TOPICS OF THE DAY.
A TRIANGULAR WAR.
Fro the dull, commonplace mind of the Saxon the notion 1 of a triangular battle has always presented con- siderable difficulties. He is inclined to think that there can only be two sides to a fight, and that if there are a greater number of sets of combatants they must, temporarily at any rate, compose their cross-differences. The more nimble-witted Celt, however, finds little embarrassment in the idea of a "triple duel," or, at any rate, of a triangular campaign. Indeed, his history affords him an excellent example. Unless we are greatly mistaken, a triangular campaign was actually conducted in Ireland during the Great Rebellion. There were then three armies in Ireland— one the Nationalist army of Owen O'Neill, the second the English Royalist army of the Ring, and thirdly a Parlia- mentary Cromwellian army. Each of these armies ranged through Ireland, and when one of them came up with either of the other two, they fought impartially. It really looks as if in the Parliamentary arena we were going to see something very like this. Mr. Redmond's speech denouncing the plan of his ally, the Prime Minister, showed far more bitterness and antagonism than have ever been shown before by the Irish leader. He said, in far plainer terms than are usual in the case of Parliamentary friends, that he could be no party to an amending Bill, and that he disliked the whole suggestion and thought it unnecessary. No doubt be did. From his point of view, what Mr. Asquith was proposing to do was to give him his pound of flesh by means of the Home Rule Bill, and then to take a quarter of a pound back, and that the prime cut, by means of an amending Bill. But though Mr. Redmond may openly threaten Mr. Asquith, and has evidently succeeded in frightening a section of the Liberal Party—witness the meeting of Liberal M.P.'s over which Mr. Neil Primrose presided— we are by no means sure that so astute a Parliamentary strategist as the Prime Minister will be frightened. Mr. Redmond may say that he will turn out the Govern. ment the moment he has got his Home Rule Bill, but can he carry out his threat? In the first place, it is evident that Mr. Asquith is going to keep the Bills very close together. The consequences of this are worth noting. To begin with, Mr. Redmond clearly cannot defeat the Government on the amending Bill, pro- vided that the Unionists are satisfied with it. For that measure their support would enormously outweigh the opposition of Mr. Redmond's eighty followers. To this Mr. Redmond may reply : "No doubt I cannot upset the amending Bill, but if the Government pass it I shall take the first opportunity of putting them in a minority in order to revenge myself upon them for their duplicity." That sounds very well ; but suppose Mr. Asquith so arranges his programme that he gets all his controversial measures through before the Home Rule Bill and the amending Bill are finally passed. In that case Mr. Redmond may not find an opportunity to upset the Government from motives of revenge. In other words, the prorogation will follow immediately upon the simultaneous passage of the Home Rule Bill and of the amending Bill. During the recess Mr. Redmond's votes are not wanted. No doubt Mr. Redmond might move a vote of censure upon the Government the day before the prorogation, when Mr. Asquith's tactics had become obvious ; but, however angry he was, he would probably not care to do this. For it is essential for him to have a friendly Govern- ment in power while the Home Rule Bill is coming into operaticei. The only result of his upsetting the Government out of revenge would be that there must be an immediate General Election under conditions which would make a Liberal defeat absolutely certain. If the Irish Party were to turn the Government out by a hostile vote' in Parliament, they would have to follow up that vindictive act by also asking the Irish voters in all the English and Scotch boroughs to vote against the Govern- ment, with the consequent loss of a considerable number of Liberal seats. The result, in any case, of it General Election under the conditions of open war between the Nationalists and the Liberal Home Rulers must be the return of a substantial Unionist majority. But the
first act of such a majority in a new Parliament would be to repeal the Home Rule Bill
The truth is, Mr. Redmond is in a cleft stick, and apparently he is beginning to understand it. The moment the Home Rule Bill is passed his immediate Parliamentary power is gone—plevided, of course, that Mr. Asquith is willing to make reasonable concessions to the Ulstermen. That Mr. Asquith is prepared to make such concessions is, we think, pretty obvious from the form in which he announced his intention to bring in an amending Bill. He did not speak at all as if the amending Bill were to be something small or strictly circumscribed, which the Unionists must take or leave for what it was worth. On the contrary, he hinted very plainly that, even if the Bill were introduced in a narrow shape, it might be expanded so as to secure a genuine peace. No wonder Mr. Redmond was frightened by such expressions. The natural inter- pretation of Mr. Asquith 'ii words is that he will, to begin with, confine his amending Bill to the proposal which he made for Exclusion by counties, but that, if the House of Commons likes, it can be expanded into something a good deal more generous. Under existing conditions such expansion would be natural—nay, inevit- able. It is clearly not worth Mr. Asquith's or any- body's while to pass an amending Bill which would be inadequate. The whole object of such a Bill is to secure peace. This means that the Bill must satisfy the mon of Ulster, and give them assurances which will induce them to lay down their arms. But we know that no such satis- faction can be given to them unless at least six counties are exempted by a " clean cut," or unless a Referendum be taken in the homogeneous area formed by those counties. Further, there must be no limit of time to the Exclusion except the inevitable limit of " until Parliament shall otherwise direct." In fine, the amending Bill cannot, if it is to be worth more than the