Sir Roger Casement and Sinn Fein: Some Personal Notes

I MET Roger Casement first in a beautiful old house — the relics of a mediæval convent — beside a chalk stream in Buckinghamshire. I had myself just returned from long journeys in Central Africa, and was trying to expose the abominations of the slave traffic in the Portuguese provinces of Angola and the Cocoa islands of San Thomé and Principe. Casement, who had been British Consul in those regions and on the Congo for seven years, had also only lately come back (1905) and was the first man in England to recognize my report, not merely as unexaggerated, but as understating the horror of the truth. It may be that that prejudiced me in his favor when, after that first meeting, I described him as one of the finest men and noblest characters I had ever known. But it was a common verdict. I have heard many English people say exactly the same. Not only was he strikingly handsome — with tall, upright figure, black hair and beard, clear blue eyes, and fine features, showing, as Mr. Robert Lynd has said, the stamp of nobility in his very face and step — but few could resist his charm of manner, his perfect politeness, and a nature obviously so sympathetic, generous and sincere.

What led such a man into ways that have brought him to trial for his life on the charge of high treason? He was sent as consul to various cities in South America; he was chosen by the Foreign Office to investigate the atrocious trade in rubber and murder on the Putumayo; his report (Miscellaneous, No. 8, 1912) was perhaps the finest Bluebook ever written by a consul. He was knighted as reward, and was glad of a title which gave official recognition to his work. He received a pension abundantly due to him for long and precarious labors in unhealthy parts of the world, which had seriously injured his constitution. Everything that secure position, friendship, and society can offer was open to him. Apart from the envy of colleagues, and the malignant animosity lurking in all official minds towards any one who disturbs routine by exposing abuses, he was universally admired and beloved. It would have been easy for him to settle down at fifty into a pleasing existence of social intercourse, literary production (for he was a poet), and benevolent utility. But there was something in his nature which gave him no rest. Unhappily for his peace, he was capable of indignation, and to every Irishman the cause for indignation stands near.

In a letter to me about something I had written against the Turks while I was with the Bulgarian Army as war correspondent in 1912, he said,—

‘You are probably right about the Turks, but I am right about the English! I wish all “Empires” and all damnable conspiracies against the poorer classes of mankind — generally speaking, “the Irish” — could be brought to book as Turkey has been. But that does not lead me to denounce the Turk himself, and as between the London press and its loathsome backing of the winner, I stood for the Turk. Besides, he was down! I knew he was beaten before it began, and when the whoops and howls of this unseemly throng of scribblers broke loose upon his defeated agonies I joined him — and in that camp, the camp of the fallen, I stick.’

In the camp of the fallen he always was. It was part of his Irish and generous nature to be there, and for that camp no Irishman need look abroad. Always a strong Irish patriot, he became more and more engrossed in the history — the ancient and modern history — of Ireland’s wrongs, especially after he was released from official responsibilities. He studied that appalling history continually, brooding over it until, acting upon an oversensitive and quixotic mind, it began to obsess him, as people say. I call it an appalling history because no chapter in Russian or Prussian or savage history has been more hideous than England’s treatment of Ireland from the first invasion up to about 1880. It is a history no Englishman can read without the deepest shame. It stirs a profound indignation even in so fine an English patriot as Mr. G. K. Chesterton, always ready to think everything for the best so long as there is plenty of beer and Christianity to go round.¹ No one of Irish stock ever forgets it. To an Englishman, for instance, the word Limerick usually suggests lace or facetious rhymes; to an Irishman, Limerick is always ‘ the City of the Violated Treaty,’—a treaty more than two centuries old, — a treaty of which not one Englishman in ten thousand has ever heard. An Act of Oblivion would be the surest settlement of the Irish question, but it cannot be enforced. England cannot subjugate the Recording Angel.

