Current Topics

New Zealand Tablet, 28 August 1919, Page 14

Current Topics

A Silly Serjeant '/' ':"'!/_, ■ 'A, certain Mr. Serjeant Sullivan had the good fortune to be begotten by .one of the most sterling patriots that Ireland has ever known. His father \ and his uncle—A. M. and T. D. Sullivanwould turn in their graves to-day could they realise how the worthy serjeant has fallen from their high ideals. This person is ready to speak ex cathedra on Ireland, with an ignorance of the facts of the case only rivalled by his assurance. He is one of those renegades who write the sort of letters about Ireland which are sure to find a warm welcome in the columns of the London Tablet. His balderdash is good enough for that journal, which published without a word of comment Hughes's disgraceful and lying attack on Dr. Mannix; but among Irishmen, and generally among those , who still believe that small nations ought to have the right of self-determination, Mr. Serjeant Sullivan is small beer indeed. It was with no little delight we recently read that Lord Justice O'Connor gave the silly Serjeant a well-deserved lesson in a public court. According to the Irish Independent it happened that, during the hearing of a breach of promise case before Lord Justice O'Connor and a city jury, Serjeant Sullivan made some characteristic remarks about the religion of- the Irish people to-day. Amid great applause in the court the Judge in his address to the jury commented strongly on the silly Serjeant's tirade against his own countrymen and countrywomen. "Unlike the contributor to the Tory Tablet, our old friend, of whose sincerity and Catholicism nobody could possibly doubt, was neither prepared to cast aspersions on the good name of his fellow-countrymen nor to allow others to do so in his court. He told the jury, apropos of the Serjeant's remarks, that he entirely disagreed with what that gentleman had said, and that he saw nothing, whether in Ireland's history or in the case before them, to show that the sterling moral tone of the country had in the slightest degree weakened. "Our morality and sense of personal chastity are above reproach. One of the brightest jewels in the character of Irish women, and, indeed, of Irish men, is that chastity is not on the decrease, but that the highest sense of honor and purity in the sexes is on the. increase in this country." Needless to say the Judge's words will not be found in the London Tablet. Our readers will not forget that this Judge was kicked out of the office of AttorneyGeneral because he was a Catholic and an Irishman of the sterling type, like his father before him. A jobber from Wales and a "moralist" from Scotland may deprive him of an Attorney-Generalship for his love of truth, but to deprive him of his manliness and to make a man of a Serjeant Sullivan is beyond them.

Our Chivalry When we remember what the British Empire is and how it was built up we readily admit that it has its fitting bard in Kipling, the singer of savagery and the laureate of low ideals. It was in connection with the Boer War that he told us in his own delicate and refined way that we had got "a hell of a lesson" from the farmers whose property we stole. The lesson he meant was one of our inefficiency. There was, however, a greater lesson which we also failed to learn. At the time of the, Boer War the man who had the courage to protest against the. injustice of that exploit of Imperialism was in danger of losing his liberty or his life, and it was then considered a highly patriotic thing to circulate the atrocious tales about bogus Boer atrocities which even in their ideal existence could not surpass the gross reality of what we ourselves were doing to Boer women and children. In the years that have gone by since then frothy passions subsided and hired journalists ceased to obscure the reason of. the people, with the result that we all know now that the men who protested against the war were right, and that our

. . -i f . .f.f ' -.v.-,. ;-u ' nr-! patriotism.,,at the time was nothing .short of an unreasoning support of a policy of PrussianismNevertheless we did not learn our lesson. It needed but another war to bring to .the surface once more, all the unlovely ill-nature and : all the abominable disregard for truth . and justice which are the original , sins of British Jingoes. Taking our press as a whole, and sadly recognising that it is a reflection of the views of a majority among us, a retrospect of the Great War must lead us to ask where is that British chivalry of which we boast, where that British fair play which we say we are proud of ?. Looking calmly at what was called patriotism in war time can we deny that Dr. Johnson was wrong when he defined patriotism as the last refuge of a - scoundrel? Examine Jingo patriotism the only sort that it was safe to profess—and find a single note of a single Christian virtue in it if you can. Bernard Shaw says we lost our manners in the war, but what we lost was more than manners. However, let us hear him on the case:

