Not a single vote was taken in the Convention until the 12th of March, 1918, when it had been sitting for nearly seven months, and two days later the question which it had been summoned to consider, namely, the relation of Ulster to the rest of Ireland, was touched for the first time. The first clause in the Bishop of Raphoe's scheme, establishing a Home Rule constitution for all Ireland, having been carried with Lord Midleton's help against the vote of the nineteen representatives of Ulster, the latter proposed an amendment for the exclusion of the Province, and were, of course, defeated by the combined forces of Nationalism and Southern Unionism.

Thus, on the only issue that really mattered, there was no such "substantial agreement" as the Government had postulated as essential before legislation could be undertaken; and on the 5th of April the Convention came to an end without having achieved any useful result, except that it gave the Government a breathing space from the Irish question to get on with the war.

It served, however, to bring prominently forward two of the Ulster representatives whose full worth had not till then been sufficiently appreciated. Mr. H.M. Pollock had, it is true, been a valued adviser of Sir Edward Carson on questions touching the trade and commerce of Belfast. But in the Convention he made more than one speech which proved him to be a financier with a comprehensive grasp of principle, and an extensive knowledge of the history and the intricate details of the financial relations between Great Britain and Ireland.

Lord Londonderry (the 7th Marquis), who during his father's lifetime had represented an English constituency in the House of Commons and naturally took no very prominent part in Ulster affairs, although he made many excellent speeches on Home Rule both in Parliament and on English platforms, and was Colonel of a regiment of U.V.F., gave proof at once, on succeeding to the peerage in 1915, that he was desirous of doing everything in his power to fill his father's place in the Ulster Movement. He displayed the same readiness to subordinate personal convenience, and other claims on his time and energy, to the cause so closely associated historically with his family. But it was his work in the Convention that first convinced Ulstermen of his capacity as well as his zeal. Several of Lord Londonderry's speeches, and especially one in which he made an impromptu reply to Mr. Redmond, impressed the Convention with his debating power and his general ability; and it gave the greatest satisfaction in Ulster when it was realised that the son of the leader whose loss they mourned so deeply was as able as he was willing to carry on the hereditary tradition of service to the loyalist cause.

In another respect, too, the Convention had an indirect influence on the position in Ulster. When it appeared likely, in January 1918, that a deadlock would be reached in the Convention, the Prime Minister himself intervened. A letter to the Chairman was drafted and discussed in the Cabinet; but the policy which appeared to commend itself to his colleagues was one that Sir Edward Carson was unable to support, and he accordingly resigned office on the 21st, and was accompanied into retirement by Colonel Craig, the other Ulster member of the Ministry. Sir John Lonsdale, who for many years had been the very efficient Honorary Secretary and "Whip" of the Ulster Parliamentary Party, and its leader while Carson was in office, had been raised to the peerage at the New Year, with the title of Lord Armaghdale, so that the Ulster leadership was vacant for Carson to resume when he left the Government, and he was formally re-elected to the position on the 28th of January. It was fortunate for Ulster that the old helmsman was again free to take his place at the wheel, for there was still some rough weather ahead.

The official Report of the Convention which was issued on the 10th of April was one of the most extraordinary documents ever published in a Government Blue Book.[97] It consisted for the most part of a confused bundle of separate Notes and Reports by a number of different groups and individuals, and numerous appendices comprising a mass of miscellaneous memoranda bristling with cross-references. The Chairman was restricted to providing a bald narrative of the proceedings without any of the usual critical estimate of the general results attained; but he made up for this by setting forth his personal opinions in a letter to the Prime Minister, which, without the sanction of the Convention, he prefixed to the Report. As it was no easy matter to gain any clear idea from the Report as to what the Convention had done, its proceedings while in session having been screened from publicity by drastic censorship of the Press, many people contented themselves with reading Sir Horace Plunkett's unauthorised letter to Mr. Lloyd George; and, as it was in some important respects gravely misleading, it is not surprising that the truth in regard to the Convention was never properly understood, and the Ulster Unionist Council had solid justification for its resolution censuring the Chairman's conduct as "unprecedented and unconstitutional."

In this personal letter, as was to be expected of a partisan of the Nationalists, Sir Horace Plunkett laid stress on the fact that Lord Midleton had "accepted self-government for Ireland "—by which was meant, of course, not self-government such as Ireland always enjoyed through her representation, and indeed over-representation, in the Imperial Parliament, but through separate institutions. But if it had not been for this support of separate institutions by the Southern Unionists there would not have been even a colourable pretext for the assertion of Sir Horace Plunkett that "a larger measure of agreement has been reached upon the principles and details of Irish self-government than has ever yet been attained." The really surprising thing was how little agreement was displayed even among the Nationalists themselves, who on several important issues were nearly equally divided.

It was soon seen how little the policy of Lord Midleton was approved by those whom he was supposed to represent. Although it was exceedingly difficult to obtain accurate information about what was going on in the Convention, enough became known in Dublin to cause serious misgiving to Southern Unionists. The Council of the Irish Unionist Alliance, who had nominated Lord Midleton as a delegate, asked him to confer with them on the subject; but he refused. On the 4th of March, 1918, a "Call to Unionists," a manifesto signed by twenty-four influential Southern Unionists, appeared in the Press. A Southern Unionist Committee was formed which before the end of May was able to publish the names of 350 well-known men in all walks of life who were in accord with the "Call," and to announce that the supporters of their protest against Lord Midleton's proceedings numbered upwards of fourteen thousand, of whom more than two thousand were farmers in the South and West.

This Committee then took steps to purge the Irish Unionist Alliance by making it more truly representative of Southern Unionist opinion. A special meeting of the Council of the organisation on the 24th of January, 1919, brought on a general engagement between Lord Midleton and his opponents. The general trend of opinion was disclosed when, after the defeat of a motion by Lord Midleton for excluding Ulster Unionists from full membership of the Alliance, Sir Edward Carson was elected one of its Presidents, and Lord Farnham was chosen Chairman of the Executive Committee. The Executive Committee was then entirely reconstituted, by the rejection of every one of Lord Midleton's supporters; and the new body issued a statement explaining the grounds of dissatisfaction with Lord Midleton's action in the Convention, and declaring that he had "lost the confidence of the general body of Southern Unionists." Thereupon Lord Midleton and a small aristocratic clique associated with him seceded from the Alliance, and set up a little organisation of their own.

FOOTNOTES:

[96] Report of the Proceedings of the Irish Convention (Cd. 9019), p. 10.

[97] Cd. 9019.



CHAPTER XXIII

NATIONALISTS AND CONSCRIPTION

While the Irish Convention was toilfully bringing to a close its eight months' career of futility, the British Empire was in the grip of the most terrible ordeal through which it has ever passed. On the 21st of March, 1918, the assembled Irishmen in Dublin were discussing whether or not proportional representation should form part of the hypothetical constitution of Ireland, and on the same day the Germans well-nigh overwhelmed the 5th Army at the opening of the great offensive campaign which threatened to break irretrievably the Allied line by the capture of Amiens. The world held its breath. Englishmen hardly dared to think of the fate that seemed impending over their country. Irishmen continued complacently debating the paltry details of the Bishop of Raphoe's clauses. Irishmen and Englishmen together were being killed or maimed by scores of thousands in a supreme effort to stay the advance of the Boche to Paris and the sea.

It happened that on the very day when the Report of the Convention was laid on the table of the House of Commons, the Prime Minister made a statement of profound gravity, beginning with words such as the British Parliament can never before have been compelled to hear from the lips of the head of the Government. For the moment, said Mr. Lloyd George, there was a lull in the storm; but more attacks were to come, and—

The "fate of the Empire, the fate of Europe, and the fate of liberty throughout the world may depend on the success with which the very last of these attacks is resisted and countered."

Mr. Asquith struck the same note, urging the House—

"With all the earnestness and with all the solemnity of which I am capable, to realise that never before in the experience of any man within these walls, or of his fathers and his forefathers, has this country and all the great traditions and ideals which are embodied in our history—never has this, the most splendid inheritance ever bequeathed to a people, been in greater peril, or in more need of united safeguarding than at this present time."

Not Demosthenes himself, in his most impassioned appeal to the Athenians, more fitly matched moving words to urgent occasion than these two statesmen in the simple, restrained sentences, in which they warned the Commons of the peril hanging over England.

But was eloquent persuasion really required at such a moment to still the voice of faction in the British House of Commons? Let those who would assume the negative study the official Parliamentary Report of the debate on the 9th of April, 1918. They will find a record which no loyal Irishman will ever be able to read without a tingling sense of shame. The whole body of members, with one exception, listened to the Prime Minister's grave words in silence touched with awe, feeling that perhaps they were sitting there on the eve of the greatest tragedy in their country's history. The single exception was the Nationalist Party. From those same benches whence arose nineteen years back the never-forgotten cheers that greeted the tale of British disaster in South Africa, now came a shower of snarling interruptions that broke persistently into the Prime Minister's speech, and with angry menace impeded his unfolding of the Government's proposals for meeting the supreme ordeal of the war.

