SIR F. E. SMITH AND IRELAND

New Zealand Tablet, 28 March 1918, Page 9

SIR F. E. SMITH AND IRELAND

An ex-British officer, writing on Sir F. E. Smith,, gives both a new viewpoint and some added facts. He says : To the Editor of the Evening Post. Sir, —The Irish Convention is reported to be near an end all friends of Ireland, the United States, and England, must hope that an agreement will be reached upon this momentous question. The dispatches of the past few days have emphasised, the vital interest which America has in its just solution. As an ex-British officer of this war I venture to point out the character of the utterances of the latest British emissary to the United States, Sir F. E. Smith, and to quote from his remarks upon the Irish problem. At this time it appears to be an affront to liberal opinion in the United States to send Sir Frederick here, and a distinct danger to the cause of an amicable Irish agreement. As soon as Lord Northcliffe returned home, Sir Frederick Edwin Smith, Attorney-General of England, was sent. To review his career briefly, he was born of humble parentage on July 12, 1872 ; mainly through his own ability, he was enabled to enter. Wadham College, Oxford, where he had the honor of being chosen president of the Oxford Union, in 1893. After a brilliant course, he was graduated ; then studied law, and was called to the bar. In 1906. he became member for the Walton Division of Liverpool in the Tory interest, and early distinguished himself by his incisive style in debate, and by a disrespect' for democratic style in debate, and by a disrespect for democratic forms. In his contribution to Rights of Citizenship he states (p. 22): . . . "for good or for evil we are governed by democracy. The apparent tendency is to extend rather than to restrict the popular character of our Government. ". . . This country will remain democratic unless the tendency ... be arrested by civil convulsions." The Tories tried to restrict the tendency by forcing two general elections within twelve months: they failed; and, dreading to rouse the people of England by provoking another election there, they then resorted to the expedient of civil convulsions —in Ireland, using as an excuse the then pending Home Rule Bill. To prepare for this convulsion Mr. F. E. Smith inflamed the British army against the Irish people. He and his aides succeeded so well that, on October 12, 1913, the army journal, The Regiment, felt constrained to announce: "This (the alleged Irish attitude to the British army) is more than flesh and blood can endure. It is no exaggeration to say that the temper of the troops is rising/' Mr. Smith's methods may be studied in reports in his speeches in the English press of that day. Here I shall refer only to a pamphlet he wrote in November, 1913, entitled Irish Home Rulers and the British Army, a pamphlet which was distributed in thousands among the British soldiers, a pamphlet in which he recounted all the criticisms Irishmen had made of the English army, beginning with an 1885 statement which he attributed to William Redmond,, M.P., who, as a major in the British army, was recently killed in Flanders, and continuing down through the Boer War. "The Nationalists who cannot conquer Ulster for themselves will shortlv be fawning upon the army to conquer it for them," was the avowed reason which led Mr. Smith to pen the pamphlet. In due course the temper of the troops rose high enough for the King's Own Scottish Borderers to fire the fatal volley on the Dublin citizens in Bachelor's Walk. This anti-Irish campaign was secondary to the larger plan of reducing the Asauith Government to impotence by pledging the army to defy the Government. For this purpose a. British covenant was drawn up and signed by Mr. F. E. Smith, Lord Milner, Lord Robert Cecil, and most of the members of the present Executive in England, together with countless officers in high commands hi the army and navy. The covenant.<smi (f % tY t iaJl Mi : mmU Justified in

