Part 15

In his next tract "The Spiritual Nation" Pearse analyzed the national teaching of Thomas Davis, who was to him the embodiment of the idea of the spiritual side of nationality. Davis was a Separatist (Pearse puts this, by quotation from his writings, beyond reasonable doubt) but he laid stress more upon the spiritual than upon the material side of Irish independence. He saw in nationality "the sum of the facts, spiritual and intellectual, which mark off one nation from another," the language, the folklore, the literature, the music, the art, the social customs. "The insistence on the spiritual fact of nationality is Davis's distinctive contribution to political thought in Ireland, but it is not the whole of Davis." To secure spiritual independence, material freedom is necessary, and such freedom can only be found in political independence. One rhetorical paragraph of Davis's makes his attitude clear. "Now, Englishmen, listen to us. Though you were to-morrow to give us the best tenures on earth--though you were to equalise Presbyterian, Catholic and Episcopalian--though you were to give us the amplest representation in your Senate--though you were to restore our absentees, disencumber us of your debt, and redress every one of our fiscal wrongs--and though, in addition to all this, you plundered the treasuries of the world to lay gold at our feet and exhausted the resources of your genius to do us worship and honour--still we tell you--we tell you in the name of liberty and country--we tell you in the name of enthusiastic hearts, thoughtful souls and fearless spirits--we tell you by the past, the present and the future, we would spurn your gifts if the condition were that Ireland should remain a province. We tell you and all whom it may concern, come what may--bribery or deceit, justice, policy or war--we tell you, in the name of Ireland, that Ireland shall be a nation."

In the last pamphlet, "The Sovereign People," Pearse essayed the hardest task of all. It was introduced by the short preface, dated 31st March, 1916, "This pamphlet concludes the examination of the Irish definition of freedom which I promised in 'Ghosts.' For my part I have no more to say." It is told that he entreated the printer to have it published at once: he wished his last words, the final manifesto of his party, to be in the hands of the public before he went into the Rising. The tract is an attempt to establish, on the basis of the writings of James Fintan Lalor, the thesis that the independence claimed for Ireland is of a republican and democratic type. He expressed his views clearly and unequivocally upon such questions as the rights of private property, the individual ownership of the material resources of the community, and universal suffrage. Pearse's views as expressed in this pamphlet are seen to be practically identical with those of James Connolly, and there is little doubt that it was upon the basis of some such understanding that Pearse's followers and those of Connolly joined forces at the last. "The nation's sovereignty," the exposition runs, "extends not only to all the men and women of the nation, but to all the material possessions of the nation, the nation's soil and all its resources, all wealth and all wealth-producing processes within the nation. In other words, no private right to property is good as against the public right of the nation. But the nation is under a moral obligation so to exercise its public right as to secure strictly equal rights and liberties to every man and woman within the nation.... No class in the nation has rights inferior to those of any other class. No class in the nation is entitled to privileges superior to those of any other class.... To insist upon the sovereign control of the nation over all the property within the nation is not to disallow the right to private property. It is for the nation to determine to what extent private property may be held by its members and in what items of the nation's material resources private property may be allowed. A nation may, for instance, determine, as the free Irish nation determined and enforced for many centuries, that private ownership shall not exist in land, that the whole of a nation's soil is the public property of the nation.... There is nothing divine or sacrosanct in any of these arrangements; they are matters of purely human concern, matters for discussion and adjustment between the members of a nation, matters to be decided on finally by the nation as a whole; and matters in which the nation as a whole can revise or reverse its decision whenever it seems good in the common interests to do so.... In order that the people may be able to choose as a legislation and as a government men and women really and fully representative of themselves, they will keep the choice actually or virtually in the hands of the whole people ... they will, if wise, adopt the widest possible franchise--give a vote to every adult man and woman of sound mind. To restrict the franchise in any respect is to prepare the way for some future usurpation of the rights of the sovereign people. The people, that is the whole people, must remain sovereign not only in theory but in fact.... It is in fact true that the repositories of the Irish tradition, as well the spiritual tradition of nationality as the kindred tradition of stubborn physical resistance to England, have been the great, faithful, splendid, common people, that dumb multitudinous throng which sorrowed during the penal night, which bled in '98, which starved in the Famine; and which is here still--what is left of it--unbought and unterrified. Let no man be mistaken as to who will be lord in Ireland, when Ireland is free. The people will be lord and master." These theses are enforced by quotations from Lalor, the most outspoken Democrat and Radical in the tradition of Irish nationalism. The pamphlet concludes with a defence of John Mitchel (who adopted Lalor's teaching) against the charge of hating the English people. "Mitchel, the least apologetic of men, was at pains to explain that his hate was not of English men and women, but of the English thing which called itself a government in Ireland, of the English Empire, of English commercialism supported by English militarism, a thing wholly evil, perhaps the most evil thing that there has ever been in the world."

