August 8 1924
British ministers and politicians who were knaves in their designs with the Irish people and the affairs of this country were also fools: their traditional and distinctive dishonesty reacted on themselves and on their own nation – especially in modern times.
How often have Britons of all political parties given expression within the past half-dozen years to feelings of regret that Gladstone’s policy had not been adopted and made operative in 1886 or 1893!
Do not sane and experienced men in British public life know in their hearts, though they dare not to say what is present to their minds, that if the Conservative Party had refrained from supporting Sir Edward Carson in 1912-14, and if the Asquithian government had not weakly, or criminally, surrendered to threats of violence, the Great War could have been averted, the peace of the world maintained, and all the horrors and miseries that have befallen the nations of Europe within the past decade avoided?
Weakness or treachery – often a combination of both qualities – have been the dominant characteristics of British “statesmanship” in Ireland. Parties domiciled in London have shamelessly utilised for their own domestic ends the feuds caused and fostered by English policy amongst sections of our people so that all might be more easily deluded and despoiled.
Lord Randolph Churchill was helping Parnell from 1880 until 1885. When he saw that the balance of advantage for his party lay on the anti-Irish side, he said to a prominent Nationalist: “I have done my best for you; now I shall do my best against you”. And he “turned over” at once.
That man’s performance was a fair example of the unscrupulous hypocrisy of his class – the class that really ruled Great Britain down to yesterday.
Historical facts are immutable; yet arguments from general hypotheses to particular instances is wholly unwise. All English governments have not been composed of knaves and weaklings; a few have acted fairly – according to their dim lights.
It is neither just nor prudent to assume that a government in London are planning the repudiation of their honourable obligations or shirking their responsibilities to the people of Ireland on one hand, or that they are timorously amenable to frenzied threats on the other.
