The Evolution of Sinn Fein Part 1

The Evolution of Sinn Fein.

by Robert Mitch.e.l.l Henry.

INTRODUCTORY.

It is almost a commonplace of the political moralists that every failure on the part of England to satisfy the moderate and const.i.tutional demands of the Irish people for reform has been followed invariably by a deplorable outbreak of "extremist" activities in Ireland. Unfortunately for the moral, that const.i.tutional demands should therefore be promptly and fully conceded, the statement is almost exactly the reverse of the truth, if Irish history as a whole be taken as the field for induction.

The Irish Nation cannot be said to have at any period abandoned its claim to independence. Of the meaning of that claim there was no question from the Conquest to the fall of Limerick. The whole of that period is occupied by a long struggle between the English and the Irish peoples for the effective possession of the island. On neither side was there any misapprehension of the meaning and object of the contest. The English Government, whether it employed naked force, intrigue or legal fiction, aimed (and was understood to aim) at the moral, material and political subjugation of the Irish: the Irish, whether they fought in the field or intrigued in the cabinets of Europe, whether allied with France or with Spain or English royalists, had but one object, the a.s.sertion of their national independence. It was a struggle not merely between two nations but between two civilizations. Men of English blood who were absorbed by the Irish nation and who accepted the Irish civilization fought as stoutly for the independence of their adopted (and adopting) country as did the descendants of the Milesians. England could never count on the fidelity to her ideals and policy in Ireland of the second generation of her own settlers. History cannot produce another instance of a struggle so prolonged and so pertinacious. Whole counties, stripped by fire and sword of their aboriginal owners were repeopled within two or three generations and renewed the struggle. But superior numbers and organization, a more fortunate star and (it seemed) the designs of Providence, prevailed in the end; and with the fall of Limerick England might have regarded her task as at last accomplished. The Irish Nation was prostrate, and chains were forged for it which, heavier and more galling than any forged for any nation before, seemed to offer a perpetual guarantee of slavery, misery and degradation. Ireland was henceforth to be administered as a kind of convict settlement. The law, in the words of a famous judgment, did not presume the existence of such a person as a Catholic Irishman; that is to say, two-thirds of the inhabitants of the country had no legal existence.

Legal existence was the privilege of Protestant Englishmen living in Ireland and of such Protestant Irishmen as claimed it. But legal existence in Ireland during the eighteenth century was no prize to be grasped at.

The mere fact of residence in Ireland entailed practical disabilities for which no mere local ascendancy was an adequate compensation. The manufactures and trade of Ireland were systematically and ruthlessly suppressed. Englishmen who settled there found that while they were at liberty to oppress "the mere Irish" they were subject themselves to a similar oppression by the English who remained at home. No one might enter that prison house and remain wholly a man. The "garrison" grumbled, protested and threatened, but in vain. Const.i.tutionalists appealed to the policy of the Conquest in support of the independence of the country. It was argued that the Parliament of Ireland, established by the conquerors as a symbol of annexation, was and ought to be independent of the Parliament of England. The claim was held to be baseless and treasonable; so far from being abandoned or weakened, it was enforced and a.s.serted by the arms of the Volunteers, and in less than a century after the fall of Limerick the Renunciation Act of 1783 enacted that the people of Ireland should be "bound only by laws enacted by his Majesty and the parliament of that kingdom in all cases whatever."

But while this was independence, it was independence in the sense of Molyneux, Swift and Grattan, not in the sense in which it had been understood by Hugh O'Neill. The American colonies went farther and fared better, and the descendants of the race of Hugh O'Neill had to be reckoned with still. Their position under the settlement of 1783 was what it had been since the Treaty of Limerick was broken by the Penal Laws, and all that they gained at first was an indirect share in the prosperity which began for the country with the a.s.sertion of its legislative independence.

The population increased; trade, commerce and manufactures flourished and multiplied; the flag of Ireland began once more to creep forth upon the seas; but the ancient race was still proscribed in the land of its birth.

But while it was in human nature to invent, it was not in human nature to continue to administer, a code so diabolical as that of the Penal Laws.

The Volunteers who claimed legislative independence of England a.s.serted the rights of conscience for their fellow-countrymen. Under the free Parliament a gradual alleviation took place in the lot of Catholics in Ireland; in 1793 they were admitted to the franchise and there is a presumption that had the Irish Parliament really been independent the Penal Laws would have in time been abolished entirely. But the vigilance of English policy and English Ministers never ceased; their meddling in the affairs of Ireland was perpetual and mischievous: the rights of the Irish Parliament were constantly in danger from the interference of English Ministers who advised their common Monarch and moulded his Irish policy through the Viceroy and the Executive. It was but a step from the admission of Catholics to the franchise to their admission to the House of Commons, but that step was never taken by the Irish Parliament. The measures of Parliamentary reform pressed upon them by the popular party both inside and outside Parliament were constantly rejected, partly through the mere conservatism of privilege partly through the influence of the English Cabinet. The United Irishmen, whose aim was to establish a free and equal representation of all Irishmen irrespective of creed, despaired of obtaining their object by open agitation and, subjected to repressive enactments, transformed themselves into a secret a.s.sociation for the overthrow of the existing government and for complete separation from England as the only method of securing and maintaining the rights of Ireland. They were the first Irish Republican Party. They appealed for a.s.sistance to the French Directory, but so jealous were they of their independence that they seem to have jeopardized the prospect of help by their insistence that the force sent must not be large enough to threaten the subjugation of the country. The Government, becoming aware of the conspiracy, took steps at once to foster it and to crush it. Their agents went through the country, forming United Irish lodges and then denouncing the members to the authorities. Under pretence of helping the Irish Government in its difficulties. English regiments were poured into the country and, when a sufficient force was a.s.sembled, open rebellion was provoked and crushed with a systematic barbarity which is even now hardly credible.

To understand the Rebellion and the policy of the Union which followed it, one must go farther back than the last quarter of the eighteenth century.

