THREE FEATURES OF THE IRISH PROBLEM.
THE three features of the Irish problem which most require reflection at the present moment are : (1) Reprisals. (2) The insincerity and factitious inconse- quence of the attitude adopted by Mr. Asquith and his friends on the whole question of Home Rule and the Irish Civil War. (3) The Ulster Parliament. We shall deal first with the question of Reprisals. More mischievous nonsense in England and more mendacious calumny in Ireland have been talked and written about the problem than on any other subject within living memory. The whole problem can be stated in a sentence. Reprisals are the duty of the Government, but unfortunately they have failed to perform this duty, and left it to be taken up by the rank and file of the soldiery and the police. The truth of this statement can easily be shown. Reprisals undertaken by police or soldiers on their own initiative, conducted haphazard, and often on insufficient evidence and without proper deliberation, are apt to involve innocent people, to punish the less guilty and to let the more guilty escape. They are also bound to be subversive of discipline and to make men excitable and impatient of what they may think unnecessary delay, though such delay may be essential. Therefore reprisals—hitting back—are the duty of the Government. Unauthorized reprisals, however, are sure to take place if a state of war exists, whether it exists in name or only in fact, if the Government fails in its duty. If the snipers in the trenches had been allowed to kill off our best men and no reprisals had been ordered by the authorities, or any schemes laid for the shooting of the snipers, the soldiers would •have taken matters into their own hands. Even the best-disciplined soldiers and police, if the authori- ties are not:vigilant to protect them in every possible way, will either give up fighting or else they will take the law into their own hands. It is useless to tell men who are .being shot that there can be • no. effective hitting -back because of this or, that legal punctilio, or because the only people who could give sufficient evidence to secure convic- tion of the murderers would be afraid to give it, and could not indeed be expected to give it, because they would thereby be signing their own death-warrant. If there is real ground for such punctilio, though often there is not, except in the timidity of the authorities, then the law must be at once changed, and until it is changed the authorities must take action and trust to an act of indemnity. But remember, such action, pending a change in the law, must be made by. the authorities openly and above-board, and not by permitting policemen or soldiers to make reprisals on their...own initiative. • Once more, reprisals in the sense of hitting back there must be, but they are the duty of the Government and the authorities, legal, administrative and military, and not of the men themselves. In the Defence of the Realm Act there is probably plenty of power to give provisional protection to the authorities, but if further legislation is considered advisable, as it most likely will be, then let such legislation be prompt, clear, and severe. The enacting of fresh legislation has indeed an advantage. It advertises to all the evil-doers the determination of the Government to punish ill-doing in Ireland, and not to let it be protected by punctilios and technicalities of various kinds. What are the exact methods which should be adopted cannot be dealt with by us to-day. They have been sketched by us before, and on some subsequent occasion may be elaborated. It is enough on the present occasion to say that their object should be to distinguish more easily and quickly between friends and foes. The insincerity and inconsequence of the attitude adopted by Mr. Asquith and his friends on the Irish question have been more than usually conspicuous in the Liberal leader's recent speeches. We have no wish to be disrespectful to Mr. Asquith, and we are quite sure of his good intentions, but we say with conviction, the result of long and careful study, that he is always at his worst when he is dealing with Ireland. All the faults of the opportunist statesman with a House of Commons con- science show themselves in. their naked ugliness. Mr. Asquith's last speech on the Irish question is a really terrible warning of what appallingly dangerous results can be produced by those who practise the party politician's favourite occupation of building on a foundation of para- doxes. If the Sinn Feiners and the body which stands behind them—i.e., the Irish Republican Army—were hard-headed, reasonable, steadfast people like the Boer farmers of South Africa, there would not be the slightest difficulty in making the kind of settlement with them which we have made in South Africa—a settlement which was never opposed in the Spectator, nor indeed by the majority of the Unionist Party. But what is the use of talking about an Irish settlement on the South African lines when instead of welcoming it as the Boers welcomed it the Simi Feiners throw proposals for a settlement on the most advanced Dominion lines back in our faces not only with contempt but with the bitterest hatred I To pretend to find an analogy in South Africa and to use it as an instru- ment of party warfare, and to show the wickedness of the Unionist Party, as does Mr. Asquith, may be good party politics, but it is certainly nothing else. It does not take us one step nearer a Dominion solution, or indeed any solution, but only confuses the issue. Take, again, the utter unreality of what Mr. Asquith says about Ulster. If he had said what he now professes to say seven or eight years ago it is quite conceivable that the Irish question would have been settled. But he did not say it or anything like it. Instead he made preparations, or at any rate allowed his colleagues to make preparations, for invading Ulster, blockading and, if necessary, bombarding Belfast and forcing her to go under the Dublin Parliament. We do not bring up this matter lightly or in order to create prejudice, but when Mr. Asquith and his followers talk about the Irish problem as they do it must be remem- bered. Certainly the people of North-East Ulster remem- ber it. In any case, we are not going to quarrel with Mr. Asquith, because even at the last moment he has found salvation as regards North-East Ulster. We will only point out to him that though he is doing right and justice by taking the line he now takes about North-East Ulster, and is at least in one point producing a scheme which is not a paper scheme, but a possible scheme for Irish settlement, he is nevertheless getting not nearer but further away from that conversion of the Sian Feiners into the loyal supporters of the British Empire of which he dreams.
