogether pleasant reading. There were cruelties in other quarters the memory of which has been handed down through the generations, under another flag than our own. The most IRELAND'S WOES AND BRITAIN'S WILES blessed thing to know and remember however, is the fact that the world in the main, has moved forward into a brighter and better day since the time when Pitcairn stirred his toddy with his bloody finger in the Monroe Tavern nigh unto Lexington Green, and said uncomplimentary things about the brave Minute Men, who gave his Eed Coats the licking they richly deserved. It would do us all good to read afresh the story of the Revolution and the events remote as well as near that led up thereto. We all know about the annoyance and oppression of the government at home, and the intolerable and haughty super- iority and superciliousness that its representa- tives assumed towards the colonists. We know and have it tatooed upon almost every inch of our epidermus, that taxation without representation is an outrage. And by the way, if the revolution- ists felt as bad over taxation without representa- tion as we sometimes do over taxation with misrep- resentation, I do not wonder they emptied the tea chests into Boston Bay. Be that as it may, we know that the Colonists were right and Britain was wrong, and we are glad for her sake as well as our own that resistance was made and a new nation was born; but our memories do not so readily carry us back to the protection the British Navy gave us in the Colonial period. It was our shield in the French wars, just as in a later day it stood between us and the Hun. And our mem- ories do not clearly recall the huge debt that [152] NATIONAL CHARACTERISTICS weighed upon the English people, largely pro- duced by the upkeep of that navy, just as we are in danger today of forgetting that some of England's burden that she is carrying now, was incurred in our defence as well as in her own. Her service of today however is likely to call to the mind of intelligent people her service of a century and a half ago, and will in time, it would seem, soften somewhat the judgments of fair- minded men as they contemplate her effort to compel us to buy and drink tea upon which she had laid a tax in the hope of liquidating something of her debt. Today England asks for no recompence, nor expects any, but on her own behalf and on behalf of the other allies, she would like to borrow a few of the shekels we piled up as a result of the war until such time as her crops are ripe and her ships come home. Some of our far-seeing states- men seem to have an idea that John Bull expects to profit or he would not want to borrow, and their counsel would be not to lend him the money. The part the British Navy has played in the history not only of England but of the world is a familiar story. As I have said, it saved the North American Colonies from extinction before they became a nation. For a hundred years it has secured and maintained the Freedom of the seas, not for its own merchantmen alone, but for the mercantile marine of every nation whose people go to sea. It has made all the lanes of [153] IRELAND'S WOES AND BRITAIN'S WILES the world's commerce as secure from molestation as a village street. It has charted the seven seas, so that the danger to navigation from rocks and shoals and contrary currents has been reduced to a minimum. The world 's debt to the sea-dogs of England is beyond calculation. There are none of us who do not profit by its watch and care, for there isn't a dweller in the remotest hamlet of a great Continent who does not rely for some of the necessaries and comforts of life, upon ocean borne commerce, and yet how many people there are who enjoy all this from day to day, and who never give a thought as to who has secured it for them and who can see nothing in the British Navy but an instrument of tyranny and oppres- sion. Another matter of very special interest in con- nection with this matter, is the fact that the far flung British Empire has been built up by a nation that has never been dominated by militarism. Britain until this last war, has never had a large army. It was only when the necessity of match- ing the unparalelled military machine of Germany, presented itself, that England built up an army that was in any degree comparable in numbers in a proportionate way with the standing armies of half a dozen nations that might be named. England has never been in any true sense, a military power. She has never had a large army. It has always been ridiculously small in point of numbers, — for the most part, not much if any beyond a respec- [154] NATIONAL CHARACTERISTICS table police force in any large city in America. The Irish agitator is fond of calling this police force recruited chiefly in Ireland when operating in that country, the domination of brutal military power. Ireland is no more controlled by mili- tarism than any city in the United States is con- trolled by militarism because it has an efficient police force. So whatever may have been the power that built up the British Empire and that has maintained and given it force and power, we must look for it elsewhere than in the mailed fist and shining sword. The year 1920 has been a great year in the his- tory of the English speaking world. The Celebra- tion of the coming of the Pilgrims to these shores 300 years ago is an event of most unusual moment. The English people are as interested in the oc- casion as we are ourselves, and the opportunity it affords for drawing the very best elements of both nations together in mutual good will and confidence, is unique. The Pilgrims were the out- standing pioneers in democracy both in church and state and as such embodied the ideals, that for three centuries have been the most potent and uplifting influence in the life of both peoples. To understand aright this fact, is to find a com- mon interest and a common bond of unity, that should do something in the way of sending the apostle of hate to hide himself away from contact with decent men. The fact that these pioneer [155] IRELAND'S WOES AND BRITAIN'S WILES Pilgrims for conscience and freedom's sake, for- sook England is apt to blind us to the greater fact that they themselves, with their love of liberty and the forward-looking spirit, were an English product. True they sojourned for a time in Holland, but they themselves were aware that if they remained there, they ran the risk of losing their precious heritage. It is Longfellow is it not, who has written some well-turned lines about the sifting of wheat for the planting of a nation? There is something of poetic fiction in the phras- ing, but like all good fiction, especially if it be poetic, it has more of truth in it than the most literal prose could have ; for it was out of that seed and out of that planting that much that is noblest and best in this great Republic of the west, has grown. There are two things however, that I think we are in danger of forgetting as we dwell upon the poet's suggestive lines, indeed the phrasing itself may easily conduce to this lapse of memory. The first of these considerations is that this wheat for the sifting, grew in the soil of England and not in that of New England. If we believe in an over- ruling Providence at all, and that this Providence takes an interest in the affairs of men and nations, we can not I think, but feel, that some power and wisdom other than human has been presiding over the destinies of this nation; and it was no hap- hazard chance that determined that the wheat for its planting; should be grown in English soil. Serious minded men and women find in this con- [156] NATIONAL CHARACTERISTICS sideration food for profound and ever widened thought. A second matter if possible, more deeply sug- gestive, and that is more easily overlooked than the former, is that not all of the sifted wheat came over in the Mayflower nor in the brave ships that followed in her wake. A few bushels of that self- same wheat remained to be planted in its native soil, and to be carefully cultivated from gener- ation to generation, even as the kindred seed was planted here. It may be too, that trusting to our virgin soil and our new and more congenial en- vironment, we were the less careful and watchful husbandmen. At any rate in more material lines of agriculture, we seem to have presumed too greatly upon the exhaustless quality of our soil, and as a consequence have suffered loss. More- over it may be that we were less thoughtful about the enemy who sows tares in the field, taking it too easily for granted that the planter of evil had been left behind, and that our fields were immune from his visitations. Possibly we trusted too much to the two thousand miles of ocean lying between the Old World and the New. Perhaps we may be relying over much upon that same barrier, now that we have taken to deporting some of the sowers of tares in our midst. The principle that eternal vigilance is the price of Liberty, had its finest phrasing on this side of the sea; one wonders however if we haven't failed somewhat in the practice of that vigilance as [1571 IRELAND'S WOES AND BRITAIN'S WILES contrasted with our kinsfolk on the other side. Too often and too much it would seem, would it not, we have regarded democracy as something that could be handed out ready made, and when properly labeled, the only thing we had to do was to sit down and enjoy it? Boastful of our liberty it may be, and self-satisfied we may have become blind to the fact that other people less concerned about the label, were more successfully attaining the reality than we. Too often I fear, this blindness has led the more ignorant and narrow minded among us to throw stones at folk at whose feet they might well sit to take lessons in democracy. Be all this as it may, the two outstanding facts that I have mentioned, — the soil in which the wheat grew in the first place, and our neglect or inability to corner more than a fraction of even the sifted portion, — recognized and accepted, ought to lead us to join hands in mutual confidence and regard, and in grateful appreciation of our common origin and our common destiny. There is one characteristic of the Britisher that can not be fairly denied him. He is a good sport. Perhaps there is no man in the world that quite comes up to him in this regard. He plays the game on the level, and he is almost if not alto- gether a better loser than winner. He likes to win the prize, but his interest is first of all in the game for its own sake. Some of us lose interest and are disposed to drop out when the prize eludes our grasp, but John goes on playing. This spirit NATIONAL CHARACTERISTICS of good sportsmanship is seen in the good natured way in which John Bull takes the criticisms and unkind things that are said about him. Lots of people would like him better if they could succeed in making him mad more easily. He gets more knocks than almost any other human, but for the most part he only smiles and goes on with his job. If one tenth of the vituperative slurring and nagging that has gone out from Washington toward England, during the last year or two, had been directed from the floor of the House of Com- mons at Westminster towards this country, it is safe to say that before this, more than one reso- lution would have been presented in Congress asking why diplomatic relations between America and Great Britain should not be severed. John Bull has a good deal of common sense in these matters. He knows we are not all boors. One wonders sometimes if the