Brooding over immemorial wrongs, Casement not merely ceased to regard himself as a British subject (that, I think, he had never done), but came to regard the British government as his country’s permanent and irreconcilable enemy. For a time he was fairly hopeful about Home Rule. Even at Sir Edward Carson’s signing of the ‘Covenant,’ when I was with him in Belfast, he remained hopeful, for he believed that what he called ‘Carson’s circus’ would dissolve in laughter. But when he saw the Ulster volunteers openly organized, drilled, and armed to oppose the government; when gun-running was successfully practiced by the Ulster ‘loyalist’ rebels and nothing said; when British officers and regiments openly threatened mutiny if ordered to Ulster, his last hopes of securing his country’s freedom ‘by constitutional means ’ appear to have been extinguished. To meet the Ulster rebels he helped to arm and organize the ‘National Volunteers,’ a large section of whom afterwards became the ‘Irish Volunteers.’ With the ‘Citizen Army’ raised by James Connolly early in 1914, in consequence of the Larkin strike of transport workers, I think he had no immediate connection beyond sympathy.

When first he conceived the fatal notion of seeking German aid, I am not sure. He may have followed the example of Wolfe Tone, who called in French assistance when France was our enemy; or perhaps he took the hint from ‘Welcome to the Kaiser’ inscribed on Orangemen’s arches, or from a speech of Captain Craig, the Ulster leader and close friend of Sir Edward Carson, declaring that ‘Germany and the German Emperor would be preferred to the rule of John Redmond, Patrick Ford, and the Molly Maguires.’ When I was in Ulster during the most dangerous period of volunteer drilling and the simmering Ulster rebellion (early in 1914), I noticed the presence of at least three German correspondents. One of them, a pleasant enough man, named Schweriner (I think a Jew, of the Vossische Zeitung), accompanied me from Belfast to Dublin, and was very solicitous in seeking information about the whole country.

At the time I wondered why German papers should be at the expense of sending correspondents for the threat of an Ulster rising. I now understand how the expense was covered, and my wonder has entered upon other conjectures. Whatever happened, it seems probable that a German agent would find in Casement a quixotic victim ready to fall into the Teutonic trap. Incredible as it must appear to an Englishman, Casement may have believed in Germany as a deliverer. In any case, by German aid he might strike a blow at Ireland’s historic and perpetual oppressor — the oppressor whose ancient crimes ‘obsessed’ him. If he could but have passed an Act of Oblivion binding on his own indignant spirit! But cruel rage possessed him, and the error — the fatal error — was committed.

I have dwelt upon Roger Casement because the unhappy development of his career illustrates the whole movement of revolt. Like him, the ‘rebels’ might some years ago have settled down into a pleasing existence of social intercourse, literary production (many of them were poets), and benevolent utility. When first I knew the Sinn Feiners, such seemed their enviable destiny. In spite of subtle divisions and cross-divisions — in spite of mutual and eloquent denunciations arising from imperceptible differences — intellectual society in Dublin was unusually pleasant. A productive school of literature had arisen, hampered, it is true, by the mutual admiration and the personal animosity that prevail in narrow circles; hampered also by attempted ‘revivals,’ always dangerous in any art, and by the patriotic zeal of extremists who denied the honor of ‘Irish poets’ to such distinguished poets as William Yeats and George Russell (‘A.E.’) because they did not write in Irish, being unacquainted with that language. Nevertheless, in prose, and lyrics, and drama, all three, the Irish school has been the most remarkable movement of a generation’s literature in the English tongue; and very likely much of the poetry in Irish is remarkable, too, though one distrusts poetry except in a language imbibed at babyhood and habitually used in thought.

On the side of benevolent utility one found the agricultural and coöperative movement inaugurated by Sir Horace Plunkett, organized by George Russell, that true poet and artist, and developed throughout Ireland with extraordinary success, in spite of official discouragement on the one side, and idealist contempt for practical reforms on the other. Many other useful, and often delightful, schemes were being already developed under the Irish County Councils, or were designed for the moment when the Parliamentarians should have secured Home Rule at last. One must add a revival of Irish industries in homespun cloth and other materials, Irish decoration in brooches, head-ornaments, wedding-rings, and interlaced designs, Irish folk-songs and music to the native pipes and harp, Irish costume, including the kilt, and Irish games such as hurling — a fine admixture of hockey, football, and battle. Though touched by every revival’s danger of affectation and self-consciousness — as when nice people stick up a maypole in Southwark and teach our stagnant slums to sing ‘Blow away the morning dew! ’ — these occupations and interests were attractive and inspired by the most genuine patriotism.

