The stronger a free Ireland grew the surer would be the guarantee that the role of England "consciously assumed for many years past, to be an absolute and wholly arbitrary judge of war and peace" had gone for ever, and that at last the "balance of power" was kept by fair weight and fair measure and not with loaded scales.



Chapter IV

THE ENEMY OF PEACE

I believe England to be the enemy of European peace, and that until her "mastery of the sea" is overmastered by Europe, there can be no peace upon earth or goodwill among men. Her claim to rule the seas, and the consequences, direct and indirect, that flow from its assertion are the chief factors of international discord that now threaten the peace of the world.

In order to maintain that indefensible claim she is driven to aggression and intrigue in every quarter of the globe; to setting otherwise friendly peoples by the ears; to forming "alliances" and ententes, to dissolving friendships, the aim always being the old one, divide et impera.

The fact that Europe to-day is divided into armed camps is mainly due to English effort to retain that mastery of the sea. It is generally assumed, and the idea is propagated by English agencies, that Europe owes her burden of armaments to the antagonism between France and Germany, to the loss of Alsace-Lorraine by France, and the spirit and hope of a revanche thereby engendered. But this antagonism has long ceased to be the chief factor that moulds European armaments.

Were it not for British policy, and the unhealthy hope it proffers France would ere this have resigned herself, as the two provinces have done, to the solution imposed by the war of 1870. It is England and English ambition that beget the state of mind responsible for the enormous growth of armaments that now over-shadows continental civilization. Humanity, hemmed in in Central Europe by a forest of bayonets and debarred all egress to the light of a larger world by a forbidding circle of dreadnoughts, is called to peace conferences and arbitration treaties by the very power whose fundamental maxim of rule ensures war as the normal outlook for every growing nation of the Old World.

If Europe would not strangle herself with her own hands she must strangle the sea serpent whose coils enfold her shores.

Inspect the foundation of European armaments where we will, and we shall find that the master builder is he who fashioned the British Empire. It is that empire, its claim to universal right of pre-emption to every zone and region washed by the waves and useful and necessary for the expansion of the white races, and its assertion of a right to control at will all the seas of all the world that drives the peoples of Europe into armed camps. The policy of the Boer War is being tried on a vaster scale against Europe. Just as England beat the Boers by concentration camps and not by arms, by money and not by men, so she seeks to-day to erect an armourplate barrier around the one European people she fears to meet in the field, and to turn all Central Europe into a vast concentration camp. By use of the longest purse she has already carried this barrier well towards completion. One gap remains, and it is to make sure that this opening, too, shall be closed that she now directs all the force of her efforts. Here the longest purse is of less avail, so England draws upon another armoury. She appeals to the longest tongue in history—the longest and something else.

In order to make sure the encompassing of Europe with a girdle of steel it is necessary to circle the United States with a girdle of lies. With America true to the great policy of her great founder, an America, "the friend of all powers but the ally of none," English designs against European civilization must in the end fail. Those plans can succeed only by active American support, and to secure this is now the supreme task and aim of British stealth and skill. Every tool of her diplomacy, polished and unpolished, from the trained envoy to the boy scout and the minor poet has been tried in turn. The pulpit, the bar, the press; the society hostess, the Cabinet Minister and the Cabinet Minister's wife, the ex-Cabinet Minister and the Royal Family itself, and last, but not least, even "Irish nationality"—all have been pilgrims to that shrine; and each has been carefully primed, loaded, well aimed, and then turned full on the weak spots in the armour of republican simplicity. To the success of these resources of panic the falsification of history becomes essential and the vilification of the most peace-loving people of Europe. The past relations of England with the United States are to be blotted out, and the American people who are by blood so largely Germanic, are to be entrapped into an attitude of suspicion, hostility and resentment against the country and race from whom they have received nothing but good. Germany is represented as the enemy, not to England's indefensible claim to own the seas, but to American ideals on the American continent. Just as the Teuton has become the "enemy of civilization" in the Old World because he alone has power, strength of mind, and force of purpose to seriously dispute the British hegemony of the seas, so he is assiduously represented as the only threat to American hegemony of the New World.

This, the key note of the attack on Germany, is sounded from every corner of the British Empire, wherever the Imperial editor, resting on the labours of the lash he wields against the coloured toilers in mine and camp, directs his eyes from the bent forms of these indentured slaves of dividend to the erect and stalwart frames of the new Goths who threaten the whole framework of Imperial dividend from across the North Sea. From the Times to the obscurest news-sheet of the remotest corner of the British Dominions the word has gone forth.

The Monroe Doctrine, palladium of the Anglo-Saxon world empire, is imperilled by German ambitions, and were it not for the British fleet, America would be lost to the Americans. Wherever Englishmen are gathered to-day their journals, appealing possibly to only a handful of readers, assert that the function of the British fleet is to exclude the European States, with Germany at their head, from South America, not because in itself that is a right and worthy end to pursue, but because that continent is earmarked for future exploitation and control by their "kinsmen" of the United States, and they need the support of those "kinsmen" in their battle against Germany.

I need quote but a single utterance from the mass of seditious libels of this character before me to show how widespread is the propaganda of falsehood and how sustained is the effort being made to poison the American mind against the only people in Europe England genuinely fears, and therefore wholeheartedly hates.

The Natal Mercury for instance, a paper written for the little town of Durban and appealing to a population of only some 30,000 whites, in a recent issue (March, 1913), devoted a leader to the approaching "Peace Centennial" of 1914, to be held in commemoration of the signing of the Treaty of Ghent, which ended the second war between Great Britain and the American people in 1814.

"After all, blood is thicker than water," quotes the Natal journal with satisfaction, and after pointing out some latter day indications of rapprochement between England and the United States, it goes on to proclaim the chief function of the British navy and the claim thereby established on the goodwill of America.

"We make mention of them because such incidents are likely to repeat themselves more and more frequently in that competition for naval supremacy in Europe which compels the United States to put her own fleets into working order and to join in the work that England has hitherto been obliged to perform unaided.

"It is England that polices the Seven Seas, and America has reaped no small benefits from the self-imposed task, an aspect of the matter to which every thoughtful American is alive. There is a real and hearty recognition in the New World of the silent barrier that Great Britain has set up to what might become something more than a dream of expansion into South America on the part of one potent European State. It is, indeed, hardly too much to say that the maintenance of the Monroe Doctrine is at the present moment almost as fully guaranteed by England as it is by the country that enunciated the policy and is the chief gainer by it. It is a case in which a silent understanding is of far greater value than a formal compact that 'would serve as a target for casual discontent on this side or that'."

The article concludes by proclaiming "the precious permanence of an unseen bond" and the lofty and enduring worth of "good faith mutually acknowledged and the ultimate solidarity of mutual interests rightly perceived." "The ultimate solidarity" aimed at by those who direct these world-wide pronouncements is not one of mere sterile friendship between the American and the British peoples. American friendship with England is only worth having when it can be translated by world acts into enmity against Germany.

It might truly be said of the British Empire to-day that where two or three are gathered together, there hatred of Germany shall be in the midst of them. Turn where he will, from the Colonies to England, from England to her fleet, from the seas to the air, the Englishman lives and moves and has his being in an atmosphere not of love but of hatred. And this too, a hatred, fear, and jealousy of a people who have never injured him, who have never warred upon him, and whose sole crime is that they are highly efficient rivals in the peaceful rivalry of commerce, navigation, and science.

We are told, for instance, in one of the popular London magazines for January, 1913, in an article upon the financial grievances of the British navy that were it not for Germany there would be to-day another Spithead. "Across the North Sea is a nation that some fifty years ago was so afraid of the British navy that it panicked itself into building an iron-clad fleet.

"To-day, as the second naval power, its menace is too great for any up-to-date Spithead mutiny to come off. But the pay question was so acute that it is possibly only the Germans and their 'menace' that saved us from the trouble." But while the "patriotism" of the "lower-deck" may have been sufficiently stout to avert this peril, the patriotism of the "quarter-deck" is giving us a specimen of its quality that certainly could not be exhibited in any other country in the world.

Even as I write I read in the "British Review" how Admiral Sir Percy Scott attacks Admiral Lord Charles Beresford, dubs him the "laughing-stock of the fleet," accuses him of publishing in his book The Betrayal a series of "deliberate falsehoods," and concludes by saying that the gallant Admiral is "not a seaman."

And it is a fleet commanded by such Admirals as these that is to sweep the German navy from the seas!

During the Crimean war the allied British and French navies distinguished themselves by their signal failure to effect the reduction of such minor fortresses as Sveaborg, Helsingfors, and the fortified lighthouses upon the Gulf of Finland. Their respective Admirals fired their severest broadsides into each other, and the bombardment of the forts was silenced by the smart interchange of nautical civilities between the two flagships. Napoleon III, who sought an explanation of this failure of his fleet, was given a reply that I cannot refrain from recommending to the British Admiralty to-day. "Well, Sire," replied the French diplomatist, who knew the circumstances, "both the Admirals were old women, but ours was at least a lady." If British Admirals cannot put to sea without incurring this risk, they might, at least, take the gunboat woman with them to prescribe the courtesies of naval debate.