policy of Free Trade has anything to do with this good sports- manship of the Englishman. Free Trade is always Fair Trade. Of course no country is absolutely a Free Trade country, just as no country is so fully and absolutely under a Protective Tariff as to be entirely prohibitive and so to shut out all competition. However Great Britain on the one hand and America on the other, may be taken as representative of the two opposite policies. I think it is neither greatly to its credit nor greatly to the blame of either country that the particular [159] IRELAND'S WOES AND BRITAIN'S WILES tariff policy associated with its name has been adopted as its own. England, a manufacturing country with a limited supply of food stuffs and raw material, naturally became a Free Trade country. The United States with an unlimited supply of food and raw material of all kinds, and with manufacturing industries to be encouraged and built up, just as naturally gravitated towards a Protective policy, but these facts would not prevent in any way the bearing of either policy upon the general thought and life of the people. In a generation or two this or that policy might have a most profound influence in this direction. Indeed I have often wished that some capable metaphysician would write a treatise bearing on the psychological and ethical effects of tariffs on individual and national character. To speak bluntly and not with any pretence at philosophic penetration, but I think in a measure truly, when we have stripped a Protective Tariff of all its fine phraseology, it has the effect and is designed to have the effect of putting the buyer at the mercy of the seller. Today as the buyer, I submit and approve because tomorrow I expect to have you in a corner when I have something to sell. When the round of exchange has been effected even if the balance swings fair and clear between us, we have both had a lesson as to how best to deal with a man when he can 't help himself, and it is doubt- ful if either of us has learned that it is the con- sumer that pays the duty in the long run. [i6o] NATIONAL CHARACTERISTICS All this may or may not inculcate and cultivate a spirit of distrust and suspicion, but it does seem to have a tendency to fix the idea that if a man is truly to succeed he must first of all learn how to corner the market before he proceeds to market his corn. We are told that a high tariff protects the American workman and makes him the best paid of his class in all the world. That may be true but it does not seem to have equal success in protecting him in the expenditure of the wage he has earned. He is learning that a pauper wage is not always a small wage, but a wage that has small purchasing power. He is learning or has learned that the distance between his own gate- way and the Poor House door, is not measured in terms of income but in measurements of out-go; and that a fiscal policy that shows him how to keep from burning his candle at both ends by cutting it in two and burning one end of each part, may not be altogether a wise solution of the difficulty, for there may be some waste in the cutting. When it is a neck and neck race between wages and prices to see which can soar the highest, the contest may be exhilarating, but normal blood pressure and heart action are not easily maintained in high altitudes, as you very well know. Some years ago a phrase the spell-binders used to conjure with was, — **The Full Dinner Pail." This to be sure, is a weighty desideratum whether we eat our dinner out of a pail or off the bottom of a tub in the back kitchen, and is well calculated [i6i] IRELAND'S WOES AND BRITAIN'S WILES to land the votes on election day, but I noticed that our enthusiasm reached its highest level, and our hats went farthest into the air when our pail was skillfully set side by side with the empty or only half filled pail of some workman across the sea. It was not our full and heaped up pail, but the empty pail of the other fellow, — empty be- cause ours was full, — that clinched the argument in favor of a protective tariff. Of course we were told and we tried to believe, that when the full pail was on our side of the sea and the empty one on the other, the thing was not only all right but superlatively virtuous and patriotic, and I suppose it was. But some old fashioned folk among us, even in those days wondered if the most far seeing statesmanship would be able always to keep the two pails the breadth of the ocean apart. We wondered if the pack having once acquired the habit of worrying the neighbor's flock, would pause very long to examine ear marks or to con- sider on which side of the fence the quarry was found. It may be my son, that the ethics of tariffs is a problem of deeper and more far reach- ing moment than some people think. Appetites grow by what they feed upon, and when abnor- mally developed, they sometimes become rapacious and insatiable. As a consequence men lose their sense of perspective and their ability to see life as a whole, and when their purposes are thwarted in any way, or when the top-heavy structure they have erected, topples over of its own weight, they [162] NATIONAL CHARACTERISTICS easily become impatient and irritable, and some- times hard to get along with. How much I wonder, has all this had to do with the bad temper and bad manners displayed by some of our Senators, during the debate over the Peace Treaty? The juvenile spirit, accustomed to give little consideration to others, that exag- gerates its own importance and its own achieve- ments, and insists on having its own way in every- thing, does not readily get the habit of taking a world view of things. I notice that some of our Solons at "Washington, have become greatly distressed over the Uniform General Pershing is wearing. It would seem that in a moment of weakness, he has yielded to British influence to the extent of getting himself a pair of riding breeches of an English pattern, and worse than that has had a slit of two or three inches made in the tail of his military tunic. These departures from democratic simplicity, and the subserviency to Imperialistic British custom which it entails, is hardly to be tolerated in the Com- mander in Chief of our Armies. Yet they do say that some of these defenders of the Constitution, wear silk hats and cotton socks, and it is reported that a few of them wear suspenders. Such is the inconsistency of human nature ! Human nature or no human nature, how galling it must be for these men to have to use the English language in which to uphold the Constitution and the Inde- pendence of the United States of America, IRELAND'S WOES AND BRITAIN'S WILES especially against the encroachments of Imperial Britain. How perfectly splendid it would be, as the young ladies would say, and how interesting and instructive, if the extremest among our represen- tatives at Washington, could carry their point to its consistent and logical culmination, and so thoroughly Americanize the Halls of Congress, in both speech and dress, as to eliminate the least possible suggestion of European and especially of English influence. If this could be done, if only for a period of ten years, it would teach the world a lesson in democratic simplicity and dig- nity that the world would not be very likely to forget. Let the Constitution be amended if need be, in order to provide that no debate nor set speeches be permitted in any language except Choctaw, and that during the sitting of Congress, members of both houses on pain of expulsion, shall wear nothing but buck-skin breeches and moccasins and a woolen blanket each. Let it be understood that blankets of Congressmen be bordered in red and those of senators in blue. This done I feel sure that European and English influence would be reduced to a minimum, and in stately dignity and commanding simplicity, our Reichstag would be- come an object lesson to the world. [164] CHAPTER XIV Militarism ERHAPS an interrogation point will be placed after my remark about the non- military character of the British Empire ! To be sure, beside the small army England has maintained through the centuries, is to be placed the mighty navy which has been her boast and her defence. It is true that since the great Armada of Philip, England has possessed to a greater or less extent, a predominating sea power, and the question may be put forward as to whether or no this navy has taken the place of an army in con- stituting the Empire a military nation. This would seem to be the thought entertained by our pacifist friends at the beginning of the European war. Horrified at the outbreak of hostilities, as we all were, these people seemed unable to dis- criminate, and so placed every nation that had been drawn into the conflict, upon the same foot- ing and in the same category. To them war was war and fighting was fighting, and the man who wards off a blow is as guilty and as much to be censured, as the man who strikes the blow. Hence it happened that with sapient ingenuity a new word was coined and pressed into circulation. This [165] IRELAND'S WOES AND BRITAIN'S WILES new word was, — ' * Navalism, ' ' and its use seemed to give the pacifist orator courage in attacking the Militarism of the Central Powers. Just why learned Divines and Professors and Principals of Colleges and Seminaries, took comfort in the use of this term in their arguments on behalf of the pacifist position, it is difficult to determine; but it is assuredly certain that militarism met with its hardest knocks at their hands, when Navalism was set up to receive blow for blow. Evidently it never dawned upon these men, that if the thing had any meaning at all, — to use these two words as co-ordinate terms or as standing for co-ordinate ideas in the way they did, was to do violence to language and the proper use of words. If 'navalism' had to be attacked as a menace to the world 's peace and tranquillity, why I wonder, did it not appeal to somebody as fit and proper, to drop the term militarism out of the discussion altogether, and substitute another new invention, namely the word 'armyism'? Of course this might have led to a further sub-division of the general term 'militarism' and possibly we might have been regaled upon the menace of 'Infantryism' or 'Cavalryism' or 'Artilleryism', — until at least the conviction was borne in upon us that nothing in the remotest degree capable of harboring a menace, had been left out in the castigation. "Navalism" in so far as it was a menace to the peace and well-being of the world, could be so only in so far as it was an element in Militarism. [i66] MILITARISM The army of Germany dominated and controlled the civil government, and that is what constituted Militarism. No navy I ever heard or read of, in England or anywhere else ever did this thing. And what is more, no navy ever has been or ever can become a weapon of aggression, but only of defence. A navy can support an army as an in- strument of aggression and invasion, but can not itself over-run territories or menace the indepen- dence or freedom of a people, nor can it tyrannize over a subject population. It can not in any wise, become a substitute for an army as an instrument of aggression or conquest, — of invasion or of tyranny. It is manifestly true therefore, that the nation that has never given itself to building up a great and dominating army, can not with any reason, be called a military power, no matter how big a navy it may have. As a matter of fact, so far from being an instrument of aggression or a men- ace to any