THE .
Vol. 2.
No. 29
(New Series).
ENGLAND'S PERPETUAL :COALITION! MORE ABOUT BURGLARS, WITH A CAPITAL "B." EASY DOING LITTLE. A year ago, it was easier forming a Volunteer corps than falling off a log. The young men said, "We'll form a Volunteer corps." There ;yer:e army 'reservists in nearly every parish. Most of these reserve men were equal to· the task of lining up a hundred men in two ranks, numbering them odd and even, shifting theni into fours and 'back again, turning them ;µid wheeling them this way and · that way, dividmg them into sections and squads, showing them how to gesticulate .a _rifle tha they hadn't got or even ml de up their minds to get, and putting them through various other exercises.
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FIVE FINGER EXERCISES . I am not scoffing, far from it, at these exerci~es, or at the men who went through them, or at the men who put therri through them. The exercises were good and useful, if sometimes imperfect, and always tiresome when too often repeated'. 'fhe men that were drilled became better men than they had been before, and better men than some· of them, a year earlier, had ever thought of being. The men who drilled them were in some cases wonderfully capable men) and in most cases they were very useful men. The fact that between 260,000 and 300;000 young Irishmen went through these military exercises with some sort of a national purpose in the spring and summer of 1914 is all-to the good. Most of the men who were drilled will at all events find it easier to answer the call again . Most ·of them have had their minds trained for a time, in some way or other, on the aim of national defence. Between the sur'nmer of 1913 and the summer of 1914 the mind of young Ire.l and. accomplished ·a ch;µ1ge like the change of an egg into a bird. It will"'lie a long time before there are as many eggs going stale in Ireland as there were this · time two years.
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THE ORIGIN OF TROUBLE. Tn the S~ring of 1914; the Coalition played · its · bluff- against Irelanq . Don't imagine that the Coalition had no existence or was not in active operation until it was publicly avowed a ' few weeks · ago by the ·reconstruction of the Government. · The pretence of a Liberal and Irish alliance was, on one side, a hyp0critical sham, and served a purpose . . The growth of the Irish Volunteers : alam1ed the · secret · Coalitfon, and :forced it to show itself just a
SATURDAY, JUNE 26, 1915.
Price One Penny.
little. On botk .sides, the Coalition leaders, in the use .they formerly made of them, I must say the Spring of 1914, in their public speeches, their feelings .a re not only different from mine described the Irish Volunteers, in the same but are diametrically opposite. Those who words, as "a serious complication." The have used dang~rous weapons for a · good purdanger of the complicated had to be removed pose are most bound to take care, when the or reduced. In the meantime, what Ireland object is attained, that no bad use is .made of could do was clearly enough demorn;trated. those weapon_s." The bad use to which the After a prolonged resistance, the arrival of this . British Reform Minister objected was the serious complication compelled the Unionist reform of the Irish Parliamel)t. The good leaders to a surrender on the question o'f Home purpose was the attainment of that Parliament's Rule for the' greater part of Ireland. There independence, which the same minister was has not been since 1782 a more remarkable plotting to destroy. Imperialist utterance regarding Ireland than * * * the ·speech in which Mr. Balfour held up the THE LEADER H YPNOTISEp. Grattan was unfortunately better schooled in white flag-though, as in 1782, the Imperialists on both sides were all the time plotting to undo the ideas of British Whig politics than in the ideas of Irish Nationality, and he fell a victim what they pretended to be doing. to this pious preaching. He was at that time * * * a free .man, and a,t the zenitl).- of his power, HISTORY REPEATED. In q8z'~ ·by tJ:~moft <J9lemn ;;treaty ev&r yet he was-ht:1mbugged aii:cl--Ghea-t~-hy the cant made between two nations, ·the British Govern- of Whiggery. This we must .in jus.tice rememment agreed that Ireland should have an ber, when we· think how other men, without independent Parliament and that this settle- Grattan's genius, his freedom, or his power, ment was to be ''-perpetual." The British have been blinded .and overborne by the same Government did not lose a moment in setting cant of Whiggery allied with . the other . forces Grattan at this crisis about to undermine. and destroy this settlement of the Coalition. which it had just declared «perpetual." Hav- deserted the Volunteers. He had courage ing won an independent Parliament, the Irish enough to speak and vote against the Viceroy's Volunteers proceeded to demand that this policy of resistlfhce to reform, but, wrote the Parlian;tent and "the electoral franchise should Viceroy to Fox, "hjs speech evidently showed be i:eforined · and made representative. The that he meant us no harm.'" The plotters .d id British Premier, Fox, was a reformer-in not succeed so far as to make him the active inBritain. He preferred that Ire.land should strument of their plot t~'clestroy the Vohmteers. retain an unreformed and easily corrupted Fox and Northington found other instru~ Parliament, for this purpose was to defeat and ments. The Volunteer Convention .met in the destroy the perpetual settlement, and · reform Rotundo, • and put forward a scheme of in Ireland would have defeated his purpose. Parliamentary · reform which, says · Leckey, He professed the greatest anxiety over - the "was a comprehensive and also a moderate and demand for, reform put forward by the Irish reasonable one.'' The Reform Bill was. then Volunteers. Then, as in 1914, the Volunteers introducedby Flood in the Irish Pa_rliament. were a .serious com2lication. Fox wrote to . The Government used all its resources, to defeat the Lord Lieutenant:-" I want words to express the Bill, which was rejected on the first readto you how critical, in the genuine sense of the ing. "The numbers were 15§ to 49, and it is word, I conceive the present moment to be; said that more than half the majority were if the Volunteers will not dissolve in a reason- placemen" (Leckey). The Volunteer Convenable time, government, and even the name of tion did not dissolve in the meantime, awaiting it, .must be af an end." the decision of the Commons. It was a ]eader. * * * less body. Grattan held aloqf . . Charlemont . suecumbed to ;British Whig _influence. "I THE WHIG PRETENCE. Fox's policy was cloaked in the pretence that never cordially approved of the meeting, " he it was constitutionally wrong and bad to yield afterwards wrote, " yet as I found it impossiple anything to the demand . of citizens assembled to withstand the general . impulse towarqs it; in arms. It was to such a demand that he had I .did not choose to exert . myself against it." just yielded by solemn treaty the independence Let tis think of this attit.ude, ~n i:he light of . · ·of the Irish Parliament, and this perhaps was recent history. the justification, to his own mind> of the * * * treacherous plot into -.ivhich he had now entered. How .T o MANf\GE IREL~~D. •.. ·. . . No British 'minister ever did anything without The Governmen still feared that the Volunsome grand moral justification. " If Grattan teers might succeed .in 9-~feating the plot. '' Our · or any others,". wrote Fox at this .time, ". feel next step,''.. the Viceroy wrote to Fox, "was to ·. any difficulty in treating the Volunteers in this · try, by ~eans of _our friends il.J. the assemb.l y,, tone "~meaning that Gra.t tan should refuse to to perplex its proceedings and to Greate · con~ listen to them a~ a <;:onst~tutiol'lal body- " from fusion . ~n . iµ; . deHberatiQnS. Apother d~siraJble