That England to-day loves America, no one who goes to the private opinions of Englishmen, instead of to their public utterances, or the interested eulogies of their press, can for a moment believe.

The old dislike is there, the old supercilious contempt for the "Yankee" and all his ways. "God's Englishman" no more loves an American citizen now than in 1846 when he seriously contemplated an invasion of the United States, and the raising of the negro-slave population against his "Anglo-Saxon kinsmen."

To-day, when we hear so much of the Anglo-Saxon Alliance it may be well to revert to that page of history. For it will show us that if a British premier to-day can speak as Mr. Asquith did on December 16th, 1912, in his reference to the late American Ambassador as "a great American and a kinsman," one "sprung from a common race, speaking our own language, sharing with us by birth as by inheritance not a few of our most cherished traditions and participating when he comes here by what I may describe as his natural right in our domestic interests and celebrations," then this new-found kinship takes its birth not in a sense of common race, indeed, but in a very common fear of Germany.

In the year 1846, the British army was engaged in robbing the Irish people of their harvest in order that the work of the famine should be complete and that the then too great population of Ireland should be reduced within the limits "law and order" prescribed, either by starvation or flight to America.

Fleeing in hundreds and thousands from the rule of one who claimed to be their Sovereign, expelled in a multitude exceeding the Moors of Spain, whom a Spanish king shipped across the seas with equal pious intent, the fugitive Irish Nation found friendship, hope, and homes in the great Celtic Republic of the West. All that was denied to them in their own ancient land they found in a new Ireland growing up across the Atlantic.

The hate of England pursued them here and those who dared to give help and shelter. The United States were opening wide their arms to receive the stream of Irish fugitives and were saying very harsh things of England's infamous rule in Ireland. This could not be brooked. England in those days had not invented the Anglo-Saxon theory of mankind, and a united Germany had not then been born to vex the ineptitude of her statesmen or to profit from the shortcomings of her tradesmen.

So the greatest Ministers of Queen Victoria seriously contemplated war with America and naturally looked around for some one else to do the fighting. The Duke of Wellington hoped that France might be played on, just as in a later day a later Minister seeks to play France in a similar role against a later adversary.[3]

[Footnote 3: Sir Edward Grey and the Entente Cordiale.]

The Mexicans, too, might be induced to invade the Texan frontier. But a greater infamy than this was seriously planned. Again it is an Irishman who tells the story and shows us how dearly the English loved their trans-Atlantic "kinsmen" when there was no German menace to threaten nearer home.

Writing from Carlsruhe, on January 26th, 1846, to his friend, Alexander Spencer, in Dublin, Charles Lever said: "As to the war the Duke[4] says he could smash the Yankees, and ought to do so while France in her present humour and Mexico opens the road to invasion from the South—not to speak of the terrible threat that Napier uttered, that with two regiments of infantry and a field battery he'd raise the slave population in the United States."

[Footnote 4: The Duke of Wellington: the report was brought to Lever by the Marquis of Douro, the Duke's heir.]

The infamy of this suggestion cannot be surpassed. The brilliant soldier who conceived it was the chivalrous Englishman who conquered Scinde, one of the chief glories of the Britannic hierarchy of soldier-saints.

The Government planning it was that of the late Queen Victoria with the Duke of Wellington's advice, and the people against whom the black-slave millions were to be loosed were the "kith and kin" of those meditating this atrocious form of massacre. Truly, as an old Irish proverb, old even in the days of Henry VIII. put it, "the pride of France, the treason of England and the warre of Ireland shall never have end."

As a latter day witness of that treason, one who had suffered it from birth to the prison cell, a dead Irishman speaks to us from the grave. Michael Davitt in a letter to Morrison Davidson on August 2701, 1902, thus summed up in final words what every Irishman feels in his heart:

"The idea of being ruled by Englishmen is to me the chief agony of existence. They are a nation without faith, truth or conscience enveloped in a panoplied pharisaism and an incurable hypocrisy. Their moral appetite is fed on falsehood. They profess Christianity and believe only in Mammon. They talk of liberty while ruling India and Ireland against the principles of a constitution, professed as a political faith, but prostituted to the interests of class and landlord rule."

Have Englishmen in less than two generations substituted love for the hate that Napier, Wellington, and the Queen's Ministers felt and expressed in 1846 for the people of the United States? Is it love to-day for America or fear of someone else that impels to the "Arbitration Treaties" and the celebration of the "Hundred years of Peace?"

The Anglo-American "Peace Movement" was to be but the first stage in an "Anglo-Saxon Alliance," intended to limit and restrict all further world changes, outside of certain prescribed continental limits, to these two peoples alone on the basis of a new "Holy Alliance," whose motto should be Beati possidentes.

Since England and America, either in fact or by reservation enjoy almost all the desirable regions of the earth, why not bring about a universal agreement to keep everyone in his right place, to stay "just as we are," and to kindly refer all possible differences to an "International Tribunal?"

Once again the British Bible was thrown into the scale, and the unrighteousness of Germany, who did not see her way to join in the psalm singing, was exposed in a spirit of bitter resignation and castigated with an appropriate selection of texts. The Hague Tribunal would be so much nicer than a war of armaments! With no reckless rivalries and military expenditure there could be no question of the future of mankind.

An idyllic peace would settle down upon the nations, contentedly possessing each in its own share of the good things of life, and no questionable ambitions would be allowed to disturb the buying and selling of the smaller and weaker peoples. The sincerity of the wish for universal arbitration can be best shown by England, when she, or any of the Powers to whom she appeals, will consent to submit the claim of one of the minor peoples she or they hold in subjection to the Hague Tribunal. Let France submit Madagascar and Siam, or her latest victim, Morocco, to the franchise of the Court. Let Russia agree to Poland or Finland seeking the verdict of this bench of appeal. Let England plead her case before the same high moral tribunal and allow Ireland, Egypt, or India to have the law of her. Then, and not until then, the world of little States and beaten peoples may begin to believe that the Peace Crusade has some foundations in honour and honesty—but not till then.

Germany has had the straightforwardness and manliness to protest that she is still able to do her own shooting and that what she holds she will keep, by force if need be, and what she wants she will, in her own sure time, take, and by force too, if need be. Of the two cults the latter is the simpler, sincerer, and certainly the less dishonest.

Irish-American linked with German-American keen-sighted hostility did the rest. The rivalry of Mr. Roosevelt and Mr. Taft aided, and the effort (for the time at any rate) has been wrecked, thereby plunging England into a further paroxysm of religious despondency and grave concern for German morals. This mood eventuated in Lord Haldane's "week end" trip to Berlin. The voice was the voice of Jacob, in spite of the hand of Esau. Mr. Churchill at Glasgow, showed the real hand and the mess of pottage so amiably offered at Berlin bought no German birthright. The Kreuz Zeitung rightly summed up the situation by pointing out that "Mr. Churchill's testimony can now be advanced as showing that the will of England alone comes in question as the exponent of peace, and that England for many years past has consciously assumed the role of an absolute and perfectly arbitrary judge of war and peace. It seems to us all the more significant that Mr. Churchill proposes also in the future to control, with the help of the strong navies of the Dominions, the trade and naval movements of all the Powers on the face of the earth—that is to say, his aim is to secure a world monopoly for England." There has never been any other thought in the English mind. As I said in Part I. of this paper, "British interests are first the control of all the seas of all the world in full military and commercial control. If this be not challenged peace is permitted; to dispute it seriously means war."

Germany is driven by necessity to dispute it seriously and to overcome it. She cannot get out to play her part in world life, nay, she cannot hope to ultimately maintain herself at home until that battle has been fought and won.

Arrangements with England, detentes, understandings, call them what you will, are merely parleys before the fight. The assault must be delivered, the fortress carried, or else Germany, and with her Europe, must resign the mission of the white races and hand over the government and future of the world to one chosen people.

Europe reproduces herself yearly at the present time at the rate of about five million souls. Some three-fifths of the number are to-day absorbed into the life of the Continent, the balance go abroad and principally to North America, to swell the English-speaking world. Germany controls about one-fifth of Europe's natural annual increase, and realising that emigration to-day means only to lose her people and build up her antagonist's strength, she has for years now striven to keep her people within German limits, and hitherto with successful results far in excess of any achieved by other European States. But the limit must be reached, and that before many years are past. Where is Germany to find the suitable region, both on a scale and under conditions of climate, health and soil that a people of say 90,000,000 hemmed in a territory little larger than France, will find commensurate to their needs? No European people is in such plight.

