Current Topics

New Zealand Tablet, 22 May 1919, Page 14

Current Topics

Sinn Fein \. ; '. ..',]„.."' .;'.:',?-'■■;" '*'','';. '.,'..'.,.V A word of warning is necessary with regard to,the fablegrams about Ireland just now.., The Sinn Fein Party has driven the Government to the wall, and every effort of the nefarious propaganda will be ; directed towards misrepresenting Ireland. Even messages. purporting to be from De Valera must be received with a grain of salt, as the following official statement proves: On behalf of the Executive of Sinn Fein, we are authorised to state that all the letters and interviews appearing in the press and purporting to come from President De Valera are without foundation. The only message which President De Valera has addressed since he left Lincoln Gaol was that to the Ard Chomhairle of Sinn Fein on February 20, in which he stated that he escaped from Lincoln Gaol to do the nation's work. We have never heard of the "Ultra-Irish Society of Great Britain," or of Mr. Sean McCarthy, who presided, or of Mr. P. 'J. Ryan, and we are surprised that the Irish press should inflict such an obvious hoax on the Irish public. President De Valera will address all his communications through this office, and the people will hear from him at the right time. We would also warn the people against the reputed interviews given by Sean T. O'Ceallaigh in Paris, as we are acquainted with the methods of the British propagandists. 11. Boland ) TT 0 m -n- } lion. Sees. 1. Kelly ) Sinn Fein, 6 Harcourt St., Dublin, March .'), 1919. Ulster Disunion The official correspondent of the New York Nation tells American readers that Ulster is breaking up, and that had the Nationalists and Sinn Feiners not contested certain Ulster seats the Orange Party would have had serious reverses. "Even the Protestant Ulsterites," he says, "are drifting away from their old hatred and fear of the South and of Home Rule. The present strike is giving Labor a decided push in the direction of Sinn Fein. The laboring men I have talked with—some of the Orange persuasion, some of the Green—are quite agreed that the political issue between North and South has been thrust aside, giving place to the struggle against the common enemy, the employer. 'Three years,' said one of them, 'will see us all Sinn Fein.' " The Dublin Transport and General Workers' Union has taken hold in Belfast since the strike, embracing all the unorganised laborers. In the course of a few years this union, which is thoroughly Sinn Fein, and which was mainly responsible for the rising, has grown from 5000 to 75,000 members. "A strange sensation," says the same writer, "to see such unanimity in 'rebellion.' " The fact that Protestants are strongly represented in Sinn Fein, and that some of the chosen delegates of the people are Protestants, is not unobserved by the Ulster Labor Party. Once it is borne in on them that they too are interested in securing freedom for the land they live in they will quickly cease to be made the tools of an English gang of placemen who have successfully exploited them for their own ends during many years. British Versus Bolshevik Morality In their attack on Mr. Semple some time ago, the Jingo,papers of this Dominion made, as is their way, much capital of a since-exploded canard about the nationalisation of women by the Bolsheviki; and with their usual logic and good taste tried to make out that it was as great a crime for him to support Sinn Fein in asking English tricksters to keep their pledges as it was to declare that he would be a Bolshevik were he a Russian. Knowing only what a corrupt press propaganda chooses to tell us of Bolshevism, we cannot pronounce judgment on it, but knowing the methods of the British propaganda and the " lies c it issued about

Ireland its., attacks .on any movement are, something ■ a 'priori in its , favor. Once . more we have . a splendid example of- how. England, by no means clean herself, attempts to blacken her foes and arouse hatred against them. The: story .of Bolshevik immorality has been proved false; but here is a story of British perversion that cannot be shewn to be false. Lord Buckminster brought before the Parliament last autumn an abominable Bill to license polygamy. The Bill was camouflaged as a measure to enable poor petitioners to break their lawful marriages. The House of Lords threw it out, thus giving temporary check to what is really, according to The Mouth , “an infamous propaganda.” We are told that this effort in favor of polygamy will be revived again . when Parliament meets. It may therefore be timely to quote, the editorial comment of The Month on this latest exhibition of hypocrisy of which our pious editors have no harsh things to say because the scandal is British, not Bolshevik;

“The proposal will be urged again in the Commons when the new Parliament assembles. The pagan views of the marriage contract introduced by Protestantism are too prevalent for us to hope that the matter will be allowed to rest. It would be amusing, were it not so sad, to note that the advocates of easy divorce profess the greatest zeal for morality. Lord Buckminster said that many separated persons, living with new consorts, were anxious to ‘sanctify’ their adulterous unions by obtaining for them the sanction of the civil law—a capital instance of the legal persuasion that it is the law that creates morality. An admirable expose of the unsound position of these assailants of matrimony may be found in the Tablet for November 24, as also in a pamphlet, II hi/ Catholic* Oppose Divorce, published by the Westminster Federation. Therein it is shewn that such opposition is motived as much by zeal for the well-being of society as for the observance of religious prohibitions. There is nothing in essence to' distinguish the proposals of Lord Buckminster and his following from the bestial ‘f'ree-love’ decrees credited to the Bolshevists at Vladimir and summarised in the Observer for November 3.”