What was the reason? It was because Ireland, the greater part of which had till now successfully shirked its share of privation and sacrifice, was at last to be asked to take up its corner of the burden. The need for men to replace casualties at the front was pressing, urgent, imperative. Many indeed blamed the Government for having delayed too long in filling the depleted ranks of our splendid armies in France; the moment had come when another day's delay would have been criminal. As Mr. Lloyd George pointed out, the battle that was being waged in front of Amiens "proves that the enemy has definitely decided to seek a military decision this year, whatever the consequences to himself." The Germans had just called up a fresh class of recruits calculated to place more than half a million of efficient young men in the line. The collapse of Russia had released the vast German armies of the East for use against England and France. It was under such circumstances that the Prime Minister proposed

"to submit to Parliament to-day certain recommendations in order to assist this country and the Allies to weather the storm. They will involve," continued Mr. Lloyd George, "extreme sacrifices on the part of large classes of the population, and nothing would justify them but the most extreme necessity, and the fact that we are fighting for all that is essential and most sacred in the national life."

The age limit for compulsory military service was to be raised from forty-two to fifty, and Ireland was to be included under the new Military Service Bill now introduced. England, Scotland, and Wales had cheerfully submitted to conscription when first enacted by Mr. Asquith in 1916, and to all the additional combings of industry and extension of obligation that had been required in the past two years. Agriculture and other essential industries were being starved for want of labour, and men had actually been brought back from the sorely pressed armies to produce supplies imperatively needed at home.

But from all this Ireland had hitherto been exempt. To escape the call of the country a man had only to prove that he was "ordinarily resident in Ireland"; for conscription did not cross the Irish Sea. From most of the privations cheerfully borne in Great Britain the Irishman had been equally free. Food rationing did not trouble him, and, lest he should go short of accustomed plenty, it was even forbidden to carry a parcel of butter across the Channel from Ireland. Horse-racing went on as usual. Emigration had been suspended during the war, so that Ireland was unusually full of young men who, owing to the unwonted prosperity of the country resulting from war prices for its produce, were "having the time of their lives." Mr. Bonar Law, in the debates on the Military Service Bill, gave reasons for the calculation that there were not far short of 400,000 young men of military age, and of "Al" physique, in Ireland available for the Army.

No wonder that Mr. Lloyd George said it would be impossible to leave this reservoir of man-power untouched when men of fifty, whose sons were already with the colours, were to be called up in Great Britain! But the bare suggestion of doing such a thing raised a hurricane of angry vituperation and menace from the Nationalists in the House of Commons. When Mr. Lloyd George, in conciliatory accents, observed that he had no wish to raise unnecessary controversy, as Heaven knew they had trouble enough already, "You will get more of it," shouted Mr. Flavin. "You will have another battle front in Ireland," interjected Mr. Byrne. Mr. Flavin, getting more and more excited, called out, with reference to the machinery for enrolment explained by the Prime Minister—"It will never begin. Ireland will not have it at any price"; and again, a moment later, "You come across and try to take them." Mr. Devlin was fully as fierce as these less prominent members of his party, and after many wrathful interruptions he turned aside the debate into a discussion about a trumpery report of one of the sub-committees of the Irish Convention.

It was truly a sad and shameful scene to be witnessed in the House of Commons at such a moment. It would have been so even if the contention of the Nationalists had been reasonably tenable. But it was not. They maintained that only an Irish Parliament had the right to enforce conscription in Ireland. But at the beginning of the war they had accepted the proviso that it should run its course before Home Rule came into operation. And even if it had been in operation, and a Parliament had been sitting in Dublin under Mr. Asquith's Act, which the Nationalists had accepted as a settlement of their demands, that Parliament would have had nothing to do with the raising of military forces by conscription or otherwise, this being a duty reserved, as in every federal or quasi-federal constitution, for the central legislative authority alone.

But it was useless to point this out to the infuriated Nationalist members. Mr. William O'Brien denounced the idea of compelling Irishmen to bear the same burden as their British fellow-subjects as "a declaration of war against Ireland"; and he and Mr. Healy joined Mr. Dillon and his followers in opposing with all their parliamentary skill, and all their voting power, the extension to Ireland of compulsory service. Mr. Healy, whose vindictive memory had not forgotten the Curragh Incident before the war, could not forbear from having an ungenerous fling at General Gough, who had just been driven back by the overwhelming numerical superiority of the German attack, and who, at the moment when Mr. Healy was taunting him in the House of Commons, was re-forming his gallant 5th Army to resist the enemy's further advance.

In comparison with this Mr. Healy's stale gibe at "Carson's Army," however inappropriate to the occasion, was a venial offence. Carson himself replied in a gentle and conciliatory tone to Mr. Healy's coarse diatribe.

"My honourable friend," he said, "talked of Carson's Army. You may, if you like, call it with contempt Carson's Army. But it has just gone into action for the fourth time, and many of them have paid the supreme sacrifice. They have covered themselves with glory, and, what is more, they have covered Ireland with glory, and they have left behind sad homes throughout the small hamlets of Ulster, as I well know, losing three or four sons in many a home."

On behalf of Ulster Carson gave unhesitating support to the Government. He and his colleagues from Ulster had always voted against the exemption of Ireland from the Military Service Acts. It was true, no doubt, as the Nationalists jeeringly maintained, that conscription was no more desired in Ulster than in any other part of the United Kingdom. Of course it was not; it was liked nowhere. But Carson declared that "equality of sacrifice" was the principle to be acted upon, and Ulster accepted it. He "would go about hanging his head in shame," if his own part of the United Kingdom were absolved from sacrifice which the national necessity imposed on the inhabitants of Great Britain.

The Bill was carried through by the 16th of April in the teeth of Nationalist opposition maintained through all its stages. Mr. Bonar Law announced emphatically that the Government intended to enforce the compulsory powers in Ireland; but he also said that yet another attempt was to be made to settle the constitutional question by bringing in "at an early date" a measure of Home Rule which the Government hoped might be carried at once and "without violent controversy."

After the experience of the past this seemed an amazingly sanguine estimate of the prospects of any proposals that ingenuity could devise. But what the nature of the measure was to have been was never made known; for the Bill was still in the hands of a drafting committee when a dangerous German intrigue in Ireland was discovered; and the Lord-Lieutenant made a proclamation on the 18th of May announcing that the Government had information "that certain of the King's subjects in Ireland had entered into a treasonable communication with the German enemy, and that strict measures must be taken to put down this German plot."[98] On the same day one hundred and fifty Sinn Feiners were arrested, including Mr. De Valera and Mr. Arthur Griffith, and on the 25th a statement was published indicating the connection between this conspiracy and Casement's designs in 1916. The Government had definitely ascertained some weeks earlier, and must have known at the very time when they were promising a new Home Rule Bill, that a plan for landing arms in Ireland was ripe for execution.[99] Indeed, on the 12th of April a German agent who had landed in Ireland was arrested, with papers in his possession showing that De Valera had worked out a detailed organisation of the rebel army, and expected to be in a position to muster half a million of trained men.[100]

Such was the fruit of the Government's infatuation which, under the delusion of "creating an atmosphere of good-will" for the Convention, had released a few months previously a number of dangerous men who had been proved to be in league with the Germans, and who now took advantage of this clemency to conspire afresh with the foreign enemy. It was not surprising that Mr. Bonar Law said it was impossible for the Government, under these circumstances, to proceed with their proposals for a new Home Rule Bill.

On the other hand, no sooner was the Military Service Act on the Statute-book than the Government began to recede from Mr. Bonar Law's declaration that they would at all costs enforce it in Ireland. They intimated that if voluntary recruiting improved it might be possible to dispense with compulsion. But although Mr. Shortt—who succeeded Mr. Duke as Chief Secretary in May, at the same time as Lord Wimborne was replaced in the Lord-Lieutenancy by Field-Marshal Lord French—complained on the 29th of July that the Nationalists had given no help to the Government in obtaining voluntary recruits in Ireland, and, "instead of taking Sinn Fein by the throat, had tried to go one better,"[101] the compulsory powers of the Military Service Act remained a dead letter.

The fact was that the Nationalists had followed up their fierce opposition to the Bill by raising a still more fierce agitation in Ireland against conscription. In this they joined hands with Sinn Fein, and the whole weight of the Catholic Church was thrown into the same scale. From the altars of that Church the thunderbolts of ecclesiastical anathema were loosed against the Government, and—what was more effective—against any who should obey the call to arms. The Government gave way before the violence of the storm, and the lesson to be learnt from their defeat was not thrown away on the rebel party in Ireland. There was, naturally, widespread indignation in England at the spectacle of the youth of Ireland taking its ease at home and earning extravagantly high war-time wages while middle-aged bread-winners in England were compulsorily called to the colours; but the marvellously easy-going disposition of Englishmen submitted to the injustice with no more than a legitimate grumble.