Russia has the immense and healthy world of Siberia into which to overflow. France, far from needing outlets, increases not at all, and during 1911 showed an excess of close on 40,000 deaths over births. For France the day of greatness is past. A French Empire, in any other sense than the Roman one of commercial and military exploitation of occupied territories and subjugated peoples is gone forever.

France has no blood to give except in war. French blood will not colonize even the Mediterranean littoral. Italy is faced with something of the same problem as Germany, but to a lesser extent. Her surplus population already finds a considerable outlet in Argentina and South Brazil, among peoples, institutions, and language largely approximating to those left behind. While Italy has, indeed need of a world policy as well as Germany, her ability to sustain a great part abroad cannot be compared to that of the Teutonic people. Her claim is not so urgent; her need not so insistent, her might inadequate.

The honesty and integrity of the German mind, the strength of the German intellect, the skill of the German hand and brain, and justice and vigour of German law, the intensity of German culture, science, education and social development, these need a great and healthy field for their beneficial display, and the world needs these things more than it needs the British mastery of the seas. The world of European life needs to-day, as it needed in the days of a decadent Roman Empire, the coming of another Goth, the coming of the Teuton. The interposing island in the North Sea alone intervenes. How to surmount that obstacle, how to win the freedom of the "Seven Seas" for Europe must be the supreme issue for Germany.

If she falls she is doomed to sterility. The supreme test of German genius, of German daring, of German discipline and imagination lies there.

Where Louis XIV., the Directory, and Napoleon failed, will the heirs of Karl the Great see clearly?

And then, when that great hour has struck, will Germany, will Europe, produce the statesman soldier who shall see that the key to ocean freedom lies in that island beyond an island, whose very existence Europe has forgotten?

Till that key is out from the Pirate's girdle, Germany may win a hundred "Austerlitzes" on the Vistula, the Dnieper, the Loire, but until she restores that key to Europe, to paraphrase Pitt, she may "roll up that map of the world; it will not be wanted these fifty years."



Chapter V

THE PROBLEM OF THE NEAR WEST

The foregoing reflections and the arguments drawn from them were penned before the outbreak of the war between Turkey and the Balkan Allies.

That war is still undecided as I write (March 1913), but whatever its precise outcome may be, it is clear that the doom of Turkey as a great power is sealed, and that the complications of the Near East will, in future, assume an entirely fresh aspect. Hitherto, there was only the possibility that Germany might find at least a commercial and financial outlet in the Asiatic dominions of the Sultan. There was even the possibility, had Turkey held together, that England, to mitigate pressure elsewhere, would have conceded to an expanding and insistent Germany, a friendly interest and control in Asia Minor. It is true that the greatest possible development, and under the most favoured conditions of German interests in that region, could not have met the needs or satisfied the ever increasing necessities of Teutonic growth; but at least it would have offered a safety valve, and could have involved preoccupations likely to deflect the German vision, for a time, from the true path to greatness, the Western highways of the sea.

An occupation or colonisation of the Near East by the Germanic peoples could never have been a possible solution under any circumstances of the problem that faces German statemanship. As well talk of reviving the Frank Kingdom of Jerusalem.

The occupation by the fair-haired peoples of the Baltic and North Seas of the lands of Turk and Tartar, of Syrian and Jew, of Armenian and Mesopotamian, was never a practical suggestion or one to be seriously contemplated. "East is East and West is West," sings the poet of Empire, and Englishmen cannot complain if the greatest of Western peoples, adopting the singer, should apply the dogma to themselves. Germany, indeed, might have looked for a considerable measure of commercial dominance in the Near East, possibly for a commercial protectorate such as France applies to Tunis and Algeria and hopes to apply to morocco, or such as England imposes on Egypt, and this commercial predominance could have conferred considerable profits on Rhenish industries and benefited Saxon industrialism, but it could never have done more than this. A colonisation of the realms of Bajazet and Saladin by the fair-skinned peoples of the North, or the planting of Teutonic institutions in the valley of Damascus, even with the benevolent neutrality of England, is a far wider dream (and one surely no German statesman ever entertained) than a German challenge to the sea supremacy of England.

The trend of civilized man in all great movements since modern civilization began, has been from East to West, not from West to East. The tide of the peoples moved by some mysterious impulse from the dawn of European expansion has been towards the setting sun. The few movements that have taken place in the contrary direction have but emphasized the universality of this rule, from the days of the overthrow of Rome, if we seek no earlier date. The Crusades furnished, doubtless, the classic example. The later contrary instance, that of Russia towards Siberia, scarcely, if at all affects the argument, for there the Russian overthrow is filling up Northern rather than Eastern lands, and the movement involves to the Russian emigrant no change of climate, soil, law, language or environment while that emigrant himself belongs, perhaps, as much to Asia as to Europe.

But whatever value to German development the possible chances of expansion in the Near East may have offered before the present Balkan war, those chances to-day, as the result of that war, scarcely exist. It is probably the perception of this outcome of the victory of the Slav States that has influenced and accelerated the characteristic change of English public opinion that has accompanied with shouts of derision the dying agonies of the Turk. "In matters of mind," as a recent English writer says in the Saturday Review, "the national sporting instinct does not exist. The English public invariably backs the winner." And just as the English public invariably backs the winner, British policy invariably backs the anti-German, or supposedly anti-German side in all world issues. "What 1912 seems to have effected is a vast aggrandizement of the Slavonic races in their secular struggle against the Teutonic races. Even a local and temporary triumph of Austria over Servia cannot conceal the fact that henceforth the way south-east to the Black Sea and the Aegean Sea is barred to the Germans."[5]

[Footnote 5: Mr. Frederick Harrison in the English Review, Jan., 1913.]

That is the outstanding fact that British public opinion perceives with growing pleasure from the break up of Turkey.

No matter where the dispute or what the purpose of conflict may be, the supreme issue for England is "Where is Germany?"

Against that side the whole weight of Great Britain will, openly or covertly, be thrown. German expansion in the Near East has gone by the board, and in its place the development of Greek naval strength in the Mediterranean, to take its stand by the Triple Entente, comes to be jauntily considered, while the solid wedge of a Slav Empire or Federation, commanding in the near future 2,000,000 of armed men is agreeably seen to be driven across South-eastern Europe between Austro-German efforts and the fallow lands of Asia Minor. These latter can safely be left in Turkish hands yet a while longer, until the day comes for their partition into "spheres of influence," just as Persia and parts of China are to-day being apportioned between Russia and England. This happy consummation, moreover, has fallen from heaven, and Turkey is being cut up for the further extension of British interests clearly by the act of God.

The victory of the Balkan States becomes another triumph for the British Bible; it is the victory of righteousness over wrong-doing.

The true virtue of the Balkan "Christians" lies in the possibility of their being moulded into an anti-German factor of great weight in the European conflict, clearly impending, and in their offering a fresh obstacle, it is hoped, to German world policy.

Let us first inspect the moral argument on the lips of these professors. We are assured, by it, that the claim of the Balkan Allies to expel Turkey from Europe rests upon a just and historic basis.

Briefly stated it is that the Turk has held his European provinces by a right of conquest only. What the sword took, die sword may take away. When the sword was struck from the Ottoman's grasp his right to anything it had given him fell too. Thus Adrianople, a city he has held for over five hundred years, must be given up to a new conqueror who never owned it in the past and who certainly has far less moral claim to be there to-day than the descendants of Selim's soldiers.

But the moral argument brings strange revenges.

If Turkey has no right to Adrianople, to Thrace—"right of sword to be shattered by the sword"—what right has England to Ireland, to Dublin, to Cork? She holds Ireland by exactly the same title as that by which Turkey has hitherto held Macedonia, Thrace, Salonika—a right of invasion, of seizure, of demoralization. If Turkey's rights, nearly six hundred years old, can be shattered in a day by one successful campaign, and if the powers of Europe can insist, with justice, that this successful sword shall outweigh the occupation of centuries, then, indeed, have the Powers, led by England, furnished a precedent in the Near East which the victor in the next great struggle should not be slow to apply to the Near West, when a captive Ireland shall be rescued from the hands of a conqueror whose tide is no better, indeed somewhat worse than that of Turkey to Macedonia. And when the day of defeat shall strike for the Turkey of the Near West, then shall an assembled Europe remember the arguments of 1912-13 and a freed Ireland shall be justified on the very grounds England to-day has been the first to advance against a defeated Turkey.

"But the Turk is an Asiatic," say the English Bashaws: to which indeed, Europe might aptly reply, "and are the English European or non-European?" The moral argument, and the "Asiatic argument" are strange texts for the desecrater of Christian Ireland to appeal to against that continent which she would fain hem in with Malayan and Indian battleships, and Canadian and Australasian dreadnoughts. Not the moral argument, but the anti-German argument, furnishes the real ground for the changed British attitude in the present war.

The moral failure of Turkey, her inability to govern her Christian peoples is only the pretext: but just as the moral argument brings its strange revenges and shows an Ireland that has suffered all that Macedonia has suffered, and this at the hands of Christians, and not of Moslems, so the triumph of the Balkan Allies, far from benefiting Britain, must, in the end, react to her detriment.