On Palm Sunday, 1916, the Union of Irish Labour and Irish Nationality was proclaimed in a striking fashion. In the evening of that day Connolly hoisted over Liberty Hall, the headquarters of the Citizen Army, the Irish tricolour of orange, white and green, the flag designed by the Young Irelanders in 1848 to symbolise the union of the Orange and Green by the white bond of a common brotherhood. On Easter Monday the Irish Republic was proclaimed in arms in Dublin.

AFTER THE RISING.

There are many interesting topics of enquiry in connection with the Easter Rising: but they relate to points of detail or affect the responsibility of individuals; they do not concern the history of Sinn Fein. The Rising was the work not of Sinn Fein, but of the leaders of the Republican Party in the Irish Volunteers and of the Citizen Army. Of the signatories to the proclamation of the Republic only one had any sort of connection with Sinn Fein and he had been a reforming, rather than an orthodox, Sinn Feiner. But the general public, some from mere instinct, others from a desire to discredit a movement which they disliked and feared, persisted in calling the Rising by the name of the "Sinn Fein Rebellion," and substituted "Sinn Fein" for "Irish" in speaking of the Volunteers. In truth it would have been impossible for Sinn Fein, even if it had wished to do so, to repudiate all responsibility for the Rising. It had from the beginning proclaimed the independence of Ireland, not (it is true) in the form of an Irish Republic, but in the form of a National Constitution free from any subordination to the Parliament of England: it had renounced the idea of an appeal to arms in view of the certain failure of an armed rising: but it had not repudiated revolution upon principle and it had admitted that in certain contingencies Ireland might with propriety appeal to arms to secure its independence. The only criticism it could make upon the Rising would have been that it was a well-intentioned error of judgment, the error of men who had mistaken their means and their opportunity for accomplishing an object good in itself. It is highly improbable that any such criticism would under the circumstances have been made in public by the leaders of Sinn Fein: in any case they were not afforded the opportunity to make it, for they were arrested and deported as part of the measures of repression taken after the Rising had collapsed.

At the time of the Rising Ireland was still far from being either Sinn Fein or Republican. The prestige of parliamentarianism had been shaken and its strength impaired: expectations had been disappointed, but the reasons for the failure were still the subject of keen discussion, and the Sinn Fein explanation was by no means universally accepted. Convinced Republicans were a minority, insignificant except for their ability and fervour. The mass of Nationalists felt disturbed and uneasy. It was plain that their cause was losing ground, and that mere pre-occupation with the war was not the sole reason for the growing indifference of England to the government of Ireland. Nationalist Ireland was represented (by people who affected to speak more in sorrow than in anger) as having disowned the patriotic lead of Mr. Redmond and as failing in its duty, and this view was clearly becoming the prevalent view in England. The policy pursued by the War Office towards Nationalist recruits (a policy described by a member of the War Cabinet as "malignant") was slowly killing recruiting, and the decline of recruiting was claimed to be a justification of the policy that produced it, and that by people perfectly well aware of the facts. The favour shown to the Ulster Volunteers had not induced them to go in a body to the war: but while they were reported to have done magnificently, the National Volunteers were held to have done little and to have done it with a bad grace. The advent of the Coalition Government, which included some of the bitterest enemies of Irish Nationalism, did not mend matters. Mr. Redmond, it is true, was offered a seat in the Coalition Cabinet and declined the offer. It seemed to many Irishmen at the time that Mr. Redmond might very well have accepted it: that having stretched a point in promising Irish assistance in the war out of gratitude for a coming recognition of Irish claims, it was a mere standing upon ceremony to refuse to stretch another point and enter an English Ministry. But Mr. Redmond decided in view of the state of feeling in Ireland that he had gone as far as was prudent. His generous enthusiasm had received a shock, first in the hints of Irish disapproval at his failure to take full advantage of his opportunity, secondly when he came into contact with the cold hostility of the War Office. His slowly waning influence in Ireland might have vanished if he had advanced farther on the path of unconditional co-operation. It had been for years a maxim--the maxim--of the Nationalist Party to accept no office under the Union Constitution, and no office under the Crown until the claims of Ireland had been conceded. These claims had not been conceded, and the prospect that they would ever be conceded was growing fainter. Had he represented Ireland under an Irish Constitution, even a Provisional Constitution, the case would have been different: Nationalist Ireland would have followed him, as England then followed Mr. Asquith: but to enter the Cabinet under the circumstances as the representative of Ireland seemed to be merely to forfeit by his entry the only ground upon which he had a claim to enter it. His decision left the way open to the almost unfettered activities of the opponents of his policy both in England and in Ireland. The strength of England in time of war, the readiness of her public men to subordinate, within limits, the strife of parties to the interests of the Commonwealth, meant the weakness of Ireland in the end. It was loudly proclaimed in England that the happy co-operation of days of stress must not be allowed to be broken up when peace dawned: that the strife of parties must be mitigated when war was over: but Ireland knew that she had been in later years their chief battleground, and that any mitigation of their quarrel, while it might be to the advantage of English public life, could only be brought about at the expense of her national hopes. And in Ireland the Executive, pursuing a fixed anti-national policy, tempered only by the prudence, the theoretical liberalism, or the bland indifference of successive Chief Secretaries, could henceforth count on the steady backing of friends in power over the water.

