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Home Rule

Question, 1910.

towns there are few manufactures in Ireland and little employ- ment in the towns save in transport services, wages being low and unemployment chronic. This want of manufactures and employment has, rightly or wrongly, been attributed in Ireland to the selfish trade policy of England, and it is easy to see how the revolutionary elements fostered by the distress in the cities gained a host of recruits throughout the country. 1

Another and even more fateful influence which began to operate in 1910 the reopening of the Home Rule question was due to the result of the general elections, which by leaving the Unionist and Liberal parties almost equally balanced in the House of Commons made it clear that the Irish Nationalists, under the leadership of Mr. John Redmond, would hold the scales of power at Westminster. Thus Home Rule, kept in the background by the Liberal Government so long as it com- manded an unchallenged parliamentary majority, became once more a main plank in the Liberal platform. The im- mediate effect was to revive the prestige of the Nationalist party, which had suffered some eclipse during the dull years of comparative contentment, and to give fresh impulse to the political agitation in Ireland.

The nature and goal of this agitation were little understood outside Ireland; and, indeed, from the first the issues were obscured by dissensions among the Nationalists themselves. Some years earlier Mr. William Martin Murphy, a leading employer in Dublin, had founded the Irish Independent in oppo- sition to the official Nationalist organ, the Freeman's Journal. It was largely under his influence that, on the eve of the general election, the unity of the Nationalist party was broken by the secession of Mr. William O'Brien, who accused Mr. Redmond and Mr. John Dillon of " blocking land purchase " and of having sold the Irish vote to the Liberal party, an accusation which was to be repeated later, with fatal force, by the Sinn Feiners. 2 In the results of the elections in Ireland the effects of the Liberal-Nationalist alliance were significantly apparent: n " Independent Nationalists " were returned, among them being Mr. Tim Healy (N. Louth), and in the Protestant north, once the stronghold of Radicalism, only one Liberal, Mr. Redmond Barry, held his seat in the predominantly Catholic constituency of North Tyrone. Ulster or, rather, the solid Protestant block of the " six counties " stood revealed as unalterably opposed to Nationalism. And behind the forces thus arrayed for the com- ing struggle there remained, sinister and menacing, the great political organizations which Ireland inherited from her troubled past in Ulster the Orangemen, fiercely Protestant in spirit, who formed the backbone of the Unionist resistance; behind the Nationalists, the United Irish League and the Ancient Order of Hibernians, the latter exclusively Catholic and strong in its

1 Very large numbers of the agricultural labourers were affiliated to the Irish Transport and General Workers' Union, the head- quarters of which in Dublin, Liberty Hall, became the centre of the communist movement in the British Isles, and thus introduced a new factor in Irish political disturbances.

J In the Cork Accent, the first number of which appeared on Jan. I 1910, Mr. O'Brien thus stated his mission: " Ireland is passing through a grave crisis. She is being plundered by the Radical Government (a reference to the Finance Act) and gagged by the ' Molly Maguires ' (the Ancient Order of Hibernians). The present Government has carried out Mr. Dillon's wishes, and killed land purchase in Ireland, thus robbing the country of the fruits of thirty years' agitation. It was only a knave would make, or a fool believe, the assertion that Home Rule was to be passed when the Lords' Veto was abolished. Under the rule of the ' Molly Maguires ' no Protestant could be admitted into the National movement, be a member of a public board or a public contractor, obtain a position in the gift of a public body, or even get the Catholics' custom in his shop ; and that section would either be starved out of existence or out of the country."

On Feb. II 1910 a public meeting was held at Cork, under the presidency of the Lord Mayor, for the purpose of founding a new Independent Nationalist daily newspaper the Cork Free Press. On this occasion Mr. O'Brien stated that at the elections the candidates " opposed to the despotism of the ' Molly Maguires ' haJ received 45,547 votes, while the candidates of the Molly Maguires ' only polled 44,865 votes put together."

Genera/ Election, 1910.

affiliation with the same order in the United States; and, la but not least, the Irish Republican Brotherhood, contemptuous of party alliance and constitutional methods.

Thus, while Home Rule was being debated in England as a mere problem in local self-government, in Ireland the revival of the question emphasized once more the cleavage in the nation, Protestant and Catholic standing ranged % el against each other, as they had stood since the i6th century, marking " the contrast not only of two creeds, but two breeds, of two ways of thinking, of two ways of looking at all the most vital interests of men." 3 English politicians were proposing to legislate, in the spirit of the 2oth century, for a country which industrially was " just early igth century " and " in religious matters had not yet emerged from the i7th "; for in 1910, and later, it was still true that " religion is the touch- stone by which every Irishman is tested," 4 and that creed marked the line of cleavage in everything that made for national senti- ment. This is the fundamental fact which must be grasped, if the root cause of subsequent troubles is to be understood.

There were in 1910, however, other organized forces at work in Ireland, destined to cut across the traditional lines of political and religious cleavage. At this time the labour movement became organized with the foundation Mo"me of the Irish Transport and General Workers' Union, under the leadership of James Larkin, a fiery demagogue, and James Connolly, who had founded the Irish Socialist Republi- can party in 1896, and who returned from America in 1910 inspired with a burning resentment at the conditions of life to which Irish working people were too often subjected. This Labour movement, of which the centre was established at Liberty Hall in Dublin, also threw itself into opposition to the official Nationalists, its spokesmen pointing out that influential Nationalist members of the Dublin corporation were responsible for the condition of the city slums by which they profited, and that from the point of view of labour there was nothing to choose between the dominant political parties. Equally oppos to the official Nationalists was another organization, whic included among its objects the general improvement of socia and industrial conditions in Ireland the association known Sinn Fein (" we ourselves "). Sinn Fein was quies- cent during the elections, but was none the less active behind the scenes. Its more prominent members, wt were recruited mainly from the ranks of the young " intelle tuals," scorned the opportunist policy of the official Nationalists gloried in upholding the tradition of Wolfe Tone and Rober Emmet; and openly aimed at establishing an independent Irish Republic. 6 In 1910 indeed they still advocated none but peace ful methods; but they were already planning the application of the policy advocated by their leader, Mr. Arthur Griffith, 8 namely that of using against " British rule " in Ireland the methods which had been successfully employed by the Magyars against Austrian rule in Hungary; and in their annual congress, held Sept. 29, they proposed making fresh efforts for the with- drawal of the Irish members from Parliament. Their ardent nationalism, based on a somewhat reckless idealization of Ireland's past, 7 present and future, was already a force to be


 * Dr. Mahaffy, Provost of Trinity, in the Convention of 1917.

4 " Dogmatism in Irish Life," by Ernest A. Boyd, Irish Review (1913), p. 241; ib. p. 244.

'The Sinn Fein group had originally favoured Irish independence under the Crown, i.e. the Constitution of 1783. Republicanism wa- first openly professed by their organ Irish Freedom in 1910.

6 In " The Regeneration of Hungary " (1904), which originall: appeared as a series of articles in the United Irishman.

7 Most national movements have sought inspiration in the belie in a golden age of national civilization, real or imaginary, in thi past. It is certainly true of the Irish question that nobody can understand it who does not realize the immense part played in Ireland by historical tradition, true and false. As for the legend of the golden age of Irish civilization destroyed by the English in- vaders, the truth of this may be tested by readers of the E. B. by reading the article IRELAND: Early History (14.756) by the late E. C. Quiggin, an eminent Celtic scholar who wrote in a spirit wholly detached and scientific. This may be compared with the article BREHON LAWS by Mr. Lawrence Ginnell, the Nationalist M.P.