In June 1918, while this agitation against conscription was at its height, the hostility of the Nationalists took a new turn. A manifesto, intended as a justification of their resistance to conscription, was issued in the form of a letter to Mr. Wilson, President of the United States, signed by Mr. Dillon, Mr. Devlin, Mr. William O'Brien, Mr. Healy, the Lord Mayor of Dublin, and some others, including leaders of Sinn Fein. It was a remarkable document, the authorship of which was popularly attributed to Mr. T.M. Healy. If it ever came under the eye of Mr. Wilson, a man of literary taste and judgment, it must have afforded him a momentary diversion from the cares of his exalted office. A longer experience than his of diplomatic correspondence would fail to produce from the pigeon-holes of all the Chanceries a rival to this extraordinary composition, the ill-arranged paragraphs of which formed an inextricable jumble of irrelevant material, in which bad logic, bad history, and barren invective were confusedly intermingled in a torrent of turgid rhetoric. The extent of its range may be judged from the fact that Shakespeare's allusions to Joan of Arc were not deemed too remote from the subject of conscription in Ireland during the Great War to find a place in this amazing despatch. For the amusement of anyone who may care to examine so rare a curiosity of English prose, it will be found in full in the Appendix to this volume, where it may be compared by way of contrast with the restrained rejoinder sent also to President Wilson by Sir Edward Carson, the Lord Mayor of Belfast, the Mayor of Derry, and several loyalist representatives of Labour in Ulster.

In the Nationalist letter to President Wilson reference was made more than once to the sympathy that prevailed in Ireland in the eighteenth century with the American colonists in the War of Independence. The use made of it was a good example of the way in which a half-truth may, for argumentative purposes, be more misleading than a complete falsehood. "To-day, as in the days of George Washington"—so Mr. Wilson was informed—"nearly half the American forces have been furnished from the descendants of our banished race." No mention was made of the fact that the members of the "banished race" in Washington's army were Presbyterian emigrants from Ulster, who formed almost the entire population of great districts in the American Colonies at that time.[102] The late Mr. Whitelaw Reid told an Edinburgh audience in 1911 that more than half the Presbyterian population of Ulster emigrated to America between 1730 and 1770, and that at the date of the Revolution they made more than one-sixth of the population of the Colonies. The Declaration of Independence itself, he added—

"Is sacredly preserved in the handwriting of an Ulsterman, who was Secretary of Congress. It was publicly read by an Ulsterman, and first printed by another. Washington's first Cabinet had four members, of whom one was an Ulsterman."[103]

It is, of course, true that not all Ulster Presbyterians of that period were the firm and loyal friends of Great Britain that their descendants became after a century's experience of the legislative Union. But it is the latter who best in Ireland can trace kinship with the founders of the United States, and who are entitled—if any Irishmen are—to base on that kinship a claim to the sympathy and support of the American people.

FOOTNOTES:

[98] Annual Register, 1918, p, 87.

[99] Ibid., p. 88

[100] Ibid.

[101] Annual Register, 1918, p. 90.

[102] See Lecky's History of England in the Eighteenth Century, vol. iv, p. 430.

[103] See Lecture to the Edinburgh Philosophical Institution by Whitelaw Reid, reported in The Scotsman, November 2nd, 1911.



CHAPTER XXIV

THE ULSTER PARLIAMENT

ON the 25th of November, 1918, the Parliament elected in December 1910 was at last dissolved, a few days after the Armistice with Germany. The new House of Commons was very different from the old. Seventy-two Sinn Fein members were returned from Ireland, sweeping away all but half a dozen of the old Nationalist party; but, in accordance with their fixed policy, the Sinn Fein members never presented themselves at Westminster to take the oath and their seats. That quarter of the House of Commons which for thirty years had been packed with the most fierce and disciplined of the political parties was therefore now given over to mild supporters of the Coalition Government, the only remnant of so-called "constitutional Nationalism" being Mr. T.P. O'Connor, Mr. Devlin, Captain Redmond, and two or three less prominent companions, who survived like monuments of a bygone age.

Ulster Unionists, on the other hand, were greatly strengthened by the recent Redistribution Act. Sir Edward Carson was elected member for the great working-class constituency of the Duncairn Division of Belfast, instead of for Dublin University, which he had so long represented, and twenty-two ardent supporters accompanied him from Ulster to Westminster. In the reconstruction of the Government which followed the election, Carson was pressed to return to office, but declined. Colonel James Craig, whose war services in connection with the Ulster Division were rewarded by a baronetcy, became Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Pensions, and the Marquis of Londonderry accepted office as Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State in the Air Ministry.

Although the termination of hostilities by the Armistice was not in the legal sense the "end of the war," it brought it within sight. No one in January 1919 dreamt that the process of making peace and ratifying the necessary treaties would drag on for a seemingly interminable length of time, and it was realised, with grave misgiving in Ulster, that the Home Rule Act of 1914 would necessarily come into force as soon as peace was finally declared, while as yet nothing had been done to redeem the promise of an Amending Bill given by Mr. Asquith, and reiterated by Mr. Lloyd George. The compact between the latter and the Unionist Party, on which the Coalition had swept the country, had made it clear that fresh Irish legislation was to be expected, and the general lines on which it would be based were laid down; but there was also an intimation that a settlement must wait till the condition of Ireland should warrant it.[104]

The state of Ireland was certainly not such as to make it appear probable that any sane Government would take the risk of handing over control of the country immediately to the Sinn Feiners, whom the recent elections had proved to be in an overwhelming majority in the three southern provinces. By the law, not of England alone, but of every civilised State, that party was tainted through and through with high treason. It had attempted to "succour the King's enemies" in every way in its power. The Government had in its possession evidence of two conspiracies, in which, during the late frightful war, these Irishmen had been in league with the Germans to bring defeat and disaster upon England and her Allies, and the second of these plots was only made possible by the misconceived clemency of the Government in releasing from custody the ring-leaders in the first.

And these Sinn Fein rebels left the Government no excuse for any illusion as to their being either chastened or contrite in spirit. Contemptuously ignoring their election as members of the Imperial Parliament, where they never put in an appearance because it would require them to take an oath of allegiance to the Crown, they openly held a Congress in Dublin in January 1919 where a Declaration of Independence was read, and a demand made for the evacuation of Ireland by the forces of the Crown. A "Ministry" was also appointed, which purported to make itself responsible for administration in Ireland. Outrages of a daring character became more and more frequent, and gave evidence of being the work of efficient organisation.

President Wilson's coinage of the unfortunate and ambiguous expression "self-determination" made it a catch-penny cry in relation to Ireland; but, in reply to Mr. Devlin's demand for a recognition of that "principle," Mr. Lloyd George pointed out that it had been tried in the Convention, with the result that both Nationalists and Unionists had been divided among themselves, and he said he despaired of any settlement in Ireland until Irishmen could agree. Nevertheless, in October 1919 he appointed a Cabinet Committee, with Mr. Walter Long as Chairman, to make recommendations for dealing with the question of Irish Government.

But murders of soldiers and police had now become so scandalously frequent that in November a Proclamation was issued suppressing Sinn Fein and kindred organisations. It did nothing to improve the state of the country, which grew worse than ever in the last few weeks of the year. On the 19th of December a carefully planned attempt on the life of the Lord-Lieutenant, Lord French, proved how complete was the impunity relied upon by the organised assassins who, calling themselves an Irish Republican Army, terrorised the country.

It was in such conditions that, just before the close of the parliamentary session, the Prime Minister disclosed the intentions of the Government. He laid down three "basic facts," which he said governed the situation: (1) Three-fourths of the Irish people were bitterly hostile, and were at heart rebels against the Crown and Government. (2) Ulster was a complete contrast, which would make it an outrage to place her people under the rest of Ireland.[105] (3) No separation from the Empire could be tolerated, and any attempt to force it would be fought as the United States had fought against secession. On these considerations he based the proposals which were to be embodied in legislation in the next session. Sir Edward Carson, who in the light of past experience was too wary to take all Mr. Lloyd George's declarations at their face value, said at once that he could give no support to the policy outlined by the Prime Minister until he was convinced that the latter intended to go through with it to the end.

The Bill to give effect to these proposals (which became the Government of Ireland Act, 1920) was formally introduced on the 25th of February, 1920, and Carson then went over to Belfast to consult with the Unionist Council as to the action to be taken by the Ulster members.

The measure was a long and complicated one of seventy clauses and six schedules. Its effect, stated briefly, was to set up two Parliaments in Ireland, one for the six Protestant counties of Ulster and the other for the rest of Ireland. In principle it was the "clean cut" which had been several times proposed, except that, instead of retaining Ulster in legislative union with Great Britain, she was to be endowed with local institutions of her own in every respect similar to, and commensurate with, those given to the Parliament in Dublin. In addition, a Council of Ireland was created, composed of an equal number of members from each of the two legislatures. This Council was given powers in regard to private bill legislation, and matters of minor importance affecting both parts of the island which the two Parliaments might mutually agree to commit to its administration. Power was given to the two Parliaments to establish by identical Acts at any time a Parliament for all Ireland to supersede the Council, and to form a single autonomous constitution for the whole of Ireland.

The Council of Ireland occupied a prominent place in the debates on the Bill. It was held up as a symbol of the "unity of Ireland," and the authors of the measure were able to point to it as supplying machinery by which "partition" could be terminated as soon as Irishmen agreed among themselves in wishing to have a single national Government. It was not a feature of the Bill that found favour in Ulster; but, as it could do no harm and provided an argument against those who denounced "partition," the Ulster members did not think it worth while to oppose it.