The fall of Limerick ended (or seemed to end) the struggle for the military domination of Ireland. Once it was in the effective possession of England the period of its commercial subjugation began. Every kind of manufacture which competed with that of England was suppressed: every branch of commerce which threatened rivalry with that of England was forbidden. To ensure at once that military resistance might not be renewed and that commercial subjugation might be endured the policy was adopted first (to quote Archbishop Boulter) of "filling the great places with natives of England" and secondly of perpetuating the animosity between Protestants and Catholics. It was hoped in this way to form "two nations"

out of one and render the task of government and exploitation easier in consequence. The remarkable power of absorbing foreign settlers shown by the Irish Nation since before the Conquest was thus to be nullified and religion pressed into service against humanity. So clearly was this policy conceived that Archbishop Boulter could write "The worst of this is that it tends to unite Protestant with Papist and, whenever that happens, good-bye to the English interests in Ireland forever." But the agents of the policy overreached themselves. Irish Protestants turned against a policy which counted the merit of being a Protestant as less than the demerit of being Irish. Dean Swift won the favour alike of Irish Protestant and Irish Catholic by his mordant pamphlets against the English policy in Ireland and may justly be reckoned as on the whole the most powerful champion of Irish independence in the sense of the eighteenth century. The Irish agents of the policy of Protestant Ascendancy overreached themselves too. Official Irish Protestantism bore almost as hardly upon Presbyterians as upon Papists, and the United Irishmen at the end of the century found no support in Ireland warmer than that accorded them by the best of the Ulster Presbyterians. There is little doubt that the reversal of the commercial ascendancy by the legislation of 1782 was regarded by the English Ministry as a merely temporary setback, to be repaired at the earliest convenient opportunity. In any case the valuable a.s.set of Protestant Ascendancy, with its possibilities of perpetual friction and disunion among Irishmen, was still in their hands. When the rise of the United Irishmen threatened even this, the necessity of recovering the lost ground and the opportunity of doing so were immediately recognised. The obstinacy with which the Irish Parliament opposed Parliamentary reform (an obstinacy directly fostered by the policy of the English Ministry) drove the United Irish movement into hostility at once to the English connection and to the existing const.i.tution of Ireland. They could thus be represented as at once a menace to England and a menace to Ireland, and it was held to be the duty of both Governments to combine to crush them. They were crushed by English troops, but the Irish Parliament was crushed with them. Pitt decided that direct control by the English Ministry must take the place of indirect control through an Irish Executive, and the Legislative Union was enacted.

There seemed to be no other permanent or ultimate alternative to the complete independence and separation of England and Ireland.

Much impressive rhetoric has been expended upon the measures taken to secure that the members of the Irish Parliament should produce a majority in favour of the Act of Union. They were bribed and intimidated; they were offered posts and pensions: some of them were bought with hard cash. But even a Castlereagh must have been aware that if he should suborn a servant to betray his master the gravamen of the charge against him would not be that he had corrupted the morals of the servant by offering him a bribe.

Ordinary morality may not apply to politics, but if it does, Pitt and Castlereagh were guilty of a far greater crime than that of bribing a few scores of venal Irishmen; and the members of the Irish Parliament who took their money were guilty not of corruption but of treason. For the Act of Union was intended to accomplish the destruction of the national existence. The members of Parliament who voted against it, knew this: the Irish people who pet.i.tioned against it, knew this: Pitt and Castlereagh knew it: the men they paid to vote for it, knew it too.

The politics of Ireland during the nineteenth century would have been tangled enough at the best, but the Act of Union introduced a confusion which has often seemed to make the situation inexplicable to a normal mind. But, to leave details aside, the main lines of the problem are clear enough. The Act of Union was designed to end the separate national existence of Ireland by incorporating its legislative and administrative machinery with that of England. To secure control to the "Predominant Partner" (as the incorporating body has since been called) the representation of Ireland in the Imperial Parliament was fixed at a total which at the time of the Act was less than half that to which it was ent.i.tled on the basis of the population. While the intention of the authors of the measure (as their published correspondence makes perfectly clear) was to subordinate Irish national interests to those of England, the measure was presented to Parliament as one designed to further the mutual interests of the two kingdoms. But to Protestant waverers it was commended in private as a necessary means of securing the Protestant interest, while to the Catholics hopes were held out that the removal of the Catholic disabilities maintained by the Protestant ascendancy in Ireland might be hoped for from the more liberal Parliament in England.

There is no doubt that many Catholics, especially among the n.o.bility and higher clergy, were induced at least to discourage resistance to the measure, partly for this reason, partly out of fear of the republican sympathies and aims of the reforming United Irishmen. The extreme Protestants, such as the Orangemen who helped to suppress the rebellion, viewed the measure with a certain suspicion, if not with definite hostility. They looked forward, now that the rebellion was crushed, to a prolonged tenure of unchallenged ascendancy. But the bulk of the more liberal Protestants were against it, and the wiser Catholics. They foretold the ruin of trade, the burden of increased taxation, the loss of all real independence and freedom that were bound to, and did, result. But they were neither consulted nor listened to and the measure was pa.s.sed after free speech had been bought over in Parliament and suppressed by military force outside.

The measure once pa.s.sed brought about an unnatural s.h.i.+fting of parties in Ireland. Many of those who had opposed the measure before it became law, now decided to make the best of what could no longer be prevented. The orators of the Patriot Party pa.s.sed over to the English Parliament and were practically lost to Ireland. The aristocracy who had upheld the Irish Parliament gravitated towards the new seat of Government and abandoned a capital deserted by the Parliament of their pride. They sent their children to be educated in England, and in the second generation they began to call themselves not Irishmen but Englishmen. The representatives of both these parties became in time convinced upholders of the Union and their influence in Ireland was thrown in favour of the maintenance of the _status quo_. To this "Unionist" party must be added the Orange party who stood for Protestant ascendancy. Much as they disliked the Union to begin with they came to see in the end that, unaided, they could not stand for long against the claim of their Catholic fellow-countrymen for political equality. The one thing that reconciled them to the Union was its possibilities in securing the Protestant interest. To this att.i.tude they have remained faithful ever since, and in the course of the century they were joined by the majority of the Protestants of Ireland. Ulster, at one time the chief strength of the United Irishmen, became the headquarters of extreme and even fanatical support of the Union. Here "the Protestant interest," carefully fostered as an instrument of English influence in Ireland, founded its citadel, the rallying point of opposition to "Irish"

