ON LYING AS A WEAPON IN POLITICAL CONTROVERSY.
[TO TM EDITOR Or TRE "SPECTATOR.")
Sia,—Some time ago an article appeared in the Spectator dealing with a peculiar aspect of the Irish controversy. It was, one felt, regarded as rather "strong meat" by some, for it directed atten- tion in blunt language to the practice, so much in vogue in the
"Other Island," of calling in the aid of the imagination when in lack of facts to support a case or to strengthen an attack on an opponent. But to any one who has had for a lifetime to follow Irish politics close at hand, the wonder is, rather, that the use of so familiar a weapon should be regarded with doubt or incredulity in England.
In ancient days, when there was a "King" in every parish, and when faction-fighting and civil war were his chief sport, each of these magnates maintained a group of retainers whose duty it was to sing the glories of the chief who fed them, and to deride and lampoon his neighbours and rivals. The popularity, promotion, and pay of these bards naturally depended on the fervour of their imagination, and on the unbridled licence of their vocabulary in praise or blame, and indeed much that now passes for " history " in Ireland rests on no better foundation than the postprandial outpourings of these inspired tribal parti- sans. An Irish writer tells somewhere of a King who was too proud to lie, but who congratulated himself on the fact that his chief bard was the most fluent and circumstantial liar in the province.
The bards are gone, but their place has never been long vacant. It is now worthily filled by the orators and penmen of the various political factions, who are never at a loss to celebrate the glorious achievements, past or present, of their side or the infamous " betrayals " of their opponents. To stick to times within living memory, those who have read of the furious controversies that accompanied the quarrel between O'Connell and the Young Ire- lenders, or those between the Buttites and the Parnellites and the Ilealyites and O'Brienites, not to speak of the amenities of the Parnellite " split " itself, will not be at a loss for examples! When Gavan Duffy invited Thomas MacNevin to enter Parliament as a Repealer in 1845, MacNevin replied: "My Parliamentary mania is cured. I will work with you and Davis, but no more with that base mélange of tyranny and mendicancy." And about the same time Thomas Davis himself wrote to his friend Denny Lane : "I lose patience with the lying, ignorant, and lazy elan who surround O'Connell." John Mitchel, later on, spoke very plainly of the habitual untruthfulness of -O'Connell and his friends, and there is a passage in Morley's Life of Cobden in which the Free Trade leader confesses to his wife that although he had worked for years with O'Connell, he could never get over his prejudice against the Liberator arising from the same cause.
When Irish politicians are so fluently unscrupulous in their outpourings concerning each other, whom they know so wer), it is no wonder that their cup quite overflows when they unite to sluice England with misrepresentation and abuse. That is a fountain that never runs dry. That England is deliberately bleeding Ireland to death; that she untiringly schemes to dis- courage anti kill Irish industries and Irish shipping; that she forcibly prevents Irishmen from developing and exploiting the coal mines, gold mines, peat bogs, and other sources of national wealth with which the island abounds—these are some of the least of her crimes. Amongst sensible and educated people such rub- bish may be dismissed with a smile, and it leaves England un- harmed; but amongst an ignorant and easily misled populace it does infinite harm by diverting their energies from honest in- dustry and self-help, and teaching them to rely on tumid rhetoric and insincere verbiage. As one of their leaders recently put it, he would rather see Ireland in rags and " agitated " than happy and prosperous under English rule.
Of late, thanks perhaps to Prussian associations, this mis- representation has taken the form amongst political extremists of attributing to their opponents the crimes which they themselves have committed or propose to commit. When North-East Ulster under the threat of Sinn Fein and the "strong hand "—for Sinn Fein was at work long before Sir Edward Carson and his Cove- nanters were heard of—began deliberately to prepare armed resist- ance to treason and secession, we all remember how loud was the outcry against thew who dared to speak of using force to resist a " Constitutional " movement calculated to thrust them by force out of the shelter of the equal citizenship of the United Kingdom. And to this day there are probably innocent people in England who were deluded into believing that the trouble all arose from the turbulence and illegality of the people of the Northern province.
And, that the indictment should be complete, the impudent falsehood was circulated soon after the war broke out that Sir Edward Carson and his friends had been working in secret collu- sion with Kiihlmann and the German spy-bureau. As time went on the story grew till we had the wholly imaginary picture of Kuhlmann, or some other German agent, as the honoured guest of this or that Ulster leader and figuring in group photographs as one of the " Prussian " deliverers of Protestant Ulster. And the picture was not complete until we had the tale of " German " rifles and bayonets obligingly provided by Berlin for the purpose of armed insurrections against the British Government! That the arms which were provided for the defence of Ulster, and which were open to anybody's inspection, bore the marks of two of our present Allies, and that not one of them was German; that they were bought in the open market and paid for at the market price; that neither Sir Edward nor any other Ulstel leader had even seen Kfihlinanzi or had so much as heard his name —these facts are brushed aside by the numberless scribes and orators who still repeat the original falsehood with ever-growing variations. And no one who knows the fertility and obstinacy of the Celtic imagination need have any hope that the truth will ever overtake the lie.
It is true that some Sinn Feiners, temporarily checked by emphatic and precise contradictions, have been constrained to fall back on the position that, even if Kuhlmann had no dealings with Ulster, still he and his spies were busy in Ireland at that particular time and were sending reports on the situation to their employers in Berlin. That may well be, and we should be the last to deny that Sinn Fein had direct and peculiar means of knowing of the movements of German spies and agents; but it is surely the comble of mendacious audacity to endeavour to be- smirch the loyal defenders of the Empire with charges which, as their detractors well know, ehould properly be directed to a very
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