The present apparent injury to German interests by the closing of South-eastern Europe, and the road to Asia Minor, will inevitably force Germany to still more resolutely face the problem of opening the Western seaways. To think otherwise is to believe that Germany will accept a quite impossible position tamely and without a struggle.

Hemmed in by Russia on the East and the new Southern Slav States on the South-east, with a vengeful France being incited on her Western frontier to fresh dreams of conquest, Germany sees England preparing still mightier armaments to hold and close the seaways of the world. The Canadian naval vote, the Malayan "gift" of a battleship come as fresh rivets in the chain forged for the perpetual binding of the seas, or it might more truly be said, for the perpetual binding of the hands of die German people.

We read in a recent London periodical how these latest naval developments portend the coming of the day when "the Imperial navy shall keep the peace of the seas as a policeman does the peace of the streets. The time is coming when a naval war (except by England), will be as relentlessly suppressed as piracy on the high seas." (Review of Reviews, December, 1912.)

The naive arrogance of this utterance is characteristically English. It is, after all, but the journalistic echo of the Churchill Glasgow speech, and the fullest justification of the criticism of the Kreuz Zeitung already quoted. It does not stand alone; it could be paralleled in the columns of any English paper—Liberal as much as Conservative—every day in the week. Nothing is clearer than that no Englishman can think of other nations save in terms of permanent inferiority. Thus, for instance, in a November (1912) issue of the Daily News we find a representative Englishman (Sir R. Edgecumbe), addressing that Liberal journal in words that no one but an Englishman would dream of giving public utterance to. Sir R. Edgecumbe deprecated a statement that had gone round to the effect that the Malayan battleship was not a free gift of the toiling Tamils, Japanese, Chinese, and other rubber workers who make up, with a few Malays, the population of that peninsula, but was really the fruit of an arbitrary tax imposed upon these humble, but indifferent Asiatics by their English administration.

Far from being indifferent, Sir R. Edgecumbe asserted these poor workers nourished a reverence "bordering on veneration" for the Englishman. "This is shown in a curious way by their refusing to call any European 'a white man' save the Englishman alone. The German trader, the Italian and Frenchman all are, in their speech coloured men."

After this appreciation of themselves the English cannot object to the present writer's view that they are non-Europeans.

Thus while the Eastern question is being settled while I write, by the expulsion of the Turk from Europe, England, who leads the cry in the name of Europe, is preparing the exclusion of Europe from all world affairs that can be dominated by sea power. Lands and peoples held for centuries by Turkey by a right not less moral than that by which England has held Ireland, are being forcibly restored to Europe. So be it.

With settlement of the Eastern question by this act of restitution Europe must inevitably gain the clarity of vision to deal with the Western question by a similar act of restoration.

The Western Macedonia must go the way of its Eastern fellow. Like those of the Orient, the problems of the Occident for Europe are twofold—a near Western and a far Western question. Ireland, keeper of the seas, constitutes for Europe the near Western question.

The freedom of those seas and their opening to all European effort alike on equal terms constitutes the far Western question. But in both cases the antagonist of Europe, the non-European power is the same. The challenge of Europe must be to England, and the champion of Europe must be and can be only Germany. No other European people has the power, the strength of mind, of purpose and of arm to accomplish the great act of deliverance. Europe too long blinded to her own vital interests while disunited, must now, under the guidance of a united Germany, resolutely face the problem of freeing the seas.

That war of the seas is inevitable. It may be fought on a continent; it may be waged in the air—it must be settled on the seas and it must mean either the freeing of those seas or the permanent exclusion of Europeans from the affairs of the world. It means for Europe the future, the very existence of European civilization as opposed to the Anglo-Saxon world domination. In that war, Germany will stand not alone as the champion of Europe, she will fight for the freedom of the world.

As an Irishman I have no fear of the result to Ireland of a German triumph. I pray for it; for with the coming of that day the "Irish question" so dear to British politicians, becomes a European, a world question.

With the humbling of Great Britain and the destruction of her sea ownership, European civilization assumes a new stature, and Ireland, oldest and yet youngest of the European peoples, shall enter into free partnership with the civilization, culture, and prosperity that that act of liberation shall bring to mankind.



Chapter VI

THE DUTY OF CHRISTENDOM

It is only the truth that wounds. An Irishman to-day in dealing with Englishmen is forced, if he speak truly, to wound. That is why so many Irishmen do not speak the truth. The Irishman, whether he be a peasant, a farm labourer, however low in the scale of Anglicization he may have sunk, is still in imagination, if not always in manner, a gentleman. The Englishman is a gentleman by chance, by force of circumstances, by luck of birth, or some rare opportunity of early fellowship. The Irishman is a gentleman by instinct and shrinks from wounding the feelings of another man and particularly of the man who has wounded him. He scorns to take it out of him that way. That is why the task of misgoverning him has been so easy and has come so naturally to the Englishman. One of the chief grievances of the Irishman in the middle ages was that the man who robbed him was such a boor. Insult was added to injury in that the oppressor was no knight in shining armour, but a very churl of men; to the courteous and cultured Irishman a "bodach Sassenach," a man of low blood, of low cunning, caring only for the things of the body, with no veneration for the things of the spirit—with, in fine, no music in his soul. The things that the Irishman loved he could not conceive of. Without tradition or history himself he could not comprehend the passionate attachment of the Irishman to both, and he proceeded to wipe both out, so far as in him lay, from off the map of Ireland and from out the Irishman's consciousness.

Having, as he believed, with some difficulty accomplished his task, he stands to-day amazed at the result. The Irishman has still a grievance—nay more, Ireland talks of "wrongs." But has she not got him? What more can she want except his purse? And, that too, she is now taking. In the indulgence of an agreeable self-conceit which supplies for him the want of imagination he sees Ireland to-day as a species of "sturdy beggar," half mendicant, half pickpocket—making off with the proceeds of his hard day's work. The past slips from him as a dream. Has he not for years now, well, for thirty years certainly, a generation, a life time, done all in his power to meet the demands of this incessant country that more in sorrow than in anger he will grant you, was misgoverned in the past. That was its misfortune, never his fault. This is a steadily recurring phase of the fixed hallucination in his blood. Ireland never is, but only always has been cursed by English rule. He himself, the Englishman of the day, is always a simple, bluff, good-hearted fellow. His father if you like, his grandfather very probably, misgoverned Ireland, but never he himself. Why, just look at him now, his hand never out of his pocket relieving the shrill cries of Irish distress. There she stands, a poverty-stricken virago at his door, shaking her bony fist at him, Celtic porter in her eye, the most fearful apparition in history, his charwoman, shaming him before the neighbours and demanding payment for long past spring cleanings that he, good soul, has forgotten all about or is quite certain were settled at the time. Yes, there she stands, the Irish charwoman, the old broom in her hand and preparing for one last sweep that shall make the house sweet and fit for her own children. And John Bull, honest, sturdy John Bull, believing the house to be his, thinks that the only thing between him and the woman is the matter of wages; that all she wants is an extra shilling. Ireland wants but one thing in the world. She wants her house to herself, and the stranger out of her house.

While he is, in his heart, perfectly aware of this, John Bull (for the reasons given by Richard Cox), is quite determined that nothing shall get him out of the house. "Separation is unthinkable," say English Ministers. The task of Ireland is to-day what it always has been—to get the stranger out of the house. It is no shame to Ireland or her sons, that up to this they have failed in each attempt. Those attempts are pillars of fire in her history, beacons of light in the desert of sin, where the Irish Israel still wanders in search of the promised land. Few of the peoples in Europe who to-day make up the concert of powers, have, unaided, expelled the invader who held them down, and none has been in the situation of Ireland.

As Mr. Gladstone wrote in 1890, "can anyone say we should have treated Ireland as we have done had she lain not between us and the ocean, but between us and Europe?"

In introducing the scheme of mild Home Rule termed the Councils Bill in 1907, Mr. Birrell prefaced it with the remark that "separation was unthinkable—save in the event of some great world cataclysm." World cataclysms up to this have not reached Ireland—England intervened too well. She has maintained her hold by sea power. The lonely Andromeda saw afar off the rescuing Perseus, a nude figure on the coast of Spain or France, but long ere his flight reached her rock-bound feet she beheld him fall, bruised and mangled, and devoured by the watching sea monster.

Had Italy been placed as Ireland is, cut off from all external succour save across a sea held by a relentless jailor, would she have been to-day a free people, ally of Austria on terms of high equality?