The Rising came like a flash of lightning in an evening twilight, illuminating and terrifying. It was not entirely unexpected: those whose duty and those whose pleasure it is to suspect everything had been uneasy for some time. The few people who were in touch with the inner circles of the Irish Volunteers had long known that something was in progress. But the authorities had nothing definite to go upon, and the majority of Irishmen knew nothing definite about it. When news came that Dublin had been seized, that an Irish Republic had been proclaimed, and that troops were hurrying across from England, the prevailing feeling was one of stupefaction. Even the Unionist newspapers, never at a loss before in pointing the Irish moral, were stunned for the moment. When the facts began to be realized, Unionist and Nationalist joined in a common condemnation of the Rising, which, unable to accomplish its professed aim, could have no real effect beyond that of hampering the Allied cause. Later on Nationalists began to fear and Unionists to hope that it meant the death of Home Rule, or at least its postponement to an indefinite future.

When the Rising was crushed and the leaders and their followers had surrendered it is questionable whether the fortunes of Republicanism in Ireland had ever been at so low an ebb. All their plans had miscarried; their very counsels had been contradictory and confused. German assistance had disappointed them; the country had not supported them; and the army had made an end of their resistance and had brought their strongholds about their heads: their leaders were in custody, not even as prisoners of war: all of their followers who had shown that they could be counted on were either dead or in gaol. There was no district in Ireland that had not sent men to the war: many of them had died at the hands of the Germans to whom the Republican leaders had looked for aid, many of them were risking their lives every hour; it was not from the friends and neighbours of these men that sympathy for the Rising could have been expected. Sinn Fein was involved in the general feeling; if it had not fomented the Rising, what had it done to discourage it? Was it not the stimulus which had spurred more daring spirits into action?

A bruised reed never seemed less difficult to break or less worth the breaking. It was decided to break it _ad majorem cautelam_.

Four days after the surrender Pearse and two others after a secret trial were shot in the morning: the next day and the next others were shot. There was a pause of three days, and the shooting was resumed till thirteen had paid the penalty. After the thirteenth execution, a proclamation was issued that the General Officer Commanding in Chief had "found it imperative" to inflict these punishments, which it was hoped would act as a deterrent and show that such proceedings as those of the Rising could not be tolerated. Two more executions followed, that of James Connolly and another. At the same time arrests took place all over the country. Three thousand prisoners who had taken no part in the Rising were collected, many of them as innocent of any complicity in the affair as the Prime Minister. To have been at any time a member of the Irish Volunteers was sufficient cause for arrest and deportation. They were taken through the streets in lorries and in furniture vans at the dead of night and shipped for unknown destinations.