claims. After Connaught, the most definitely "Celtic" portion of Ireland (in spite of the Ulster Plantations), its extreme Protestant sympathies, carefully fostered by the Protestant clergy into a bigotry that has become grotesque, converted the dominions of the O'Neills and the O'Donnells into a desperate and apparently irreconcilable antagonist of Irish national interests. Besides, Ulster suffered less than the rest of Ireland from the economic effects of the Union. Though the population of Ulster has been almost halved as the result of it, the "Ulster custom" saved the tenants from some of the worst abuses of the land system of the other provinces, and the prosperity of the linen trade, never endangered by collision with English interests, did not suffer by the measure; while the greater wealth of the manufacturing districts made the burden of unfair taxation (which repressed commercial and industrial enterprise in the rest of Ireland) less felt than it might have been. A mistaken view of their own interests, and an equally mistaken view of the real aims of the rest of their countrymen (a mistake sometimes encouraged by the tactics of their opponents) converted Protestant Ulster into an att.i.tude which ignorance has represented as a consciousness of a racial difference between itself and the rest of Ireland. But even in Ulster there still remain many Protestant Irishmen to whom the recollection of the days of the United Irishmen is like the recollection of the Golden Age. Still faithful to the doctrines of equality, fraternity and freedom they are the last links of the chain which once bound Ulster to the cause of Ireland.

On the other hand Catholic Ireland as a whole, and especially its leaders, ecclesiastical and other, viewed the enactment of the legislative Union with a kind of apathetic despair. Nothing apparently was to be hoped from the Irish Parliament in the direction of real religious equality or reform of the franchise: nothing more could be expected from armed resistance after the signal failure of the rebellion. The country was occupied by an English army and, whatever they thought, they must think in silence. Hopes were held out that the Union might bring Catholic Emanc.i.p.ation, that the Catholic clergy might receive a State subsidy similar to that given to the Presbyterian ministers. They were to find that Catholic Emanc.i.p.ation was no more to the taste of England than to that of the Irish Parliament and that a State subsidy to the Catholic Church would only be granted at the price which Castlereagh desired the Presbyterian ministers to pay for the _Regium Donum_. But for the moment they did nothing and there was nothing that could be done. Ent.i.tled to vote but not to sit in Parliament, but half-emanc.i.p.ated from the bondage, material and moral, of the Penal Laws, they had no effective weapon at their disposal within the const.i.tution, and the only other weapon that they had had broken in their hands. They were forced into a position of silent and half-hearted protest, and have ever since been at the disadvantage of having to appear as the disturbers of the existing order.

The hopes held out by the promoters of the Union were not realized without prolonged and violent agitation, and the cause of Ireland appeared doubly alien, clothed in the garb of a Church alien to the legislators to whom appeal was made. That the national cause was first identified with the claims of Irish Catholics to religious equality is the _d.a.m.nosa hereditas_ of Irish Nationalism in the nineteenth century. The music of "the Pope's Bra.s.s Band" drowns the voice of orator and poet. The demand that the nation as a whole should no longer be compelled to support the establishment of the Church of a minority was represented as a move on the part of the Roman Curia to cripple Protestantism in the United Kingdom.

The demand for the reform of the worst land system in Europe was looked upon as a resistance to the const.i.tution inspired by the agents of the Vatican. The Irish people asks for nothing, but the Pope or the Irish Catholic hierarchy, working in darkness, is supposed to have put it into their heads, though the Irish people have taught both Pope and Bishops many lessons upon the distinction between religious authority and political dictation.

Thus there gradually developed during the nineteenth century the Unionist and the Nationalist parties, the former upholding the legislative Union though not averse (upon pressure) to the concession of administrative reforms: the latter under many forms claiming in greater or lesser measure the abolition of the _fons et origo malorum_, the withdrawal from the people of Ireland of the right to an independent legislature. The historic claim to complete independence has on many occasions been modified in theory or abated in practice by the National leaders: but a survey of the history of Ireland since the Union shows that, with whatever apparent abatements or disguises the claim may have been pressed, there has always been deep down the feeling that behind the Union lay the Conquest, the hope that to repeal the one meant a step upon the road to annul the other.

IRISH NATIONALISM IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.

The political history of Post-Union Ireland opens with an armed rebellion.

Robert Emmet for an abortive attempt to seize Dublin Castle was condemned and executed in 1803. His rising was the last effort of the United Irishmen. Since the Union, and for more than a century after his death, the country was governed under a species of martial law, and Coercion Acts were matters of almost annual enactment. The Government could not count on the steady loyalty of any cla.s.s of the community. The Orange societies required to be placated, the Presbyterians to be muzzled, the Catholics to be suppressed. Castlereagh's administration was a frank recognition of the fact that Irishmen as a body were hostile to the Union, and that any means might be employed to keep them quiet. For more than twenty years the Catholics waited in vain for the fulfilment of the hopes of emanc.i.p.ation held out at the time of the Union. Meanwhile "the bonds of Empire"

continued to be drawn tighter and tighter. In 1817 the Irish Exchequer, the belated relic of Ireland's independent existence, was amalgamated with that of England, and the long history of the financial oppression of the country began. At last in 1823 Catholic Ireland began the public agitation of its claims for civil equality with Irish Protestants. The agitation, justifiable and necessary in itself, natural and dignified had it taken place in an independent Ireland and had it been of the nature of an appeal to the justice of their fellow-countrymen, a.s.sumed the inevitable form of an appeal to a foreign legislature for a justice denied them at home. The Catholic a.s.sociation founded in 1760 was revived by Daniel O'Connell and in six years' time, so strong was the feeling aroused, the English Government yielded, for fear (as the Duke of Wellington confessed) of a civil war. O'Connell had talked as if he were ready for anything and the Duke of Wellington seems to have thought that he meant what he said. It was the first victory for "moral force" and O'Connell became enamoured of the new weapon. Next year the t.i.the War broke out and ended in 1838 in an incomplete victory, the t.i.thes, instead of being abolished, being paid henceforth in money as an addition to the rent. But before the t.i.the War ended, O'Connell (now member for Clare in the Imperial Parliament) had founded the Const.i.tutional Party by giving his support to Lord Melbourne's Government. For O'Connell's policy there was this to be said: that, the Union being an accomplished fact, the only way to secure legislative benefits for Ireland was through the only means recognized by the const.i.tution: that, both English parties being equally indifferent to the special interests of Ireland, it was sound practical policy to secure by an alliance with one or other, as occasion might dictate, some special claim upon its consideration and (incidentally) some hope of appointments to Government positions of Irishmen in sympathy with the majority in Ireland: that the only alternative was open defiance of the Const.i.tution and the sacrifice of what otherwise might be gained by its recognition. Against his policy it could be urged that to employ const.i.tutional forms was to recognize a const.i.tution repugnant to his declared convictions; that appeals to the Parliament of the United Kingdom tended in practice to intensify Irish divisions and to break up the nation into two groups of litigants pleading before a bar which viewed them with an indifferent disdain; that in any case success in the appeal would be the result of accident and circ.u.mstance or be dictated by the interests of English policy. Between these two views of Irish national policy Ireland has been divided and has wavered ever since.