“Not only our simple citizens, but our editors and our statesmen, and even in a few instances our soldiers, have been guilty of solecisms. Instead of putting on our full-dress clothes and standing on our best behaviour, we have been recklessly abusive and injurious. We have frantically denied every statement made by the enemy without stopping to consider whether it was true, and have thereby not only missed the advantage of many valuable admissions in our own favor, but put ourselves gratuitously in the wrong. We have passionately accepted and reaffirmed as authentic news stories which on the face of them could not possibly have been true. . . It seems hardly credible now that the Headmaster of Eton was driven scurrilously from his place for reminding us that our occupation of Gibraltar raised the same problem as the German control of the Kiel Canal, or that the Archbishop of York would have been unfrocked, had such a proceeding been possible, for speaking of the Kaiser as one gentleman speaks of another whose hospitality he has accepted in former days.” Politicians of the George type, and journalists of the sort that the politicians find ready for their unscrupulous uses are responsible to a great extent for the national disgrace of such a nasty spirit. They have during this war and during other wars deliberately fostered the ignoble and brutal spirit for which England was branded all over Europe during the Boer War. They have done even more: they have sowed the seeds of future wars by their vile pandering to the inflamed passions of a mob stirred up for the vile ends of capitalists and place-hunters. Shaw has a word to say on the results of Propaganda work and similar devilry which is well worth meditation just now when we are told that we have secured a lasting peace : “Everyone who is not a born fool must realise soon what all clever people realised long ago, that the moral cleaning-up after the war is far more important than the material restorations. The towns that have been knocked down mostly needed it very badly, and will be replaced, let us hope, by better planned, healthier, happier habitations. . . But the poisoning of the human soul by hatred, the darkening of the human mind by lies, and the hardening of the human heart by slaughter and destruction and starvation, are evils that spread and fester long after the guns have stopped. Yet the importance that war gives to fools who are negligible in peace makes them loth to let war cease if they can possibly carry it on by mere rancor after the soldiers have come home.”

All the while that our press was telling us its tales of corpse-factories and mutilated children and German polygamy it had never a harsh word to say for the atrocities ( y of our Russian Allies, or for those of our own men, freely admitted by themselves, xndeeci one editor of a characteristically Jingo paper went to considerable trouble to get up an agitation against us when we one day suggested that we had ample sins of our own to do penance for arid that doing penance for them was more profitable in the end than telling falsehoods about the enemy. Let us remember that

an English general testified that Britain struck a coward’s blow at the womb of South Africa, and let us not forget that we never had a national word of blame for the blow struck during the recent war at the womb of Germany: Mr. Shaw describes it thus : - ‘ “Without counting the war carnage, which has been frightful, we have by our blockade caused 763,000 persons to die in Germany of ‘ malnutrition/ a polite name for starvation. By 1917 we had increased the civilian mortality by 32 per cent, above the figure for 1913. Next year we got that appalling figure up to 37 per cent. This does not include influenza cases. More than 50,000 children under fifteen died in 1917, and 15,000 girls and women under thirty. These are only the deaths the conditions of the survivors may be imagined. And this is going on more or less, and will go on until the blockade is raised.” It has gone on. Even when peace was in sight, six months after the arms were laid down it went on. Starvation compelled Germany to sign—not starvation of men but of women and children. Yet in our press-not a word was said by way of protest. To protest would be Christian, to organise the people to compel the Government to act in a Christian manner would have been human. But we were inhuman and we discarded Christianity in spite of our united patriotic lip-services and our prayer proclamations. And it is because we have abandoned Christianity that we are cursed by blindness to our shame, to our sins, to our hypocrisy. Is there a single beautiful trait in the Empire to-day? Is there any public respect for truth and justice and the other things that must be the foundations of any sort, of reform that is not as vain as the promises of our politicians? When our statesmen learn to keep their pledges, when our press learns to tell the truth, when our people abjure their cruelty and their injustice and their irreligion there will be some room for hope. At present there is • none whatever.

Ninety-Eight

A correspondent, sceptical concerning the atrocities of the British in Ireland in Ninety-Eight, refuses to accept the account which we recently gave of that bloody episode. In order to set his mind at rest for ever we herewith present him with testimonies from an impartial British historian whose accuracy and honor nobody will question. We leave to our readers to judge if we overstated facts. Speaking of Ireland in 1897, Belloc writes; “In the island itself hell had been let loose. The worst' of the regular and irregular forces obtainable by the ‘Crown,’ aided by a militia and yeomanry recruited from the most fanatical of the Protestant population, were quartered upon the as yet unroused and wholly defenceless Catholic peasants. The infamous, unheard of, tortures which they inflicted perpetually upon the weak and the defenceless were the least of their crimes, and their unbridled pillage may go unchallenged when we remember that their favorite abomination was outrage and assault upon the purity of the Catholic women. Scenes more awful—as awful are not recorded by any bands in the outermost corners of modern Europe. It is from this foul license of the Protestant irregular troops, more than from any other source, and from those months more than from any other period, that dates the * permanent and increasing peril England must run from the estrangement of the Irish race. The peril is rendered the worse from the fact, that the schools and the universities of