But when Carson met the Ulster Unionist Council on the 6th of March the most difficult point he had to deal with was the same that had given so much trouble in the negotiations of 1916. The Bill defined the area subject to the "Parliament of Northern Ireland" as the six counties which the Ulster Council had agreed four years earlier to accept as the area to be excluded from the Home Rule Act. The question now to be decided was whether this same area should still be accepted, or an amendment moved for including in Northern Ireland the other three counties of the Province of Ulster. The same harrowing experience which the Council had undergone in 1916 was repeated in an aggravated form.[106] To separate themselves from fellow loyalists in Monaghan, Cavan, and Donegal was hateful to every delegate from the other six counties, and it was heartrending to be compelled to resist another moving appeal by so valued a friend as Lord Farnham. But the inexorable index of statistics demonstrated that, although Unionists were in a majority when geographical Ulster was considered as a unit, yet the distribution of population made it certain that a separate Parliament for the whole Province would have a precarious existence, while its administration of purely Nationalist districts would mean unending conflict.

It was, therefore, decided that no proposal for extending the area should be made by the Ulster members. Carson made it clear in the debates on the Bill that Ulster had not moved from her old position of desiring nothing except the Union; that he was still convinced there was "no alternative to the Union unless separation"; but that, while he would take no responsibility for a Bill which Ulster did not want, he and his colleagues would not actively oppose its progress to the Statute-book.

It did not, however, receive the Royal Assent until two days before Christmas, and during all these months the condition of Ireland was one of increasing anarchy. The Act provided that, if the people of Southern Ireland refused to work the new Constitution, the administration should be carried on by a system similar to Crown Colony government. Carson gave an assurance that in Ulster they would do their best to make the Act a success, and immediate steps were taken in Belfast to make good this undertaking.

To the people of Ulster the Act of 1920, though it involved the sacrifice of much that they had ardently hoped to preserve, came as a relief to their worst fears. It was represented as a final settlement, and finality was what they chiefly desired, if they could get it without being forced to submit to a Dublin Parliament. The disloyal conduct of Nationalist Ireland during the war, and the treason and terrorism organised by Sinn Fein after the war, had widened the already broad gulf between North and South. The determination never to submit to an all-Ireland Parliament was more firmly fixed than ever. The Act of 1920, which repealed Mr. Asquith's Act of 1914, gave Ulster what she had prepared to fight for, if necessary, before the war. It was the fulfilment of the Craigavon resolution—to take over the government "of those districts which they could control."[107] The Parliament of Northern Ireland established by the Act was in fact the legalisation of the Ulster Provisional Government of 1913. It placed Ulster in a position of equality with the South, both politically and economically. The two Legislatures in Ireland possessed the same powers, and were subject to an equal reservation of authority to the Imperial Parliament.

But with the passing of the Act the long and consummate leadership of Sir Edward Carson came to an end. If he had not succeeded in bringing the Ulster people into a Promised Land, he had at least conducted an orderly retreat to a position of safety. The almost miraculous skill with which he had directed all the operations of a protracted and harassing campaign, avoiding traps and pitfalls at every step, foreseeing and providing against countless crises, frustrating with unfailing adroitness the manoeuvres both of implacable enemies and treacherous "friends," was fully appreciated by his grateful followers, who had for years past regarded him with an intensity of personal devotion seldom given even to the greatest of political leaders. But he felt that the task of opening a new chapter in the history of Ulster, and of inaugurating the new institutions now established, was work for younger hands. Hard as he was pressed to accept the position of first Prime Minister of Ulster, he firmly persisted in his refusal; and on his recommendation the man who had been his able and faithful lieutenant throughout the long Ulster Movement was unanimously chosen to succeed him in the leadership.

Sir James Craig did not hesitate to respond to the call, although to do so he had to resign an important post in the British Government, that of Parliamentary Secretary to the Admiralty, with excellent prospects of further promotion. As soon as the elections in "Northern Ireland," conducted under the system of Proportional Representation, as provided by the Act of 1920, were complete, Sir James, whose followers numbered forty as against a Nationalist and Sinn Fein minority of twelve, was sent for by the Viceroy and commissioned to form a Ministry. He immediately set himself to his new and exceedingly difficult duties with characteristic thoroughness. The whole apparatus of government administration had to be built up from the foundation. Departments, for which there was no existing office accommodation or personnel, had to be called into existence and efficiently organised, and all this preliminary work had to be undertaken at a time when the territory subject to the new Government was beset by open and concealed enemies working havoc with bombs and revolvers, with which the Government had not yet legal power to cope.

But Sir James Craig pressed on with the work, undismayed by the difficulties, and resolved that the Parliament in Belfast should be opened at the earliest possible date. The Marquis of Londonderry gave a fresh proof of his Ulster patriotism by resigning his office in the Imperial Government and accepting the portfolio of Education in Sir James Craig's Cabinet, and with it the leadership of the Ulster Senate; in which the Duke of Abercorn also, to the great satisfaction of the Ulster people, consented to take a seat. Mr. Dawson Bates, the indefatigable Secretary of the Ulster Unionist Council during the whole of the Ulster Movement, was appointed Minister for Home Affairs, and Mr. E.M. Archdale became Minister for Agriculture. The first act of the House of Commons of Northern Ireland was to choose Major Hugh O'Neill as their Speaker, while the important position of Chairman of Committees was entrusted to Mr. Thomas Moles, one of the ablest recruits of the Ulster Parliamentary Party, whom the General Election of 1918 had sent to Westminster as one of the members for Belfast, and who had given ample evidence of his capacity both in the Imperial Parliament and on the Secretarial Staff of the Irish Convention of 1917.

Meantime, in the South the Act of 1920 was treated with absolute contempt; no step was taken to hold elections or to form an Administration, although it must be remembered that the flouted Act conferred a larger measure of Home Rule than had ever been offered by previous Bills. Thus by one of those curious ironies that have continually marked the history of Ireland, the only part of the island where Home Rule operated was the part that had never desired it, while the provinces that had demanded Home Rule for generations refused to use it when it was granted them.

In Ulster the new order of things was accepted with acquiescence rather than with enthusiasm. But the warmer emotion was immediately called forth when it became known that His Majesty the King had decided to open the Ulster Parliament in person on the 22nd of June, 1921, especially as it was fully realised that, owing to the anarchical condition of the country, the King's presence in Belfast would be a characteristic disregard of personal danger in the discharge of public duty. And when, on the eve of the royal visit, it was intimated that the Queen had been graciously pleased to accede to Sir James Craig's request that she should accompany the King to Belfast, the enthusiasm of the loyal people of the North rose to fever heat.

At any time, and under any circumstances, the reigning Sovereign and his Consort would have been received by a population so noted for its sentiment of loyalty to the Throne as that of Ulster with demonstrations of devotion exceeding the ordinary. But the present occasion was felt to have a very special significance. The opening of Parliament by the King in State is one of the most ancient and splendid of ceremonial pageants illustrating the history of British institutions. It was felt in Ulster that the association of this time-honoured ceremonial with the baptism, so to speak, of the latest offspring of the Mother of Parliaments stamped the Royal Seal upon the achievement of Ulster, and gave it a dignity, prestige, and promise of permanence which might otherwise have been lacking. No city in the United Kingdom had witnessed so many extraordinary displays of popular enthusiasm in the last ten years as Belfast, some of which had left on the minds of observers a firm belief that such intensity of emotion in a great concourse of people could not be exceeded. The scene in the streets when the King and Queen drove from the quay, on the arrival of the royal yacht, to the City Hall, was held by general consent to equal, since it could not surpass, any of those great demonstrations of the past in popular fervour. At any rate, persons of long experience in attendance on the Royal Family gave it as their opinion in the evening that they had never before seen so impressive a display of public devotion to the person of the Sovereign.

Two buildings in Belfast inseparably associated with Ulster's stand for union, the City Hall and the Ulster Hall, were the scenes of the chief events of the King's visit. The former, described by one of the English correspondents as "easily the most magnificent municipal building in the three Kingdoms,"[108] was placed at the disposal of the Ulster Government by the Corporation for temporary use as a Parliament House. The Council Chamber, a fine hall of dignified proportions with a dais and canopied chair at the upper end, made an appropriate frame for the ceremony of opening Parliament, and the arrangements both of the Chamber itself and of the approaches and entrances to it made it a simple matter to model the procedure as closely as possible on that followed at Westminster.

Among the many distinguished people who assembled in the Ulster Capital for the occasion, there was one notable absentee. Lord Carson of Duncairn—for this was the title that Sir Edward Carson had assumed on being appointed a Lord of Appeal in Ordinary a few weeks previously—was detained in London by judicial duty in the House of Lords; and possibly reasons of delicacy not difficult to understand restrained him from making arrangements for absence. But the marked ovation given to Lady Carson wherever she was recognised in the streets of Belfast showed that the great leader was not absent from the popular mind at this moment of vindication of his statesmanship.