Along these peaceful lines — the lines of the Gaelic League, the ‘Irish Homestead,’ Irish literature and drama, Irish arts, and the Parliamentary development of Home Rule — Irish patriotism might have proceeded without violence but for certain external events and a certain quality deeply rooted in the Irish nature. The external events were such as I noticed in the instance of Sir Roger Casement — such events as the open preparation of Ulster for armed rebellion; the violent suppression of the transport workers’ strike; the firing upon a Dublin crowd by British troops after the Nationalist gun-running at Howth and about ten days-before the beginning of the war; the suspension of the Home Rule Act; the inclusion of Sir Edward Carson and Sir F. E. Smith (leaders of designed lawlessness in Ulster) in the Coalition Government as Law Officers of the Crown, and the appointment of Mr. J. H. Campbell (another prominent leader of the Ulster ‘rebels’) as Attorney-General for Ireland. It must not, however, be supposed that the immunity or reward of the Ulster leaders aroused indignation and nothing more among the Nationalist Irish. They took the Ulster methods rather for their example and encouragement. Many a Nationalist has expressed to me in the same breath a scornful hatred towards Sir Edward Carson, and a patriotic pride in his defiance of the English government. For Carson was, after all, an Irishman, and so were they all — except ‘F.E.,’ who, as ‘galloping Freddy,’ became an object of amusement rather than detestation or pride.

It is difficult for foreigners like us to appreciate the bond which holds the most incensed Irish opposites together.

On Covenant Day (September 28, 1912), for instance, I was watching Sir Edward Carson sign that melodramatic and sinister document in Belfast City Hall, while close beside me stood Mr. Garvin, the brilliant Unionist editor of the Observer and, at that time, of the Pall Mall Gazette — an Irishman whose eyes and mind are always going full gallop — galloping hell-forleather in any direction, with far greater rapidity than ‘Freddy’ ever galloped. All the time during that solemn ceremony, while Carson was bowing over the fateful document as at an altar of religion, Mr. Garvin, in subdued tones, kept assuring me of his profound affection for Charles Stuart Parnell. He loved Carson and he loved Parnell. He had been the first to stand publicly at Parnell’s side after his ‘fall.’ He had served him to the last and he reverenced his memory. It was all perfectly true and sincere, but a little difficult for a foreigner to understand when he was listening to quill pens scratching the signatures of Ulster Covenanters on the parchment, and knew that in England Mr. Garvin supplied the Unionist Party with brains.

When first it was proposed to exclude Ulster from Home Rule, Parnell laid down the precept that ‘Ireland cannot afford to lose a single Irishman.’ The Irish have also a saying that ‘The worst Irishman is better than the best of England.’ We should remember those sayings, however accurately we realize the difference of race and temperament, religion and imagination, between Ulstermen and the ‘mere Irish’ (as our fathers called them), and however regretfully we recognize an Israelitish hatred on Ulster’s side, and the secretive hatred natural to an oppressed and despised people on the other.

But undoubtedly the chief external cause of the growing discontent which culminated in the rising was the suspension of the Home Rule Act. If any outward and visible sign of Home Rule had been given; if any change had been effected in the ‘Castle’ gang; or if the beautiful old Parliament House in Dublin (now the Bank of Ireland) had been prepared for a reëstablished Parliament, all might have been well. But even though Home Rule was ‘ placed on the Statute Book,’ nothing happened. People began to suspect one another in the long series of Ireland’s hopes deferred. Mr. Redmond, with all his political capacity as a leader, seemed incapable of striking the emotional moment. Of all conspicuous Irishmen, he, almost alone, had failed in imaginative appeal. Under his direction, the Home Rule ideal had become a rather dull, commonplace, and jogtrot affair, much entangled in the forms and manœuvres of a distant Parliament among hostile or indifferent strangers. Mr. Redmond had every quality but inspiration and imaginative appeal — every quality except those to which the Irish nature most eagerly responds.