But O'Connell, having been successful once, seems to have conceived it possible to be successful always, and he decided to attempt the Repeal of the Union. It is hard to suppose that he thought this possible by any means which he was prepared to use. In 1840 he founded the Repeal a.s.sociation, and in two years' time he had practically the whole of Catholic Ireland, and a small but enthusiastic body of Protestants, behind him. Monster meetings were held all over the country. Repeal Clubs were founded, recruits pressed in, "moral force," in the form of threats that "he would either be in his grave or a freeman" within a reasonable time, was employed by the leader. But when the Government proclaimed the meeting, announced to be held on Sunday, October the 8th, 1843, at Clontarf, chosen as the scene of Brian Boroimhe's crowning victory over the Danes, O'Connell yielded at discretion. No reform, as he proclaimed afterwards, was worth the shedding of a single drop of human blood; and Brian's battlefield saw the troops wait all day long for the foe that never came. Unable to persuade, O'Connell was unprepared to fight, the enemies of Repeal. But the Repeal a.s.sociation continued: the Repeal members of Parliament either were (like O'Connell) arrested and imprisoned or withdrew from Westminster to deliberate in Ireland upon Committees of the Repeal a.s.sociation on matters of national moment. As time went on, O'Connell (and still more his worthless son, John) gave the a.s.sociation an ever-increasing bias towards sectarianism and away from Nationalism. He fought the "Young Ireland" Party, as Davis, Gavan Duffy, John Mitchel and their a.s.sociates were called, who carried on the purely national and liberal traditions of the United Irishmen, and finally forced them to secede. Their paper _The Nation_, founded in 1842, was until its suppression the mouthpiece of the liberal and really National Party. It voiced in impa.s.sioned prose and verse the aspirations of the historic Irish nation. Its guiding spirit, Thomas Davis, was a member of a Protestant family in Mallow, and its contributors comprised men of all creeds, Irish and Anglo-Irish, who looked forward to the revival of Irish culture, of the Irish language and of an Irish polity in which room would be found for all sons and daughters of Ireland, free to develop as one of the family of European nations, released from all outside interference in national concerns. But Irish divisions, fostered by the Union, fomented by statecraft and furthered by many Irishmen, grew steadily more p.r.o.nounced.

Thomas Davis and his friends, at the risk of misunderstanding and misrepresentation, did their utmost to promote union on the basis of a common pride in Ireland's past and a common hope for Ireland's future. The Committees of the Repeal a.s.sociation worked hard at reports upon Irish needs and Irish conditions. They promoted the composition and publication of Repeal Essays pointing to the results of the Union in diminis.h.i.+ng manufactures and in an impoverished national life. They had a temporary success, and their writings were destined to supply inspiration to their successors, but they were battling with a running tide. The moderate people, tired of the struggle, were finding in Federalism a resting place between conviction and expediency or had made up their minds to accept the Union. The gradual process of Anglicization went on apace. The establishment in 1831 of the Board of National Education under the joint management of Catholic, Protestant and Presbyterian dignitaries was, in spite of much opposition, making sure headway. It was destined to destroy for all practical purposes the Gaelic language which till then had been in common use in all parts of Ireland. It proscribed Irish history and Irish patriotic poetry in its schools. It was seized upon by ecclesiastics of all persuasions and made, in the name of religion, a potent instrument of a policy of internal division and mistrust. It placed education, with all its possibilities of national culture and national union, in the hands of a Board definitely anti-national in its outlook, working through instruments to whom sectarian prejudices meant more than national welfare.

Had Davis lived he might have done much with his great gifts, his tolerant spirit and his heroic temper: his death in 1845 was one of the greatest losses which Ireland suffered during the nineteenth century. O'Connell, whose later activities had been almost wholly mischievous, died two years later just as the full horror of the Famine burst upon the country. The Government which had a.s.sumed responsibility for the interests of Ireland, met this awful visitation with an inept.i.tude so callous as almost to justify John Mitchel's fiercest denunciations. While the crops were being exported from the country over 700,000 persons died of starvation and as many again by famine fever. When the fever and famine had done their work, the clearances began. The population fled from the country where there was nothing left for them or, if they did not fly, they were s.h.i.+pped off by the landlords to leave room for the development of grazing farms. From 1846 to 1851, one million and a quarter of the population "emigrated," and in the next nine years they were followed, thanks to the same causes, by another million and a half. During the same period 373,000 families were evicted from their holdings to provide room for a handful of graziers.

The Famine and its consequences seemed a final proof of the failure of the English Government to preserve the elementary interests of Ireland, and a section of the Young Irelanders could see no other remedy than an appeal to force, if they were to regain independence and keep Ireland from destruction. John Mitchel seceded from _The Nation_ and founded _The United Irishman_, in which week after week with extraordinary eloquence and courage he advocated the policy of resistance. He advised the peasantry to procure arms, to manufacture pikes, if nothing better could be had, to resist the official searches for arms (for a stringent Coercion Act had been one of the weapons with which the Government combatted the Famine) and to refuse to allow food to leave the country. He appealed in a series of letters to the Protestant farmers of Ulster to help Ireland as they had helped before in the days of the United Irishmen. Had all the leaders of the Young Ireland Party possessed the spirit of Mitchel, and had any of them known how to organize a rebellion, they would not have lacked a very formidable following. But Mitchel was arrested, sentenced and transported before anything was done and the actual outbreak under Smith O'Brien and Meagher was doomed to failure from the outset.