The blood shed by the founders of modern Italy would all have been shed in vain—that blood that sanctified the sword of Garibaldi—had it not been for the selfish policy of Louis Napoleon and the invading armies of France. Italy, no more than Ireland, could have shaken herself free had it not been for aid from abroad. The late Queen Victoria saw clearly the parallel, and as hereditary custodian of Ireland, Her Majesty protested against the effort then being made to release Italy from an Austrian prison, when she herself was so hard put to it to keep Ireland in an English jail. Writing to her Prime Minister on July 25th, 1848, Her Majesty said:—

"The Queen must tell Lord John (Russell) what she has repeatedly told Lord Palmerston, but without apparent effect, that the establishment of an entente cordiale with the French Republic, for the purpose of driving the Austrians out of their dominions in Italy would be a disgrace to this country. That the French would attach the greatest importance to it and gain the greatest advantage from it, there can be no doubt of. But how will England appear before the world at the moment she is struggling for her supremacy in Ireland?..." and on Oct. 10th following Her Majesty wrote to her uncle, the first King of the Belgians (who owed his new minted crown to the Belgian people depriving the Dutch Sovereign of his "lawful possessions") in the following memorable words:

"Really it is quite immoral, with Ireland quivering in our grasp, and ready to throw off her allegiance at any moment, for us to force Austria to give up her lawful possessions. What shall we say if Canada, Malta, etc., begin to trouble us? It hurts me terribly." (Page 237, Queen Victoria's letters, published by order of His Majesty, King Edward VII.)

It hurt Ireland much more terribly, that failure to throw off the hand that held her "quivering in our grasp," so soon to stretch her "a corpse upon the dissecting table."

Ireland has failed to win her freedom, not so much because she has failed to shed her blood, but because her situation in the world is just that unique situation I have sought to depict. Belonging to Europe, she has not been of Europe; and England with a persistency that would be admirable were it not so criminal in intention and effect, has bent all her efforts, all her vigour, an unswerving policy, and a pitiless sword to extend the limits of exclusion. To approach Ireland at all since the first English Sovereign laid hands upon it was "quite immoral." When Frederick of Hohenstaufen (so long ago as that!) sent his secretary (an Irishman) to Ireland we read that Henry III of England declared "it hurt him terribly," and ordered all the goings out and comings in of the returned Irish-German statesman to be closely watched.

The dire offence of Hugh O'Neill to Elizabeth was far less his rebellion than his "practises" with Spain. At every cessation of arms during the Nine Years War he waged with England, she sought to obtain from him an abjuration of "foreign aid," chiefly "that of the Spaniard." "Nothing will become the traitor (O'Neill) more than his public confession of any Spanish practices, and his abjuration of any manner of harkening or combining with any foreigners."

Could O'Neill be brought to publicly repudiate help from abroad it would have, the Queen thought, the effect that "in Spain... the hopes of such attempts might be extinguished."

As long as the sea was open to Spain there was grave danger. If Spaniard and Irishman came close together O'Neill's offence was indeed "fit to be made vulgar"—all men would see the strength of combination, the weakness of isolation.

"Send me all the news you receive from Spain for Tyrone doth fill all these parts with strange lies, although some part be true, that there came some munition." It was because O'Neill was a statesman and knew the imperative need to Ireland of keeping in touch with Europe that for Elizabeth he became "the chief traitor of Ireland—a reprobate from God, reserved for the sword."

Spain was to Elizabethan Englishmen what Germany is to-day.

"I would venture to say one word here to my Irish fellow countrymen of all political persuasions. If they imagine they can stand politically or economically while Britain falls they are woefully mistaken. The British fleet is their one shield. It if be broken Ireland will go down. They may well throw themselves heartily into the common defence, for no sword can transfix England without the point reaching behind her." (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, in the Fortnightly Review, Feb., 1913, "Great Britain and the Next War.")

The voice is a very old one, and the bogey has done duty for a long time in Ireland. When, to-day, it is from Germany that freedom may be feared, Ireland is warned against the German. When, three hundred years ago the beacon of hope shone on the coast of Spain, it was the Spaniards who were the bad people of history.

Fray Mattheo de Oviedo, who had been sent to Ireland as Archbishop, wrote to King Philip III from O'Neill's stronghold, Dungannon, on June 24, 1600. We might be listening to the voice of the Fortnightly Review of yesterday. "The English are making great efforts to bring about a peace, offering excellent terms, and for this purpose the Viceroy sent messengers twice to O'Neill, saying among other things, that Your Majesty is making peace with the Queen, and that his condition will be hopeless. At other times he says that no greater misfortune could happen to the country than to bring Spaniards into it, because they are haughty and vicious and they would destroy and ruin the country." The Irish princes were no fools. "To all this they reply most honourably that they will hold out as long as they have one soldier or there remains a cow to eat."

Hugh O'Neill saw clearly that all compromise between Ireland and England was futile, and that the way of escape was by complete separation and lay only through Europe. He again and again begged the Spanish King to sever Ireland and erect it into an allied State. He offered the crown of Ireland to a Spanish prince, just as three centuries earlier another and a great O'Neill offered the crown of Ireland to Edward Bruce in 1315.

The coming of the Bruce saved Gaelic Ireland for three centuries. Had Philip of Spain sent his son as King to Ireland, her fate had been settled then instead of remaining three centuries later to still confront European statesmanship with an unsolved problem.

In many letters addressed by the Irish leaders to Philip II and Philip III we find the constantly recurring note of warning that to leave England in possession of Ireland meant the downfall of Spain. The Irish princes knew that in fighting England they were in truth fighting the battle of European civilization.

Writing to Philip II from Lifford, on May 16th, 1596, O'Neill and O'Donnell drew the King's attention to the cause of Ireland as the cause of Europe, and in the name of Ireland offered the crown to a Spanish prince. "But inasmuch as we have felt to our great and indescribably harm the evil doings and crimes of those whom the Queen of England is in the habit of sending amongst us, we beg and beseech Your Majesty to send someone well known to you and perfectly fit to be the King of this island, for his own welfare, ours, and that of the Christian State (Christendom)."

They asked for a prince "who will not be unwilling to rule over and live amongst us and to direct and guide our nation, well and wisely." They pointed out how "he will obtain much advantage and glory by so doing," and finally they begged "would that Your Majesty would appoint the Archduke of Austria, now Governor of Flanders, a famous man and worthy of all praise, than whom none would be more acceptable." (The original is in Latin and in the archives of Simancas.)

No more statesmanlike appeal was ever made from Ireland; and had the Archduke of Austria assumed the crown of Ireland in 1596, "now or never" would indeed have become "now and forever." Had Philip II carried out his often repeated promises of sending aid to that country the fate of his own kingdom must have been a very different one.

"I wish it were possible for me, by word of mouth, to show the importance of this undertaking and the great service that would be rendered thereby to God and His Church, and the great advantage it would be to the service of Your Majesty and the peace of Your States to attack the enemy here."

So wrote in 1600 to Philip II, the Archbishop of Dublin, already quoted, Mattheo de Oviedo.

This prelate had been specially sent to Ireland "to see and understand the state of the country misrepresented by English emissaries at foreign courts."

The wrath of Elizabeth against O'Neill was largely due to his keeping in touch with the continent, whereby the lies of her agents abroad were turned to her own ridicule. To Essex, her Viceroy, she wrote: "Tyrone hath blazed in foreign parts the defeat of regiments, the death of captains, and loss of men of quality in every quarter."

O'Neill not only for years beat her generals in the field, her beat herself and her councillors at their own game. To Essex, in an ecstacy of rage at the loss of the last great army sent, she wrote (September 17th, 1599): "To trust this traitor upon oath is to trust the devil upon his religion. Only this we are sure (for we see it in effect), that you have prospered so ill for us by your warfare, as we cannot but be very jealous lest we should be as well overtaken by the treaty."

(Essex wished to bring O'Neill in by a treaty which, while ostensibly conceding the terms of the Irish prince was to allow the Queen time to carry out her purpose.)

The Irish princes knew Elizabeth and her Ministers, as well as she read Essex. "Believe no news from Ireland of any agreement in this country," they had written to Philip II in 1597, "great offers have been made by the Queen of England, but we will not break our word and promise to your." In a letter written a year earlier (Oct. 18, 1596), replying to the special envoy sent by the king, they said: "Since the former envoys left us we have used every means in our power, as we promised we should do, to gain time and procrastination from one day to another. But how could we impose on so clever an enemy so skilled in every kind of cunning and cheating if we did not use much dissimulation, and especially if we did not pretend we were anxious for peace? We will keep firm and unshaken the promises which we made to Your Majesty with our last breath; if we do not we shall incur at once the wrath of God and the contempt of men."

How faithfully they kept those promises and how the Spanish King failed in his, their fate and the bitter ruin of their country shows. That men fighting for Ireland had to meet Elizabeth and her statesmen with something of her own cunning is made very clear to anyone reading the State papers in Ireland.

Essex, in one of his "answers" wrote: "I advise Her Majesty to allow me, at my return to Dublin, to conclude this treaty, yielding some of their grants in the present; and when Her Majesty has made secret preparations to enable me to prosecute, I will find quarrels enough to break and give them a deadly blow."

