The Crime Against Europe Part 8

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 ash.o.r.e.

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 sc.u.m 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 s.e.xes 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 s.e.x 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 s.e.x 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 advertis.e.m.e.nt from the Cork _Evening Echo_ (of March, 1913), in ill.u.s.tration:

"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 battles.h.i.+ps 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 statesmans.h.i.+p.

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 p.r.o.nouncements, 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 relations.h.i.+p 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 n.o.ble 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 pa.s.sionate 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 pa.s.sion in the ma.s.s 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 n.o.blest 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 subst.i.tute 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 s.h.i.+pping 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 "friends.h.i.+p" 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 a.n.a.logy, and one given us by the only Englishman who was in every clime, and in every circ.u.mstance 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 s.h.i.+eld. 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.