Mitchel had advanced far beyond "moral force" and the Repeal of the Union.

He had definitely renounced the idea of arguing the Union out of existence: he regarded no policy as either practicable or manly which did not begin and end in the a.s.sertion that Ireland was a free country and was prepared to adopt any and every means to put her freedom into practice.

Like all the Young Irelanders, he had begun his political life as a Repealer and a follower of O'Connell; he had appealed to the Irish gentry to act again as they had acted in 1782. But Irish history since the Union and especially the experiences of the Famine years (there had been several partial famines before 1846) was making some serious thinkers very sceptical of a political solution which left one of the main factors of politics out of account. The man who saw the defects of the Repeal solution and exposed them most trenchantly and convincingly was James Fintan Lalor. In a series of letters and articles written for _The Nation_ and for the _Irish Felon_ he expounded a theory of nationality which went to the very roots of political facts. His policy was not Repeal; "I will never," he said, "contribute one s.h.i.+lling or give my name, heart, or hand, for such an object as the simple repeal by the British Parliament of the Act of Union." The facts of everyday life in Ireland showed that a new social system was required, the old having had its day. "There was no outrise or revolt against it. It was not broken up by violence. It was borne for ages with beggarly patience, until it perished by the irritation of G.o.d in the order of nature." So long as a system remained in which the land of Ireland was not in possession of the people of Ireland, no repeal or other measure purely political would avail. If the landlords were to remain (and Lalor had no desire to expel them if they were willing to submit to the paramount right of the nation) they must accept their t.i.tles to whatever rights should be theirs from the Irish nation and the Irish nation only. "The principle I state, and mean to stand upon, is this" (he wrote) "that the entire owners.h.i.+p of Ireland, moral and material, up to the sun and down to the centre, is vested of right in the people of Ireland; that they, and none but they, are the landowners and lawmakers of this island; that all laws are null and void not, made by them, and all t.i.tles to land invalid not conferred and confirmed by them; and that this full right of owners.h.i.+p may and ought to be a.s.serted and enforced by any and all means which G.o.d has put in the power of man." The coming of the lean years culminating in the Famine had taught Lalor the overwhelming importance of the question: "A revolution is beginning to begin which will leave Ireland _without a people_ unless it be met and conquered by a revolution which will leave it without landlords." Failure to observe (or to see the importance of) the land question had led to the defeat of Mitchel and Smith O'Brien. "They wanted an alliance with the landowners.

They chose to consider them as Irishmen, and imagined they could induce them to hoist the green flag. They wished to preserve an Aristocracy. They desired, not a democratic, but merely a national revolution. Who imputes blame to them for this? Whoever does so will not have me to join him. I have no feeling but one of respect for the motives that caused reluctance and delay. That delay, however, I consider as a matter of deep regret. Had the Confederation, in the May or June of '47, thrown heart and mind and means and might into the movement I pointed out, they would have made it successful, and settled at once and for ever all quarrels and questions between us and England." But though Lalor insisted on the importance of the question of the owners.h.i.+p of the soil and confessed complete indifference to Repeal, an indifference which he claimed was largely shared by the people of Ireland (for Repeal, as he said, the Irish wolf dog "will never bite, but only bark") he was a land reformer, not out of a lack of interest in political questions, but out of an intense belief in the realities of politics. He never joined the Repealers, partly because O'Connell and his following disgusted him; as he says in a letter to Gavan Duffy: "Before I embarked in the boat I looked at the crew and the commander; the same boat which you and others mistook in '43 for a war frigate because she hoisted gaudy colours and that her captain swore terribly. I knew her at once for a leaky collier-smack, with a craven crew to man her, and a sworn dastard and a foresworn traitor at the helm--a fact which you and Young Ireland would seem never to have discovered until he ordered the boat to be stranded and yourselves to be set ash.o.r.e." This language may be unnecessarily vigorous and hurtful but the judgment is not essentially unjust. But it was not merely disgust which kept Lalor out of the Repeal ranks. He disbelieved utterly in the Repeal of the Union as a solution for the Irish question. It was in the first place impracticable. "You will _NEVER_, in form of law, repeal the Act of Union. _Never_, while the sun sits in heaven, and the laws of nature are in action. _Never_, before night goes down on the last day."

What was, however, practicable was to claim the land, refuse to pay rent for it, and inst.i.tute a protracted, obstinate and violent resistance to the attempt on the part of English troops to take it back again. Once the land was again in the possession of the people of Ireland their ultimate policy would be clear. "Not the repeal of the Union, then, but the Conquest--not to disturb or dismantle the Empire, but to abolish it utterly for ever--not to fall back on '82 but act up to '48--not to resume or restore an old const.i.tution, but found a new nation and raise up a free people, and strong as well as free, and secure as well as strong, based on a peasantry rooted like rocks in the soil of the land--this is my object."

"Not the const.i.tution that Wolfe Tone died to abolish, but the const.i.tution that Wolfe Tone died to obtain--independence; full and absolute independence for this island, and for every man within this island." Lalor knew well enough that this meant fighting in the long run, but he thought that it was worth fighting for while Repeal of the Union was not: but who was to lead the fight? Little was to be looked for from the Repeal leaders, content with "a small Dublin reputation," with neither the desire nor the talents to lead a nation. His last article in the _Irish Felon_, written while Smith O'Brien and Meagher were in prison, is an impa.s.sioned appeal for someone to lead a nation that was only waiting for a man. "Remember this--that somewhere and somehow and by somebody, a beginning must be made. Who strikes the first blow for Ireland? Who draws first blood for Ireland? Who wins a wreath that will be green for ever?"

The _perenni fronde corona_ which Lalor promised has not yet been won and may never be won by the means which Lalor thought of, but the influence of his writings upon later Irish political thought has been profound. The Repeal Movement brought out three men of real genius--Davis, Mitchel and Lalor. Davis was always more than a simple Repealer; his mind took in too great a range, his knowledge was too wide, his commonsense too great, to see in Repeal of the Union the ultimate end of Irish political endeavour.

