THE FUTILITY OF TALK.

Let us consider the whole policy in a sane, business-like way. John Bull runs his Other Island purely as a lucrative investment; he makes a good profit by the concern. Ireland is simply an Area for supplying beef and mutton, oats and butter, timber and men. We, Irish men and women, exist merely to be exploited. Well, we know it; what have we done? How have we striven to oust this big profiteer who sweats and coerces us? We were once an independent concern, we managed our own affairs. Then John Bull annexed us; by means of bribes and promises and threats he turned out the Irish directors. Arrangements were made by which 100 Irishmen were admitted to the English Employers’ Federation 600 strong. And for 118 years these Irishmen have been talking there, making speeches and petitions and harangues. And we? What have we been doing? Oh, yes, now and then the Irish—that is, John Bull’s workingmen—got restive and made things unpleasant. So they got some concessions: Emancipation, Land Acts, etc. But still they always turned again to talk; with 80 Irishmen talking to 600 Englishmen they were told that they would be quite safe. Weren’t we “represented” at Westminster? Whenever these, our representatives, definitely proposed anything, they were, of course, beaten; but if the majority against them was less than 200, they always raised a deafening cheer. It is so nice to be beaten by only 150, whereas if we were not “represented” we should be beaten by 230—which would be dreadful. Then we were told that what was said in Parliament reached the world—as if Mr. King had not told more truth about us in Parliament than the whole Irish Party, as if Hansard is not censored, as if Dr. McCartan, Mrs. Sheehy-Skeffington and others have not said more in America than twenty Westminsters could convey—not to mention T. P. O’Connor’s performances! To what depths are we reduced, when Westminsterism is excused only as a means of getting into Hansard!

Do we really think that a handful of Irishmen by merely talking can persuade eight times their number of Englishmen to take their grip off this country, to cease exploiting us, to give up their fat profits? Is it not, to say the least, more likely that the English majority, far cleverer and more powerful, will succeed in cajoling, bribing and fooling the few Irish flies who walk into the spiders’ parlour? In fact, was not the Act of Union specially designed for this very purpose? To swallow a powerless Irish minority in an English Parliament, to give them facilities for talking and letting off steam that thereby the Irish people might be beguiled into doing nothing else. By providing a sham outlet for our energies, by diverting our attention into wordy warfare, the English Parliament has succeeded for 118 years in preventing us from seeing the obvious truth that the English Government can only be made unworkable in Ireland.

The very genius of Parnell has done us harm by intensifying the illusion. He succeeded for a while, where Butt failed, because he adopted unparliamentary methods in Parliament. For a time, by persistent obstruction, Parnell made Government unworkable, even in England. He was beaten in the end; obstruction is no longer possible; we have reverted to the mock debates of Isaac Butt. Things are even much worse; for the whole Party system has made Parliament a fraud and a farce. The House of Commons has lost its independence to a caucus which controls the jobs and the party funds. The latest development, whereby Messrs. Lloyd George and Bonar Law have arranged to wipe out the Opposition, makes the further presence of a few Irish Nationalists a jocose anachronism.

The English Coalition would, however, still like the eighty Irishmen to come and hobnob with them. England is far keener on their attendance than Ireland ever was. Those who oppose the Westminster policy are mostly in English prisons; absenteeism is treason felony. English aeroplanes drop leaflets printed (at our expense) by the English Government to denounce the policy of abstention, to show that it is folly. The English foreign propaganda tirelessly advertises the presence of Mr. Dillon and Co. in Westminster as the surest proof of England’s kindness to us, and of Irish loyalty to the Empire. The Irish Party think that their attendance is good for Ireland, the English Government is quite certain that it is good for England, everyone agrees that it cannot be good for both. Which, do you think, knows the situation best: the English Government, whose policy of exploiting us has been hitherto so eminently successful, or the Irish Party which has been so often taken in, outwitted, bribed and duped? It is worth pondering over.

THE ALTERNATIVE.

Undoubtedly in most minds the great objection to the Abstention Policy is that it seems a mere negation; it seems to leave a horrible blank. What! No Irish Representatives at Westminster? Are we to allow Carson to represent us? And so on. Let us look at the thing calmly. Why do we want to be “represented” at all? We must first answer that question. For instance, we have no desire to be “represented” in Timbuctoo or in the Moon; but some Irish people find it consoling to feel that they are represented in England. If not, they feel something dreadful will happen: the income-tax will be trebled, we shall all be coerced and conscripted. Well, as things have hitherto been, the Irish Party have never succeeded in staving off a penny of our taxation. Twenty-four years ago an Anglo-Irish Commission found that England was plundering Ireland of two and three-quarter millions a year in excess of the amount of plunder sanctioned by the Union. From that day to this we have never secured the remission of one penny of this plunder; on the contrary, it has been increased tenfold. And all this time we have been strongly “represented” at Westminster. We have been paying heavily for the privilege! As for coercion—did the Party ever prevent it? For years past they might have got the Crimes Act abolished, they didn’t or couldn’t. Conscription was passed swiftly in spite of our “representatives”—but somehow it did not come off. Now, that is worth thinking on. Conscription, like Coercion Acts and Budgets, danced through our representatives, yet we ourselves beat it. How? By electing our own little parliament in Dublin (we called it the Mansion House Conference, of course, for decency’s sake), by voting taxes to it (we called them the Defence Fund), by organising the country so effectively that the English-made law was seen to be impossible and unworkable. What an object-lesson if only we will learn from it. The anti-conscription campaign is Sinn Fein in a nutshell. Even the Party developed a momentary backbone; the members came back to Erin and actually left us “unrepresented” in London—and we hardly noticed the dreadful fact!

The Abstention Policy means, therefore, that we give up the sham battle and take up the real struggle in grim earnest. We cease to rely on talk as an effective economic or political defence, we begin to DO something, to rely on ourselves. There is only one way of putting an end to English tyranny in Ireland, and that is, not by scolding at it from the other side of the Irish Sea, but by making it unworkable over here.

Do we mean the use of physical force? This is a difficulty which at once arises in discussing the abstention policy. This is chiefly due to the hysterical asseveration of Mr. John Dillon, whose chief electioneering argument—apart from abuse—is that the only alternative to Westminster is Rebellion. It seems rather curious, doesn’t it, that we cannot sit tight here in our own country and win independence as Hungary did under Deak. But perhaps Mr. Dillon means that if we were not distracted and bamboozled by the fighting on the floor of the House, we would not so tamely acquiesce in our oppression; and