paper it is written upon, contain less than this irreducible minimum ; and it may very well happen that, when they come to details, the Government may see that, if they are obliged to exclude the six counties, it might be safer to treat the whole of Ulster as one area. In truth, the adoption of the policyof an amending Bill, for which Mr. Asquith has now given a solemn Parliamentary pledge, must surely mean that the Cabinet are prepared to make peace with Ulster. But making peace with Ulster means the abolition of the time-limit and the exclusion of at least the six counties which constitute the homo- geneous Protestant Ulster. Anything less means war, not peace. We shall be told, no doubt, by Liberal critics that all we have been writing is far too optimistic from the Unionist point of view, and that things will turn out very differently. " What Mr. Asquith will do," it will be urged, " will be something of this kind. To begin with, he will produce what the Unionists will call an inadequate amending Bill, and, when he is told that it is inadequate for the purposes of preventing civil war, he will say that he can go no farther and that his last word has been spoken. This will get him out of his difficulty with the Nationalists. The amending Bill will have to be dropped, and Mr. Asquith will re-embrace Mr. Redmond, and so be able to carry on for another year." If it is objected "How about the coercion of Ulster ? " the answer which we understand many Liberals are prepared to give is something of this kind : " It is true that Mr. Asquith cannot coerce Ulster at the present moment, owing to the impossibility of getting the Army to move. As soon, however, as the Ulstermen have proclaimed their Provi- sional Government, they will either let their scheme become ridiculous, or else take some headstrong action. which will put them utterly in the wrong with public opinion here, and lead to breaches of the peace which will make the use of the Army imperative, not nominally to coerce Ulster, but to restore order. Ulster haVing thus given herself away, Mr. Asquith will be able either to appeal at once to the country to give him a mandate for forcing Ulster under the Home Rule Bill, or else to carry on without such an appeal, owing to the disgust shown by moderate men at the lawlessness of the Ulster Provisional Government."
If the Liberals seriously entertain such a theory as this in regard to coming events, we would advise them to dis- abuse their minds of it as soon as possible. We are not in the secrets of the Ulstermen and do not know their
plans. Of one thing, however, we are certain—they will do nothing foolish. That we have ground for the faith that is in us is proved by the fact that during two years of constant provocation they have never once committed a blunder, or in the very least delivered themselves into their enemies' bands by rashness or folly. If we know anything of Sir Edward Carson and his followers, the Pro- visional Government—which, by the way, already exists, and so needs no sensational setting-up—will not take any provocative action. They will not seize Govern- inent property, or attempt to turn the soldiers out of Belfast, or take any other unwise step. What they are much more likely to do, and what the Government will find much more embarrassing, will be to organize—and no one can say that they are inefficient at organization—a grand scheme of passive resistance. A. strong Unionist Govern. ment found great difficulty in dealing with the "Plan of Campaign" on isolated Irish estates. How would the present Government manage if they were faced in Ulster with a universal strike against the payment of the Imperial taxes ?
Let us suppose that the Provisional Government re- quested not only individual taxpayers, but all public companies over which Covenanters had control, in future not to pay Income Tax or Super Tax to the Government, but to pay the same into a special fund, placed very possibly in a French bank, and thus out of reach of the arm of the Imperial Government. [The object of paying into a special fund would, of course, be to afford proof that the Ulstermen did not wish to escape their liabilities as citizens, but that they were determined while their grievances remained unredressed not to contribute to funds which would be used for driving them under the Dublin Parliament.] The Government must then either "take it lying down," or be forced to enter upon a series of civil prosecutions in order to obtain payment of taxes. In many instances they would have to bring their actions before Ulster juries. Every case would, of course, be appealed against till it reached the House of Lords, and every process of execution or distress would be disputed to the legal limit. No doubt the loss and incon- venience to the people of Ulster would be terrible, but it is a loss and inconvenience which we are sure they are quite prepared to stand. Remember, too, that the special fund of which we have spoken would be quite sufficient to prevent the victimization of individuals. They could be amply compensated in the matter of pecuniary loss. The Ulstermen, of course, can see these facts as well as we can, and we may be certain that the Provisional Govern- ment are not going to play into the hands of the Liberals by an overt act, but will show the Imperial Government that, just as they cannot put down the Covenanters by physical force, so they will not be able to wear them down by delay or by provoking them to overt acts of rebellion when they have such a potent weapon at their command as a strike against taxes. Passive resistance by a whole community is probably irresistible in any case. When it is supported by one hundred thousand well-drilled and well-armed men it can only be put down by Turkish methods—by killing everybody who disobeys. But, as we know, the Government are not prepared to kill the Covenanters, or, at any rate, to kill them in sufficiently large numbers. As we have said again and again, you cannot argue with armed men. You must either kill them or give in to them. This Mr. Asquith knows, and this is why ho is bound to pass an amending Bill, and an amend- ing Bill which is adequate for its work.