people, the British navy has been the ultimate defence of human liberty the world over. For two centuries and more, it has maintained the freedom of the seas. Pre-eminently a sea-faring, commercial people, the British have been com- pelled to provide an adequate defence for their shipping, but that defence has never been in any way a menace to the shipping of any other nation. It is only during the period of British naval supremacy that this absolute freedom for the coming and going of the shipping of any and every nation on a complete equality of privilege in times [167] IRELAND'S WOES AND BRITAIN'S WILES of peace, has been maintained. When Spain was a dominating sea power, she drew lines on the high seas beyond which no shipping except her own, was permitted to go. When Dutch sea power was dominant, Holland did the same thing. Never at any time has England followed this course in times of peace. In war it has always been recog- nized as legitimate warfare, for a belligerent na- tion to prevent its enemy if possible, from receiv- ing material that would be of assistance in carrying forward the war, whether conveyed by neutral shipping or by the boats of the enemy country herself. All nations at war, have claimed this as a right and have followed it as a practice as far as they have been able. We ourselves have always done it. The war with Spain had not been declared many hours, when our navy began to overhaul neutral shipping bound for Cuba. Ves- sels were boarded, their manifests or cargo exam- ined, and when necessary they were compelled to enter an American Port, there to await the de- cision of a prize court: and America was wholly within her rights in so doing. But, and this should be remembered, it has been the unalterable policy of both the American and the British navies, that in no case should a neutral vessel be sunk, or the lives of non-combatants be put in jeopardy, much less sacrificed. Of course to Germany and the Sinn Fein outfit on both sides of the sea, it was a great grievance that the navy of England was at hand not only to [i68] MILITARISM defend her own existence, but also the world's liberty and civilization, when a concerted attack was made upon them. It seems to me that no proposition could be more self-evident to reasonable and thinking men, than that if this defensive weapon had for any reason failed to be on hand, the whole world today would be lying prostrate and at the mercy of Prussian Militarism. Of course ignorance and jealousy and blind spite must be expected to go on prating about the freedom of the seas, and must continue to berate England in connection with the matter, but the great body of clear- thinking people among us can not but hope that at least until our own navy can be depended on to do or help in doing what the British navy has been doing for centuries, this same old navy, in the interest of world peace and world liberty shall not abate its supremacy in any degree. Any club is good enough for the Anglophobist to use in his senseless and stupid attacks upon Eng- land, and any propaganda that appeals to preju- dice and ignorance and that by misrepresentation and distortion of fact, can embarrass the British government in any part of the empire, is sanc- tioned and approved. It is indeed a strange phe- nomenon that any of our people can be wheedled into making fools of themselves and of our coun- try in this respect. Conspicuous in this direction is the effort of the Anglophobist at the present time to make trouble for England in India and [169] IRELAND'S WOES AND BRITAIN'S WILES Egypt. If we weren't fools we would welcome England in India and Egypt, and in Persia too. One wonders why it is that when Persia sees it to be to her advantage to enter into a special agreement with England, certain of our make- believe statesmen can not contemplate the ar- rangement without getting as red in the face as an apoplectic turkey-cock. German intrigue has for years sought to stir up fanatical tribesmen to rebel against the Persian Government, in the hope that the German scheme of world conquest would be furthered tliereby, especially if the traditional friendship of Persia for Great Britain could be impaired. To this end the fanatical groups were informed that the German Emperor had become a convert to Islam, and this sort of propaganda has not ceased with the war. It ought to be well known to everybody by this time, that one of the elements entering into the effort Germany was making to dominate the world, was the purpose of the Kaiser and his Potsdam gang to set the whole Mohammedan world on fire from Morocco to Calcutta. Had this part of the Prussian program been successful, it is appalling to contemplate what the result would have been, and it is a miracle that it did not succeed. Calamitous as was the world's war in every respect, it is manifestly true that it would have been ten-fold more so if this diabolical scheme had worked out as intended. It is doubt- ful if human civilization could have long survived. [170] MILITARISM Many strange and well-nigh inexplicable happen- ings attended the prosecution of this greatest of wars, but nothing could well be more marvellous than that the rest of the Mohammedan world did not follow the lead of Turkey and the Sultan when they threw in their lot with Germany. Nothing apparently had been left to chance, and by every possible principle of calculation, this is what should have happened. Why did this plot miscarry? It is nothing but common justice and fair play to Britain, to say that the chief cause of failure, perhaps the only cause, is to be found in the just and righteous and liberal government she has exercised over the vast Mohammedan population within the Empire. These peoples freely elected to remain loyal to the government that had always treated them fairly and had never tyrannized over them, rather than follow their co-religionists and the supreme leadership and dictatorship of their faith, when these suc- cumbed to the blandishments of Berlin. And now that this peril is averted for the time being at least, we find dense ignorance and vindictive spite and prejudice in Washington and elsewhere lend- ing itself to undermine and destroy the power to which we owe our salvation in this matter. It seems intolerable and beyond belief that the Kaiser's game should be taken up on this side of the A;tlantic. These people are playing with fire, in seeking to gratify their unreasoning hate and ill-will and remind one of a gruesome story [171] IRELAND'S WOES AND BRITAIN'S WILES once read or heard somewhere of a cowboy on the plains. He had for some reason or other come to have a grouch against the rest of the outfit, and he nursed his grievance till it became a disease. He determined to have vengeance, and watched his chance to stampede the great herd of steers when he thought he could do it with safety to himself and disaster to his fellow cowboys and to the cattle and their owners as well. He made the attempt but something went wrong with his plan and he himself was caught in the wild mad rush of the herd. After the cyclone of horns and hoofs had passed over, the other men sought to discover some trace of their comrade but none was to be found. The cruel hoofs had trampled into nothingness the rider and his mount. This is what the Kaiser very nearly brought to pass. This is what other paranoiacs are seeking to do. If they can succeed in stampeding the Moham- medan world, there will be little of our civiliza- tion left to tell the tale. Another attack upon England more amusing but scarcely less reprehensible and dangerous, is that represented by the message sent to the Prime Minister of Great Britain by four score or so of our pseudo-statesmen at Washington. It seems reasonably certain that some of these men must have been holding their sides when they attached their names to this grotesquely unique message, for it is hardly conceivable that in a group of nearly one hundred there would not be several [172] MILITARISM with some sense of humor in their makeup. Among the majority however, judging from the spelling of their names, that capacity would be a rare commodity. A sense of the ridiculous surely would have prevented the quoting of our constitu- tion as having any binding force upon an indepen- dent and sovereign nation having a constitution of its own, even if unwritten, and especially when that other nation has been quite as scrupulous in ob- serving the principle embodied in the paragraph quoted, as we have been ourselves. Indeed one would suppose that a sense of humor or some- thing else would have restrained these worthy gentlemen from calling attention to the fact that the grossest violations of the principle that, — *'No person shall be deprived of life, liberty or property, without due process of law," are to be found in the land where the principle is em- bodied in the constitution. And besides it is not very pleasant to contemplate as this act compels us to contemplate, that there is no land civilized or uncivilized, barbarian, Scythian, bond or free, where that violation takes place by the means and the process of the stake and fagot, except our own. We would do well to wipe that stain off our escutcheon before we tell other folk how they ought to manage their own affairs. Uncle Sam is a very estimable and amiable old gentleman, possessed of a good degree of common sense, but I fancy he gets at times a bit weary of some of these garrulous old women who presume to speak ['73] IRELAND'S WOES AND BRITAIN'S WILES on his behalf. I don't think he likes to be forced into the position of assuming the role of common scold among the nations. I feel sure he isn't com- fortable when he is pushed upon a holier-than- thou perch and with parrot-like prescience and precision, made to read moral lectures to the rest of mankind. The world laughed a good deal at the German for claiming to be the super-man. Some of us are concerned, not that we shall be laughed at, but that we may give cause for laughter if we proceed to climb upon the pedestal from which Fritz has fallen. It isn't altogether becoming, nor is it I think, in accord with the real spirit of America, to ex- pect or demand that we should have special con- sideration and be exempt from laws and judg- ments that in similar circumstances, obtain among other people. Perhaps it is due to thoughtless- ness, but too often I fear, we treat people who come from older countries to dwell among us, as if they were heathen altogether. We forget too often that they may have something to con- tribute to us as well as we to them. We often speak of the stranger as caring only for our dol- lars, and when he has filled his pockets, he goes back to spend the money we have given him, in the old homeland. We seem to forget that he has left the equivalent in labor, and that macadamized roads, bridges and sewer pipes, water mains laid and reservoirs built, constitute the permanent assets that remain with us as a result of the ex- [174] MILITARISM change. We sometimes pronounce severe judg- ments on people who fail to become naturalized citizens, especially if they speak our own lan- guage; and we are equally severe upon any of our own citizens who cross the water and take out citizenship papers in some other land. Does it ever occur to us I wonder, that it may be a bit incongruous to make the self- same act a crime on one side of the sea and a virtue on the other? The brilliant performance of the Senate at Washington, or some of its leaders at least, in dealing with the Peace Treaty