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A Forgotten Small Nationality

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The following article by Mr. Francis Sheehy Skeffington is reprinted by permission of the Century Magazine Company. Four months after it appeared, the American newspapers published the startling news that the author was one of many civilians deliberately murdered by English troops and officers, during the uprising in Dublin of Easter week. As he was a pacifist, and had lent his best efforts to the quieting of the populace and the prevention of looting, this "Prussianization of Ireland created consternation" when the appeal of his widow for mercy for other innocent husbands was read in the House of Commons.

A scholar and a litterateur, Mr. Skeffington's writing is the best portrait of the man, and is a fearful comment on the heavy hand of England in Ireland.

England has so successfully hypnotized the world into regarding the neighboring conquered island as an integral part of Great Britain that even Americans gasp at the mention of Irish independence. Home rule they understand, but independence! "How could Ireland maintain an independent existence?" they ask. "How could you defend yourselves against all the great nations?" I do not feel under any obligation to answer this question, because that objection, if recognized as valid, would make an end of the existence of any small nationality whatever. All of them, from their very nature, are subject to the perils and disadvantages of independent sovereignty. I neither deny nor minimize these. But the consensus of civilized opinion is now agreed that they are entirely outweighed by the benefits which complete self-government confers upon the small nation itself, and enables it to confer on humanity. If the reader will not admit this, I will not stay to argue the matter with him. I will merely refer him to the arguments in vogue in favor of the independence of Belgium as against Germany, or of the Scandinavian countries as against Russia.

​Neither will I stop to argue with those who say that Ireland should be content with home rule. Ireland has not got home rule, and, unless England is sufficiently humbled in this war to make Ireland's friendship worth buying, is not likely to get it. But what if it had? Bohemia has home rule within the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Is Bohemia contented? It is notorious that the great mass of the Czechs are eagerly longing for the moment when Russia will inflict such a blow upon the Austro-Hungarian Empire as may enable Bohemia to become an independent central European state. Again, if Bohemia, why not Ireland?

There is an idea in some quarters, sedulously encouraged by England, with an eye on the friendship of the United States, that whatever may have been the case in the past, the English Government in Ireland has improved of late years. Let us therefore examine its conduct in Ireland during the months immediately preceding the war.

A Liberal Government was in office in England, pledged to give home rule to Ireland. On the strength of that pledge, Mr. John Redmond and his party kept that Government in power for over four years, and enabled it to pass not merely the act for curbing the power of the House of Lords, but other measures, such as the National Insurance Act, in which Ireland had no interest or which were actually detrimental to Ireland. In Ulster Sir Edward Carson led, armed, and drilled a body of 80,000 men, pledged to resist by force the enactment of home rule. Their drilling and arming were in themselves unlawful; their avowed object was still more so, involving defiance of the enactments of that imperial Parliament to which they professed the utmost loyalty. Nevertheless, the Liberal Government allowed this open propaganda of rebellion, this aristocratically led and financed movement, to proceed unchecked.

After two years of this, the Nationalists of the South awoke. After all, they said, we outnumber these Carsonites by about four to one. If they choose to introduce the factor of physical force, if they can employ it successfully to intimidate the English Government, so that its leading members say that the coercion of Ulster is "unthinkable," then we, too, will cease to rely upon weapons of persuasion alone. We, too, will arm and drill, and will face the English Government with the only argument it appears to understand. And they formed the Irish Volunteers.

​That was in November, 1913. Within a month the Government, which for two years had allowed the Carsonites to get in all the arms they wished, issued an order prohibiting the importation of any arms or ammunition into Ireland.

When Ireland is taunted, as a New York evening newspaper has taunted it, with its "poltroonery" in not taking advantage of the present war to seize freedom, these facts have to be remembered. Anything in the nature of arming or drilling was sternly repressed in Ireland until Carson began it. The "Volunteers" and the "Territorials" of England had no counterpart in Ireland, where the people were never trusted with arms. Carson and his followers were left untouched, because it was known that, however they might declaim against a particular English Government, in effect they stood for that English domination in Ireland which every Government, whether it calls itself Liberal or Tory, is careful to maintain as the very sheet-anchor of the British Empire. But the arming of Irish Nationalists, who were pledged to maintain the rights and liberties of Ireland only, was a different matter. The gravely perturbed English Government could not suppress the movement altogether—Carson's immunity had made that impossible,—but, with an ingenious show of impartiality as between the two regions, it prohibited all import of arms. Carson's men had been arming for two years; the Nationalists had just begun to organize. The strict impartiality of the order will appeal to those who now protest against any embargo on the export of munitions from the United States.

he died of heart disease​