Great Britain are content to ignore the whole story of those abominations, and that the mass of educated Englishmen know less of the seeds whence their present dangers have sprung than they do of any department of contemporary history.” ( History of England, p. 376.) Note that here, in the year before the Rebellion, we have the British forces perpetrating unspeakable atrocities among defenceless Catholics. Note also the testimony that it is the way of the teachers of the

English, people to conceal this black page of crime against Ireland. |On | page 381 we read the following tribute to British honor: s £» &<=>*■. ■>'

- There was a lack ■of honor -in dealing with surrenders, which makes these few days peculiar in ..the history even of Irish maladministration. The most famous case is that of the' Gibbet Rath, in Kildare. Three thousand of the insurgents had come in to sur-

render to Duff, who was waiting at the head of a regular force ; panic or mere wantonness led to. the massacre of a tenth of them in the actual process of surrender. . ■ v ' : - ' ■

Another garland on the altar of Orange purity is this; '

But almost at the same moment the imbecile crueltyand still more the sexual filth—of the regulars and Orange yeomanry quartered in another district provoked a more formidable struggle. The County of Wexford was that one upon which, perhaps, an English Government could most securely count of all Ireland. It was somewhat differentiated in race from, the rest of the population, and it was at peace. The outrages committed by the soldiers, their wanton, aimless, and incredible cruelty—worst of all their unceasing assaults upon the Catholic women — a peril less negligible than the abortive risings in the neighborhood of Dublin. I have said that it was upon Saturday, May 26 (Whit Saturday, that year), that the Government could feel itself secure after the risings near the capital. It was upon the same day that a certain priest, Father John Murphy, returning to find his church destroyed (for no conceivable reason save the anarchic hate of the Protestant soldiery), and remembering the innumerable tortures and other abominations which the unarmed countryside had been compelled to suffer, determined that such tyranny was no longer to be tolerated, and put himself at the head of his parishioners.

Dealing with the Battle of New Ross Belloc says : The regulars in recapturing it once more prepared the future of English and Irish relations by a wholesale massacre of the wounded, and this was avenged by the burning by the insurgents of a barn containing a hundred prisoners. The barn here mentioned as Scullabogue Barn, which was burned by the straggling and defeated Irish who were retreating from New Ross, maddened no doubt by the wholesale massacre of their wounded and defenceless friends and brothers-in-arms. In the account of the fighting at Arklow and at Wexford we find the same story of wholesale brutal murder of wounded men:

Before Arklow they failed, and this failure combined, with that of New Ross decided the matter. The insurgent wounded left upon the field were again massacred. . . Wexford surrendered. There was the usual breach of faith, the usual massacre of prisoners (which in the town could be excused as an act of retaliation, for thirty-six prisoners had been put .to death by the other side), and right on through the rest of the mouth and even into the next month the stream of executions, murders, and outrages continued. One other incident must be told as an illustration of the barbarous and fiendish brutality of the forces which in those dark days England employed in Ireland to put down a rising caused by her own cruelty and “sexual filth.” The death of Father John Murphy

is thus described by Belloc: The heroic priest, after torture with a flogging of five hundred lashes, was killed and his body burnt at the door of a local Catholic of prominence “that he might enjoy the smell of a roasted priest.” I mention this little instance not because it is unique, but because it will help the impartial reader to understand something of the future relations between the Catholic Irish on the one hand, and the Orangemen and alien Government upon the other. ’ There in a few words we have the inner history of Ireland’s relations with England to-day. The same Orange hordes whose sexual filth and incredible bravery in assaulting defenceless women ' caused the Rebellion

are to-day protected and patronised 5 by the Lloyd George : Government at the cost of the peace of the Empire. For their sakes the Propaganda* is entrusted to their leader, Carson. For .them a thousand liars are active in the British press at home and abroad. Forgers like the Dunedin “Civis” lose no opportunity of calumniating, the Catholics whose extermination has been for centuries the object of Orangedom. To-day and yesterday English rule in Ireland means nothing else than the active and powerful encouragement of the assassins of Ninety-Eight. As Belloc says,- good care is taken to conceal the facts from most Englishmen. He might have added that good money is spent to the present day in the manufacture of crimes with which to damage the Catholics in the eyes of the world. If any reader wants a full history of the Neronian crimes of England in Ireland in NinetyEight, we refer him to Father Kavanagh’s History. The bare outlines given by Belloc are sufficient indictment in themselves of the “champions of small nations’’ and their mercenary forgers and “Civises.” It is all in keeping with the murder of Sheehy-Skeffiugton, with the : massacre at Batchelor’s Walk, with the brutalities practised on Irish women in the gaols, with the framedup Gorman plots, with the murders in King Street. And, nevertheless, we are told by our local liars that Ireland has no grievances !