To the one set, to those sham “Liberals” and “Unionists” of the wretched money game at Westminster, it was a lucrative jest. They cared not for Ireland at all, and not too much for England. They treated the martyrdom of Ireland as a counter in their play. To do them justice, they thought that England could never suffer. To the others, to those of Ireland, the struggle was (as they thought) a battle always lost.
In the beginning of their effort, the men who had organised a political caucus for Ireland and had attempted, by what they called the “Nationalist” Party, to get some settlement by way of the Parliamentary morass, were sincere; yes, at first, flamingly sincere. Parnell I never met; but Davitt I knew—and a man more heroically sincere I have never had the fortune to meet and respect. To the very end the effort of the Irishmen at Westminster retained some dwindling element of truth. And this I say though I know that many Irishmen today may laugh at me for saying it. But it is true. Down to the very end, sunk as they had grown in the sodden Westminster habit, and conventional as had become the repetition of their demand, some conception of a goal to be reached at last still inhabited these men. I knew them and I can testify to it. Right up to 1914—it sounds laughable, but it is true—the group at Westminster which called itself “The Irish Party” did, in some fading way, still hold the idea of a “Parliamentary settlement.” It was true of John Redmond and his brother. I may fairly say that his brother died for that idea.
They really did think (to me it was astonishing; to the younger Irish, to many of them at least, incredible) that a solution was to be reached through the working of those then undermined, moth-eaten, now crumbled falsehoods of the professional politicians: that the farce of voting is “the voice of the people”; that the House of Commons is “a mirror of England”; that “the nation rules through its representatives”—and all the rest of the absurdities bred by the grafting of French democratic attempts on to the decline of English aristocracy.
It sounds not possible that any Irishman, even after a lifetime at Westminster, could be so deceived. But, I say it again, I knew these men. I can testify to the truth of what I have said. They did right up to 1914 still faintly hope. I knew them as friends and as opponents. They were my opponents when I took my share in defending the Catholic schools in 1906, and they were angry at my going to see the Pope in that year, to lay before him what I thought to be sufficient amendments to Mr. Birrell’s Bill (for they regarded the Catholic schools in England as their private domain). What is enormous, these men, Redmond and his party, thought that their Westminster method could still achieve something after the manifest betrayal of Ireland by the politicians labelled “Liberal” upon the outbreak of the Great War.
It is a process I have watched over and over again in the course of my short but too long life; men not seeing what (one would imagine) should be apparent to a child.
These men did not see that you cannot get strength out of rottenness; nor justice, nor truth, nor generosity out of moribund institutions (such as is now the House of Commons), which, after a certain stage in decline, no longer live save for personal intrigue.
I say nothing, therefore, against them, in spite of their failure, and I revere their memory. The Irish in good time will give to the last protagonists in that futile attempt a due position in their annals; and specially to William Redmond and his brother, John Redmond.
For writing this I may be assailed from either side; but it is true.
Anyhow, I saw the tragedy going on before my eyes, as a man on a shore height may see a boat making straight for rocks under water, apparent to him, but of which her steersman knows nothing. I saw it in the years when I watched it as a young man from the gallery of the House of Commons; I saw it during the two Parliaments in which I sat; I saw it when I had left the place in disgust. I saw it in the last four years before the Great War; England, still drifting hopelessly on to the Irish reef: till she struck.
I saw, year after year, from my boyhood to my middle manhood and later, the Parliamentary poison eating up the Irish effort and the English face turned away from Ireland, failing to understand its own doom. For England, a seat of vision, might have understood the opportunity and the peril had the Irish themselves used pen and word directly. But the wrong instrument was used: the broken and now useless instrument of the Commons.
I saw the politicians whom the Irish sent over, or rather, who had the machinery of the Irish protest in their hands, grow fonder and fonder of the Westminster drug and degradation. I saw them half in doubt, at last, whether it were not better to remain in London half enjoying what had become second nature to them, the wretched pomposities of the House of Commons. They should rather have nourished the flame of their country. Yet they were honest men, and at heart and at root were Irish to the end. But they thought that England was to be made to understand by the use of a machine, the Parliamentary machine, which was already worn out. It was their fundamental