Mitchel abandoned Repeal for Revolution in hot blood and out of a haughty heart. Lalor had the cool head and the keen eye and the sense of reality which Mitchel lacked; but though he wrote less and did less and suffered less, what he lost in immediate reputation he gained in his influence over a later age and in a wider field.

The situation of Ireland in the years immediately following the Famine was tragic. On the one side was starvation, impotence, despair. The starvation might have been, and in any normally governed country would have been, averted: but Ireland was in the unnatural position of being governed by outsiders who had absolutely no interest in the country beyond that of ensuring that it should not govern itself: seeing the remedy for its misery, but unable to employ it, in the face of an army which not all the fiery eloquence of Mitchel and Meagher could persuade the starving people was capable of being defeated by a mob of pikemen, Ireland sank back into an apathetic and moody despair from which it took many years to recover, during which the life of the nation almost drained away. On the other side was the Government, indifferent to the misery of its victim, determined that nothing, not even the extinction of the race, should alter the fixed resolve of England to be absolute and sole master in Ireland. The failure of the Rebellion of '48 was not to the rulers of England a matter altogether of congratulation. A highly-placed personage, able to gauge with accuracy the sentiment of the English ruling cla.s.ses, wrote: "There are ample means of crus.h.i.+ng the rebellion in Ireland and I think it is now very likely to go off without any contest, which people (and I think with right) rather regret. The Irish should receive a good lesson or they will begin again." The awful mortality from famine and pestilence was regarded with a kind of chastened and reverential grat.i.tude, as an unexpected interference of Providence for the extirpation of the hated race. In the then temper of England no revolution had the least chance of sympathy or success. It would have been crushed, whatever the cost.

But though prostrate, despairing and depleted Ireland still claimed her rights, though for a few years it seemed as if they had been tacitly waived. The Repeal agitation died, and its place was taken by the Irish Tenant League which aimed not at interference with const.i.tutional arrangements but at the solution of the land question, not in the radical method advocated by Lalor but by legislation securing certain rights to the tenant, the claim of the landlord to be owner of the land being left untouched. Lalor had foretold that on the land question Ulster instead of being "on the flank" of the rest of Ireland would march with it side by side: and Gavan Duffy in his League of the North and South went some length in the way of securing the co-operation of the Northern Tenant Righters. At the same time the Irish representatives in Parliament formed the beginning of an Independent Parliamentary Party, holding aloof from any binding alliance with either English Party but combining at need with the party most favourable at the moment to Irish claims. But the new policy proved a failure within three years, partly by the treachery of members of the party, but chiefly through the inherent hopelessness of the position of any Irish party then in Parliament. Besides, the Tenant League had to contend with the masterful personality of Cardinal Cullen, an ecclesiastic of the Ultramontane School, who spent his life in the endeavour, temporarily successful, to throw the whole weight of his Church against the just claims of the nation.

During the abortive attempt at a const.i.tutional policy, the survivors of the party of Mitchel and Lalor were not idle. It cannot be said that Ireland had at this time come to recognize the futility of parliamentary agitation, for it cannot be said to have given it a sufficient trial: but the results of it had so far been disappointing, and the tradition of independence was still fresh, and its spirit strong. The new form which was a.s.sumed by the Separatist movement after the failure of '48 was that known as the Fenian Society, or the Irish Republican Brotherhood. Its chief organizers, James Stephens, John O'Mahony, John O'Leary and Thos.

Clarke Luby had all been "out" in '48. Stephens and O'Mahony had lived in Paris till 1850; Stephens then returned to Ireland, gaining his living as a teacher of French, while O'Mahony went to New York. Both in Ireland and New York the teaching of the two friends found ready listeners, and an amazing success. The Irish in America were only too ready to return to Ireland to overthrow the Government in whose authority they saw the source of their country's misfortunes and their own exile. On the conclusion of the American War thousands of Irishmen who had fought under Grant or Jackson were ready to place their services at the disposal of an Irish leader. But they found no one of sufficient ability and prestige to lead them. Smith O'Brien and the other survivors of the Young Ireland Party had become const.i.tutionalists. John Mitchel, though he went to Paris to act as treasurer for the Society, refused to take any more active part. O'Mahony and the Americans wanted to equip and despatch an expedition: James Stephens, who had undertaken to organize the movement in Ireland, insisted that American a.s.sistance should be confined to money. The money came in slowly and though Stephens could enrol a revolutionary army he could not equip it. The Americans too wanted the rising to take place before Stephens thought the time was ripe, and the consequent quarrel between the Irish and American leaders was fatal to the chance of success. In any case little real progress was made until the year 1865, but the work of preparation went steadily on. The organization in Ireland, which at first was without a name, the oath of members.h.i.+p being merely an oath of allegiance to the Irish Republic, was formally inaugurated on St.

Patrick's Day, 1858. In 1859 the Government, becoming alarmed, broke up the Phoenix Society of Skibbereen, an independent organization, and the members later on joined the Fenians. All the forces of the Church and the influence of such recognized leaders as were left were arrayed against the new organization. Fenians were refused the rites of the Church for being members of a secret oath-bound society, and at least one member has left upon record that having to choose between Faith and Country he chose Country. The Fenians boldly defied Cardinal Cullen and his clerical agents. The _Irish People_, founded in 1862 under John O'Leary as editor, took up the Cardinal's challenge and faced consistently and courageously the question of "the priest in politics." It did incalculable service to the Fenians by its courage and frankness. In the same year Belfast and Ulster were brought within the Fenian Circle. By 1865 there were, it was claimed, 13,000 sworn Fenians in the army, rather more in the militia, and a good many of the police had joined as well. Stephens judged it time to prepare for action, but his despatches to the country ordering preparations to begin fell into the hands of the police. The office of the _Irish People_ was seized, Habeas Corpus was suspended and the jails were filled. Stephens himself was arrested some weeks afterwards. After his escape from Richmond Prison he lay hid for three months in Ireland and then escaped to France and America. Whether better fortune would have crowned his work if he had gone on in spite of the arrests is a nice question. Some at any rate of his followers judged that he had missed his chance. The subsequent attempt in '67 under American leaders fared no better; and General Ma.s.sey, arrested at Limerick Junction, judged it better to avoid bloodshed by giving full information to the Government.

