BE MY BROTHER OR I'LL KILL YOU.
TIlE easy descent of the extreme revolutionary from .1 pious and fraternal maxims to the necessity, and even the justice as he sees it, of bloody massacre is so familiar in history that it no longer has the power to surprise us. The Jacobin, true to type under all his aliases, never suspects at first what will be the culmination of his own logic. He wants men to be saved, and having a frenzied confidence in his own way of salvation he can see no other. If men have not. enough sense to recognize what is good for them, it is surely the essence of humanity to protect them from themselves! So he argues and so lie acts. If lie believes that eternal damnation is reserved for all who disagree with his religious dogma, it is a small matter, indeed it is an ultimate kindness on his part, that their worthless bodies should be sacrificed in order that their precious souls may be saved. The same rule compels the apostles of the political millennium as inspired the authors of the Inquisition. The little humane compulsion which is resorted to in the beginning causes suspicion and resentment among those who hold that Liberty, after all, need not have violence conunitted in her name. The position of the revolutionary leaders soon becomes unsafe. Fear for the safety of their persons succeeds fear for the safety of their principles. They begin to put out of the way those whom they deem their enemies. Pious and fraternal maxims are reapplied in a wholly new sense. Never were they so welcome and never did they seem so cogent as when they are brought to the service of men who want to reconcile their consciences with infamy ! Thus we find Marat saying in his famous Address to all Citizens : "Five or six hundred executions would have assured you repose, liberty, and happiness ; a false humanity has restrained your hands and stopped your blows. This will cause the loss of millions of your brothers," and so on.
All this is too familiar to need emphasis. It is useless to hope that such a way of thinking will be stopped by calling attention to it. But it is perhaps a less unprofitable task to call attention to methods of thought which have a strong family resemblance to what we have been describing
when those are employed by public men who may be supposed not to be in the grasp of the ruthless senti- mentalism of revolutionary fervour. In last week's Nation, "A Wayfarer," the writer of "A London Diary," delivered an attack upon the Nonconformists in this country which seems to us to call for a very strong protest. When a writer who always exhibits such an admirable style, and who never wearies in his enthusiasm for his personal ideals, shows such amazing intolerance as he directed last week towards the political conduct of Noncon- formists, we cannot help hoping that for the moment he has, as the Greeks used to say, escaped his own notice." In any case it is a great pity, and something of a danger to public life, that anyone calling himself a Liberal should revel in such illiberal exclusiveness. Dr. Roberts, who wrote a letter lately to the Manchester Guardian complaining that that paper had maximized the murders by Government agents in Ireland and minimized those of the Sinn Feiners, was the object of particular attack. Dr. Roberts said in his letter that he would denounce the reprisals in Ireland if the assassinations were condemned in the same breath. How could a man who holds the view that murder is murder by whomsoever committed say anything else, unless indeed he said that those who began the murders were by far the more guilty of the two sets of criminals? We assume for the moment that some of the deeds committed by the authors of reprisals may be classed as murder. No doubt Dr. Roberts believes that, and the fact that he believes it is all that is necessary for our argument. Dr. Roberts evidently feels with the majority of us that most Liberal newspapers, in spite of the fact that they can always produce little verbal proofs to the contrary, have conveyed to their readers the unfortunate impression that the men who have suffered from months of terrorism in Ireland, from the danger of sudden death at the hands of gun-men lurking in ambush or disguised as friends, and who have at last " seen red" and taken their protection into their own hands are the real assassins in Ireland. If Dr. Roberts and most Nonconformists feel that, small blame to them. They are showing a detestation and horror at murder, and showinc, it in its proper degree and in a common-sense way. That ° is precisely where our Liberal idealists have failed.
But when Dr. Roberts says that he will denounce reprisals if assassins are condemned in the same breath, "A Wayfarer" comments :—
" That is a very nice and highly Christian offer on the part of Dr. Roberts. He is not responsible for what these extremists have done to blacken the name of Ireland. But he is very much responsible for what Mr. Lloyd George has done to blacken the name of England. If he and British and Welsh Nonconformity had arisen as one man and said that for a Government to condone and promote murder (no matter what crimes had been com- mitted against it) was to efface the civilized order (in which I suppose he believes) and to nullify Christianity (of which he is a professor and teacher) the policy could have been stopped dead. Mr. George would not have dared to go on with it."
"A Wayfarer" then goes on to say that "not the feeblest of the Seven Churches more completely betrayed her trust" than it has been betrayed by Nonconformity. He accuses Nonconformists of having callously allowed the war to go on when Lord Lansdowne intervened to try to arrest the wreck of a continent." "Their silence gave two more years of drum-beating, to useless, senseless slaughter." But why should it be assumed that it was hardness of heart or weakness in the Nonconformists not to rally to an action which as they believed, sodas we believe, would have left the issues of the war unsettled and con- demned Europe to the miseries and sufferings of an un- arrested German attempt at domination ? Why should Liberalism—to identify Nonconformity with Liberalism— have been so hard-hearted as to consent to preserve in Europe a dangerous remnant of a system which was frankly and wholly non-Liberal ?
Returning from the war to Ireland, "A Wayfarer" says : "Again Nonconformity utterly failed . . . In the more instinctive graces of Christian feeling it was always lacki g. It wanted, also, that firm traditional morality of the Anglican Church." After a tribute to the fathers of Nonconformity, "A Wayfarer" says of their descendants of to-day that they have "sunk to mere followers of the State, flatterers of its follies, apologists of its crimes." We hold no brief for Nonconformity politically, whose way
has often diverged from ours in education and in many other matters, but we cannot remain silent when we see it exposed to such outrageous calumny. The writer in the Nation turns upon Nonconformists simply because they do not share his particular view about murder. He takes
the spiritual position of Sulla of the Proscriptions, of the Jacobin, of the Inquisitor, of the Bolshevik commissary. This is the real revolutionary spirit, and goodness knows where it might lead in the hearts of men who are less humane or more given to panic than we are sure "A Wayfarer" is. Any timid Nonconformist who was frightened by suck invective might yield to it. But if he did, he would en- courage the motives which lie at the foundations of revolu- tion. The leaders of the French Terror, thinking that they must be the servants of the people, became the servants of anyone who shouted out loudly enough that he had the trust and confidence of the people and enjoyed a mandate from them. This is what "A Wayfarer" is doing now. He tells his readers that he is right, and that everybody who differs from him is a hound, a blasphemer, anti-Christ. "Be my brother or I'll kill you " is borrowed from Jacobinism and adopted with enthusiasm by the idealistic Liberal. "This," as Burke said, "is the sap of Truth." Let us apply to the whole subject of murder and Ireland what Burke said of the Terrorists in France : " There is indeed a vacancy in the fraternal corps ; a brother and a partner is wanted. If we please we may fill up the place of the butchered Abel ; and, whilst we wait the destiny of the departed brother, we may enjoy the advantages of the partnership, by entering without delay into a shop of ready- made bankruptcy and famine."
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