L. G. Redmond-Howard

“ We declare the right of the people of Ireland to the ownership of Ireland, and to the unfettered control of Irish destinies, to be sovereign and indefeasible. The long usurpation of that right by a foreign people and Government has not extinguished the right, nor can it ever be extinguished except by the destruction of the Irish people. In every generation the Irish people have asserted their right to national freedom and sovereignty ”

“ He will aspire after a free and self-reliant Ireland, and the first thing he will do in order to realize his aspirations will be to make himself self-reliant and free—free from everything that is shameful and ignoble, as he wishes to see his country free from the shame of foreign conquest and the ignominy of English rule. He will attempt to become himself among his neighbours what he wishes to see Ireland among the nations—conspicuous for honour and courage, and courtesy and virtue. ”

“ But deep in the heart of Ireland has sunk the sense of the degradation wrought upon its people—our lost brothers and sisters—so deep and humiliating that no agency less potent than the red tide of war on Irish soil will ever be able to enable the Irish race to recover its self-respect, or establish its national dignity in the face of a world horrified and scandalized by what must seem to them our national apostasy. ”

“ We ought equally to remember that we do not require an Act of the British Parliament in order ourselves to become pure or temperate, or diligent or unselfish. Our liberty—our real liberty—the liberty both of ourselves and our country—is in our own hands. England cannot crush or kill it, or even seriously injure it. England can only remain in Ireland, indeed, as long as our character is weaker than her guns. ”

“ Unless Ireland can be shown to be held by her own free consent, in perfect contentment, the whole of our contention falls to the ground—for our policy in Ireland is only in microcosm our policy of Empire; and Germany will be able to point the finger of scorn and ridicule at us, and prove thereby to France and Russia that, tyrants at home, we only used them to fight a battle we dared not fight alone. ”

“ It is that "the only part of the Irish Nation which a good many of us have any chance of setting free immediately is ourselves." In other words, no Parliament can make a nation free—not even a native Parliament; or, as Arthur Griffith puts it, "Every Irish man or woman's self is the Irish Nation."
With this no one of course would quarrel, but it does not follow, as the Gaelic element in Sinn Fein seemed to think, that "every Irishman who does not speak Irish is against his will a representative of English Domination in Ireland and striking a blow at his country's heart." ”

“ Whatever is to be said in favour of the use of physical force against England, there is nothing to be said in favour of Irishmen making use of it against each other. It would be as wrong, for instance, for Sinn Feiners to wreck a meeting of Parliamentarians as it would be for Parliamentarians forcibly to break up a meeting of Sinn Feiners. You might compel timid people to join you in this way, and you would win the support of that great body of people that likes always to be on the stronger side. But it is not in the hands of the timid and the selfish that the destinies of Ireland are. ”

“ Every dreamer should also be a man of action, every soldier a volunteer to his own idealism; and at once I understood that strange combination between the "intellectuals" and the "workers" which formed such a unique feature of the rebellion, and which the prosperous citizens of Dublin—penned up in their houses for the first time hungry, and for the first time aware of the reality of life's struggle—could only blindly mass together under the name of "criminal lunatics," like the anarchists of Sidney Street in London some years before. ”

“ The climax of a century of arguments, futile only because of the proverbial dullness of the race to which they were addressed, the rising has lifted the Home Rule controversy at one stroke from the region of the village pump into the very midst of the counsels of Europe, for it was a challenge—of madmen, if you like—to the greatest Empire in the world, at the very moment of its gravest crisis, upon the most fundamental portion of its policy of interference with the affairs of the Continent, namely, England's claim to be the champion of small nationalities. ”

“ If Orangemen could drill, why not Nationalists; if the planter could fight, why not the native; if the hands of Government could be forced by threats and arms brought in under their very eyes, why not take advantage of it; if war was inevitable sooner or later, why not prepare?—any way, it would be as noble to die for a race's emancipation as the privileges of an hereditary officialdom.
Plan for plan, and man for man, then followed the constitution of the Irish Volunteers—Carsonism turned on Carson—and Germany "used" rather than "served" in the interests of Ireland. ”

