Evening Post. SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 9, 1929. MONARCHY AND DIPLOMACY

Evening Post, Volume CVII, Issue 32, 9 February 1929, Page 8

Evening Post. SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 9, 1929. MONARCHY AND DIPLOMACY

Equally welcome with the testimony of the "Dublin Star" to the value of the King's services to the cause of peace in Ireland in connection with the opening of the Northern Parliament is the incidental evidence which it furnishes of the changing attitude of Southern Ireland to the King and the people- of Britain. The starting point of the article was "the deep sympathy the King's illness aroused in every town and village in the Irish Free State"—a sympathy which, it declared, "would have been even 'deeper if His Majesty's part in ending the Anglo-Irish struggle were generally known." The "Star's" description of the speech with which the King had been asked to open Ulster's Parliament as "a bloodthirsty document, amounting to a declaration of war against the Dail Eireann," was doubtless exaggerated, but General Smuts, who was consulted about the revision, confirms the newspaper's accuracy on the essential point.

The "Star's" report was inaccurate in some respects, he said, but a true story so far as it reflects the greatest credit on His Majesty the King, for he inspired the initiative ■on a critical occasion. : ■, .

The inference of the "Dublin Star"— that history will award greater credit for statesmanship to King George than to many monarchs and ministers who seemed dazzlingly to influence the destiny of the nations—

is therefore not impugned, nor is its cheerful diagnosis of the relations which it was the object of its article.

We believe that before'many years the old feeling of Irishmen instinctively associating the Cfown with tyranny, injustice, and the degradation of Iroland will completely disappear, and the King will gladly be honoured as the_ head of a unique association of nations, under which we have greater national freedom and security than we could have as a separate republic.

Coming from the semi-official organ of the Free State Government, this double testimony to the personal services of the King and to the success of the policy of peace and goodwill to which he gave so admirable a start has a special significance. The attitude of the Government itself to the British connection has always been correct, but never cordial. The great opportunity presented to President Cosgrave during his recent visit to the United States of testifying that under the Irish Treaty Britain had "played the game" and left no reasonable ground for complaint was completely missed. In the course of this visit President Cosgrave met Mayor "Big Bill" Thompson, of Chicago, and testified quite unnecessarily to the effect that he was not as black as he had been painted. A similar testimony on behalf of the King whom "Big Bill" had warned to "keep his snoot out of Chicago" would have been no more than fair play to the British Government and would have gone far to abate the suspicion' and the hatred of Britain for which in the United States the Irish question is still made the cover. Mr. Cosgrave was, of course, not concerned with the peril of Chicago, but he could have said with perfect accuracy and propriety that never since December, 1921, had King George attempted to poke his "snoot" into Dublin. On the eve of his retirement at the beginning of the year Mr. Tim Healy, bravest and frankest of Irishmen, whether as the antagonist or the friend of Britain, had set a better example. The man who had been the Governor-General of the .Irish Free State during five highly critical years spoke as follows at a dinner given in his honour by the Government in Dublin on the 7th January:—

The English in my few years have never interfered—and I pledge my faith and honour to this—to the extent of a tittle or scintilla in any Irish matter. They have left the Ministry absolutely free; left us in fact untouched, unadvised, and that is >a tribute that should not be left? unpaid.

Mr. Healy's tribute to the King on the same occasion was followed by a contrasted reference to the Free State Government's principal opponent in which he displayed the caustic wit that was once the terror and the delight of the House of Commons:—

You have heard talk about "our foreign King," but ho is a gentleman. We know his pedigree. I wish ' we knew as much about those who refer to his interference in Irish affairs.

The personal eulogy of the King by the Free State Government's semiofficial organ and its testimony to the rapid waning of the old misunderstandings justify the hope that the Government itself will soon be as unreserved and as hearty as the late Governor-General in its public acknowledgments.

Though the services rendered by the winning personality of Edward VII. to British diplomacy, especially in conciliating the goodwill o£ France, were constant and valuable, it looks as though one must go back to the previous reign for a parallel to the definite and far-reaching intervention attributed to King George at Belfast. Something far short of a "bloodthirsty" speech at the opening of the North of Ireland Parliament might well have precipitated the hostilities which the Kaiser had temporarily averted in 1914 but which had been simmering ominously ever since he had been put out of the way, but it cannot be called a certainty. Queen Victoria and the Prince Consort can, however, be

definitely credited with having averted that most terrible kind of war to which it is now the fashion of our politicians and even of our statesmen to refer as "unthinkable." On the 9th November, 1861, when British sympathy with the Southern Stales in the American Civil War had excited great indignation in the North, a Federal warship fired a shot across the bows of the British steamer Trent, and after threatening violence seized two Confederate envoys who were on board before allowing her to proceed. For this high-handed and absolutely illegal act Captain Wilkes at once became a popular and even an official hero in the Federal States. The Secretary of the Navy congratulated him in a letter declaring that his conduct was

marked by intelligence, ability, decision, and firmness, and has the emphatic approval of this Department.

Three other virtues were ascribed to the gallant captain by the House of Representatives, which without a dissentient vote thanked him for his "brave, adroit, and patriotic conduct."

Britain also was ablaze with passion, and Lord Palmerston had public opinion behind him in his desire to forward a peremptory demand to Washington which could only have resulted in war. But the draft was submitted to the Queen, who, according to her custom, sought Prince Albert's advice. He appreciated the danger, and, though already sickening with the typhoid which within a fortnight was to carry him off, rose at 7 a.m. to write a memorandum on the subject. When he showed it to the Queen he told her that his hand could scarcely hold the pen, and she has recorded that it was the last thing he ever wrote. His advice was that the despatch should be made polite instead of peremptory, that the insult should be assumed to be the result of a subordinate's error of judgment, and that the, United States Government should thus be given an easy way out. The advice was taken and war was averted. Walt Whitman, the great poet of American democracy, wrote a few years afterwards of the service thus rendered to humanity by the Queen and Prince Albert as follows:—

Vory little, as we Americans stand this day, with our sixty-five or soveiiVy millions of population, an immense surplus in the treasury, and all that actual power or reserve power (land and sea) so dear to nations—very little, I say, do wo realise that curious craw'ing national shudder when the "Trent' affair" promis'd to bring upon us a war with Great Britain —follow'd unquestionably, as that war would have been, by recognition of the Southern Confederacy from all tho leading European nations. It is now certain that all this then' inevitable train o:; calamity hung on arrogant and peremptory phrases in the prepared and written missive of the British Minister, to America, which the Queen (and Prince Albert latent) positively and promptly cancell'd; and which her firm attitude did alone actually erase and leave out, against all the other' official prestige and Court of St. James's. On such minor and personal incidents (so to call them) often depend the great growths and turns of civilisation. This moment * of a woman and a queen surely swung the grandest .oscillation of modern history's'pendulum. Many sayings and doings of that period, from foreign potentates and powers, might be dropt in oblivion by America—but never, this, if I could have my way.

The terms of this letter are described by Sir Sidney Xee as "exuberant," but surely the exuber-ance-of a poet is preferable to the grudging and back-handed acknowledgment of Mr. John T. Morse, the author of a Standard Life of Lincoln: —

For once at least 'Royalty did a good turn to the American Kepublic.

"Even in a palace life may be well led," says an English < poet. Perhaps once in a century it may reach the high standard of the White House.