Such an event as that which brought His Majesty to Belfast was naturally an occasion for bestowing marks of distinction for public service. Sir James Craig wisely made it also an occasion for letting bygones be bygones by recommending Lord Pirrie for a step in the Peerage. Among those who received honours were several whose names have appeared in the preceding chapters of this book. Mr. William Robert Young, for thirty years one of the most indefatigable workers for the Unionist cause in Ulster, and Colonel Wallace, one of the most influential of Carson's local lieutenants, were made Privy Councillors, as was also Colonel Percival-Maxwell, who raised and commanded a battalion of the Ulster Division in the war. Colonel F.H. Crawford and Colonel Spender were awarded the C.B.E. for services to the nation during the war; but Ulstermen did not forget services of another sort to the Ulster cause before the Germans came on the scene.[109] A knighthood was given to Mr. Dawson Bates, who had exchanged the Secretaryship of the Ulster Unionist Council for the portfolio of a Cabinet Minister.

These honours were bestowed by the King in person at an investiture held in the Ulster Hall in the afternoon. There must have been many present whose minds went back to some of the most stirring events of Ulster's domestic history which had been transacted in the same building within recent years. Did Sir Hamar Greenwood, the Chief Secretary, as he stood in attendance on the Sovereign in the resplendent uniform of a Privy Councillor, look in curiosity round the walls which he and Mr. Churchill had been prohibited from entering on a memorable occasion when they had to content themselves with an imported tent in a football field instead? Did Colonel Wallace's thoughts wander back to the scene of wild enthusiasm in that hall on the evening before the Covenant, when he presented the ancient Boyne flag to the Ulster leader? Did those who spontaneously started the National Anthem in the presence of the King without warrant from the prearranged programme, and made the Queen smile at the emphasis with which they "confounded politics" and "frustrated knavish tricks," remember the fervour with which on many a past occasion the same strains testified to Ulster's loyalty in the midst of perplexity and apprehension? If these memories crowded in, they must have added to the sense of relief arising from the conviction that the ceremony they were now witnessing was the realisation of the policy propounded by Carson, when he declared that Ulster must always be ruled either by the Imperial Parliament or by a Government of her own.

But the moment of all others on that memorable day that must have been suggestive of such reflections was when the King formally opened the first Parliament of Northern Ireland in the same building that had witnessed the signing of the Ulster Covenant. Without the earlier event the later could not have been. If 1921 could have been fully foreseen in 1912 it might have appeared to many Covenanters as the disappointment of a cherished ideal. But those who lived to listen to the King's Speech in the City Hall realised that it was the dissipation of foreboding. However regarded, it was, as King George himself pronounced, "a profoundly moving occasion in Irish history."

The Speech from the Throne in which these words occurred made a deep impression all over the world, and nowhere more than in Ulster itself. No people more ardently shared the touchingly expressed desire of the King that his coming to Ireland might "prove to be the first step towards an end of strife amongst her people, whatever their race or creed." So, too, when His Majesty told the Ulster Parliament that he "felt assured they would do their utmost to make it an instrument of happiness and good government for all parts of the community which they represented," the Ulster people believed that the King's confidence in them would not prove to have been misplaced.

Happily, no prophetic vision of those things that were shortly to come to pass broke in to disturb the sense of satisfaction with the haven that had been reached. The future, with its treachery, its alarms, its fresh causes of uncertainty and of conflict, was mercifully hidden from the eyes of the Ulster people when they acclaimed the inauguration of their Parliament by their King. They accepted responsibility for the efficient working of institutions thus placed in their keeping by the highest constitutional Authority in the British Empire, although they had never asked for them, and still believed that the system they had been driven to abandon was better than the new; and they opened this fresh chapter in their history in firm faith that what had received so striking a token of the Sovereign's sympathy and approval would never be taken from them except with their own consent.

FOOTNOTES:

[104] See Letter from Mr. Lloyd George to Mr. Bonar Law, published in the Press on November 18th, 1918.

[105] Precisely twenty-four months later this outrage was committed by Mr. Lloyd George himself, with the concurrence of Mr. Austen Chamberlain.

[106] Ante, p. 248.

[107] See ante, p. 51.

[108] The Morning Post, June 23rd, 1921.

[109] See ante, Chapter XVIII.



APPENDIX A

NATIONALIST LETTER TO PRESIDENT WILSON

To THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

SIR,

When, a century and a half ago, the American Colonies dared to assert the ancient principle that the subject should not be taxed without the consent of his representatives, England strove to crush them. To-day England threatens to crush the people of Ireland if they do not accept a tax, not in money but in blood, against the protest of their representatives.

During the American Revolution the champions of your liberties appealed to the Irish Parliament against British aggression, and asked for a sympathetic judgment on their action. What the verdict was, history records.

To-day it is our turn to appeal to the people of America. We seek no more fitting prelude to that appeal than the terms in which your forefathers greeted ours:

"We are desirous of possessing the good opinion of the virtuous and humane. We are peculiarly desirous of furnishing you with the true state of our motives and objects, the better to enable you to judge of our conduct with accuracy, and determine the merits of the controversy with impartiality and precision."

If the Irish race had been conscriptable by England in the war against the United Colonies is it certain that your Republic would to-day flourish in the enjoyment of its noble Constitution?

Since then the Irish Parliament has been destroyed, by methods described by the greatest of British statesmen as those of "black-guardism and baseness." Ireland, deprived of its protection and overborne by more than six to one in the British Lower House, and by more than a hundred to one in the Upper House, is summoned by England to submit to a hitherto-unheard-of decree against her liberties.

In the fourth year of a war ostensibly begun for the defence of small nations, a law conscribing the manhood of Ireland has been passed, in defiance of the wishes of our people. The British Parliament, which enacted it, had long outrun its course, being in the eighth year of an existence constitutionally limited to five. To warrant the coercive statute, no recourse was had to the electorate of Britain, much less to that of Ireland. Yet the measure was forced through within a week, despite the votes of Irish representatives, and under a system of closure never applied to the debates which established conscription for Great Britain on a milder basis.

To repel the calumnies invented to becloud our action, we venture to address the successors of the belligerents who once appealed to Ireland. The feelings which inspire America deeply concern our race; so, in the forefront of our remonstrance, we feel bound to set forth that this Conscription Act involves for Irishmen questions far larger than any affecting mere internal politics. They raise a sovereign principle between a nation that has never abandoned her independent rights, and an adjacent nation that has persistently sought to strangle them.

Were Ireland to surrender that principle, she must submit to a usurped power, condone the fraudulent prostration of her Parliament in 1800, and abandon all claim to distinct nationality. Deep-seated and far-reaching are the problems remorselessly aroused by the unthinking and violent courses taken at Westminster.

Thus the sudden and unlooked-for departure of British politicians from their past military procedure towards this island provokes acutely the fundamental issue of Self-determination. That issue will decide whether our whole economic, social, and political life must lie at the uncontrolled disposition of another race whose title to legislate for us rests on force and fraud alone.

Ireland is a nation more ancient than England, and is one of the oldest in Christendom. Its geographical boundaries are clearly defined. It cherishes its own traditions, history, language, music, and culture. It throbs with a national consciousness sharpened not only by religious persecution, but by the violation of its territorial, juristic, and legislative rights. The authority of which its invaders boasted rests solely on an alleged Papal Bull. The symbols of attempted conquest are roofless castles, ruined abbeys, and confiscated cathedrals.

The title of King of Ireland was first conferred on the English monarch by a statute of the Parliament held in Ireland in 1542, when only four of our counties lay under English sway. That title originated in no English enactment. Neither did the Irish Parliament so originate. Every military aid granted by that Parliament to English kings was purely voluntary. Even when the Penal Code denied representation to the majority of the Irish population, military service was never enforced against them.

For generations England claimed control over both legislative and judicial functions in Ireland, but in 1783 these pretensions were altogether renounced, and the sovereignty of the Irish Legislature was solemnly recognised. A memorable British statute declared it—

"Established and ascertained for ever, and shall at no time hereafter be questioned or questionable."

For this, the spirit evoked by the successful revolt of the United States of America is to be thanked, and Ireland won no mean return for the sympathy invited by your Congress. Yet scarcely had George III signified his Royal Assent to that "scrap of paper," when his Ministers began to debauch the Irish Parliament. No Catholic had, for over a century, been allowed to sit within its walls; and only a handful of the population enjoyed the franchise. In 1800, by shameless bribery, a majority of corrupt Colonists was procured to embrace the London subjugation and vote away the existence of their Legislature for pensions, pelf, and titles.

The authors of the Act of Union, however, sought to soften its shackles by limiting the future jurisdiction of the British Parliament. Imposed on "a reluctant and protesting nation," it was tempered by articles guaranteeing Ireland against the coarser and more obvious forms of injustice. To guard against undue taxation, "exemptions and abatements" were stipulated for; but the "predominant partner" has long since dishonoured that part of the contract, and the weaker side has no power to enforce it. No military burdens were provided for, although Britain framed the terms of the treaty to her own liking. That an obligation to yield enforced service was thereby undertaken has never hitherto been asserted. We therefore cannot neglect to support this protest by citing a main proviso of the Treaty of Union. Before the destruction of the Irish Parliament no standing army or navy was raised, nor was any contribution made, except by way of gift, to the British Army or Navy. No Irish law for the levying of drafts existed; and such a proposal was deemed unconstitutional. Hence the 8th Article of the Treaty provides that—

"All laws in force at the time of the Union shall remain as now by law established, subject only to such alterations and regulations from time to time as circumstances may appear to the Parliament of the United Kingdom to require."

