DEATH OF ARTHUR GRIFFITH

Evening Star, Issue 18046, 14 August 1922, Page 7

DEATH OF ARTHUR GRIFFITH

THE FREE STATE PRESIDENT. FOUNDER OF SINN FEIN. LLOYD OJIORGE'S TRIBUTE. Press Telegraph—Copyright. LONDON, August 12. Mr Arthur Griffith died suddenly in Dublin. Mr Lloyd George telegraphed to Mr Collins, stating: I am deeply distressed to learn of Mr Griffith’s death. My admiration for his singleminded patriotism, ability, sincerity, and courage has grown steadily since first we met less than a year ago. Hia character made a deep impression on the British Ministers, who shared with him those unremitting label's in which he was called npon to play so testing and difficult a part. His loss is a heavy one for Ireland. I trust his work will continue to complete success. Mr , Lloyd ■ George also . telegraphed' to •dr Griffith’s widow in similar terms, addingj

I am certain that Ireland will always reverence his memory as one of her most loyal, gifted, and courageous sons. Mr Griffith had been a patient in a private hospital in Dublin for a fortnight, and waa recovering from influenza. Ho had also been operated upon for tansilitis. ■While ho was proceeding to the bathroom in the morning he fainted'. He regained consciousness after being put to bed. A priest waa summoned, but Mr Griffith collapsed again, and died in a few minutes from cerebral hemorrhage. AH the kinemas and theatres in Dublin decided to dose until Tuesday. The opening of the Dublin Horse &how»has been postponed.—A. and N.Z. Cable. [Mr Griffith was born in Dublin in 1872. He was educated at the Christian Brothers’ School in that city. First' a compositor in a newspaper office, he became a journalist. Ho was regarded as the founder of the Sinn Fein movement, for it was he who first applied' the lessons of the Hungarian struggle for independence to the Irish political situation. Through his writings ha had a profound influence upon his fellow-countrymen. During the war he adopted a strongly anti-British attitude: bat he took no active part in the Easter rebellion of 1916. He was, however, arrested after that rising, and imprisoned for eight months. On his release he resumed his profession of journalism, but he was again imprisoned in 1918. He was liberated after ten months, but- later his house was raided and many documents were found in it. Mr Griffith was once more imprisoned, and was released only when the Irish peace negotiations began. He was, undoubtedly, the chief intellectual force in the Sinn Fein movement. He was elected President of Bail Eireann after the session which was held shortly after the- execution of the Irish Treaty.] NO ORATOR.

Short, stocky, with thick black hair and heavy brows, Griffith is just a mar. in the street (wrote a journalist at the time of the London Conference), though his eyeglasses and his rather fulsome moustache give him. as he writes away at his desk, rather a professorial air. His hearing is reminiscent of a military training, and at fifty, one can see in him the champion weight-lifter of Dublin of over twenty-five years ago. He is an uninspiring talker, though his even tones and bis matter-of-fact manner make him convincing in a personal conversation. He has earnestness and industry stamped on everything he says and does. But he loses all such advantages when he speaks in public, for his low voice remains low, and his lack of animation belies the conviction. Some of his listeners think he is nervous in his public speaking, and perhaps stage-shy in debate, yet in his utter indifference to or lack of comprehension of oratorical trickery will more likely be found the explanation of his colorless addresses. ‘' AN AMERICAN IMPRESSION. Arthur Griffith, said Mr Hackett (writing in the New York ‘ World ’), is in great contrast to Collins. They _ have this in common—they are hard realists as well as firm nationalists. But— Where Collins is the magnetic leader of men, Griffith is .the profound intellectual, Bv profound! I mean profound. Only fifty years of age, I believe that Arthur Griffith has developed a policy for Ireland which may easily make him one of the big statesmen of Europe if he continues on his career.

Griffith is superficially a quiet hole-in-■the-corner journalist of the familiar Continental type, like Clemenceau. The late John Redmond dismissed him as ‘‘gutter journalist” in 1916. And, superficially again, his story is something like this: He has been a journalist-propagandist most of his life. The son of a Roman Catholic Dublin compositor (in spite of a supposedly Welsh name), Mr Griffith started hie career ae a proof-reader on a Dublin newspaper. Abandoning that occupation, ho tried hia fortune for a time in the diamond fields in South Africa, and actually worked in a diamond mine. On his return to Ireland from living in South Africa and England, Arthur Griffith soon started his first famous • weekly, the ‘ United Irishman.’ This paper was a name endeared) to Parnellites, but the Nationalism which Arthur Griffith began to preach after the downfall of Parnell was not of the parliamentary variety. It was essentially a proud and scornful Nationalism, intended first of all to whip Irishmen out of slave psychology, and, .secondly, to givo them a broad economic and political programme. Griffith preached; in the wilderness for many years. There was nothing sensational about him, except the frequency with which Ms little papers came to be suppressed. He and his wife and small family lived obscurely on little means. His editing of a propagandist paper out of a plain devotion to an idea earned him more reproaches than ha’pence. But the rising generation in Dublin became familiar through him with the names of Wolfe Tone and John Mitchell, of Louis Kossuth and Deak. He told Dublin of the Hungarian Insurrection, and he sought to adapt the Hungarian policy to Ireland. By 1905 men were enough impressed by the resourcefulness and depth of his views to join in the First National Council Convention, with Edward Martyn, of Galway, as president. Here Sinn Fein (“Ourselves”) was launched as a national doctrine. It remained a "mere doctrine, discussed only by yonng Dubliners, for many years. As late as 1915 John Redmond said: “What is called the Sian Fein movement is simply tho_ temporary cohesion of isolated cranks in various parts of Hie country, and it would be impossible to say what their principles are, or what their object is. In fact, they have no policy and no leader, and do not amount to a row’ of pins as far as the' future of Ireland is concerned.” That was the common verdict in Ireland up to the rebellion of 1916. . But behind Arthur Griffith's laconic exterior, behind his heavy eyeglasses and his cold eyes, there was an idea of dual monarchy and an Anglo-Hibernian Empire that has matured in the present settlement. This settlement is really the correct projection of all his Sinn ' Fein designs. Griffith is a Nationalist. ■He is a Nationalist in the sense that Bismarck ■was a Nationalist." But he is also an Imperialist. ’ And what he has always asked for Ireland is not separatism, but 1 partnership—partnership in the affairs of the World. "The policy of Sinn Fein,” he taid in 1905, “is to bring Ireland out of the comer and make her assert her existence in the world. I have spoken of an essential; but the basis of the'policy is national self-reliance.”