British Political Life under the Menace of Nickel and Lead.

Dominion, Volume 15, Issue 284, 26 August 1922, Page 11

British Political Life under the Menace of Nickel and Lead.

The danger of the slackening of the public conscience with regard to political crime is here discussed by “ The Saturday Review.

“Qver two centuries ago this country realised the danger of a standing army in irresponsible hands in time of peace. The annual Army Act is an enduring memorial to the practical effect of that realisation. Mr. Griffith and Mr. Collins, if they wish to rid themselves of the menace of the revolver, should study the circumstances by which it comes about that the enlistment and existence of the whole British army requires the special assent of Parliament every year. —"The Saturday Review.

The Aftermath.

( (HE murders of Sir Henry Wilson in London and of Herr Rathg enau in Berlin have brought the whole of European society, M with a shock, face to face with a menace which may threaten fl the stability of our civilisation,” saj-s the “Saturday Review.” “No thoughtful observer of the means by which the necessity of ruthless slaughter was incflScated in youthful minds at our great training camps during the wgr, could fail to bo aware that we, and other countries driven to employ similar teaching, would have to pay for it somehow when peace came. “Few of us imagined that it would mean an attempt to substitute for the age-long and mitigated way of political controversy in Europe the methods of Mexico, or that our civic morals would within a year or two be within danger of being degraded to the level of a western mining camp. Yet that is what has happened. And the poison has got into places not directly affected by the war. Tactics of Assassination. “In Ireland, with its freedom from conscription, its low percentage of recruiting and the invincible dislike of the majority of its inhabitants to fighting of an organised kind, every young man carries a revolver, as before the war he would have carried a pocket-knife or a watch. Moreover, having regard to the results already achieved, it is not unfair to the Irish Republican Army, which has taken into its soiled hands the traditions of the Wild Geese of Limerick and the Irish Brigade, to say that its tactics are not those of warfare, or even of guerilla warfare, but of assassination. Little groups of men dragging out their enemies from farmhouses and manorhouses and cottages at night to their death; others shooting indiscriminately in the streets of crowded cities or picking off flheir victims at the doorways of their houses —that is the kind of intelligence with which we have become sickeningly familiar in the columns of newspapers for months past. o

“Mr. Churchill stated the other day that two divisions of the I.R.A. had been sent to Belfast. These men have not been used, nor have they outwardly shown that they are organised, for warfare as it is ordinarily understood. You do not arm troops with weapons such as theirs if you mean to fight even with guerilla tactics. They are armed not with rifles, but with revolvers, and their plan of campaign is not one of civil war but of murder.

Slackening of Conscience. “The slackening of the public conscience in these matters has nob reached England, and it is not likely to reach it. But it exists as a possibility and ite existence cannot be ignored. J. few more horrors like tho assassination of Sir Henry Wilson and the exasperation of the ordinary citizen'would take the form of buying a revolver himself and using it without hesitancy either in hot blood or in moments of assumed justification. “One of the most remarkable features of that grim tramp of the gathering crowd of civilians and policemen in the wake of the murderers through Belgravia and Pimlico (a scene surely unmatched in fiction, for the whole thing was done in daylight and at a walking pace), was that no one of the pursuers fired a shot or apparently had the means of doing so. Who would be prepared to say that it would bo the same after another assassination ; still more if by some disintegration of our security the new Irish habit of killing without mercy, or even reluctance, tho opponents of what you stand for were to slip over into this country and we were to be confronted with several attempts against public menf We should probably take a leaf out of tho murderers’ book.

“Across the Irish Sea tho effect is different. In Ireland public conscience has slackened to an amazing degree. If an assassination takes place even in a crowded street, people appear not to notice it or turn the other way. As for the leaders of tho people, it is frankly difficult to believe that murder shocks them at all. In his day Mr. Collins was famous for his exploits as a gunman. When you compare his silence, Mr. de Valera’s sham

philosophical verbiage and Mr. Rory O’Connor’s impudence over the murder of Sir Henry Wilson, with the unequivocal, heartfelt and vigorous denunciation of the Phoenix Park murders issued at the time by Mr. Parnell, Mr. Dillon, and Mr. Davitt, all of them extreme men, you have the measure of the extent to which our political life has come under this menace of nickel and lead, and how dangerous may be the consequences unless the general conscience of the community intervenes.

Danger in Europe. “The danger is oven greater in Europe than it is here. Since the signature of pence two great German political leaders —Herr Erzberger and Herr Rathenau —have been shot under circumstances of peculiar brutality. It is hardly more than a year ago since the Spanish Prime Minister (killed, by the way, with precisely tho same tactics as were applied this week to Herr Rathenau) was murdered in Madrid., Assassination, dormant since the seventeenth century, is again asserting itself as a political weapon, and the revolver makes its bid for rule.

“This carelessness of human life, the readiness to destroy it on a point of political difference, has its counterpart in an equal recklessness in the matter of property.”