The Irish, however, failed in this contest. They were not sufficiently good liars, and lacked the higher flights of villainy necessary to sustain the encounter. The essential English way in Tudor days, and much later, for administering a deadly blow to an Irish patriot was "assassination." Poison frequently took the place of the knife, and was often administered wrapped in a leaf of the British Bible. A certain Atkinson, knowing the religious nature of Cecil, the Queen's Prime Minister, the founder of a long line of statesmen, foremost as champions of Church and Book, suggested the getting rid of O'Neill by some "poisoned Hosts." This proposal to use the Blessed Sacrament as a veritable Last Supper for the last great Irish chief remains on record, was endorsed by Cecil.

Another Briton, named Annyas, was charged to poison "the most dangerous and open rebel in Munster," Florence MacCarthy More, the great MacCarthy. Elizabeth's Prime Minister piously endorsed the deed—"though his soul never had the thought to consent to the poisoning of a dog, much less a Christian ."

To Carew, the President of Munster, Cecil wrote enjoining the assassination of the young Earl of Desmond, then "in the keeping of Carew": "Whatever you do to abridge him out of Providence shall never be imputed to you for a fault, but exceedingly commended by the Queen." After this, we are not surprised to learn that in her instructions to Mountjoy, the successor of Essex, the Queen recommended "to his special care to preserve the true exercise of religion among her loving subjects." As O'Neill was still in the field with a large army, she prudently pointed out, however, that the time "did not permit that he should intermeddle by any severity or violence in matters of religion until her power was better established there to countenance his action." That the character of their adversary was faithfully appreciated by contemporary Irish opinion stands plain in a letter written by James Fitzthomas, nephew of the great Earl Gerald of Desmond, to Philip II. "The government of the English is such as Pharaoh himself never used the like; for they content not themselves with all temporal prosperity, but by cruelty desire our blood and perpetual destruction to blot out the whole remembrance of our posterity—for that Nero, in his time, was far inferior to that Queen in cruelty."

The Irish chiefs well sustained their part in meeting this combination of power and perfidy, and merited, on the highest grounds of policy the help so often promised by the King of Spain. They showed him not only by their valour on the field but by their sagacious council how great a part was reserved for Ireland in the affairs of Europe if he would but profit from it and do his part.

In this the Spanish King failed. Philip II had died in 1598, too immersed in religious trials to see that the centre of his griefs was pivoted on the possession of Ireland by the female Nero. With his son and successor communication was maintained and in a letter of Philip III to O'Neill, dated from Madrid, Dec. 24th, 1599, we read: "Noble and well beloved I have already written a joint letter to you and your relative O'Donnell, in which I replied to a letter of both of you. By this, which I now write to you personally I wish to let you know my good will towards you, and I mean to prove it, not only by word, but by deed." That promise was not fulfilled, or so inadequately fulfilled that the help, when it came, was insufficient to meet the needs of the case.

History tells us what the sad consequences were to the cause of civilisation in Ireland, from the failure of the Spanish King to realize the greatness of his responsibilities. But the evil struck deeper than to Ireland alone. Europe lost more than her historians have yet realised from the weakness of purpose that let Ireland go down transfixed by the sword of Elizabeth.

Had the fate of Europe been then controlled by a Hohenzollern, instead of by a Spanish Hapsburg, how different might have been the future of the world!

Although Europe had forgotten Ireland, Ireland had never forgotten Europe. Natural outpost and sentinel of that continent in the West for three-hundred years now gagged and bound, since the flight to Rome of her last native Princes, she stands to-day as in the days of Philip III, if an outcast from European civilization non the less rejecting the insular tradition of England, as she has rejected her insular Church. And now once more in her career she turns to the greatest of European Sovereigns, to win his eyes to the oldest, and certainly the most faithful of European peoples. Ireland already has given and owes much to Germany.

In the dark ages intercourse between the Celtic people of the West and the Rhinelands and Bavaria was close and long sustained. Irish monasteries flourished in the heart of Germany, and German architecture gave its note possibly to some of the fairest cathedral churches in Ireland.

Clonfert and Cashel are, perhaps amongst the most conspicuous examples of the influence of that old-time intercourse with Germany. To-day, when little of her past remains to venerate, her ancient language on what seemed its bed of death owes much of its present day revival to German scholarship and culture. Probably the foremost Gaelic scholar of the day is the occupant of the Chair of Celtic at Berlin University, and Ireland recognises with a gratitude she is not easily able to express, all that her ancient literature owes to the genius and loving intellect of Dr. Kuno Meyer.

The name of Ireland may be known on the Bourses or in the Chancelleries of Europe; it is not without interest, even fame, in the centres of German academical culture. But that the German State may also be interested in the political fate of Ireland is believed by the present writer.

Maurice Fitzgerald, the outlawed claimant to the Earldom of Desmond, wrote to Philip II, from Lisbon on September 4th, 1593:

"We have thought it right to implore your Majesty to send the aid you will think fit and with it to send us (the Irish refugees in the Peninsula) to defend and uphold the same undertaking; for we hope, with God's help Your Majesty will be victorious and conquer and hold as your own the kingdom of Ireland.—We trust in God that Your Majesty and the Council will weigh well the advantages that will ensue to Christendom from this enterprise—since the opportunity is so good and the cause so just and weighty, and the undertaking so easily completed."

The history of human freedom is written in letters of blood. It is the law of God. No people who clutch to safety, who shun death are worthy of freedom.

The dead who die for Ireland are the only live men in a free Ireland. The rest are cattle. Freedom is kept alive in man's blood only by shedding of that blood. It was not an act of a foreign Parliament they were seeking, those splendid "scorners of death," the lads and young men of Mayo, who awaited with a fearless joy the advance of the English army fresh from the defeat of Humbert in 1798. Then, if ever, Irishmen might have run from a victorious and pitiless enemy who, having captured the French General and murdered in cold blood the seven hundred Killala peasants who were with his colours, were now come to Killala itself to wreak vengeance on the last stronghold of Irish rebellion.

The ill-led and half armed peasants, the last Irishmen in Ireland to stand the pitched fight for their country's freedom, went to meet the army of England, as the Protestant Bishop, who saw them, says:—"running upon death with as little appearance of reflection or concern as if they were hastening to a show."

The late Queen Victoria, in one of her letters to her uncle, the King of the Belgians, wrote thus of the abortive rising of fifty years later in 1848:

"There are ample means of crushing the rebellion in Ireland, and I think it is very likely to go off without any contest, which people (and I think rightly) rather regret. The Irish should receive a good lesson or they will begin again." (Page 223, Vol. II, Queen Victoria's letters.) Her Majesty was profoundly right. Ireland needed that lesson in 1848, as she needs it still more to-day. Had Irishmen died in 1848 as they did in 1798 Ireland would be to-day fifty years nearer to freedom. It is because a century has passed since Europe saw Ireland willing to die that to-day Europe has forgotten that she lives.

As I began this essay with a remark of Charles Lever on Germany so shall end it here with a remark of Lever on his own country, Ireland.

In a letter to a friend in Dublin, he thus put the epitaph of Europe on the grave of a generation who believed that "no human cause was worth the shedding one drop of human blood."

"As to Ireland all foreign sympathy is over owing to the late cowardice and poltroonery of the patriots. Even Italians can fight" (Letter of C. Lever from Florence, August 19th, 1848).

It is only the truth that wounds. It is that reproach that has cursed Ireland for a century.

Sedition, the natural garment for an Irishman to wear, has been for a hundred years a bloodless sedition. It is this fiery shirt of Nessus that has driven our strong men mad. How to shed our blood with honour, how to give our lives for Ireland—that has been, that is the problem of Irish nationality.



Chapter VII

THE FREEDOM OF THE SEAS

It would be idle to attempt to forecast the details of a struggle between Great Britain and Germany. That is a task that belongs to the War Department of the two States. I have assigned myself merely to point out that such a struggle is inevitable, and to indicate what I believe to be the supreme factors in the conflict, and how one of these, Ireland, and that undoubtedly the most important factor, has been overlooked by practically every predecessor of Germany in the effort to make good at sea. The Spaniards in Elizabeth's reign, the French of Louis XIV and of the Directory took some steps, it is true, to challenge England's control of Ireland, but instead of concentrating their strength upon that line of attack they were content to dissipate it upon isolated expeditions and never once to push home the assault on the one point that was obviously the key to the enemy's whole position. At any period during that last three centuries, with Ireland gone, England was, if not actually at the mercy of her assailants, certainly reduced to impotency beyond her own shores. But while England knew the value to herself of Ireland, she appreciated to the full the fact that this profitable juxtaposition lay on her right side hidden from the eyes of Europe.