And here we reach that inward and spiritual characteristic which, to the finest Irish natures, is always the prevalent motive, and which gave these external events their main importance. We are confronted by a devoted and impassioned love of country, raised almost to ‘obsession’ through an indelible memory brooding over Ireland’s wrongs. That is what Mr. Birrell meant when he said in evidence before the Commission that Sinn Fein was a perpetual background in Ireland. In the Parliamentary Party’s appeal, issued after the rising, the members pointed with justice to the immense advance in material prosperity and political power already won by constitutional means since the time of Isaac Butt and Parnell’s early days. They had a right to do so. Material prosperity is an excellent thing. No Irishman denies it, and Mr. Bernard Shaw has told us that the Irish are essentially a practical race. But for a large number of them, material prosperity is never enough. More readily even than most people, they will go to their graves for a rag, a word, a symbol, a disembodied shade. Inexorable memory, which no kindly oblivion puts to rest, has created for them that disembodied shade which sometimes appears as the ‘Little Old Woman,’ sometimes as the ‘Rose of all Roses, Rose of all the World.’ Writing of Clarence Mangan’s ‘Dark Rosaleen’ a few years ago, I said, —

‘She is no Imperial State, standing in white-columned security over the seas which her fleets command ’ — (a reference to the Athens of Pericles, beloved with equal passion) — ‘ but a shy and fugitive spirit; her beauty remains unseen by all except her worshipers. To strangers’ eyes she looks a mournful and profitless thing. Full of sad memories, reviled and held up to derision, bound, tortured, and spat upon, dragged out to make sport with her wit, starved and driven through the earth, half strangled and in turn cajoled to supply a pleasing strain of breed in the nurseries of her tormentors, even to her lovers she takes the disguise of the Little Old Woman, the Kathleen na Houlihan who sits uncomforted beside the world’s highway, or crouches muttering over the peat fires of her hearth, while under those torn rags and under the disguise of that wrinkled skin is hidden the form of the Dark Rose whose heart is the consecrated shrine of joy and sorrow, —

Such is the passionate ideal which stands in Mr. Birrell’s words as a perpetual background in Ireland. It is an ideal so beautiful in its sorrow and so deeply associated with memories of ancient struggles and pitiless suppressions, with poverty, evictions and famine, that even freedom and prosperity would not obliterate its sadness or its power. Many, in fact, have looked back with regret to times of greater suffering, and, being habituated to indignation, would feel lost without a present cause for it. This was the passionate ideal that inspired Sinn Fein on its intellectual and poetic side — always an important side among a peculiarly intelligent and imaginative people.

The actual expression, Sinn Fein, ‘Ourselves Alone,’ was, I believe, first suggested by Arthur Griffiths, the dogged, practical and rather reactionary writer who edited the Sinn Fein paper till it was suppressed. But the design of creating a passive independence by the same means as the Indian ‘Swadeshi’ movement — by following the old advice ‘ to burn everything English except the coals and the people,’ and by reviving Ireland’s old reputation in arts, literature, and industries — attracted both poetic and practical natures; for it promised success and was touched by devotion to the imaginative ideal.

When the violent outbreak came, it did not include all members of the Sinn Fein Society, nor did all its leaders belong to the ‘Intelligentsia’—still less did the rank and file. Among the highly educated leaders we may count Mr. P. H. Pearse (executed), the headmaster of a kind of model boys’ school on a large estate a few miles south of Dublin, and a supporter of the Irish Republican Brotherhood rather than of Sinn Fein; Pearse’s brother William, a painter (executed); young Thomas MacDonagh, poet, dramatist, and excellent critic (executed); Joseph Plunkett, a writer (executed), and his two brothers, John and George (imprisoned for ten years); and Professor John MacNeill, a fine Gaelic scholar and nominal Commandant of the Irish Volunteers after the split, when Mr. Redmond insisted on keeping the National Volunteers largely under his own control. At the last moment, John MacNeill (imprisoned for life) seems to have tried to check the rising: he was not actively involved himself, but he had presided at a Convention of the Irish Volunteers at which the following declaration of policy was adopted:—

(1) To maintain the right and duty of the Irish nation to provide for its own defense by means of a permanent armed and trained Volunteer Force.