Where there was no law establishing military service for Ireland, what "alteration or regulation" respecting such a law can legally bind? Can an enactment such as Conscription, affecting the legal and moral rights of an entire people, be described as an "alteration" or "regulation" springing from a pre-existing law? Is the Treaty to be construed as Britain pleases, and always to the prejudice of the weaker side?

British military statecraft has hitherto rigidly held by a separate tradition for Ireland. The Territorial military system, created in 1907 for Great Britain, was not set up in Ireland. The Irish Militia was then actually disbanded, and the War Office insisted that no Territorial force to replace it should be embodied. Stranger still, the Volunteer Acts (Naval or Military) from 1804 to 1900 (some twenty in all) were never extended to Ireland. In 1880, when a Conservative House of Commons agreed to tolerate volunteering, the measure was thrown out by the House of Lords on the plea that Irishmen must not be allowed to learn the use of arms.

For, despite the Bill of Rights, the privilege of free citizens to bear arms in self-defence has been refused to us. The Constitution of America affirms that right as appertaining to the common people, but the men of Ireland are forbidden to bear arms in their own defence. Where, then, lies the basis of the claim that they can be forced to take them up for the defence of others?

It will suffice to present such considerations in outline without disinterring the details of the past misgovernment of our country. Mr. Gladstone avowed that these were marked by "every horror and every shame that could disgrace the relations between a strong country and a weak one." After an orgy of Martial Law the Scottish General, Abercromby, Commander-in-Chief in Ireland, wrote: "Every crime, every cruelty that could be committed by Cossacks or Calmucks has been transacted here.... The abuses of all kinds I found can scarcely be believed or enumerated." Lord Holland recalls that many people "were sold at so much a head to the Prussians."

We shall, therefore, pass by the story of the destruction of our manufactures, of artificial famines, of the fomentation of uprisings, of a hundred Coercion Acts, culminating in the perpetual "Act of Repression" obtained by forgery, which graced Queen Victoria's Jubilee Year in 1887. In our island the suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act, the repression of free speech, gibbetings, shootings, and bayonetings, are commonplace events. The effects of forced emigration and famine American generosity has softened; and we do not seek a verdict on the general merits of a system which enjoys the commendation of no foreigner except Albert, Prince Consort, who declared that the Irish "were no more worthy of sympathy than the Poles."

It is known to you how our population shrank to its present fallen state. Grants of money for emigration, "especially of families," were provided even by the Land Act of 1881. Previous Poor Law Acts had stimulated this "remedy." So late as 1891 a "Congested District" Board was empowered to "aid emigration," although millions of Irishmen had in the nineteenth century been evicted from their homes or driven abroad.

Seventy years ago our population stood at 8,000,000, and, in the normal ratio of increase, it should to-day amount to 16,000,000. Instead, it has dwindled to 4,500,000; and it is from this residuum that our manhood between the ages of eighteen and fifty-one is to be delivered up in such measure as the strategists of the English War Cabinet may demand.

To-day, as in the days of George Washington, nearly half the American forces have been furnished from the descendants of our banished race. If England could not, during your Revolution, regard that enrolment with satisfaction, might she not set something now to Ireland's credit from the racial composition of your Army or Navy? No other small nation has been so bereft by law of her children, but in vain for Ireland has the bread of exile been thrown upon the waters.

Yet, while Self-determination is refused, we are required by law to bleed to "make the world safe for democracy "—in every country except our own. Surely this cannot be the meaning of America's message to mankind glowing from the pen of her illustrious President?

In the 750 years during which the stranger sway has blighted Ireland her people have never had occasion to welcome an unselfish or generous deed at the hands of their rulers. Every so-called "concession" was but the loosening of a fetter. Every benefit sprang from a manipulation of our own money by a foreign Treasury denying us an honest audit of accounts. None was yielded as an act of grace. All were the offspring of constraint, tumult, or political necessity. Reason and arguments fell on deaf ears. To England the Union has brought enhanced wealth, population, power, and importance; to Ireland increased taxation, stunted industries, swollen emigration, and callous officialism.

Possessing in this land neither moral nor intellectual pre-eminence, nor any prestige derived from past merit or present esteem, the British Executive claims to restrain our liberties, control our fortunes, and exercise over our people the power of life and death. To obstruct the recent Home Rule Bill it allowed its favourites to defy its Parliament without punishment, to import arms from suspect regions with impunity, to threaten "to break every law" to effectuate their designs to infect the Army with mutiny and set up a rival Executive backed by military array to enforce the rule of a caste against the vast majority of the people. The highest offices of State became the guerdon of the organisers of rebellion, boastful of aid from Germany. To-day they are pillars of the Constitution, and the chief instrument of law. The only laurels lacking to the leaders of the Mutineers are those transplanted from the field of battle!

Are we to fight to maintain a system so repugnant, and must Irishmen be content to remain slaves themselves after freedom for distant lands has been purchased by their blood?

Heretofore in every clime, whenever the weak called for a defender, wherever the flag of liberty was unfurled, that blood freely flowed. Profiting by Irish sympathy with righteous causes Britain, at the outbreak of war, attracted to her armies tens of thousands of our youth ere even the Western Hemisphere had awakened to the wail of "small nations."

Irishmen, in their chivalrous eagerness, laid themselves open to the reproach from some of their brethren of forgetting the woes of their own land, which had suffered from its rulers, at one time or another, almost every inhumanity for which Germany is impeached. It was hard to bear the taunt that the army they were joining was that which held Ireland in subjection; but fresh bitterness has been added to such reproaches by what has since taken place.

Nevertheless, in the face of persistent discouragements, Irish chivalry remained ardent and aflame in the first years of the war. Tens of thousands of the children of the Gael have perished in the conflict. Their bones bleach upon the soil of Flanders or moulder beneath the waves of Suvla Bay. The slopes of Gallipoli, the sands of Egypt, Mesopotamia and Judasa afford them sepulture. Mons and Ypres provide their monuments. Wherever the battle-line extends from the English Channel to the Persian Gulf their ghostly voices whisper a response to the roll-call of the guardian-spirits of Liberty. What is their reward?

The spot on earth they loved best, and the land to which they owed their first duty, and which they hoped their sacrifices might help to freedom, lies unredeemed under an age-long thraldom. So, too, would it for ever lie, were every man and every youth within the shores of Ireland to immolate himself in England's service, unless the clamour of a dominant caste be rebuked and stilled.

Yet proof after proof accumulates that British Cabinets continue to be towards our country as conscienceless as ever. They deceive frankly nations throughout the world as to their Irish policy, while withholding from us even the Act of Home Rule which in 1914 was placed on the Statute-book. The recent "Convention," which they composed to initiate reform, was brought to confusion by a letter from the Prime Minister diminishing his original engagements.

Such insincere manoeuvres have left an indelible sense of wrong rankling in the hearts of Ireland.

Capitulations are observed with French Canadians, with the Maltese, with the Hindoos, with the Mohammedan Arabs, or the African Boers; but never has the word of England, in any capital case, been kept towards the "sister" island.

The Parliaments of Australia and of South Africa—both of which (unlike our ancient Legislature) were founded by British enactments—refused to adopt conscription. This was well known when the law against Ireland was resolved on. For opposing the application of that law to Irishmen, and while this appeal to you, sir, was being penned, members of our Conference have been arrested and deported without trial. It was even sought to poison the wells of American sympathy by levelling against them and others an allegation which its authors have failed to submit to the investigation of any tribunal.

To overlay malpractice by imputing to its victims perverse or criminal conduct is the stale but never-failing device of tyranny.

A claim has also been put forward by the British Foreign Office to prevent you, Mr. President, as the head of a great allied Republic, from acquiring first-hand information of the reasons why Ireland has rejected, and will resist, conscription except in so far as the Military Governor of Ireland, Field-Marshal Lord French, may be pleased to allow you to peruse his version of our opinions.

America's present conflict with Germany obstructs no argument that we advance. "Liberty and ordered peace" we, too, strive for; and confidently do we look to you, sir, and to America—whose freedom Irishmen risked something to establish—to lend ear and weight to the prayer that another unprovoked wrong against the defenceless may not stain this sorry century.

We know that America entered the war because her rights as a neutral, in respect of ocean navigation, were interfered with, and only then. Yet America in her strength had a guarantee that in victory she would not be cheated of that for which she joined in the struggle. Ireland, having no such strength, has no such guarantee; and experience has taught us that justice (much less gratitude) is not to be wrung from a hostile Government. What Ireland is to give, a free Ireland must determine.

We are sadly aware, from recent proclamations and deportations, of the efforts of British authorities to inflame prejudice against our country. We therefore crave allowance briefly to notice the insinuation that the Irish coasts, with native connivance, could be made a base for the destruction of American shipping.