and League of Nations, has I think, sadly misrepresented the spirit of Uncle Sam; and these would-be leaders have so befogged the issues, and muddled and mixed the matter up with other questions, that it is quite doubtful if any vote that could ever be taken now would be able to register truly the real spirit of the nation. Defending themselves in their reactionary attitude and their determina- tion to defeat and discredit the President, they have placed the country in a most unenviable posi- tion. Claiming to follow in the footsteps of Washington and other founders of the Republic, they have manifestly failed to come within teles- copic distance of these early leaders in our na- tion's life. One would hardly presume to dog- matize as to what Washington's attitude would have been, had he been living today; but seeing that he was fully abreast of the forward-looking thought of his own time, it is hard to conceive [175] IRELAND'S WOES AND BRITAIN'S WILES that he would feel greatly flattered by these men professing to follow his leading when in this day and generation, they insist that we as a nation ought to live like a colony of owls in a hollow tree. Fortunately Thomas Jefferson has not left us in much doubt as to what his attitude would be as related to some of the problems of our day. In his old age, the author of the Declaration of In- dependence, wrote a letter, almost one hundred years ago now, to James Monroe then President, in which some signifi.cant words appear. A proposition had come from England, regarding united action on the part of the two nations with reference to the freedom of South American coun- tries, — a proposition for an embryo League of Nations, — if you will. In his letter to Monroe, Jefferson said: — ''Great Britain is the nation that can do us the most harm of any one or of all on earth; and with her on our side we need not fear the whole world. With her then, we should the most sedulously nourish a cordial friendship: and nothing would tend more to knit our affec- tions than to be fighting once more side by side in the same cause." Nor is it difficult to surmise what the attitude of Benjamin Franklin were he alive, would be towards the greatest effort in the direction of world peace and international good-will that has ever been made : for he had sense enough to know that no convention or constitution drawn up by [176] MILITARISM man, is ever likely to be perfect, but in all prob- ability will call for amendment from time to time. Furthermore, Franklin saw it to be not only com- mon sense, but practical wisdom to co-operate with others and to give consideration to their opinions, even if not altogether in accord with his own. These were his words at the convention which adopted the Constitution of the United States: — ' ' Mr. President, I confess that I do not entirely approve this Constitution, but I am not sure that I shall never approve it. I have experienced many instances of being obliged by better in- formation or fuller consideration to change opinions even on important subjects which I once thought right but found to be otherwise. In these sentiments I agree to this Constitution with all its faults if they are such. I doubt too whether any other convention we can obtain may be able to make a better Constitution. The opinions I have had of its errors, I sacrifice to the public good. I can not help expressing a wish that every member of this convention who may have object- tions to it, would with me on this occasion doubt a little his own infallibility, and to make manifest our unanimity, put his name to this instrument." Franklins seem to be rare at the Capitol these days. These enemies, not so much of the Treaty and League as of the President have surely placed the country in a very unenviable position; for we are bracketed with Mexico and one or two like [1771 IRELAND'S WOES AND BRITAIN'S WILES nations standing outside the League. Practically all the South and Central American Republics have become members. I wonder if this fact does not press upon us the suggestion and supposition that these countries place a larger trust in the League of Nations than they do in the Monroe Doctrine. If it does, we as represented by the Senate majority, have ourselves to blame for it. Perhaps these countries know, as some of the rest of us do, that the Monroe Doctrine would have been knocked into a cocked hat or a cocked sun- bonnet long ago, if it had not been for the British Navy. It is easy to call the League an English League, because it then becomes safe to kick it all over the lot, and at the same time secure a certain cheap popularity for being brave and patriotic in doing so; but this is either addle-pated nonsense or it is dastardly wicked politics and propaganda. As a matter of fact the Treaty and the League are no more English than they are French or Italian or A^merican. One wonders why the dip- lomats at Paris did not discover that England had preponderating voting power in the League and all the rest of it. Why was it left to certain Senators under the tutelage of Sinn Fein to dis- cover this notoriously non-existent thing? It might as well be called the League of the Man in the Moon, and doubtless among other designa- tions, this one would have been applied if any of our legislators could have been persuaded that [178] MILITARISM any considerable body of voters had a grouch or a l^rejudice against the Lunar Potentate. It is really interesting and amusing my son, to note how far a rampant imagination can carry a man sometimes. My Christian Science friend is a case in point. He sat upon a carpet tack the other day. Of course it was all a mistake, — an error of mortal mind. There was no tack there at all, but he acted as if there had been, even to the extent of using some words quite as unfit to print as yours or mine would have been. I think I know what you would do if you had an imagina- tion and a religion that played tricks on you like that. You would sell them for junk to the first pedlar that came to the door or you would go and buy yourself a pair of leather breeches. By tlie way m}^ son, I sometimes wonder why you maintain such an uncompromising attitude of hostility towards the healing achievements of your ' ' Scientific ' ' friends. Do I know any of the folk of whom you speak who have taken to per- ambulate up and down this bridge that goes nowhere. Who are the people who have been cured? Whj^ do they call it being cured, when there is nothing to be cured, — no toothache because there isn't any tooth to ache? Ah me, what felicity! No wonder folks get rid of all their pains, when there isn't any folks to have pains! What stupids we are to carry umbrellas these uncertain days, when it rains no more and no less on uncertain days than on certain days and that isn't any at [179] IRELAND'S WOES AND BRITAIN'S WILES all because there isn't any days to rain on, nor folks, nor umbrellas either. How interesting it must be to use a non-existent umbrella to keep off a non-existent rain from a non-existent $50 hat, when there isn't any head to put the hat on and no brains in the hatless head! dear I am lost in the abstruseness of the obtuse and greatly fear I will have a non-existent headache if I don't watch out. All the same I can't very well under- stand why you, dear doctor, should object to any- body or any method that abates in any degree the pain of a suffering world. Why should you insist that all healing must be done according to an orthodox plan? I'm sure you know very well that there isn't a disciple of Aesculapius among you worth his salt, who hasn't cured many a man with bread pills, — two taken at bed time in half a teaspoonful of honey. Yes and you say you got results in exactly the same way that the Chris- tian Scientist does. And that is true but neither of you know why or how. You explain in differ- ent language of course but you are both sure the indisposition was a matter of the imagination and when your patient was induced to forget it, the sickness vanished. The difficulty was not physi- cal and when the mind mastered the situation, a normal condition of health was established. The change was brought about by the direct action of mind upon matter. May I suggest a somewhat different explanation in both cases'? This is what happened. Your patient, trusting to your pills [i8o] MILITARISM and to luck, lay down and relaxed himself, and in that relaxed condition, some pinched and im- prisoned nerve managed to kick itself free and by so doing set the normal processes of nature in motion, and relief was the result. The Christian Science patient, listening to the charming prac- titioner as she floated in a cloud of sweet and mystifying rhetoric, lay down and relaxed him- self and the process and the result were exactly the same as in the case of your patient. The result would have been the same in either case had the object of reliance and veneration been a stone with a hole through it, a rabbit's foot or the shin bone of some medieval saint and it would not have detracted in any way from the merit and efficacy of the charm if in reality the stained bit of bone, as is probable in most instances, was nothing more than the shank of a sheep, provided the reliance was strong- enough to produce the necessary relaxation. But wait! Holding your theory, you see approaching the Chiropractor, the most scientific workman in the whole bilin of you. The rest of you, faith and mental healers, with your bread pills and your incantations, nudge elbows and say: — ''Now watch this fakir! He thinks he gets results and if he does, it will be in the same way that we do. ' ' Yes it is in the same way but he knows exactly why and how he gets them and you don't. He runs his deft fingers along your vertebra and dis- covers directly the poor pinched and imprisoned [i8i] IRELAND'S WOES AND BRITAIN'S WILES nerve that is causing the mischief and without waiting for the chance of relaxation to do the work, liberates and sets it free to perform its normal task. With your persistent conservatism you put him in the same category with Alexander Dowie and Mary Baker Eddy and Schlatter and a miscellaneous host of faith and mental healers, when it is you with your bread pills and not he at all who belongs in that group of fadists and cranks. Of course you do not try to cure typhoid, diptheria and smallpox with bread pills but by your theory and explanation of the process in those exceptional instances where you do resort to a sort of camouflage you encourage and send out a multitude of healers who profess and pre- sume to be able to cure all kinds of maladies by all kinds of hocus-pocus methods, — from absent treatments to walking three times round a stump on a dark night. Moreover you do not like a bit the menace to the public health which the condi- tion you have contributed in producing, is mak- ing more threatening from day to day. yes, we are all quacks more or less and at convenient times, — only I think the political quack is the most notorious quack of all, and his cure-all methods make your bread pills look like thirty cents. By his absent treatments he can make grass grow on a croquet ball, and ice cream rain down from the Milky- Way. His rival is about to enslave the country and violate the Con- stitution, by foisting upon us a ''League of [182] MILITARISM Nations," while he would send us singing down the centuries, joyous and free as a member of an ''Association of Nations." He would have us understand that the President should be driven from power with all his dynasty, because