Mr. Asquith may of course know better what the Sinn Feiners want than they know themselves, but we think it unlikely. They tell us that they will not allow North-East Ulster to have that right of self-determination which they claim for themselves. They say this not merely rhetorically, but in terms of murder, arson, and the bitterest hatred. If Mr. Asquith were proposing to give the Sinn Feiners what they want, his proposal would at any rate be rational: He is, however, proposing to give them something which they emphatically declare they do not want. The Unionist scheme is at any rate not open to this objection. Though we support the carrying of the Bill, we know quite well that it is not giving the Sian Feiners what they ask for or what they want. They want the right to pillage and oppress North-East Ulster as well as to govern them- selves in the South and West ; and this they can never be allowed to do. Though we cannot give them what they want, we are going to make them, by our Bill, face realities and oblige them to accept the responsibility which they have claimed, as we have said, in terms of outrage. They have made for the British people the government of the South and West the most disagreeable of tasks ; and it has become clear that it is the wish of the British people, whether rightly or wrongly we will not now dispute, to make the people of the South and West responsible for the government of that part of Ireland. At the same time the loyalists of North-East Ulster are to receive the rights and duties which we mean to impose on the South and West. Here let us say that if we were the Government we should be inclined to go further than their Bill goes. We would let the Ireland in which the majority of the people hate us go its own way entirely, provided full com- pensation is made to the loyalists of the South and West should they desire to leave their homes and businesses. Further, that part of Ireland which desires to go out of the Empire should shoulder its fair share of the financial burdens of the United Kingdom. Finally, proper guar- antee must be given that Irish ports and Irish waters can never be used for the destruction of the Empire. To an Irish Militia we have no objection. The Volunteers of North-East Ulster will be an adequate counter-balance. It must also be provided that the anti-British Ireland shall not be able to make treaties with Foreign Powers without our consent.
Personally, we do not like such a solution. We under- stand its dangers, but we feel that when we give Dominion Home Rule to an enemy people we are really giving this, and we would as soon see it swallowed at one bite as at two. But though this is our view, we are not going to make a quarrel over it with the Unionist Party. It is obvious that neither the Unionists nor the moderate Liberals, like Lord Grey, would support anything so drastic— anything which could be called and would in fact be drumming the cruel and murderous people of the South and West out of the Empire. We do not therefore mean to press our proposal. What we must have at this crisis is unity and co-operation in the settlement of the Irish question, not fresh schemes. In brief, we must and shall support the Government's Bill unless there is a general consent, which we do not expect, to adopt our drumming-out scheme.
What we have just said may almost be repeated in regard to our third point—the Ulster Parliament. As our readers know, we have urged for the last few years in these columns that the safest and best plan for the United Kingdom and for Ulster would be to turn the six-county area of Ulster into one or possibly two counties of England, and to leave the matter at that. The drift, however, of Unionist opinion, both in the Government and appar- ently in North-East Ulster, has gone against us. In other words, it is too late to do the best, and we must do the next best. Though we think this unfortunate, it is perhaps not unnatural. What the North-East Ulstermen in effect say is : " If we could absolutely and entirely trust the Parlia- ment of the United Kingdom, we should like best of all to remain in the bosom of England—part and parcel of her soil as of her blood. Bitter experience, however, shows us that we cannot trust our lives and liberty so com- pletely to the politicians of the United Kingdom, to opportunists who might later throw us to the wolves and drive us out of the Kingdom of England in which we had been incorporated." We do not for a moment believe in such fears, but we can quite well understand their existence. And the Ulster people add : " If we are given a Parliament of our own we can hold our liberty against all corners. No one in these days would dare to destroy a Parliament and a self-determined community after they had once been created." It is, we confess, a bitter humiliation to us to think that a body of people like the inhabitants of North-East Ulster should have come to such a decision, and should have such views and fears of the Parliament at Westminster. It is, however, no good to refuse to face the facts ; and once more, we cannot pretend that we are surprised at the bitter fruits that have grown from the indulgence in party strife, party sophistry, party paradox. Mr. Winston Churchill and plenty of Coalition Liberals when they talk of North-East Ulster now talk of justice and loyalty to our friends, but we cannot forget, nor can North-East Ulster forget, what was once their attitude.
Before we leave these three features of the Irish problem, and the disagreeable things which we have been forced to say in regard to them, we cannot forgo a mention of the speech made by Sir Edward Carson and reported in the Press on Friday week—i.e., October 15th. That speech has not had anything like the notice it deserves. It was a brave, sound and statesmanlike speech ; and though it did not contain the glittering flowers of political hypocrisy, it was throughout clear and honest. Sir Edward Carson spoke like a prophet, not a parasite, and told us not smooth things, but true things:— " These too shall last while what delights the ring Flaunts and goes down an =regarded thing."
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