In a normally governed country, a strong Government enjoying the support of the community has a comparatively easy task in dealing with an unsuccessful rebellion, if a rebellion should occur. It can shoot the leaders, if it thinks them worth shooting, or do practically what it pleases with them, and gain nothing but credit for its firmness or clemency (as the case may be). But in a country not normally governed (and no one either inside or outside Ireland considered the Irish government to be normal) the matter is more intricate. If the Government is united, has clean hands and unlimited force, and is prepared to employ force indefinitely, it may do as it pleases: but few Governments are in this position and those which are not have to pick their steps. In the case of the Easter Rising the Government began by going forward with great confidence beyond the point whence retreat was possible and then determined very carefully to pick its steps back again. At first it acted "with vigour and firmness": it handed the situation over to the care of a competent and tried officer, who proceeded to treat it as a mere matter of departmental routine. He was alert, prompt and businesslike. He did not hesitate to take what seemed "necessary steps" or to speak out where speaking plainly seemed called for. He let it be known that he had come to act and he did what he had come for.

During the week of the executions an almost unbroken silence reigned in Ireland. The first hint that anything was wrong came on the cables from America. The men who were shot in Dublin had been accorded a public funeral in New York. Empty hearses followed by a throng of mourners had passed through streets crowded with sympathisers standing with bared heads. Anxious messages from British agents warned the Government that a demonstration like this could not be disregarded. The executions were over, but the Prime Minister decided to go to Ireland to enquire into the situation on the spot. When he landed the tide of Irish feeling had already turned.

The catastrophic change of feeling in Ireland is not difficult to explain. The Rising had occurred suddenly and had ended in a sudden and hopeless failure. The leaders and their followers had surrendered, and the authorities held them at their absolute disposal. The utter hopelessness of any attempt to establish a Republic, or effect any other change in the government of Ireland by armed force, especially at such a time, had been clearly demonstrated. England held Ireland in the hollow of its hand. After four days' cool deliberation it was decided to shoot the leaders. They were not brought to open trial on the charge of high treason or on any other charge: the authorities who carried out the sentence were those who passed judgment upon their guilt and the only people who ever heard or saw the evidence upon which the judgment was based. They were shot in batches: for days the lesson was hammered home in stroke after stroke that these men were entitled neither to open trial and proof of their guilt before execution, nor to the treatment of captured enemies. The conclusion drawn by Nationalist Ireland was that if they had been Englishmen they would have been tried by English courts and sentenced by the judgment of their countrymen: that if they had been Germans or Turks they would have been treated as prisoners of war: but that being Irishmen they were in a class apart, members of a subject race, the mere property of a courtmartial. The applause of Parliament when the Prime Minister announced the executions was taken to represent the official sanction of the English people and their agreement with this attitude towards Ireland. It was resented in Ireland with a fierce and sudden passion: a tongue of flame seemed to devour the work of long years in a single night. After the execution of Pearse it would have been vain to argue against him that he had appealed to Germany for aid and invited to Ireland hands red with the blood of Irish soldiers: the reply would have been that he might have done so or he might not; that it had never been proved what he did; that he had acted for the best; that

What matters it, if he was Ireland's friend? There are but two great parties in the end.

The Prime Minister, less than a month after the Rising, spent a week in Ireland prosecuting enquiries: they resulted in two conclusions, one that "the existing machinery of Irish government" had broken down, the other that a unique opportunity had offered itself for a settlement. Negotiations for the desired settlement were, on the Prime Minister's invitation, begun by Mr. Lloyd George. He contented himself with taking up the first settlement that came to hand, the old proposal for partition; but during the negotiations he left the idea in the mind of the Nationalist leader that the partition proposed was only temporary and in the mind of the Unionist leader that it was to be permanent. Each asserted that Mr. Lloyd George had been explicit in his statement, and the unexplained discrepancy wrecked the negotiations. Even had they succeeded between the parties principally concerned, they would never have led to anything; for the Unionist members of the Coalition when there seemed to be a risk of agreement, declared that they would have no settlement at all. The Prime Minister and his deputy yielded and reconstituted "the existing machinery of Irish government" by reappointing the former Viceroy and replacing the Liberal Chief Secretary by a Unionist. Apparently their chief object was not so much to make the Government in Ireland acceptable to Irishmen as to make it less objectionable to Unionists. The result in Ireland was what might have been foreseen. Any idea there may have been that the English Government was really desirous of establishing peace and justice in Ireland vanished like smoke. Mr. Redmond warned the Government of the consequences of their "inaction" (if any policy which was steadily producing the most profound revulsion in Irish feeling could be described by that word) but the Government was obdurate. It refused to release the interned suspects, it refused to treat them as political prisoners, it refused to mitigate the application of martial law: and gave as its reason the fact that the state of the country still "gave cause for anxiety." The only party that had no cause for "anxiety" as to its future was Sinn Fein.