MICHAEL COLLINS’ WORK

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume LVI, 11 October 1922, Page 3

MICHAEL COLLINS’ WORK

Analysing the contribution made by Michael Collins to the reconstruction of Ireland, “Politico” \vitcs in l‘.e Manchester Guardian“'hie daskn-.g CoJ--Ims resembled the solid Griffith in keeping before his mint an 1ml: nation M living people, with bard, actual problems to solve,.as the vision for which he was working, and he kept clear of tiiat fatal habit of forming an intellectual picture and then trying at all costs to force the life and problems of a nation into it. De Valera, like Robespierre, .was ready to put a nation into any kind of extremity for a molaphysicaf ideal; Collins knew from Ins experience of life, as Griffith ki|cw Irom his study of history that if you keep a nation' in militant chaos for something else than actual freedom the nation that eriierges is not the nation of your dreams but the nation of your nightmares. Collins knew that the alternatives which the extreme Republicans pictured as a choice were really a dilemma. This was his first great service to the nation in whose emancipation he had played so large-a part; Tie stood for intellectual honesty; ho put the nation on its guard against a mctaphysic that treats men’s lives and happiness as if they were the subject-matter of the school-man’s logic, and so brings disaster. The English mind and the English people run so slight a risk from this particular danger that they find it hard to appreciate it. One conspicuous achievement will, I think, stand out in Irish history. He has disenfranchised rebellion. It was said of him last January that he had let his friends know that he meant to treat rebellion in such a way as to leave it without a single romantic legend. In a country' with Ireland’s memories that task might have seemed impossible. . He decided that, whatever risks he look, he would not take the chance of giving the rebels a grievance. English critics thought him weak and inefficient, hut (he result ot his strategy has been that in almost every town and village men and women think of the rebellion not as a glorious blow struck for the rights of Irishmen the tradition of every rebellion in Irish history—but as a blow struck by smallminded and vindictive men against Ireland herself.” t