An official statement asserts that:

"An important feature in every plan was the establishment of submarine bases in Ireland to menace the shipping of all nations."

On this it is enough to say that every creek, inlet, or estuary that indents our shores, and every harbour, mole, or jetty is watchfully patrolled by British authority. Moreover, Irish vessels, with their cargoes, crews, and passengers, have suffered in this war proportionately to those of Britain.

Another State Paper palliates the deportations by blazoning the descent of a solitary invader upon a remote island on the 12th of April, heralded by mysterious warnings from the Admiralty to the Irish Command. No discussion is permitted of the tryst of this British soldier with the local coast-guards, of his speedy bent towards a police barrack, and his subsequent confidences with the London authorities.

Only one instance exists in history of a project to profane our coasts by making them a base to launch attacks on international shipping. That plot was framed, not by native wickedness, but by an English Viceroy, and the proofs are piled up under his hand in British State Papers.

For huge bribes were proffered by Lord Falkland, Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland, to both the Royal Secretary and the Prince of Wales, to obtain consent for the use of Irish harbours to convenience Turkish and Algerine pirates in raiding sea-going commerce. The plot is old, but the plea of "increasing his Majesty's revenues" by which it was commended is everlasting. Nor will age lessen its significance for the citizens of that Republic which, amidst the tremors and greed of European diplomacy, extirpated the traffic of Algerine corsairs ninety years ago. British experts cherish Lord Falkland's fame as the sire of their most knightly cavalier, and in their eyes its lustre shines undimmed, though his Excellency, foiled of marine booty, enriched himself by seizing the lands of his untried prisoners in Dublin Castle.

Moving are other retrospects evoked by the present outbreak of malignity against our nation. The slanders of the hour recall those let loose to cloak previous deportations in days of panic less ignoble. Then it was the Primate of All Ireland, Archbishop Oliver Plunkett, who was dragged to London and arraigned for high treason. Poignant memories quicken at every incident which accompanied his degradation before the Lord Chief Justice of England. A troop of witnesses was suborned to swear that his Grace "endeavoured and compassed the King's death," sought to "levy war in Ireland and introduce a foreign Power," and conspired "to take a view of all the several ports and places in Ireland where it would be convenient to land from France." An open trial, indeed, was not denied him; but with hasty rites he was branded a base and false traitor and doomed to be hanged, drawn, and quartered at Tyburn. That desperate felon, after prolonged investigation by the Holy See, has lately been declared a martyr worthy of universal veneration.

The fathers of the American Revolution were likewise pursued in turn by the venom of Governments. Could they have been snatched from their homes and haled to London, what fate would have befallen them? There your noblest patriots might also have perished amidst scenes of shame, and their effigies would now bedeck a British chamber of horrors. Nor would death itself have shielded their reputations from hatchments of dishonour. For the greatest of Englishmen reviled even the sacred name of Joan of Arc, the stainless Maid of France, to belittle a fallen foe and spice a ribald stage-play.

It is hardly thirty years since every Irish leader was made the victim of a special Statute of Proscription, and was cited to answer vague charges before London judges. During 1888 and 1889 a malignant and unprecedented inquisition was maintained to vilify them, backed by all the resources of British power. No war then raged to breed alarms, yet no weapon that perjury or forgery could fashion was left unemployed to destroy the characters of more than eighty National representatives—some of whom survive to join in this Address. That plot came to an end amidst the confusion of their persecutors, but fresh accusations may be daily contrived and buttressed by the chicanery of State.

In every generation the Irish nation is challenged to plead to a new indictment, and to the present summons answer is made before no narrow forum but to the tribunal of the world. So answering, we commit our cause, as did America, to "the virtuous and humane," and also more humbly to the providence of God.

Well assured are we that you, Mr. President, whose exhortations have inspired the Small Nations of the world with fortitude to defend to the last their liberties against oppressors, will not be found among those who would condemn Ireland for a determination which is irrevocable to continue steadfastly in the course mapped out for her, no matter what the odds, by an unexampled unity of National judgment and National right.

Given at the Mansion House, Dublin, this 11th day of June, 1918.

LAURENCE O'NEILL, Lord Mayor of Dublin, Chairman of a Conference of representative Irishmen whose names stand hereunder. JOSEPH DEVLIN, JOHN DILLON, MICHAEL JOHNSON, WILLIAM O'BRIEN (Lab.), T.M. HEALY, WILLIAM O'BRIEN, THOMAS KELLY, and JOHN MACNEILL: {Acting in the place E. DE VALERA and A. GRIFFITH, deported 18th of May, 1918, to separate prisons in England, without trial or accusation—communication with whom has been cut off.}



APPENDIX B

UNIONIST LETTER TO PRESIDENT WILSON

CITY HALL, BELFAST, August 1st, 1918.

To THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

SIR,

A manifesto signed by the leader of the Irish Nationalist Party and certain other Irish gentlemen has been widely circulated in the United Kingdom, in the form of a letter purporting to have been addressed to your Excellency.[110]

Its purpose appears to be to offer an explanation of, and an excuse for, the conduct of the Nationalist Party in obstructing the extension to Ireland of compulsory military service, which the rest of the United Kingdom has felt compelled to adopt as the necessary means of defeating the German design to dominate the world. At a time when all the free democracies of the world have, with whatever reluctance, accepted the burden of conscription as the only alternative to the destruction of free institutions and of international justice, it is easily intelligible that those who maintain Ireland's right to solitary and privileged exemption from the same obligation should betray their consciousness that an apologia is required to enable them to escape condemnation at the bar of civilised, and especially of American, opinion. But, inasmuch as the document referred to would give to anyone not intimately familiar with British domestic affairs the impression that it represents the unanimous opinion of Irishmen, it is important that your Excellency and the American people should be assured that this is very far from being the case.

There is in Ireland a minority, whom we claim to represent, comprising one-fourth to one-third of the total population of the island, located mainly, but not exclusively, in the province of Ulster, who dissent emphatically from the views of Mr. Dillon and his associates. This minority, through their representatives in Parliament, have maintained throughout the present war that the same obligations should in all respects be borne by Ireland as by Great Britain, and it has caused them as Irishmen a keen sense of shame that their country has not submitted to this equality of sacrifice.

Your Excellency does not need to be informed that this question has become entangled in the ancient controversy concerning the constitutional status of Ireland in the United Kingdom. This is, indeed, sufficiently clear from the terms of the Nationalist manifesto addressed to you, every paragraph of which is coloured by allusion to bygone history and threadbare political disputes.

It is not our intention to traverse the same ground. There is in the manifesto almost no assertion with regard to past events which is not either a distortion or a misinterpretation of historical fact. But we consider that this is not the moment for discussing the faults and follies of the past, still less for rehearsing ancient grievances, whether well or ill founded, in language of extravagant rhetoric. At a time when the very existence of civilisation hangs in the balance, all smaller issues, whatever their merits or however they may affect our internal political problems, should in our judgment have remained in abeyance, while the parties interested in their solution should have joined in whole-hearted co-operation against the common enemy.

There is, however, one matter to which reference must be made, in order to make clear the position of the Irish minority whom we represent. The Nationalist Party have based their claim to American sympathy on the historic appeal addressed to Irishmen by the British colonists who fought for independence in America a hundred and fifty years ago. By no Irishmen was that appeal received with a more lively sympathy than by the Protestants of Ulster, the ancestors of those for whom we speak to-day—a fact that was not surprising in view of the circumstance that more than one-sixth part of the entire colonial population in America at the time of the Declaration of Independence consisted of emigrants from Ulster.

The Ulstermen of to-day, forming as they do the chief industrial community in Ireland, are as devoted adherents to the cause of democratic freedom as were their forefathers in the eighteenth century. But the experience of a century of social and economic progress under the legislative Union with Great Britain has convinced them that under no other system of government could more complete liberty be enjoyed by the Irish people. This, however, is not the occasion for a reasoned defence of "Unionist" policy. Our sole purpose in referring to the matter is to show, whatever be the merits of the dispute, that a very substantial volume of Irish opinion is warmly attached to the existing Constitution of the United Kingdom, and regards as wholly unwarranted the theory that our political status affords any sort of parallel to that of the "small nations" oppressed by alien rule, for whose emancipation the Allied democracies are fighting in this war.

The Irish representation in the Imperial Parliament throws a significant sidelight on this prevalent fiction. Whereas England is only represented by one member for every 75,000 of population, and Scotland by one for every 65,000, Ireland has a member for every 42,000 of her people. With a population below that of Scotland, Ireland has 31 more members in the House of Commons, and 89 more than she could claim on a basis of representation strictly proportionate to population in the United Kingdom.

Speaking in Dublin on the 1st of July, 1915, the late Mr. John Redmond gave the following description of the present condition of Ireland, which offers a striking contrast to the extravagant declamation that represents that country as downtrodden by a harsh and unsympathetic system of government:

"To-day," he said, "the people, broadly speaking, own the soil. To-day the labourers live in decent habitations. To-day there is absolute freedom in local government and local taxation of the country. To-day we have the widest parliamentary and municipal franchise. The congested districts, the scene of some of the most awful horrors of the old famine days, have been transformed. The farms have been enlarged, decent dwellings have been provided, and a new spirit of hope and independence is to-day among the people. In towns legislation has been passed facilitating the housing of the working classes—a piece of legislation far in advance of anything obtained for the town tenants of England. We have a system of old-age pensions in Ireland whereby every old man and woman over seventy is safe from the workhouse and free to spend their last days in comparative comfort."

