The Stratford Evening Post WITH WHICH IS INCORPORATED THE EGMONT SETTLER WEDNESDAY, APRIL 8, 1914. A HISTORY OF CARSONISM.

Stratford Evening Post, Volume XXXVIII, Issue 91, 8 April 1914, Page 4

The Stratford Evening Post WITH WHICH IS INCORPORATED THE EGMONT SETTLER WEDNESDAY, APRIL 8, 1914. A HISTORY OF CARSONISM.

After most extensive inquiries in Ulster as to what was really happening with regard to “Carsonism” the Hon. George Peel, descendant of a famous house of statesmen, has published in historical form an account what is termed “the Carsonade.” Here we have an account of the military and civil dispositions of Sir Edward Carson, from the date when lie accepted or assumed authority at Craigavon, in September 1911, up to the present time. It is based almost entirely upon extracts from leading Unionist newspapers and from the speeches of Sir Edward himself, of Lord Londonderry and Captain Craig, “the Romulus and Remus of Ulster,” and of other bulwarks of the Unionist party. Chapter and verse are given for quotation. In the first chapter Mr Peel reviews Sir Edward’s military system as established in I Ister. He shows the number of the forces which “in Ulster alone were declared by the highest authority to number altogether in the summer of 1913 no less than 200,000 men ‘at the lowest estimate.’ ” With the addition of forces in the rest of Ireland, in Great Britain, or in the Colonies the total is placed at 250,000. Mr Peel goes on to summarise the methods of training, the staff work, and other such details, giving an outline of th<> “wonderful preparations” which enabled Mr Walter Long to eulogise Sir Edward Carson for “forming an army which, he believed, would ■prove in its personnel, in its training, and in its equipment to be in no way inferior to the best army that their country could put into the field.” In the third chapter Mr Peel refers to the origin of Sir Edward Carson’s civil power, and states that it was on August 27, 1913, that Sir Edward Carson announced the final organisation of hi* military syitein. Yet it was only on September 2-1 following that he proclaimed the details of his

Civil Administration. “Thus while Bonaparte took three and a half years of strenuous labor from the date of Marengo for the ordination of Ins Civil Code in 1894, the Hibernian leader apparently accomplished a similar task in less than a month.” Then conies the history in detail oi the Carsoniau “proclamation” of Mr Churchill’s Belfast meeting and the signing before “an army of photographers” of the Solemn League and Covenant which “besides furnishing the colour of popular sanction in I Ister to the royal proceedings would obviously give breathing space to perfect the army.” Mr Peel here says: “Ho began to represent himself as a man of destiny; a being not his own master, but controlled and captured by forces more potent than himself, a voice echoing willy-nilly the exigencies of a democracy at his hack. All this was a method of political insurance. He was beginning to represent himsclt to he, not the organiser, but the organ, or an insurgent public.” Regarding the Executive Committee of the Provisional Government Mr Peel scathingly terms it: “A self-created aristocratic bureaucracy without a Civil Service beneath it or a Parliament above.” Peace and safety does not lie that way.