he de- feated the treaty and kept us out of peace, but he and his colleagues should receive the eternal gratitude of the nation because they blocked the game of the President and prevented him from forcing the treaty upon an unwilling people. When the political quack graduates into a full fledged demagogue, he becomes the ''champion of the plain people" making his appeal to preju- dice and ignorance, and his patent remedies rele- gate Mrs. Eddy and Dowie and your bread pills to the scrap heap. 183I CHAPTER XV A Presidential Election WHEN the Presidential Campaign of 1920 came to an end and the election was completed, it seemed as if one could hear from ocean to ocean, and from the lakes to the gulf, a great sigh of relief; and it could be noticed that no inconsiderable portion of the American electorate evinced a strong inclination to go and take a bath. The election had left a bad taste in the mouth, and ''Life Savers" were in demand in all the apothecary shops and candy stores in the land. The lack of enthusiasm and satisfaction over the successful issue, was a marked characteristic of post election days. With an unprecedented majority, the victors seemed almost as glum and sour-faced as the defeated party. Multitudes who helped to win the election seemed to take little pride in the result. They went about with the air and demeanor of men who felt that the best thing that could be said about the business, was, that of two evils, they had chosen the less, and the sooner the whole thing was forgotten the better it would be for all concerned. There is still hope for a nation when the best men in all [184] A PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION parties, are ashamed of a campaign carried on upon the low level that was occupied in the recent contest, even perhaps, when the defence or excuse put forward is that if success was to be obtained, the only way was to do the thing that was done. Thoughtful men know demagoguery even when they indulge in it ; and they are not very proud of it when they give it countenance and feel com- pelled to advance excuses for it as a necessary evil, when the election is on. What wonder then that electors of all shades of political belief entered anew the pathways of ordinary life with sober faces and with tardy and springless steps ! It is doubtful if there ever was a Presidential Election, in which such splendidly stupendous issues were before the people, and it is painfully true that there never was a campaign conducted on such a low and sordid plane as this one. It is indeed disconcerting to note that the appeal to intelligence and high ethical principles, was so conspicuously absent throughout the entire cam- paign ; and the appeal to prejudice and ignorance, to selfishness and the baser instincts of man's nature, was worked at high pressure day after day. It is surely disconcerting and alarming to realize that to befog the issues, to misconstrue and misrepresent facts, to pour forth adroit and cunning sophistries and insinuations, is the surest way of impressing the electorate and winning its support. Can it be true that the electorate of this great Nation, has descended to that level? Or is IRELAND'S WOES AND BRITAIN'S WILES it true, which is almost as humiliating, that the shrewdest politicians among us, are quite sure that it has? Puzzling and unpleasant moreover, it surely is to discover that our foremost and most prominent statesmen or would-be statesmen, evi- dently think that the only element in the electorate that is worth going after at all, is the portion that occupies that plane, — the tacit admission on their part, that in their judgment the hyphen- ated vote already controls the situation and must be won at any cost if the election is to be secured. Glancing over the campaign literature of that day, or that part of it which escaped the devour- ing flame, we come upon a very admirable speech delivered by Mr. Harding from his front porch, to a group of pilgrims of foreign birth or parent- age. Speaking to these people the candidate warned them against the danger of ''hyphenated thinking," and intimated that while sitting on the Foreign Relations Committee of the Senate and listening to the passionate appeals of men of foreign birth and extraction, he had, — ' ' forebod- ings and a growing sense of apprehension" lest the hyphenated vote in America might some day come to have the balance of voting power, and so dictate our government. The Senator did well to have apprehensions. One wonders how many of his colleagues had a like foreboding as they listened to tirades of unreasoning hatred and of grossest falsehood and misrepresentation. The foreboding was well grounded, for quite evidently [i86] A PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION the thing which he feared had already taken place and was being manifested in many ways. During the campaign, delegations from a friendly nation bearing messages of good will and brotherhood to our own, could not land upon our shores without being subject to insult and abuse from hyphenated citizens of our country. The most patriotic of our people could not rise to speak in public a friendly word concerning a friendly nation with- out being howled down by this same group of hyphenates. Little children had placed in their hands banners which these same people were too cowardly to carry themselves, and which bore insults directed against the President and against our nation as represented by him, as they were paraded before the White House door. Thus the very children were being taught disrespect and disloyalty, and at the same time were being made to feel that the way to coerce the government into yielding to their demands, was a resort to terror- ism and insult. The worst of all if worse could be is this, — the senator and his colleagues, by listening and so giving countenance and encouragement to the tor- rent of passionate vituperation poured out before them, became one of the chief causes contributing to embolden these same hyphenates in doing these things, as well as in arrogantly assuming the pres- tige and power of dictation which the campaign tacitly yet manifestly demonstrated they possess. Further on, the same day, we find the candidate [187] IRELAND'S WOES AND BRITAIN'S WILES speaking to another group, and in defence of his attitude against the League of Nations and its proposed Mandates, he declared that France and England had withdrawn their troops from Armenia in order to force the United States to go in. Now this was a wholly unwarranted inf er- ance and came near to being a gratuitous insult to these two nations. France and England have never had any desire nor purpose to force America to do anything America does not freely choose to do. These countries had burdens to carry that compelled their action, irrespective of the course that might be pursued by any other land. Moreover, although doubtless they were not influenced in any way by the knowledge, — these countries knew that in all probability, it would not be long before a resolution dictated by the very people over whom the candidate had forebodings, would be introduced in the senate, demanding that France and England withdraw their troops from Armenia, and so give the Armenian people a chance to go on peacefully under a government of their own choice. How- ever that may be, the statement of the candidate was well calculated, if indeed it was not intended to awaken resentment and give satisfaction to certain hyphenates and make sure of their ap- proval and support. Here was a spell-binder in support of the Sena- tor, who made a canvas of New England and told the people that since the Armistice, Persia had [i88] A PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION become as much a part of the British Empire as Canada ; and that if the censorship was lifted we would learn that the Persian people were fighting and dying for their freedom. The speaker knew of course that his first statement was untrue, and his second carried with it its own refutation, for if the censorship had closed down on the cables as he affirms, how did he so confidently know what was going on in that ancient land? To be sure, the will to think ill imbedded in the man's being, probably compelled him to say if not to think that both these falsehoods were true, but this for the time being at least, was not the chief reason for his reckless affirmation. He knew that his statement would inflame and poison the minds of many voters, especially of the hyphenated variety and set them more fiercely against the so called "British League of Nations." In fact he was saying exactly what his hyphenated mentors and dictators wished him to say if he hoped to get their vote. Turning to the campaign of Mr. Cox, we find no relief from the forebodings and apprehensions which we share with his opponent. Indeed, our fears that the hyphenated vote is already in the saddle, — confirmed and strengthened, for Mr. Cox while he denounced his opponent and with just cause, for crawling before the hyphenated vote, fell down himself and fawned before the hyphen, that more than any other, is a menace to the peace and concord of our people, — the most [189] IRELAND'S WOES AND BRITAIN'S WILES dangerous menace to those institutions that up- hold and support our freedom and our democ- racy. In one of his speeches Mr. Cox charged his opponent with being the candidate of the most motley array of questionable groups and in- fluences that ever stood behind any man seeking the Presidency. His charge had justification when he affirmed with much heat, that the opposition had solicited the support of racial groups by cater- ing to and feeding their discontent, and he in^ stanced Germans, Italians, Negroes, Greeks and Bulgarians as some of the races before which the opposing candidate was bowing in order to win the election, and yet he at the very moment was feeding discontent by making the most reckless and ill-considered assertions in the whole cam- paign. He bitterly denounced his opponent for failing to give any consolation or hope to the op- pressed peoples of Egypt and South Africa and Ireland. Of course he knew as well as he could know anything, that there are no oppressed people in Egypt or South Africa, and like a good many of us, he ought to have known that there has been no oppression in Ireland for a hundred years save such as groups of terrorists, — mani- festing exactly the same spirit as the mob on our own Fifth Ave., on Thanksgiving day 1920, — who by murder and assassination, oppress their fellow countrymen. He should have known too, that these assassins and terrorists are aided and abetted by the hyphenated group that he was [190] A PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION seeking so wildly to win to his support, — aided and abetted moreover, by just such demagoguery as this of which he himself was guilty. Mr. Cox may have thought that this sort of appeal to racial hates and prejudices, this coddling of discontent and animosity, was going to win him votes and he intended that it should, but he may not know that it alienated votes as well, for there are thousands of Americans, many of them with Irish blood flowing in their veins, who are sick and tired of dictation by alien organizations like Sinn Fein, whose only conception of freedom and lib- erty and fair play, is that they shall have all they want of them, but that those who disagree with them shall not have any. With the possible exception of Washington and Lincoln, no man in our