"Will anyone assert," said Gladstone, "that we would have dared to treat Ireland as we have done had she lain, not between us and the ocean, but between us and the continent?" And while the bulk of England, swollen to enormous dimensions by the gains she drew from Ireland interposed between her victim and Europe, her continental adversaries were themselves the victims of that strange mental disease psychologists term the collective illusion. All the world saw that which in fact did not exist. The greatness of England as they beheld it, imposing, powerful, and triumphant, existed not on the rocky base they believed they saw, but on the object, sacked, impoverished, and bled, they never saw. And so it is to-day. The British Empire is the great illusion. Resembling in much the Holy Roman Empire it is not British, it is not an Empire, and assuredly it is not holy. It lives on the life-blood and sufferings of some, on the suffrance and mutual jealousy of others, and on the fixed illusion of all. Rather is it a great Mendicity Institute. England now, instead of "robbing from Pole to Pole," as John Mitchel once defined her activities, goes begging from Pole to Pole that all and every one shall give her a helping hand to keep the plunder. Chins, Goorkhas, Sikhs, Malays, Irish, Chinese, South African Dutch, Australasians, Maoris, Canadians, Japanese, and finally "Uncle Sam"—these are the main components that when skilfully mixed from London, furnish the colouring material for the world-wide canvas. If we take away India, Egypt and the other coloured races the white population that remains is greatly inferior to the population of Germany, and instead of being a compact, indivisible whole, consists of a number of widely scattered and separated communities, each with separate and absorbing problems of its own, and more than one of them British neither in race, speech, nor affection. Moreover if we turn to the coloured races we find that the great mass of the subjects of this Empire have less rights within it than they possess outside its boundaries, and occupy there a lower status than that accorded to most foreigners.

The people of India far out number all other citizens of the British Empire put together, and yet we find the British Indians resident in Canada, to take but one instance, petitioning the Imperial Government in 1910 for as favourable terms of entry into that British possession as the Japanese enjoyed.

They pointed out that a Japanese could enter Canada on showing that he held from six pounds to ten pounds, but that no British Indian could land unless he had forty pounds and had come direct from India,—a physical impossibility, since no direct communication exists. But they went further, for they showed that their "citizenship" of the British Empire entailed penalties that no foreign state anywhere imposed upon them.

"We appeal," they said, "and most forcibly bring to your notice that no such discriminating laws are existing against us in foreign countries like the United States of America, Germany, Japan, and Africa, to whom we do not owe any allegiance whatsoever."

So that outside its white or European races it is clear the Empire has no general or equal citizenship, and that, far from being one, it is more divided racially against itself than are even opposing Asiatic and European nations which have the good fortune not to be united in a common, imperial bond.

The total white population of this incongruous mass in 1911 consisted of some 59,000,000 human beings made up of various national and racial strains, as against 66,000,000 of white men in the German Empire the vast majority of them of German blood. And while the latter form a disciplined, self-contained, and self-supporting and self-defending whole, the former are swelled by Irish, French-Canadians, and Dutch South Africans who, according to Sir R. Edgcumbe, must be reckoned as "coloured."

It is one thing to paint the map red, but you must be sure that your colours are fast and that the stock of paints wont run out. England, apart from her own perplexities is now faced with this prospect. Great Britain can no longer count on Ireland, that most prolific source of supply of her army, navy, and industrial efforts during the last century, while she is faced with a declining birth-rate, due largely, be it noted, to the diminished influx of the Irish, a more prolific and virile race. While her internal powers of reproduction are failing, her ability to keep those already born is diminishing still more rapidly. Emigration threatens to remove the surplus of births over deaths.

As long as it was only the population of Ireland that fell (8,500,000 in 1846 to 4,370,000 in 1911), Great Britain was not merely untroubled but actually rejoiced at a decrease in numbers that made the Irish more manageable, and yet just sufficiently starvable to supply her with a goodly surplus for army, navy, and industrial expansion in Great Britain. Now that the Irish are gone with a vengeance it is being perceived that they did not take their vengeance with them and that the very industrial expansion they built up from their starving bodies and naked limbs contains within itself the seeds of a great retribution.

"Since Free Trade has ruined our agriculture, our army has become composed of starving slum dwellers who, according to the German notion are better at shouting than at fighting. German generals have pointed out that in the South African war our regular and auxiliary troops often raised the white flag and surrendered, without necessity, sometimes to a few Boers, and they may do the same to a German invading force. Free Trade which "benefits the consumer" and the capitalist has, unfortunately, through the destruction of our agriculture and through forcing practically the whole population of Great Britain into the towns, destroyed the manhood of the nation." (Modern Germany page 251, by J. Ellis Barker, 1907). An army of slum dwellers is a poor base on which to build the structure of a perpetual world dominion.

While the navy shows an imposing output of new battleships and cruisers for 1913, the record, we are told, of all warship construction in the world, it takes blood as well as iron to cement empires. Battleships may become so much floating scrap iron (like the Russian fleet at Tsushima), if the men behind the guns lack the right stamina and education.

We learn, too, that it is not only the slum dwellers who are failing, but that to meet the shortage of officers a large number of transfers from the merchant marine to the Royal Navy are being sanctioned. To this must be added the call of the Great Dominions for men and officers to man their local fleets. As the vital resources of England become more and more inadequate to meet the menace of German naval and moral strength, she turns her eyes to Ireland, and we learn from the London Daily Telegraph that Mr. Churchill's scheme of recruiting at Queenstown may furnish "matter for congratulation, as Irish boys make excellent bluejackets happy of disposition, amenable to discipline, and extremely quick and handy."

As I can recall an article in this same journal, written during the course of the Boer War, in which Ireland was likened to a "serpent whose head must be crushed beneath the heel," the Daily Telegraph's praise to-day of the Irish disposition should leave Irish boys profoundly unmoved—and still ashore.

There is yet another aspect of the growing stream of British emigration. "Death removes the feeble, emigration removes the strong. Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and South Africa, have no use for the sick and palsied, or of those incapable of work through age or youth. They want the workers and they get them. Those who have left the United Kingdom during 1912 are not the scum of our islands, but the very pick. And they leave behind, for our politicians to grapple with, a greater proportion of females, of children and of disabled than ever before." (London Magazine!)

The excess of females over males, already so noteworthy a feature of England's decay, becomes each year more accentuated and doubtless accounts for the strenuous efforts now being made to entrap Irish boys into the British army and navy.

If we compare the figures of Germany and Great Britain, and then contrast them with those of Ireland, we shall see, at a glance, how low England is sinking, and how vitally necessary it is for her to redress the balance of her own excess of "militants" over males by kidnapping Irish youths into her emasculated services and by fomenting French and Russian enmities against the fruitful German people.

Germany 1910, males, 32,031,967; females, 32,871,456; total, 64,925,993. Excess of females, 739,489.

Great Britain, 1911:

England and Wales—Males, 17,448,476; females, 18,626,793; total, 36,075,269. Excess of females, 1,178,317.

Scotland—Males, 2,307,603; females, 2,251,842; total, 4,759,445. Excess of females, 144,239.

Total for Great Britain, 40,834,714. Excess of females, 1,322,556.

Thus on a population much less than two thirds that of Germany Great Britain has almost twice as many females in excess over males as Germany has, and this disproportion of sexes tends yearly to increase. We read in every fresh return of emigration that it is men and not women who are leaving England and Scotland. That Irish emigration, appalling as its ravages have been since 1846, is still maintained on a naturally healthier basis the sex returns for 1911 make clear. The figures for Ireland at the census were as follows:

Ireland—Males, 2,186,802; females, 2,195,147; total, 4,381,949. Excess of females, 8,346.

Ireland, it is seen, can still spare 100,000 or 150,000 males for the British armed forces and be in no unhealthier sex plight than Scotland or England is in. It is to get this surplus of stout Irish brawn and muscle that Mr. Churchill and the British War Office are now touting in Ireland.

I take the following Government advertisement from the Cork Evening Echo (of March, 1913), in illustration:

"Notice—Any person that brings a recruit for the Regular or Special Reserve Branches of the Army to the Recruiting Officer at Victoria Barracks, Cork, will be paid the money reward allowed for each recruit which ranges from 1/6 to 5/- each."

From whatever point of view we survey it we shall find that England's Empire at bottom rests upon Ireland to make good British deficiencies. The Dominions are far off, and while they may give battleships they take men. Ireland is close at hand—she gives all and takes nothing. Men, mind, food and money—all these she has offered through the centuries, and it is upon these and the unrestricted drain of these four things from that rich mine of human fertility and wealth that the British Empire has been founded and maintained. To secure to-day the goodwill and active co-operation of the Irish race abroad as well as in Ireland, and through that goodwill to secure the alliance and support of the United States has become the guiding purpose of British statesmanship.

The Home Rule Bill of the present Liberal Government is merely the petty party expression of what all English statesmen recognize as a national need. Were the present Liberal Government thrown out to-morrow their Unionist successors would hasten to bind Ireland (and America) to them by a measure that, if necessary, would go much further. Every Unionist knows this. Ireland is always the key to the situation.