The Fenian Movement, as it was called, was both in Ireland and America avowedly republican and separatist from the very first. Stephens wished to establish one form of government only--an Irish Republic, and he believed in only one method--that of armed revolution. He refused steadily to have anything to do with tenant rights or parliamentary parties or tactics.

The avowed object of the Republican Brotherhood had failed, but it brought about two measures of Irish reform, long agitated and overdue, but neglected until the events of '65 and '67 brought home to a disdainful Parliament the realities of the abuses and of the feelings which their continuance had aroused. The Irish Church Act and Mr. Gladstone's first Land Bill were due to the Fenians. They were not formally concessions to Fenianism, as the Fenians were concerned first of all to establish a Republic and then to decide upon reforms for themselves; the Government merely supposed that by mending two intolerable abuses they could cut the ground from under the revolutionary movement. This policy could be only partially successful: but it succeeded so far that for a period of thirty years there was no Irish party that openly and consistently proclaimed its adhesion to the doctrine of complete separation.

The Home Rule policy put forward by Isaac b.u.t.t in 1870 fell far short even of O'Connell's Repeal. Its object was to set up, not an independent, but a strictly subordinate, Parliament in Dublin: the effect of this proposal (whatever its authors may have intended) would have been to consolidate the Union by removing opportunities of friction and of discontent. But even the appearance of a reversal of the policy of the Union was distasteful to Parliament; and the Irish members exhausted themselves in providing an annual exhibition of eloquence and pa.s.sion for the delectation of a languid or tolerant audience. The pathetic and humiliating performance was ended by the appearance of Charles Stewart Parnell who infused into the forms of Parliamentary action the sacred fury of battle. He determined that Ireland, refused the right of managing her own destinies, should at least hamper the English in the government of their own house: he struck at the dignity of Parliament and wounded the susceptibilities of Englishmen by his a.s.sault upon the inst.i.tution of which they are most justly proud. His policy of parliamentary obstruction went hand in hand with an advanced land agitation at home. The remnant of the Fenian Party rallied to his cause and suspended for the time, in his interests and in furtherance of his policy, their revolutionary activities. For Parnell appealed to them by his honest declaration of his intentions: he made it plain both to Ireland and to the Irish in America that his policy was no mere attempt at a readjustment of details in Anglo-Irish relations but the first step on the road to national independence. He was strong enough both to announce his ultimate intentions and to define with precision the limit which must be placed upon the immediate measures to be taken. During the years in which he was at the head of the National Movement practically all sections of Nationalists acknowledged his leaders.h.i.+p and his policy. If he was not able to control all the extreme elements that grouped themselves under his banner it was no more than might have been expected. Neither he nor the Irish Republican Brotherhood was responsible for the murders perpetrated by the Invincibles, who had no connection or sympathy with the Fenian policy; but their excesses were used, and used with effect, to damage not only Parnell's position but the claims of Ireland. It was he himself who gave to his enemies in the end the only fatal weapon which they could use against him: but the prompt use of it by his own party was a portentous event in Irish politics. For the first time the Irish people not alone conformed to the exigencies of an alliance with an English party, but allowed that party to veto their choice of a leader. Parnell himself had once said "As the air of London would eat away the stone walls of the House of Commons, so would the atmosphere of the House eat away the honour and honesty of the Irish members." Certainly the tortuous ways of party politics had destroyed their loyalty, and though a small band proved faithful to him in spite of the Liberal veto, the majority came to a decision, practically dictated by the Irish hierarchy and acquiesced in (even if reluctantly) by a majority of his countrymen, to terminate his position as leader. But, though this betrayal seemed to have destroyed the cause for which he had fought, it may be questioned whether it was really more than a symptom of the inherent weakness of his position. The utmost he could gain in the direction of Home Rule, the utmost anyone could have gained under the limitations which he himself imposed upon his policy, fell markedly short of the minimum which a majority of his followers thought attainable at once and of what he himself announced to be the ultimate object of his policy. He is remembered, not as the leader who helped to force a Liberal Government to produce two Home Rule Bills, but as the leader who said "No man can set bounds to the march of a nation."

The death of Parnell marks the end of an epoch. A strong, romantic and mysterious personality, he won and kept the affections of the Irish people in a way which had been possible to few leaders before him and which none has attained since. The history of Irish politics for years after his death was a story largely of small intrigue, base personalities, divided counsels and despairing expedients; and the policy which eventually emerged, for which Mr. John Redmond was responsible, was widely removed from that of Parnell. The policy to which Mr. Redmond's adhesion was given was that of a Home Rule which might be described as "Home Rule within the Union," a Home Rule which in return for a local legislature and internal control, resigned to the Imperial Parliament all claim to the right to a foreign policy and to all that would raise Ireland above the level of an inferior dependency. It is true that Parnell would have obtained little more than this, if he had lived; but he would have obtained it in a different way and would have accepted the concession with a gesture of independence. Post-Parnellite Home Rule has been based largely upon the ground that a better understanding between the two countries is desirable in the interests of both; that government in Ireland is less efficient, more costly, less appreciated than it would be if it were administered by the people of Ireland themselves, with a due regard to the interests and general policy of the Empire; its justification is found in the success of the self-governing colonies who, thanks to being responsible for their own affairs, are contented, prosperous and loyal partners in an Imperial Commonwealth. All this is true, but it is a truth that would have carried no meaning to the mind of Parnell. To him the British Empire was an abstraction in which Ireland had no spiritual concern; it formed part of the order of the material world in which Ireland found a place; it had, like the climatic conditions of Europe, or the Gulf Stream, a real and preponderating influence on the destinies of Ireland. But the Irish claim was to him the claim of a nation to its inherent rights, not the claim of a portion of an empire to its share in the benefits which the const.i.tution of that empire bestowed upon its more favoured parts. For some years after Parnell's death the leaders of the Irish Parliamentary Party felt obliged to maintain the continuity of tradition by using the language of the claim for independence and to speak of "severing the last link" which bound Ireland to England; but even in America and Ireland such expressions were heard less and less often from official Nationalists. The final att.i.tude of the Irish Parliamentary Party is admirably summed up in the words of Mr. John Redmond: "Our demand for Home Rule does not mean that we want to break with the British Empire. We are entirely loyal to the Empire as such and we desire to strengthen the Imperial bonds through a liberal system of government. We do not demand such complete local autonomy as the British self-governing colonies possess, for we are willing to forego the right to make our own tariffs and are prepared to abide by any fiscal system enacted by the British Parliament.... Once we receive Home Rule we shall demonstrate our imperial loyalty beyond question."