(2) To unite the people of Ireland on the basis of Irish nationality and of common national interests; to maintain the integrity of the nation and to resist any measures tending to bring about or perpetuate disunion or the partition of the country.

(3) To resist any attempts to force the men of Ireland into military service until a national government was empowered by the Irish people themselves to deal with it.

(4) To secure the abolition of the system of governing Ireland from Dublin Castle and the establishment of a national government in its place.

These leaders were more or less representative of intellectual Sinn Fein, but perhaps for the driving force in the outbreak we should rather look to working-class reformers such as James Connolly (wounded and executed), a very attractive and remarkable man, the brain of the long transport-workers strike, — capable, cheerful, honorable; a natural leader, on whose platform before the war one was always glad to stand. As belonging to the workers, one must also mention John MacDermott (executed), a tram-conductor, propagandist of Sinn Fein politics; and Thomas Clarke (executed), tobacconist and news-agent, a Fenian and dynamiter of ancient days, associated with MacDermott in running Irish Freedom, the first paper suppressed under the Defense of the Realm Act.

Perhaps as a kind of intermediary between the ‘Intellectuals’ and the workers, one may place ‘The Countess’ (sentenced to death but reprieved to lifelong imprisonment). Some years ago, she and her sister, Eva GoreBooth (the well-known writer, pacifist and Suffragist), were the two honored beauties of Sligo. Constance married Count Markievicz, a good-tempered Russian artist, now serving in the Russian Hussars. During the Larkin strike, I found her flinging herself body and soul into the cause of the workers, dealing out rations to their families at Liberty Hall, organizing, exhorting, serving, training her formidable Boy Scouts with a generosity and violent enthusiasm far from pacific. Let English poets maunder about the falsehood of extremes: to her only extremes were worth a hang.

I hardly know where to place John McBride (executed), who as ‘Major’ commanded the ‘Irish Brigade’ against us in the Boer War, and so became the subject of many Irish ballads, such as that containing the verse beginning:

Unlike the usual Sinn Feiner, he was something of the old-fashioned stage Irishman, a swashbuckler, drunken, dissipated, devoid of character. But he died bravely, and when the woman to whom he had once been married (a famous woman of singular beauty and influence) heard the news, she said to her son, ‘Your father treated us badly, but now we must remember him only as one who died for Ireland.’

For us English, that is the worst of it. We execute a worthless rebel, and for Ireland a heroic saint emerges from the felon’s grave.

My dear friend, Frank Sheehy Skeffington, was neither worthless nor an active rebel. So far as violence went, he was no rebel, for he was the most violent pacifist I have known. About three weeks before the rising, he had written to the English papers, warning us of the danger if the Castle’s supposed policy of invitation was carried out. A man of great knowledge and unusual charm, a fearless champion of all noble causes, such as Irish freedom, Woman Suffrage, and International Peace, he went up and down Dublin in the thick of the fighting, posting up a placard, a copy of which I possess. It calls upon the citizens to organize themselves into a police force to stop the looting. He is said also to have dragged a wounded English officer under heavy fire into a place of safety. That is only a report at present, and the inquiry into his death has not begun as I write. But Mr. Asquith and the general commanding have admitted that he was taken into Portobello Barracks and shot without any form of trial; nor was his widow given notice of his death. Of all our recent errors in Ireland, this was one of the worst. As Mr. Healy said in the House of Commons, while grass grows and water runs, it will not be forgotten. Again we have supplied a ghastly food for that insatiable Irish memory. Two others (men of worthless character, I believe, but still human beings) were shot with Skeffington, also without even a court-martial’s form of trial.

It is now evident that the movement was not homogeneous. I doubt if it should even be called Sinn Fein, for many of the best Sinn Feiners were not in it. The rebels were a mixed lot of Adullamites, though all were inspired by love of Ireland, memory of her wrongs, and hatred of British or ‘Shoneen’ dominance. Many of the more ignorant certainly trusted to German assistance, just as in the days of the Shan Van Vocht they used to sing, ‘Oh, the French are on the sea!’