“ Standing on that fundamental right and again asserting it in arms in the face of the world, we hereby proclaim the Irish Republic as a sovereign independent State, and we pledge our lives and the lives of our comrades in arms to the cause of its freedom, of its welfare, and of its exaltation among the nations. ”

“ One of the most gratifying things about the terrible catastrophe through which we have been passing during the last few weeks is the spirit of hope which has taken the place of the spirit of despair which immediately followed the outbreak.
Ireland has ever been more of a problem suited to statesmen than to soldiers; indeed, the soldier has more often than not come in to spoil the work of the statesman, and Mr. Asquith's hurried visit to Dublin, Cork, and Belfast after John Dillon's speech was chiefly undertaken in order to prevent any repetition of the old mistake. ”

“ If Ireland cannot be the strongest nation, she can be the freest; if she cannot be the greatest, she can be the purest; if she cannot be the richest, she can be the happiest and the kindliest: and as Greece conquered ancient Rome, so may Ireland some day conquer England, if those ideals which were bred and nurtured within her bosom can be made to dominate the inferior Saxon till they spread throughout the world ”

“ The destruction of capital is enormous, not in one country, but in all of them. If the war ceased to-morrow it would have impoverished all Europe beyond recovery for generations, but that poverty, by itself, will probably be the least of its evils. It will mean the paralysis of industry, the restriction of commerce, unemployment on a scale that has never been known before, and it is an anxious question how a hitherto powerful, well-paid, well-organized population of workers will submit to the altered state of things. ”

“ The Gael is not like other men; the spade and the loom and the sword are not for him. But a destiny more glorious than that of Rome, more glorious than that of Britain, awaits him: to become the saviour of idealism in modern intellectual and social life, the regenerator and rejuvenator of the literature of the world, the instructor of the nations, the preacher of the gospel of nature-worship, hero-worship, God-worship—such is the destiny of the Gael. ”

“ The situation had reached a crisis, and it was then, and not till then, that the true feeling of the country came out in John Dillon's outburst that be Sir John Maxwell's character what it might—and he confessed to never having heard of him in his life—"he would refuse, and Ireland would refuse, to accept the character of any man as the sole guarantee of a nation's liberty," and the idea of military discretion fell dead at the phrase, shot through the heart. ”

“ This new critical tone and temper, noticeable everywhere, penetrating everything, and influencing many minds in all ranks, whilst having its disintegrating effects upon old-fashioned political beliefs and worn-out controversial phrases, was the deadly foe of that wild sentimental passion which has once more led so many brave young fellows to a certain doom, in the belief that in Ireland any revolution is better than none. ”

“ He did not, as far as I can gather, want England's downfall in itself, only Ireland's freedom: and on that freedom he wished to establish the future peace of the world, bringing Saxon and Teuton together as they are to-day together in the United States through the medium of the Celt; for the Irishman can speak with far more truth of his "German cousins" than the Englishman, at least in America; and America was to count in Sir Roger Casement's dream of world-politics. ”

“ In it he warned them—the aristocracy of industry—because like all aristocracies they tended to grow blind in long authority, and to be unaware that they and their class and their every action were being considered and judged day by day by those who had the power to shake or overturn the whole social order, and whose restlessness in poverty was making our industrial civilization stir like a quaking bog. ”

“ Until our arms have brought the opportune moment for the establishment of a permanent national Government representative of the whole people of Ireland and elected by the suffrages of all her men and women, the Provisional Government hereby constituted will administer the civil and military affairs of the Republic in trust for the people.
We place the cause of the Irish Republic under the protection of the Most High God, whose blessing we invoke upon our arms, and we pray that none who serves that cause will dishonour it by cowardice, inhumanity, or rapine. ”