Ten years before these words were used the Sinn Fein movement had begun, as a protest against the conception of national rights which made such language possible, as the latest form which the a.s.sertion of national independence has a.s.sumed.

SINN FEIN.

Of the origin of this name as the t.i.tle of a political party a pleasant tale is told. It is said that some people, convinced that (in the words of Davis) "the freeman's friend is Self-Reliance," and wis.h.i.+ng to make it the basis of a national movement, being anxious for a suitable Irish name for such an idea, applied to a famous Irish scholar to furnish it. He told them a story of a country servant in Munster sent with a horse to the fair. The horse was sold and the servant after some days appeared in his master's kitchen, worn out but happy, and seated himself on the floor. To the enquiries of some neighbours who happened to be there, as to where he had been and what he had done, he would give no answer but "Sinn fein sinn fein." The prodigal servant's witty reply eludes the translator. To his hearers it conveyed that family matters were matters for the family: but it was no mere evasion of a temporary or personal difficulty. It was the expression of a universal truth. Society is divided into groups, large or small, which have their own problems and their own interests. Their problems they can best solve themselves, and of their interests they are themselves the best judges. The solutions and the judgments will not always commend themselves to outsiders; but though outsiders cannot be denied the right to hold and to express their opinions they have no rights of veto or of interference. This right of independence, however, is subject in practice to serious limitations, and the history of human society is largely the history of the reconciliation of the competing interests and claims of social groups, each claiming to be in the last resort rightfully independent. One of such groups is the nation, and it is generally recognized that nations as such have rights a.n.a.logous to those exercised by other social groups. They may be forcibly deprived by another and stronger group of rights the exercise of which seems to the stronger to be inimical to its own interests; or rights may be surrendered in return for what may be judged to be a fair equivalent. But it is not held that rights can be extinguished by force or that, if a suitable opportunity should occur, they may not be regained either by force or by agreement. These things are generally acknowledged in the abstract; but in concrete instances there is seldom an equal unanimity: and a nation whose rights are in abeyance (especially if it be in the interest of a stronger neighbour to prevent their exercise) is in a position which seldom admits of a simple or harmonious solution. Ideally it has a right to complete independence: practically it has to be content with as much independence as it can make good; and the methods which it may employ are various, always open to challenge and compa.s.sed by uncertainty.

A nation may maintain its moral and spiritual, long after it has forfeited its material and political, independence. To such a nation the more valuable part of its independence has been preserved. But it is hardly possible in the long run for a nation which has become materially and politically dependent upon another to retain its moral and spiritual independence unimpaired. The loss of the latter is the final stage in national decline.

To the founders of Sinn Fein, a national condition was presented to which no other remedy than their own seemed to offer the prospect of relief. All previous efforts to recover the political independence lost by the Act of Union had ended in disaster and disappointment. Force had been tried and proved unavailing: the experiences of '48 and '67 had left little doubt upon the minds of reasonable men that the attempt to regain Irish independence by force of arms was (however heroic) an impossible and foolish attempt. "We believe" (wrote the chief exponent of Sinn Fein) "with the editor of the _Irish World_ that the four-and-a-quarter millions of unarmed people in Ireland would be no match in the field for the British Empire. If we did not believe so, as firmly as we believe the eighty Irishmen in the British House of Commons are no match for the six hundred Britishers opposed to them, our proper residence would be a padded cell." But if force of arms had proved useless, so had const.i.tutional agitation. There was no argument of public justice, public expediency or public generosity which had not been urged without effect upon Parliament. Irish members had been arguing against the Union for a hundred years: there was no point of view from which the case could be presented that had been overlooked. When Parliament seemed to listen and to be prepared to act it was found not to have heard the arguments for independence but arguments for a different kind of a Union. The belief that nothing was to be expected from Parliamentary action received later a striking confirmation: for when the Irish demand was whittled down to a bare minimum and all claim to independence expressly renounced, a pretext was found in the exigencies of English political relations.h.i.+ps for refusing even that.

Not only had political independence gone beyond the chance of recovery by either force or argument but material independence had followed it. The trade, commerce and industries of Ireland which had flourished during its brief period of independence had dwindled since the Union and from causes for which the Union was directly responsible. The "equitable proportion"

of Imperial taxation to which the taxes of Ireland had been restricted by the terms of the Act of Union had proved to be inequitable, so that Ireland was overtaxed to the extent of two-and-three-quarter millions of pounds per annum: new taxes in defiance of the Act had been imposed: Ireland, again in defiance of the Act, had been made jointly responsible for a debt which was not her own: Irish banks and Irish railways were managed not with reference to Irish interests but in the interests of English finance and English trade: the Irish mercantile marine was no more: the mineral resources of the country in coal and iron remained undeveloped lest their development might act unfavourably upon vested interests in Great Britain. The population had declined at a rate without parallel in Europe: even Ulster, proclaimed to be prosperous because Protestant and Unionist, had seen the population of its most "loyal"

counties almost halved in the s.p.a.ce of seventy years. Nothing but the removal of the cause could arrest this spreading decay, and the cause was declared to be irremovable: to tamper with it was to lay an impious hand upon the Ark of a grim Covenant.

But the last refuge of independence was still safe--resolve was still strong--no weakness of acquiescence, no dimness of spirit, no decay of the soul was as yet to be discerned. An answer to these questions might be found in the history of the language and of what the possession of a native language implied. Up to the time of the Union the Gaelic language had preserved intact, in spite of Penal Laws and the instruments of repression, all that was most vital in the national spirit. Tales of warriors and heroes, of the long wars of the Gael with the stranger, the sighs of love and the aspirations of devotion, satire and encomium, all the literature and song of a people were enshrined in the native tongue.