taking or supporting any action .that may be effective to prevent it (the Home Rule Bill) being put into operation, and more particularly to prevent the armed forces of the Crown being used to deprive the peopleof Ulster of their rights as citizens of the United Kingdom." On March 6, 1914, at Banbury, Mr. Smith asserted "If the Government ever tried to enforce a Home Rule Act they would find that the enemies they had to face and the difficulties they would have to confront would not be confined to Ulster. So he went— his own words—"finessing for the firing of the first shot." Ensured, by the covenant, immunity from argued interference and, moreover, supplied with a war fund of £120,000 by English sympathisers, Carson drilled openly, and purchased from the Deutsche Waffen und Munitionen Fabrik rifles, which were shipped from Hamburg by one Kiehm and were landed on April 27, 1914, in Ulster by the Norwegian ship Fanny. When the Asquith Government ordered the British army to hold themselves in readiness to proceed to Ulster to curb this rebellion the covenant held and the army officers resigned. Before this combination of rebellion and army disaffection the Liberal Government was powerless. The Government spokesman denounced those who had thus placed an aristocratically officered army in opposition to the duly elected democratic Government. Mr. Smith rebuked him, saying (Hansard March 31, 1914): "No one would think it anything but damnably wicked to try and influence the country against the army." Mr. Smith openly abetted the Carson rebellion. Being a captain of a territorial Oxford Hussar regiment, he announced with impunitv his intention to gallop to the aid of the Ulster rebels. When, owing to the disappointing course of the war, the Tories in England were passively permitted to take over the control of Mr. Asquith's government, Carson entered the English Cabinet; and, of hi* lieutenants, Campbell became Lord Chief Justice of Ireland; Chambers, Solicitor-General of Ireland, and Smith, first Solicitor-General and then AttorneyGeneral of England. Mr., now Sir Frederick E. Smith, as AttorneyGeneral prosecuted Mr. Roger Casement.- Sir Frederick is quoted (Boston Post, January 14") as sayino- in New York: "In the first place, it does not seem to be known here that after the trial of S : r Roger Casement I threatened to resign from the Cabinet unless this traitor was executed. You will remember that a tremendous effort was made to save Casement, and for a time the Government was wobbling. I gave them the choice of Casement or myself. Nothing ever gave me greater delight than the execution of Casement. I joined with Sir Edward Carson in making preparations for the civil war which England would have had were it not for the development of the European war." This remarkable combination—Smith, an avowed rebel, rewarded with high office, prosecuting Casement as a traitor, and then .dominating the Cabinet. Casement's last court of appealcan be best described in the words used by Sir Frederick Smith in the opening speech for the prosecution of Casement: "Ye must now pass to that unhappy country which has been the victim in its history of so many cruel and cynical conspiracies, but surely never of a conspiracy more cruel and more cynical than this." Last May, as a war measure, and out of regard for American sentiment, Mr v Lloyd George announced he would appoint an Irish convention to draw up a plan for the self-government of Ireland within the British Empire. Of that convention Sir Frederick is reported as saying now: "The best thing that can happen in Ireland is to prolong the life of the convention. Let them keen on talking. ... It would be very inconvenient"if anything should happen just now to overturn the attempt to bring about a settlement. In a few months, whatever happens, it won't amount to a damn." Besides discussing the Irish, Sir Frederick has also dealt with the war aims of America. Before Hie New York Bar Association at the Hotel Ardor, on .January

11, Sir Frederick said concerning public diplomacy: 'I hope I ,am not a cynic, '■.but my observations of discussions has been that it does not invariably happen that public discussions are the shortest. If it (the Peace Conference) •is to perform its prodigious work under the stimulus of publicity so that every worthy speaker developing a worthy, and here, and there, an eloquent, argument, is aware that not only those who listen to him but the press of his own country will be admiring his sagacity and prescience, I have the feeling that the merely territorial discussions will occupy quite' a considerable period and if in addition to those the peace conference is to reconstitute the arrangements of the world, I cannot help thinking that the j>rospect will be more hopeful if some of the preliminary spade work is done while the war lasts." The President demands "open covenants of peace openly arrived at," and if his words repudiate anything it is "preliminary spade work." Sir Frederick enunciated a fundamental objection to disarmament and discussed other difficulties, not that he wished to convey they were insurmountable, but he himself had "been always an ardent advocate of national service, and, in this connection, he observed that a very distinguished American statesman has quite recently indicated hope that national service will not be ruled out of the scope of the recommendations which the league of nations may ultimately present. And of that league Sir Frederick asked: "Is an unpurged Germany a possible member?" And answered: "Obviously no—only a punished Germany." The league of nations Sir Frederick characterised as a "great and splendid dream." But our examination of it "should be reserved as critical rather than rhetorical. . . ." He called attention "to the dangers of trusting rhetoric alone . . ," to the "prodigious difficulties which lie in the way of the attainment of the ideal so eloquently and so persuasively indicated by your President." Yet he agreed that "it is worth while trying for an ideal." He made suggestions "as one who is cautious by temperament and who is very slow to adopt rhetorical phrases as a substitute for the detailed working out of problems which alone leads to any lucid and practical solution." However, he said: "I am not here in the least, in any way, to disparage the most noble deals which with restrained but penetrating rhetoric your President has distributed to the encouragement of the Allies. But. I am here as a lawyer addressing lawyers, and if we do not keep our heads, well God help the rest of the population." So he pleaded with us to "consider before the occasion actually arises whether such a thing is or is not in the range of human endeavor." It is a maxim in England that the Premier is personally responsible for the deeds and utterances of his official family. When the Attorney-General of England discusses President Wilson's war aims ' and a week later still remains on record uncorrected one must begin to inquire where the views of Sir Frederick and those of the Attorney-General voicing his government begin. It is perhaps worth noting that Carson in England re-echoed Smith's criticism of America's war aims.