But for the executions, the Irish people as a whole would have taken the rising as a gallant but crazy affair, a possible danger to Home Rule, but nothing more. The executions made all the difference. It is strange: some policemen and many soldiers were killed in the rising; many peaceful citizens were killed by both sides (usually, no doubt, by accident), and a large part of Dublin (though, unfortunately, not the worst part) was destroyed by fire and shell. Yet consideration for all this death and misery was obliterated by the executions. As suppressions of rebellion go, they were not many, — only fifteen, — but, as Mr. Garvin complained, they were carried out bydriblets; they continued long after the violent danger was over, and for every man shot the ancient rage was rekindled in thousands of hearts. All their errors, all their offenses were forgotten, but the memory of those who ‘ died for Ireland’ will be cherished at every fireside. In every cottage, the pictures of ‘The Fifteen’ will be framed upon the walls; and if our Law Courts add Roger Casement as a sixteenth, he will stand in the centre. Instead of being regarded as a well-intentioned but crack-brained set of people, they will be enshrined under that Necromancy or Magic of the Dead which is both the treasure and the plague of their country.

During the cruel suppression which followed the Indian Mutiny, Disraeli wrote, ‘Of all the awful circumstances of this terrible affair, the most awful is the spirit of vengeance which is preached — as if we were to take our enemies for our model. ... I protest against meeting atrocities by atrocities.’

We have taken our German enemies as our model in conscription, in imprisonment without trial or charge, in the censorship, and the suspension of many hard-won liberties. Let us heed Disraeli’s warning and not take them as our model in cruelty as well. I have long urged that captured or surrendered rebels should be treated as belligerent prisoners are treated by the law of nations. Had this been done, the main feeling of Ireland would have supported the government for the first time in history, and it would have condemned the outbreak almost universally as futile and disastrous. Now we have added another page to that Doomsday Book from which no tears can wash out a word.

There is the future; there is the next step. We English must remember that in this war we have publicly declared ourselves to be fighting for the freedom and protection of small nationalities. By the principle of nationality we stand or fall.

In the famous interview published by the Chicago Daily News in the middle of last May, Sir Edward Grey said many of the honest and honorable things that we expect of him, but none wiser than the following: —

‘To all this we say to Germany, “Recognize the principle urged by lovers of freedom everywhere; give to the nationalities of Europe a real freedom, not the so-called freedom doled out to subject peoples by Prussian tyranny. . . . It belongs to the rudiments of political science, it is abundantly taught by history, that you cannot enslave a people and make a good job of it; that you cannot kill a people’s soul by foreign despotism and brutality. We aspire to embark upon no such course of folly and futility towards another nation.” ’

Sir Edward Grey was at the moment speaking about our supposed threats of grinding Germany to the dust, and other follies dear to the truculent minds of Fleet Street. But the wisdom of those words applies equally to Ireland. To Irish nationality we must give a real freedom — not the so-called freedom doled out to subject peoples by Prussian tyranny. History has abundantly taught us that you cannot enslave the Irish people and make a good job of it, nor can you kill the Irish people’s soul by foreign despotism and brutality. The books of that Recording Angel whom we cannot subjugate show a long and dark account against us. Only within the last fifty years have we even attempted to wipe out some items in that appalling debt. If we would see an Act of Oblivion in Ireland (and it is the only healing measure), we must on our side concede an Act of Amnesty. The moment — the emotional moment at which alone in a country like Ireland great spiritual miracles are possible — is passing as I write. By the time this is published, the moment will have gone. Either England’s unimaginative self-satisfaction, combined with the Hebraic pedantry of Ulster Scots, will have resuscitated a proud and rebellious defiance for two more generations of Irish life; or the love of justice and freedom which lies hidden somewhere at the base of the average English heart will have taken a forward step towards the only conceivable peace.

George Meredith once told me that our treatment of Ireland reminded him of a man who rather likes a running sore upon his leg kept open because it gives an interest to life. Let us now obliterate the foul parallel. For many decades to come, our life is likely to supply plenty of enthralling and perilous interests, without our cultivation of a running sore which always threatens to corrupt the heart’s blood of Ireland and of our own people as well.