I will quote two pronouncements, one English and one American, to show that Home Rule has now become an imperial necessity for England.

Speaking in the House of Lords on the Home Rule Bill, Earl Grey, the late Governor-General of Canada, said on January 27th, 1913:

"In the interests of the Empire I feel very strongly that it is imperative that the Irish question should be settled on lines which will satisfy the sentiment of the over-sea democracies, both in our self-governing colonies and in the United States. Everyone, I think will agree that it is most important and in the highest interests of the empire that there should be the friendliest feelings of generous affection and goodwill, not only between the self-governing Dominions and the Motherland, but also between America and England.... I need not elaborate this point. We are all agreed upon it. A heavy shadow at present exists, and it arises from our treatment of Ireland.... If this be so is it not our duty to remove the obstacle that prevents that relationship with America from being that which we all desire?"

The American utterance came from one equally representative of American Imperial interests. It is that of Mr. Roosevelt, published in the Irish World of New York, Feb. 8th, 1913.

"I feel that the enactment into law of this measure ... bids fair to establish goodwill among the English-speaking peoples. This has been prevented more than by any other one thing by this unhappy feud that has raged for centuries, and the settlement of which, I most earnestly hope, and believe, will be a powerful contribution to the peace of the world, based on international justice and goodwill. I earnestly feel that the measure is as much in the interests of Great Britain as of Ireland."

Did we judge of Ireland only by many of the public utterances made in her name, then, indeed might we despair of a people who having suffered so much and so valiantly resisted for so many centuries were now to be won to their oppressor's side, by, perhaps, the most barefaced act of bribery ever attempted by a Government against a people.

"Injured nations cannot so entirely forgive their enemies without losing something of their virility, and it grates upon me to hear leader after leader of the Parliamentary Party declaring without shame that Home Rule when it is won for Ireland is to be used for a new weapon of offence in England's hands against the freedom of the world elsewhere."

Did the Irish Parliamentary Party indeed represent Ireland in this, Mr. Wilfred Blunt's noble protest in his recent work, The Land War in Ireland, would stand for the contemptuous impeachment, not of a political party but of a nation.

Mr. Redmond in his latest speech shows how truly Mr. Blunt has depicted his party's aim; but to the credit of Ireland it is to be recorded that Mr. Redmond had to choose not Ireland, but England for its delivery. Speaking at St. Patrick's Day dinner in London on March 17th, 1913, Mr. Redmond, to a non-Irish audience, thus hailed the future part his country is to play under the restoration of what he describes as a "National Parliament."

"We will, under Home Rule, devote our attention to education, reform of the Poor Law, and questions of that kind which are purely domestic, which are, if you like, hum-drum Irish questions, and the only way in which we will attempt to interfere in any Imperial question will be by our representatives on the floor of the Imperial Parliament in Westminster doing everything in our power to increase the strength and the glory of what will then be our empire at long last; and by sending in support of the empire the strong arms and brave hearts of Irish soldiers and Irish sailors, to maintain the traditions of Irish valour in every part of the world. That is our ambition."

Were this indeed the ambition of Ireland, did this represent the true feeling of Irishmen towards England, and the Empire of England, then Home Rule, on such terms, would be a curse and a crime. Thierry, the French historian, is a truer exponent of the passionate aspirations of the Irish heart than anyone who to-day would seek to represent Ireland as willing to sell her soul no less than the strong arms and brave hearts of her sons in an unholy cause.

"... For notwithstanding the mixture of races, the intercommunion of every kind brought about by the course of centuries, hatred of the English Government still subsists as a native passion in the mass of the Irish nation. Ever since the hour of invasion this race of men has invariably desired that which their conquerors did not desire, detested that which they liked, and liked that which they detested ... This indomitable persistency, this faculty of preserving through centuries of misery the remembrance of lost liberty, and of never despairing of a cause always defeated, always fatal to those who dared to defend it, is perhaps the strangest and noblest example ever given by any nation." (Histoire De La Conquete De L'Angleterre Par Les Normands, Paris edition, 1846. London, 1891.)

The French writer here saw deeper and spoke truer than many who seek to-day not to reveal the Irish heart, whose deep purpose they have forgotten, but barter its life-blood for a concession that could be won to-morrow by half that blood if shed at home, thus offered without warrant "as a new weapon of offence to England's hands against the freedom of the world elsewhere."

The Irishman, who in the belief that Home Rule has come or that any measure of Home Rule the London Parliament will offer can be a substitute for his country's freedom, joins the British army or navy is a voluntary traitor to his country. Almost everything that Ireland produces, or consumes, must all go out or come solely through England and on payment of a transit and shipping tax to English trade.

The London press has lately waxed indignant over Servia denied by Austria a port on the Adriatic, and we have been told a Servia without a port is a Servia held in "economic slavery," and that her independence is illusory unless she have free outlet to the sea. But what of Ireland? With not one, but forty ports, the finest in all Western Europe, they lie idle and empty. With over 1,000 miles of seaboard, facing the West and holding the seaway between Europe and America, Ireland, in the grip of England, has been reduced to an economic slavery that has no parallel in civilization.

And it is to this island, to this people that the appeal is now made that we should distrust the Germans and aid our enslavers. Better far, were that the only outcome, the fate of Alsace-Lorraine (who got their Home Rule Parliament years ago) than the "friendship" of England. We have survived the open hate, the prolonged enslavement, the secular robbery of England and now the England smiles and offers us with one hand Home Rule to take it away with the other, are we going to forget the experience of our forefathers? A Connacht proverb of the Middle Ages should come back to us—"Three things for a man to avoid; the heels of a horse, the horns of a bull; and the smile of an Englishman."

That Ireland must be involved in any war that Great Britain undertakes goes without saying; but that we should willingly throw ourselves into the fray on the wrong side to avert a British defeat, is the counsel of traitors offered to fools.

We must see to it that what Thierry wrote of our fathers is not shamefully belied by their sons. Our "indomitable persistency" has up to this excelled and subdued the unvarying will applied to one unvarying purpose of those who, by dint of that quality, have elsewhere subjugated the universe. We who have preserved through centuries of misery, the remembrance of lost liberty, are not now going to merge our unconquered souls in the base body of our oppressor.

One of the few Liberal statesmen England has produced, certainly the only Liberal politician she has ever produced, the late Mr. Gladstone, compared the union between Great Britain and Ireland to "the union between the mangled corpse of Hector and the headlong chariot of Achilles." (1890.)

But, while I cannot admit that England is an Achilles, save, perhaps, that she may be wounded like him in the heel, I will not admit, I will not own that Ireland, however mangled, however "the plowers have ploughed upon her back and made long furrows," is in truth dead, is indeed a corpse. No; there is a juster analogy, and one given us by the only Englishman who was in every clime, and in every circumstance a Liberal; one who died fighting in the cause of liberty, even as in life he sang it. Byron denounced the union between England and Ireland as "the union of the shark with its prey."



Chapter VIII

IRELAND, GERMANY AND THE NEXT WAR

In the February, 1913, Fortnightly Review, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle at the end of an article, "Great Britain and the Next War," thus appeals to Ireland to recognize that her interests are one with those of Great Britain in the eventual defeat of the latter:

"I would venture to say one word here to my Irish fellow-countrymen of all political persuasions. If they imagine that they can stand politically or economically while Britain falls they are woefully mistaken. The British fleet is their one shield. If it be broken Ireland will go down. They may well throw themselves heartily into the common defence, for no sword can transfix England without the point reaching Ireland behind her...."

I propose to briefly show that Ireland, far from sharing the calamities that must necessarily fall on Great Britain from defeat by a great power, might conceivably thereby emerge into a position of much prosperity.

I will agree with Sir A. Conan Doyle up to this—that the defeat of Great Britain by Germany must be the cause of a momentous change to Ireland: but I differ from him in believing that that change must necessarily be disastrous to Ireland. On the contrary, I believe that the defeat of Great Britain by Germany might conceivably (save in one possible condition) result in great gain to Ireland.

The conclusion that Ireland must suffer all the disasters and eventual losses defeat would entail on Great Britain is based on what may be termed the fundamental maxim that has governed British dealings with Ireland throughout at least three centuries. That maxim may be given in the phrase, "Separation is unthinkable." Englishmen have come to invincibly believe that no matter what they may do or what may betide them, Ireland must inseparably be theirs, linked to them as surely as Wales or Scotland, and forming an eternal and integral part of a whole whose fate is indissolubly in their hands. While Great Britain, they admit, might well live apart (and happily) from an Ireland safely "sunk under the sea" they have never conceived of an Ireland, still afloat, that could possibly exist, apart from Great Britain. Sometimes, as a sort of bogey, they hold out to Ireland the fate that would be hers if, England defeated, somebody else should "take" her. For it is a necessary corollary to the fundamental maxim already stated, that Ireland, if not owned by England, must necessarily be "owned" by someone else than her own inhabitants.