country, has ever had the opportunity that Mr. Cox had. There was ready to his hand the greatest issue that was ever placed before any nation. If he had held his can- vas upon a high and unassailable level and had made his appeal solely to intelligence and honor, — to conscience and reason and judgment, refus- ing to be drawn aside by racial and other side issues, he might not — evidently would not have won the election, — but he could have secured a place in history for all time, as the man who smashed reactionary machine politics and hyphen- ism in America, and made it a certainty for a hundred years at least, that no matter which party had the ear of the people none but the [191] IRELAND'S WOES AND BRITAIN'S WILES highest type of American could ever be elected to the Presidency of the United States. Mr, Cox missed his chance when he staked his all upon the desperate attempt to coax Sinn Fein to march beneath his banner. It was not only a ruinous venture but a stupid procedure as well, for while he threw himself down utterly before this most vicious and dangerous group of hyphenates, he might have perceived that it had already been captured, or rather had captured the opposition party by kindly supplying an issue and a program for the campaign. "While the Republican Party was wandering in the dark, helpless and well-nigh hopeless, in search of an issue and a policy that would give some chance to win in the coming elec- tion, Paddy Fein stepped forward and supplied the lack by discovering that the League of Nations was a British Institution. Mr. Cox must have been desperate when he threw discretion to the winds aiid made his wild dash to fold Paddy in his arms, yet his precipitate effort served a use- ful purpose. It gave unequivocal testimony that the forebodings of his opponent were well- founded, for the most ignorant and the most in- tolerant of all the hyphenated vote had already gained the power to control and dictate, no matter which party won the election. These considerations lead us to remark an in- teresting fact in connection with the Irish ques- tion. We are accustomed to say that the late war was made in Germany. It is hardly less true to [192] A PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION say that the Irish Problem was made in America, and it is just such Presidential Elections as this late one that clinches the argument and estab- lishes the fact. It is not exaggeration to affirm that the major portion of all the terrorism and assassination that has gone forward in Ireland during the last two or three years has been due to three separate incidents, all of which were American in their origin. In the summer of 1919 three American citizens visited Ireland and went up and doAvn the land, inciting the people to revolt and insurrection, and giving them all sorts of promises of help from America and the American Government, if they would break with and resist the Government of Great Britain and Ireland. Instigated by this vile and vicious ap- peal, fanatical Irishmen lay in ambush for their countrymen and shot them to death by the score, and in this way set up a reign of terrorism in which nobody's life or property was safe if he dared to make protest or object. The second incident was the resolution of sympathy passed by the Senate of the United States, with only one dissenting voice, at the time the Peace Conference was in session in Paris. Emboldened by this Sinn-Fein-dictated folly, the campaign of terror- ism and assassination by Irishmen against Irish- men took new heart and went merrily on. The third incident was the message of protest sent to Lloyd-George by eighty or more Eepresenta- tives at Washington regarding Irish prisoners. IRELAND'S WOES AND BRITAIN'S WILES Why shouldn't Irishmen go at it afresh and kill more Irishmen, when the U. S. Government as represented by these Congressmen at least, stands ready to see that they are let out of jail, should they get in. A gentleman from Belfast spoke before a large gathering in a New England city in the summer of 1920. His address had nothing to do with politics, but at the end he was asked by his aud- ience to take a little while longer and seek to elucidate the Irish Question that was doing so much to put a damper on that cordiality that should exist between England and America. The gentleman consented and it would seem that in a few words he put his finger on the crux of the whole situation; but he did it so gently and in such a gentlemanly way that it is doubtful if any great number in the seats before him, caught his point. In a word he asked Americans to be kind and good to the Irishmen who came over to live among them. Why did he put it that way? Be- cause as I take it, something happens to many Irishmen after they come to this country. *'Agin the Government" of course, when he comes here, for that is a birth-mark which he can not escape, but some indigenous bug seems to bite many a Paddy before he has been long in the land. The soil in which he has been planted and the atmos- phere he breathes, often seems to turn a more or less matter-of-course antagonism into a disease. The fact seems to dawn upon him that suddenly [i94l A PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION he has put two thousand miles of ocean between himself and danger, and so he never scruples to keep his country and countrymen in hot water, with the ardent and fanatical hope that some of the boiling liquid will spill over and scald the shins of John Bull. The Irishman's penchant for playing to the galleries, as for the employment of terrorism in order to accomplish his ends, is well known and is thoroughly characteristic. In the Irishwoman this thing often becomes wildly hysterical. This feminine type of the phenomenon is strangely exemplified in Mr. De Valera. One looks in vain through all his communications with Lloyd-George for a single utterance that might possibly betoken statesmanship. Rhetorical fireworks intended for the galleries of the world to gaze upon with ad- miration and awe, constituted the only product of his plethoric quill, until his own people had to set him aside in order that something practical might be achieved. Mr. McSwinney carried this racial character- istic to the extreme. Starving himself to death was indeed a tragic playing to the galleries, and constituted a terrorism well calculated to bring even as hard-hearted a personality as John Bull to his knees. The great mistake England made was to weaken before this species of terrorism, when hunger-strikes were first started. To allow terrorism to defeat the processes of law is not at all to her credit, though perhaps it did [195] IRELAND'S WOES AND BRITAIN'S WILES demonstrate that she had a heart. Had she re- mained firm at the beginning, poor Terry McSwinney would doubtless be alive today. The parades to which we are treated in New York on St. Patricks Day are forceful exhibitions of this same phenomenon, especially in these later years when wild and blood-thirsty-looking ban- ners have punctuated the processions. These banners were intended and well-fitted to strike terror into any citizen or government that would be craven enough to extend a friendly hand to John Bull. By the way, one wonders what would happen if the Societies of St. Andrews, St. Georges, St. Davids and the like took to parading our streets carrying banners the exact counter- part of those carried on St. Patrick's Day, save that the insults were directed against the Irish- man, instead of being directed, as on his banners, against multitudes of his fellow-citizens. These other Societies meet in a social way, on their Saint Days, to listen to speeches, sing songs and eat impossible haggis, in glorification of their lineage and their several racial stocks. They have no desire to offer insult to anybody, but then their membership is made up of gentlemen. Are we to believe that St. Patrick's Society is made up in part at least, of something else? We hate to think it, but the evidence is against us. It is this same attitude of mind that self-invited, is turning so eagerly to safeguard the purity of our Americanism, by seeing that our school his- [196] A PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION tories shall be properly revised, and that a brand of patriotism vouched for by it shall be the only kind permitted in the education of our youth ; for it is true that already teachers in our schools have been threatened with vengeance by parents for teaching their children English Literature. These are the people who have dragged our poli- tics in the mire, and now they are reaching out to lay their unholy hands on our schools. This is a sample of the Irish problem that our poli- ticians and especially the late campaign have helped to fasten upon our country, no matter what may happen across the sea. It is only poetic jus- tice that it should be so, for both directly and in- directly, we have contributed largely to create a problem for our Anglo-Saxon kinsfolk on the other side. It is too soon to say that the Irish problem is settled or is very far on toward settlement on the old sod. Until the thraldom of ignorance and superstition and fanaticism, has been broken in Ireland, this can hardly be. If left to themselves with their terrorism and whining and gallery playing, kept for home consumption, and only their boycotts and the like met by boycotts from without, they might come to discover that their woes have been of their own making through aU the long centuries. What a howl went up when their representa- tives brought back a Treaty from London, signed by themselves and by Lloyd-George and his col- [197] IRELAND'S WOES AND BRITAIN'S WILES leagues! ''Ireland has been sold ont," was the cry. But if so, by whom, may we ask? Not by Lloyd-George certainly ! Not by the British Gov- ernment ! Only Irishmen could do that ; and there you have it. They can not trust one another and how can we expect them to trust other people; and how can other people be expected to trust them? Doctor Samuel Johnson was a puffing old hypo- chondriac, but he was the outstanding literary genius of his day; and he must have been an exceptionally shrewd judge of human nature, for he is reported to have said : — ''The Irish are a very truthful people. They never speak well of one-another. " [198] CHAPTER XVI Is THERE A CUBE FOR THE WoRLD's UNREStF WHAT is the cure for the world's unrest? — the cure for the suspicion and distrust that seems so prevalent on every hand? Does anybody know? I'm sure I do not. It is true, is it not, that there is more bitterness and hard feeling and gross selfishness abroad among the nations, than has existed at any time since the beginning of the European war? Cordiality and good feeling and co-operation seem to have given place to misunderstanding, suspicion and recrim- ination. The era of brotherhood and good-will for which men looked as a result of a common peril and a common spirit of sacrifice in beating back that peril, seems to be farther off than ever. . At a time when all thoughtful men, especially men in public position, ought to have been bending their energies and efforts in the direction of con- ciliation, mutual understanding and co-operation, there has been a strangely perverse and wicked disposition to create ill-feeling and estrangement, and it is not at all pleasant to be compelled to feel that in our own country this spirit has found such free and ill-advised expression. Old grudges and prejudices and misconceptions have been [i99l IRELAND'S WOES AND BRITAIN'S