As things are at the moment, the position of the ont- and-out Home Rulers—the people who want the Bill, the whole Bill, and nothing but the Bill, and would like to give Mr. Redmond his whole pound of flesh, and will only offer Exclusion if it is so inadequate as to be certain of rejection —seems hopeless. On the present lines they are beaten, and the exclusion of at least six counties, without a time-limit, holds the field as the only bulwark against civil war. To put it in another way, this is the only condition under which the Government and Nationalist Ireland can put Home Rule into operation. There is only one chance still left for the extreme Home Rulers, and that is that the Unionists may be unwise enough to overdo their partial victory, for such it really is, and, misjudging the course of events, say that they can now destroy the whole Home Rule project, and, to use a
Hibernianism, can exclude not only Ulster but all Ireland from the operation of the Home Rule Bilk If they reject all compromise—and we are sorry to say that there is a minority, though only a minority, of the Unionist Party advocating such a course at this moment—a fatal blunder will have been committed. The only result of such an overreaching policy will be a strong and sudden revulsion of moderate public opinion against the Unionists. If the Unionists were now to refuse to come to any agreement in the matter of Exclusion, and were to take up the line that they have got the Government at their mercy, the result would be that British public opinion generally would say that as a party they were hopeless, that some settlement of the Irish question must be arrived at, and that, if the Unionists cannot agree to a compromise, then the Government policy, even if it is bad per se, must go forward, be the consequences what they may. Happily, we are not really very much afraid of the Unionist Intransigeants being able to destroy a settle- ment. As soon as the Homo Rule Bill is passed and an amending Bill is introduced, there must be an agreement among all sections of the Unionist Party to exclude the six counties, or maybe the whole of Ulster. Here the Ulstermen, led by Sir Edward Carson, will dominate the situation. We have no fear of their statesmanship breaking down. They, we feel sure, will recognize that in all the circumstances they must take the certainty of the second- best—i.e., of a reasonable system of Exclusion—rather than gamble for what we, of course, admit in the abstract would be much better—i.e., the destruction of the whole scheme. The Ulstermen will not, we believe, run the risk of an appeal being made to the country on the ground that they and the Unionists are utterly impossible, and that, after having talked for two years about the Exclusion of Ulster, now that it is offered them they will not look at it. They will prefer to put themselves right with public opinion either by accepting a bond file proposal for the permanent exclusion of the six counties, or else by taking up the very favourable position which they would hold were they to show themselves willing to accept a reasonable scheme and were the Government to refuse it.
We have never recommended the policy of Exclusion as a wrecking measure. At the same time, we have always kept in mind the fact that in all probability Exclusion, if honestly pressed for on its merits as the only means of avoiding civil war, will in the end lead to the destruction of the Home Rule Bill, and we are still of that opinion. This is a fact which every Unionist has a right to remember, even though, as we have said, his prime object is the avoidance of civil war. He has every right to say " The policy of Exclusion will at the worst avoid the appalling horrors of civil war, and at the best it may prove a means
i
of convincing the country that Home Rule is in truth an impossibility, and that the Union remains the only true way of regulating the political relations between the two islands." In other words, it may prove that Home Rule is an impossibility because the Home Rulers will not have it except under conditions which involve civil war—and, therefore, only at a price which no sane man will pay. Mr. Redmond's speech on Tuesday shows that he is still inspired by the feeling "Home Rule for all Ireland or nothing !" He in effect told the Commons that he has no use for Home Rule unless he can have it under conditions which involve the coercion of Ulster. Therefore, it may well be that he cannot have it at all. In any case, the proper way for Unionists to handle the situation is to make it clear what are the conditions which will alone Prevent civil war. Let them offer to abide by the com- promise of a "clean cut" for the six counties or for Ulster as a whole, without a time-limit, and loyally accept the result—whether it be Home Rule for the South and West, but with the guarantee of a Unionist garrison in the North of Ireland holding hostages for good behaviour, or else the overthrow of the whole Home Rule card castle.
We can never write upon the Home Rule problem without coming back in the end to the central point. What we and every good citizen ought to be striving for at the present moment is to avoid civil war. That is the supreme end, that is the governing factor, that is the prime essential. We must be content with many second-bests and many partial solutions of the problem if we can attain the supreme good of preventing what Mr. Churchill spoke so lightly of as "bloodshed, even on an extensive scale."
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