“ Everybody now expected the collapse of the rebels, who were being captured on all sides, and crowds of British pressmen, with special facilities for the edification of neutral countries, began to arrive.
Certainly never had journalists ever had such a finale to send flashing along the wires; for a cordon of soldiers completely encircled the city on every side, and grew gradually tighter and tighter around the Post Office, the heart of the rebel position. From all sides shells now began to drop into Sackville Street, and we knew that it was the beginning of the end. ”

“ We felt like cynical critics sent to review a drama foredoomed to fiasco, yet with the difference that the actors were all real and that the tragedy would be enacted in the blood of hundreds of innocent lives.
We were watching the climax of years of planning and the culminating point of so many lifetimes of idealism, effort, and sacrifice, however mistaken.
We knew they would fail: we knew the penalty of the failure—the traitor's death or the convict's cell; but we were held to the spot, to see just how "dramatic" the fiasco would be. ”

“ Not only had the seven signatories of the famous proclamation been executed, but every day brought another victim to the wall and told of another long list of sentences to penal servitude and other penalties, while deportations—the old Cromwellian touch, when the West Indies were peopled with Irish political offenders—reached the colossal figure of over two thousand.
Militarism is of course always a last painful resort, but there were some who seemed to look upon it as an end in itself. ”

“ As the collapse became more general, however, it became more and more evident to intelligent statesmen that it was more a hatred of Castle rule than a love of German rule that had been at the bottom of it all, and that it had been, in spite of the bluster of foreign alliance, more an armed protest against a domestic state of affairs than a real attempt to sever the Imperial link; nevertheless, the latter idea still survived in the minds of the military authorities, who could see in it nothing else, with the disastrous results that only became evident in the aftermath. ”

“ That thin, short line of no more than a hundred [Pg 39] men at most, some in the green uniform of the Volunteers, some in the plainer equipment of Larkin's Citizen Army, some looking like ordinary civilians, some again mere lads of fifteen, not a few wounded and bandaged, the whole melancholy procession threading its way through long lines of khaki soldiers—but downhearted? No; and as they passed, I heard just for a couple of seconds the subdued strains of that scaffold-song of many an Irishman before them—'God save Ireland'—waft up to me. ”

“ It is significant that there is no religious or political bigotry: the movement is right outside both Carsonism and Redmondism, as indeed their new flag, with its significant colours—green, white, and orange—symbolizes; and he repeats the hope of the United Irishmen at the end of the eighteenth century, "that our animosities were buried with the bones of our ancestors and that we could unite as citizens and claim the rights of man"—the first of which is to be able to live freely, that is, with the means of life no longer the property of a class. ”

“ Could one be surprised, I ask, if some of these would-be emigrants answered the taunt gun in hand?—especially when men like Captain White, who was afterwards to try to rouse the South Wales miners to endeavour to save Connolly, was telling them plainly:—
"You are fast being led into industrial slavery. You know it, and I am apprehensive and angry, but too bewildered to move. To rob you of your right over your own poor bodies is the workers' tyrant. To rob you of your sovereign power over your own will is the workers' devil. ”

“ Not that there had not been the most cold-blooded murders, I repeat, upon the part of some of the rank and file within the first few hours, when every representative of the law was suddenly attacked unawares, as if there had been a formal declaration of war; but from the first moment that they had felt their position nothing can be attributed to the rebel leaders which was not in the most complete accord with military precedent.
Indeed, not a few of the soldiers were struck by the self-control of the Volunteers, and the sense of discipline that pervaded their ranks ”

“ It is a mistake which all the younger men deplore, and which could easily have been avoided by bringing in the men of Ulster into the national deliberations, as they have every right, in the name of their Southern followers, and then giving them the option to veto the application of any measure to their own districts—which would have been the best guarantee of justice which the Nationalists could have given and the most they had a right to expect of England, whose political position of dependence upon the Irish vote is a scandal of empire. ”