WILES given a new lease of life. A well-nigh unpardon- able ignorance of other nations and of the spirit that prompts and controls their policies, have led to an imputation of motives and designs that have been wholly unwarranted and unjust. Politicians destitute of any issue to carry before the voters, have sought to supply the lack by dragging into the mire of petty party contentions, great Inter- national problems in which the peace and welfare of the whole world is concerned. By unwarranted and malicious and false accusations of other peoples and nations, men have sought to win ap- plause and popularity, as well as to advance their own and their party's political ambitions and ends. If the world is in a turmoil of bitterness and suspicion, of distrust and alienation, let it be confessed with shame, that America has done her full share in producing this condition. Possibly such confession would be one of the first steps in the direction of bringing about a better state of affairs. A more careful and thoughtful study of the conditions that led up to the world cataclysm which began in 1914, might help us to realize something of the peril that lurks in the propa- ganda of suspicion and spite that is going forward in our midst today. The German Hymn of Hate was but the free and natural outcome of the policy that had been carried on in that country for years, in prepara- tion for the contemplated and intended attack upon the world's liberties, which was sooner or [200] IS THERE A CURB FOR THE WORLD'S UNREST? later to be made. This in and by itself, did much to make the world war inevitable. A senseless and unreasoning hate against France was incul- cated from generation to generation. A still more senseless and stupid hatred of England was taught German children from their earliest years, and they knew not why they hated, save that by false- hood and misrepresentation they were made to feel that England was seeking to work harm to their country. If upon a similar basis of misrep- resentation and falsehood, hyphenated Americans, in churches and schools up and down the land, are teaching hatred of England, is it not time that America sat up and began to take notice ? Does it not seem intolerable that these hyphenated citi- zens should set themselves to force our country into the position of becoming the heir and imitator of Germany in this matter ? Why thould these peo- ple be permitted to fasten upon us their hates and their prejudices, — their utterly irrational and stu- pid malice and spite ? It is surely intolerable that this sort of thing should be inculcated against the nation between which and our own, there ought to exist the closest and most intimate bonds of unity and good fellowship. It is little short of criminal that children, soon to become American citizens, should be taught from infancy to hate and even despise the nation and the flag which, next to our own should be honored and loved by all our people; and yet many of our public men because of ignorance or to further their selfish [20I] IRELAND'S WOES AND BRITAIN'S WILES ends, take up the cry of an 'oppressed Ireland' when as a matter of fact, as we have said, there has been no oppression in Ireland for a hundred years, save the oppression that one Irishman exercises over another. The results of the teaching of hate are patent enough in Ireland to anybody who will take the trouble to think. It always works itself out in tyranny and oppression, assault and assassination by one Irishman against another. A certain class of Irish always hate England but they don't shoot Englishmen nor Scotchmen nor Welshmen, in the first instance — they shoot Irishmen, and every word of sympathy spoken and every dollar contributed to the so-called cause of Irish freedom, sends a certain fanatical type of Irishman with criminal tendencies, out to terrorize and to shoot his own fellow countrjnnen. This is bad enough but the main thing to consider is that this propaganda will not go on and be sympathized with for many years, before not only Irishmen will be shooting Irish- men on Irish soil, but there will be periodic bursts of terrorism in this country when American citi- zens, hyphenated at least, will be shooting American citizens on American soil. It seems strange that so many of our people can be fooled by glib agitators of Sinn Fein pro- clivities, who got hold of a few catch words, like 'Liberty' and 'Freedom', — 'Democracy' and 'Re- public' and with insistent and strident clamor, ring the changes upon them, in a spirit peculiar to [202] IS THERE A CURE FOR THE WORLD'S UNREST? themselves, until the whole atmosphere is as freighted and fetid as a barnyard puddle. These terms in the mouths of these people, have no such meaning as we attach to them. They have no more conception of the significance of these words as they lie in our minds, than a child has of the purpose of the thorns on a rose tree, or the perfume in a clover field. These agitators know full well that many of us become an easy mark when they dilate upon the principle that gov- ernments derive their powers from the consent of the governed. We seem to forget that men of lawless instincts never consent to be governed in any land, and further we fail to realize that to admit that the problem of Ireland is in the slightest degree like the problem of our colonial ancestors, is to belittle and render ridiculous that great enterprise, and constitutes a grave insult to the patriots of the Revolution. When we know as we ought to know that these same Sinn Fein people were hand in glove with the Potsdam gang in their assault upon the world's liberty, it should not be difficult to realize that every word of sym- pathy and encouragement we give them is a direct contribution to the World's turmoil and unrest and a direct menace to the future peace and se- curity of the world and of democratic civilization. When the European war broke out, men said that Christianity had failed, and without any doubt it had, if Christianity is the thing that a great many people apparently take it to be. If [203] IRELAND'S WOES AND BRITAIN'S WILES it is an external thing of forms and ceremonies exalted to the position of essentials until they usurp the place of realities, then it assuredly failed. But Ecclesiasticism is not only, not Christianity, but is very far oftimes from being so, and it needs but little argument to force upon a thoughtful mind the conviction that Ecclesiasti- cism fell down grievously, — was weighed in the balance and found wanting, — when the horrors of war fell upon an unsuspecting world. There is every evidence too, that Ecclesiasticism is seek- ing feverishly to rehabilitate itself and win back some of the prestige and power which it once possessed. This of course is natural in the case of people who identify Ecclesiasticism with Christianity, but I miss my guess if this thing is ever to be trusted in the future as it has been in the past. Rituals no matter how beautiful, and dogmas, no matter how well articulated, recited and assented to, make poor substitutes for spirit and life and character, and that apparently is what they ever seek to become. Christianity is spirit and life and eventuates in character or it is nothing. The world had a superabundance of religion of mere literalism before the war, but it was powerless to prevent the war, and it is equally helpless and hopeless as a remedy for the distress into which the world has come since the war. We hear many suggestions as to what the world needs and is waiting for in this crisis. Doubtless there is more or less truth in most of these sug- [204] IS THERE A CURE FOR THE WORLD'S UNREST? gestions, but if we could light upon the one thing out of which all other desirable things would nat- urally spring, we would be getting closer to the solution of our problem, would we not? We are told that the world needs a great moral upheaval, — a moral awakening. This is a proposition I imagine, that few people will take time to deny. But in what direction can such a movement pro- ceed, and what is the planting and the soil out of which it must grow? Take the great moral prin- ciple of brotherhood, a term and an ideal much in the mind and on the lips of thoughtful men everywhere today. Why can not we have a human brotherhood, — a world brotherhood? Ah yes, why not? But brotherhood presupposes father- hood, does it not? Brotherhood apart from and independent of the prior principle of fatherhood is surely a contradiction in terms, and yet what multitudes of men and women are believers in and advocates of brotherhood, who ignore and refuse to admit the claims of fatherhood, and so fail to recognize that such a brotherhood is a plant without a root and sooner or later must wither and fade. Is not this principle of father- hood however, that binds together and upholds brotherhood, a religious principle? Does this then, not suggest that a vital and essential rela- tionship exists between morality and religion? Indeed we do not need to travel far in order to discover that a morality that is not imbedded in religion lacks vital force and c^n not endure, and [205] IRELAND'S WOES AND BRITAIN'S WILES a religion that does not eventuate in morality, is a mere form without reality or life. Manifestly, if these principles are not true, our problem is hopeless of solution. The greatest and purest moral code in existence is the decalogue, and it has never been abrogated in any of its parts ; but the code receives its ultimate sanction and war- rant from the lawgiver. A close and careful study of the code however, discovers the law-giver to be not a judge but a father, for every precept is shot through and through with that consideration and love, and regard for the fundamental neces- sities and requirements of man's nature such as only a father could disclose, and the only con- trolling force that fastens these precepts on the minds and consciences of men is the binding principle of love. Take by way of example, the precept that en- joins the observance of a sacred day, — a day of rest and worship, — one in seven. This is one of the most marvelously thoughtful and beneficent provisions that ever came in contact with human life. Wherever it came from, — if there is a more thoughtful and tender, a kinder and more fatherly provision anywhere in the universe, I know not where to look for it. Men have thought this pre- cept the most restrictive and arbitrary as well as the most unneccessary of all the code, but that is because they did not take the trouble to under- stand it. Over and over again it has been demon- strated that man's physical, not to say anything [206j IS THERE A CURE FOR THE WORLD'S UNREST? about his mental and moral being, requires and demands the recognition and observance of this precept. It is designed to meet and provide for a pre-existent requirement of man's nature; and it has been demonstrated moreover, that this in- stitution can be preserved and saved for the bene- fit and well-being of the human race only when it is kept up to the ideal of a sacred and holy day. yes, I know that every day is sacred and every task is a holy task, but let this day of rest cease to be a holy day and become a holiday, and it is sooner or later lost, even for the most material use for which it is designed, — a time for physical rest; and it is assuredly true that if man is to save himself from becoming a machine, a mere bundle of material force, he must have stated and regular times when the grip of the material is unfastened from his soul. When men lose sight