Such are the conditions which, in the eyes of Nationalist politicians, constitute a tyranny so intolerable as to justify Ireland in repudiating her fair share in the burden of war against the enemies of civilisation.

The appeal which the Nationalists make to the principle of "self-determination" strikes Ulster Protestants as singularly inappropriate. Mr. Dillon and his co-signatories have been careful not to inform your Excellency that it was their own opposition that prevented the question of Irish Government being settled in accordance with that principle in 1916. The British Government were prepared at that time to bring the Home Rule Act of 1914 into immediate operation, if the Nationalists had consented to exclude from its scope the distinctively Protestant population of the North, who desired to adhere to the Union. This compromise was rejected by the Nationalist leaders, whose policy was thus shown to be one of "self-determination" for themselves, combined with coercive domination over us.

It is because the British Government, while prepared to concede the principle of self-determination impartially to both divisions in Ireland, has declined to drive us forcibly into such subjection that the Nationalist Party conceive themselves entitled to resist the law of conscription. And the method by which this resistance has been made effective is, in our view, not less deplorable than the spirit that dictated it. The most active opponents of conscription in Ireland are men who have been twice detected during the war in treasonable traffic with the enemy, and their most powerful support has been that of ecclesiastics, who have not scrupled to employ weapons of spiritual terrorism which have elsewhere in the civilised world fallen out of political use since the Middle Ages.

The claim of these men, in league with Germany on the one hand, and with the forces of clericalism on the other, to resist a law passed by Parliament as necessary for national defence is, moreover, inconsistent with any political status short of independent sovereignty—status which could only be attained by Ireland by an act of secession from the United Kingdom, such as the American Union averted only by resort to civil war. In every Federal or other Constitution embracing subordinate legislatures the raising and control of military forces are matters reserved for the supreme legislative authority alone, and they are so reserved for the Imperial Parliament of the United Kingdom in the Home Rule Act of 1914, the "withholding" of which during the war is complained of by the Nationalists who have addressed your Excellency. The contention of these gentlemen that until the internal government of Ireland is changed in accordance with their demands, Ireland is justified in resisting the law of Conscription, is one that finds support in no intelligible theory of political science.

To us as Irishmen—convinced as we are of the righteousness of the cause for which we are fighting, and resolved that no sacrifice can be too great to "make the world safe for democracy"—it is a matter of poignant regret that the conduct of the Nationalist leaders in refusing to lay aside matters of domestic dispute, in order to put forth the whole strength of the country against Germany should have cast a stain on the good name of Ireland. We have done everything in our power to dissociate ourselves from their action, and we disclaim responsibility for it at the bar of posterity and history.

EDWARD CARSON. JAMES JOHNSTON, Lord Mayor of Belfast. H.M. POLLOCK, President Belfast Chamber of Commerce. R.N. ANDERSON, Mayor of Londonderry, and President Londonderry Chamber of Commerce. JOHN M. ANDREWS, Chairman Ulster Unionist Labour Association. JAMES A. TURKINGTON, Vice-Chairman Ulster Unionist Labour Association, and Secretary Power-loom and Allied Trades Friendly Society, and ex-Secretary Power-loom Tenters' Trade Union of Ireland. THOMPSON DONALD, Hon. Secretary Ulster Unionist Labour Association, and ex-District Secretary Shipwrights' Association. HENRY FLEMING, Hon. Secretary Ulster Unionist Labour Association, Member of Boilermakers' Iron and Steel Shipbuilders' Society.

FOOTNOTES:

[110] See Appendix A.



INDEX

Abercorn, James, 2nd Duke of, at the Belfast Convention, 33; President of the Ulster Unionist Council, 35; illness, 47, 85, 108; signs the Covenant, 122; death, 144 Abercorn, James, 3rd Duke of, 257, 282 Abercorn, Mary, Duchess of, President of the Women's Unionist Council, 37 Adair, Gen. Sir Wm., at Larne, 217 Afghan Campaign, 161 Africa, South, War, 18 Agar-Robartes, Hon. Thomas, amendment on the Home Rule Bill, 92, 94-97, 132 Agnew, Capt. Andrew, viii, 193, 202, 210, 213, 214, 220 Albert Hall, meetings at, 14, 21, 34, 71 Alexander, Dr., Bishop of Derry, at the Albert Hall, 14 Allen, C.E., 156 Allen, W.J., 35 Althorp, Lord, 138 Altrincham, election, 155 Amending Bill, 221, 223, 227; postponed, 228, 230; see Home Rule America, War of Independence, 273 Amery, L.C.S., at Belfast, 81; on the Curragh Incident, 182 Amiens, threatened capture of, 266 Anderson, R.N., Mayor of Londonderry, letter to President Wilson, 273, 296-299 Andrews, John M., letter to President Wilson, 296-299 Andrews, Thomas, 33, 35, 48 Anglo-German relations, 167, 201 Annual Register, viii, 18 note, 21, 54 note, 76, 78 note, 138, 154 note, 155 note, 157 note, 166 note, 167 note, 169 note, 170 note, 201 note, 222 note, 223 note, 238, 271 note, 272 note Archdale, E.M., 35; Chairman of the Standing Committee, 35; Minister for Agriculture, 282 Armagh, military depot, 175, 176 Armaghdale, Lord, 263; signs the Covenant, 122: see Lonsdale Armistice, the, 275 Army, British, sympathy with Ulster Loyalists, 187-189 Arran, Isle of, 175 Asquith, Rt. Hon. H.H., on the opposition of Ulster to Home Rule, 1, 2; at the Albert Hall, 21; Hull, 24; Reading, 24; Bury St. Edmunds, 25; opinion of Sir E. Carson's speech, 133; at Ladybank, 154; Manchester, 166; policy on the Ulster Question, 167-170; on the Curragh Incident, 180, 182; Secretary of State for War, 184; promises an Amending Bill, 221; on the landing of arms, 221; at the Buckingham Palace Conference, 227; on the postponement of the Amending Bill, 228, 230; defence of Home Rule Bill, 235; in Dublin, 244; on the settlement of the Irish question, 245; on the national danger, 266 Attentive, H.M.S., 178 Austrian rifles, 198

Baird, J.D., at Belfast, 81 Balfour, Rt. Hon. A.J., at Belfast, 13, 81; on election tactics, 25; on exclusion of Ulster, 95; resigns leadership of the Unionist Party, 60; how regarded in Ulster, 61; message from, 115; the "peccant paragraphs," 181 Balfour, Lord, of Burleigh, signs the British Covenant, 170 Ballycastle, 193 Ballykinler, training camp, 237 Ballymacarret, 225 Ballymena, meeting at, 108 Ballymoney, meeting at, 158 Ballyroney, meeting at, 108 Balmerino, s.s., 208, 209 Balmoral, Belfast, meeting at, 79-86, 101 Bangor, 214, 219 Barrie, H.T., 257 Bates, Richard Dawson, Secretary of the Ulster Unionist Council, 35, 121; organises demonstration, 111; on board a tender, 214; Minister for Home Affairs, 282; knighthood, 284 Bedford, Duke of, Chairman of the British League for the support of Ulster, 147 Belfast, 46; Convention of 1892, 32-34, 109; meetings at, 52, 78, 157; services on Ulster Day, 117; City Hall, 119, 283; Covenant signed, 119-122; drill hall, opened, 148; riots, 151; review of the Ulster Volunteer Force at, 163; Customs Authorities, stratagem against, 217; reception of the King and Queen, 283 Belfast Lough, 46, 175, 211, 212 Belfast Newsletter, 102 note, 111 Benn, Sir John, 53 Beresford, Lord Charles, at Belfast, 81, 109; at the Ulster Club, 125; Liverpool, 127; member of a Committee of the Provisional Government, 145 Berwick, 149, 154 Birrell, Rt. Hon. Augustine, Chief Secretary for Ireland, on the character of Sinn Feinism, 4; at Ilfracombe, 54; on the Home Rule Bill, 96; the right to fight, 138; member of a sub-committee on Ulster, 175; conduct in the Irish rebellion, 243; character of his administration, 245 Blenheim, meeting at, 97 Boyne, the, 2; battle of, 115; celebration, 224 Bradford, 172, 174, 175 Bristol, 150, 166; Channel, 208 Britannic, H.M.S., 224 British Covenant, signing the, 170 British League for the support of Ulster and the Union, formation, 147 Browne, Robert, Managing Director of the Antrim Iron Ore Company, 193 Brunner, Sir John, President of the National Liberal Federation, 167 Buckingham Palace Conference, 227 Budden, Captain, 196 Budget, 19; "The People's," 20 "Budget League," formed, 20 Bull, Sir William, 195 Bury St. Edmunds, 25 Butcher, Sir J.G., at Belfast, 81