of the provision and purpose of the Divine Father on behalf of his human children and claim the liberty to use the day for the gratification of their own pleasure and inclination irrespective of the claims of other folk, — which of course must be a matter of their own choice, — they are doing what in them lies, to rob themselves and their fellows of the benefits of a great and benevolent institution, and to fasten upon men the shackles of economic slavery. Sweat shop conditions seven days in the week the year round, for multitudes of men and women and even little children, is the result, because of the crass selfishness of other [207] IRELAND'S WOES AND BRITAIN'S WILES men, whose brotherhood has fallen down, and that because they recognized no fatherhood back of it to hold it true. But this fruitage is not the only one. When Germany fell from her high es- tate by plunging the world into a brutal and atro- cious war, men said a great people had lost its soul, and the characterization fittingly expressed an appalling truth ; but how did Germany lose her soul? In the fourth precept of the decalogue the Divine Father set up an institution designed and adapted to be one of the greatest agencies for the development and cultivation of soul, and it is a notorious fact that Germany more than any other country perhaps, degraded that institution into a means and an opportunity for the grossest material gratification and satisfaction. More than in any other way, this is how Germany lost her soul. Brotherhood gave way to brute violence because soul had died the death, and this because the Father 's council and purpose of love had been trampled under foot. But my son, brotherhood can not be forced. It is not a thing to be manufactured or coerced. It is a principle and a life and it can be developed and made potent only in accord with the laws and processes of all life. One of the great difficulties in the realm of morals and religion is due to the fact that so many people, while they may be loaded down with religion, have really no religion of their own. A religion belonging to somebody else, has been forced or fastened upon them like numbers [208] IS THERE A CURE FOR THE WORLD'S UNREST? on the backs of sprinters about to run a race; but it has established no vital relationship with their own mind and spirit. We have heard a great deal in recent years about the dogma embodied in the affirmation: — ''Might makes Right;" and when the picture presented is that of brute force seeking to attain its ends and to establish its claim, we revolt against the hideous moral per- version. But I sometimes wonder if we realize that there are other forms of coercion and com- pulsion which leave no place for individual judg- ment and decision, and so are just as subversive of what is true and right. Indeed is it not true that the might of material force imposing its dictum, is one of the least dangerous of the multi- tude of forms in which might presumes and as- sumes that it is right; for whenever or in what- ever way, individual judgment or will is over- ridden or coerced and its exercise rendered inoperative or unnecessary, right has become subordinate to and dependent on might. The Might of organization, — the might of arbitrary majorities, — the might and clamor and terroriza- tion of minorities, persisted in until because of vexatious weariness, it is yielded to in order to be gotten rid of, — the might of social position, — even the might of magnetic and forceful per- sonality, — any or all of these or similar com- pulsions, may become the might that claims or demands that it be recognized as right. And, while a temporary and even desirable end may [209] IRELAND'S WOES AND BRITAIN'S WILES by this means be attained, at times, the only real and worthy goal to be sought after, is put farther away. The tyranny of things that are big and the tyr- anny of mere acheivementfi are among the most vicious of all tyrannies, and are forever placing men and nations, communities and religious bodies at the mercy of that most vicious and degrading dogma embodied in the sentence: — ''Might makes right. ' ' An ideal rightly acclaimed during the war, found expression in the words, — ''Make the world safe for democracy," and it took a more exalted form when men said, — "Make democracy safe for the world. ' ' In this connection, with the problem on hand, these considerations become intensely significant and interesting, when we rea- lize that Ecclesiasticism has always and every- where, been subversive of democracy, while Christianity has ever been the exponent and the embodiment of the truest democracy. The funda- mental basis of Christianity and of democracy is one and the same thing, namely the worth and dignity of personality, — so that no Christianity can exist if it isn't democratic, and no democracy can long endure if it isn't Christian. Few things are more significant in the attitude and teaching of the founder of Christianity, than the value he attached to personality. It was not the form in which it appeared, but the thing itself that he valued. Any and all personality he seemed to [210] IS THERE A CURE FOR THE WORLD'S UNREST? regard as the most sacred entity in all the Uni- verse. He ever honored and exalted it. He never invaded nor imposed himself upon it, for it is upon this that a real and true religion must rest, and it is upon this that a genuine democracy must stand. To this end, he abrogated and set aside once for all and most emphatically, all priestcraft. From his day and forward, every man had the right and was called upon to be his o^vn priest. I do not speak alone of the priest- craft clad in the habiliments of priestcraft. On every hand there are men who are ever ready to assume the prerogative of becoming conscience and will for other men, and this is the essence of priestcraft, ordained or unordained. The Almighty Himself never presumes to do this thing. This is the most fundamental principle in human existence and in all our civilization, for democracy can not exist where priestcraft pre- vails. Wise men are saying that the greatest need of our time is the prophet, — the leader with vision, and I think they are right, for there is a manifest dearth of prophetic leadership abroad in the earth. The leadership of the priest is easy. The leader- ship of the prophet is hard, but it is the latter leadership for which the world is hungry. These two types of leadership have been in conflict since the dawn of civilization. The world has rewarded its priests, but it has slain its prophets. The priest has relieved the world of responsibility. [211] IRELAND'S WOES AND BRITAIN'S WILES The prophet has placed responsibility squarely on the World's shoulders. The role of the prophet has never been an easy one, and it is no easier today than it has ever been. Indeed the world of our day has more subtle and refined methods and processes of cruelty, wherewith to attack and slay her prophets, than to saw them asunder or spike them to a cross. I suppose this is true in all the more lowly walks of life, yet one can not but wonder why it is not possible to elevate a man of vision to the highest place in the gift of the people, without having vultures that feed on car- rion, pounce upon him and tear his heart out. Nevertheless it is the Prophet for which the world is crying out, and the prophet must step forward if it means to martyrdom at the hands of the world that is calling for him, if that world is to be saved. It may surprise you my son, but I have taken to reading some of the religious or church papers of the time, and I find that in one form or another, there is one complaint running through them all. They bemoan the lack of leadership and the deter- ioration of the quality of leadership they get. For example one of them expatiates upon its claim that the system for which it stands, has pro- duced splendid managers, magnificent manipula- tors, captains that compare favorably with the captains of finance and industry in the world of business, but they have no great preachers nor teachers. I take it this is onlv another way in [212] IS THERE A CURE FOR THE WORLD'S UNREST? which the unconscious cry is going up for the man who is a prophet. But after all is it not true that the Church is getting just what it has chiefly sought after. Its rewards are not for the prophet. The line of preferment and advance, — the line of least resistance is typified by the priest and not by the prophet. You say, can not the priest be a prophet? It is hardly likely. He may in- deed be a profiteer but seldom, if ever, a prophet. The two types of leadership are antagonistic. The priest cares little for reform. He is afraid of it. Advance, development, evolution he shies at. He is the only and original stand-patter. When he ventures forward he moves along certain ortho- dox lines, or he seeks the shortest cut to the goal, contradictory though it may seem. The methods and processes indeed, he makes subservient to the ends sought, and that because he seldom con- siders the morality or the righteousness of the road travelled, but only the desirableness of the end to be sought after. The prophet can wait. He can even refuse to attain the most desirable end if he has to pass along a crooked pathway in order to reach it. He knows that processes do more to develop manhood and shape democracy than victories at the polling booth. The priest lulls men to sleep. He ties bandages and blinkers on their eyes and stuffs cotton in their ears. The prophet stabs men awake, he tears down the blinds and breaks open the shutters in men's souls. It is in the prophet's way, and in the [213] IRELAND'S WOES AND BRITAIN'S WILES prophet's way only, that the world can be made safe for democracy and democracy made safe for the world. It is on this line that the demagogue and the unscrupulous agitator and disseminator of suspicion and distrust, of prejudice and ill- will, can be put out of commission. If Christianity is to survive it must be demo^ cratic. If Democracy is to live it must be Chris- tian, and to this end every dogma and every sys- tem that makes for class distinction must be relegated to the scrap heap, no matter how hoary and venerable it may be. I have taken to reading the Bible lately, and I have been interested to discover that Paul was the first great Non-conformist. He broke through the impossible and irrational dogma of Apostolic Succession. He demonstrated that Apostolic Succession is a thing of the spirit and not of the letter. He fought the Judaistic system of Priest- craft while it was beginning to fasten itself upon the Christian Church, until he himself went the way of all prophets. That system dies hard, and it dies as hard in our day as ever it did, but progress is being made. The world war, with all its welter of blood and tears, and all its weary aftermath of a distrust and suspicion and aliena- tion, is but a milestone on the way, for in it all. Calvary once more, has been acted out before the eyes of men; and the world will not soon forget that sublime st moment in all the great struggle when on an August night in 1914, a great nation [214] IS THERE A CURE FOR THE WORLD'S UNREST? not counting the cost, threw herself and all that she had into the breech, and that simply because a scrap of paper had been torn apart, and because democracy must not be permitted to perish from the earth. There is hope for the world when a thing like that can happen. *'It's coming yet for a' that, That man to man the world o*er, Shall brithers be for a ' that. ' ' [215]