The exposure of the fable about the nationalisation of women which our journalists swallowed as they swallow every unsavory dish set before them by Northcliffe ought to have covered them with shame and made them retract. But retractation of false reports to the prejudices of those who are opposed to us is not their way, although it is the way of simple and self-respecting Christians. Even if the canard had been well-founded what a retort Mr. Semple would have had ! These New Zealand agents for the infamous Propaganda of Lloyd George and Northcliffe would be mildly astonished if one expected them to condemn this latest proof of the lack of common Christian ideals among English nobles and their followers. What is sauce for the goose is not sauce for the gander here.. Is it any wonder that the press has no influence on the public ? Bigotry in Press and Literature The anti-Catholic tradition dies hard in the British Empire. Even a man who has been exposed as a cad and horsewhipped will find many people who imagine they have a right to be regarded as decent citizens to support him. • Journalists will miss no opportunity of framing a headline, which though a fair revelation of their own incompetency and dishonesty will please their low-toned market by its No-Popery ring. We have recently commented on a choice piece of blackguardism of two local papers that suppressed a tribute paid by a lecturer to a dead Catholic hero who was only too eager to risk his life for the sake of our soldiers while certain other gentlemen whom we could name were skulking in dug-outs so that they might live to tell the "tale" of what they saw and did on New Zealand platforms afterwards. We have lately come upon another proof of how far this sort of "British Fair Play" extends and how it affects even otherwise well-disposed and righteous men. In her autobiography Miss Martineau makes it clear that even i Charles Dickens was "a bigot to the ; same • extent as most English; Protestants

and: writers of his day and ours and that he 1 was capable of ;' the • dishonorable conduct of suppressing whatever might represent Catholics favorably. Miss Martineau had .about the year 1854 some misgivings as to the “principles or want of principles’’ on which Household Words was conducted. The attitude taken up by Dickens on the woman question and on the Preston strike had aroused her suspicions already when an incident occurred which she narrates as follows:

“In consequence of a request from Mr. Dickens that I would send him a tale for his Christmas number, I looked about for material in real life. ... I selected a historical fact, and wrote the story which appears under the title of The Missionary, in my volume of sketches from life. 1 carried it with me to Mr. Wills’ house, and he spoke in the strongest terms of approbation of it to me. . . Some weeks afterwards my friends told me with renewed praises of the story that they mourned the impossibility of publishing it,—Mr. Wills said, because the public would say that Mr. Dickens was turning Catholic, and Mr. Wills and Mr. Dickens, because they would never jwhlish anything, fact or fiction, which gave o favorable view of anyone under the influence of the Catholic faith. (Italics ours.) This appeared to me so incredible that Mr. Dickens gave me his ground three times over, with all possible distinctness, lest there should be any mistake: he would print nothing which could possibly dispose any mind whatever in favor of Romanism, even by the example of real good men. . . I told him that his way of going to work was the very way of arousing fair minds in their defence ; and that I had never before felt so disposed to make popularly known all historical facts in their favor. . . Mr. Dickens hoped I should think better of it : and this proof of utter insensibility as to the nature of the difficulty, and his partner’s hint the illiberality lay in not admitting that they were doing their duty in keeping Catholic good deeds out of sight of the public, showed me the case was hopeless. To a descendant of Huguenots, such total darkness of conscience on the morality of opinion is difficult to believe in when it is before one’s very eyes.”

Miss Martineau is right. The darkness of conscience, the total inability to act on a moral basis, the total hypocrisy of what is known to Britons alone as "British Fair Play" is a mystery. It proves the corruption of human nature by Protestantism and that standards of honor and decency are lower among socalled respectable Britons than among Hottentots and Kaffirs. We have here in this very town of Dunedin a thinly veiled anonymous writer who has been detected in actual forgery of quotations from standard books on history which he -'manipulated" with a view to blackening Catholics and Irishmen in the eyes of their neighbors. And that, dear readers, is British Fair Play as interpreted by Protestant guides of the people. God help us ! Ireland and America There is talk nowadays of a grand entente between the people of the United States and the British Empire —between what is so wrongly called the sea-divided branches of the Anglo-Saxon family. Be it, however, remembered that so long as England continues to play the tyrant and the hypocrite towards Ireland there never can be unity between the States and the Empire. England never learns a lesson. Her coarse bard sang in his barrack-room manner that she had learned "a hell of a lesson" after being thrashed and defeated time and again by a little band of Boers who fought for their own land against British rapacity and despotism. But we have only to recall the records, of the English (as distinct from the Colonial and Celtic) regiments in this war to know how little the lesson profited, and the bungling of the Lloyd George-Carson-Harmsworth gang was quite on a level with that of. the men who sent Buller to his defeat, because they would not listen to the expert opinion, of the only man who was capable of advising them. England is anxious for union with America. England has but to. look back and learn why that ursirvT! t>.«*> ~~-i- K—« 14 J i,„« j _ u.. v "" u u " ia " ii«*o UUU UOCII irauiacu ugmfc uuw,. ixuix Wily

r> . * 55>. it can never become/ a reality as long as a small nation is tortured and ;V plundered in the interests of a horde of Orange ruffians. Envoy after-envoy in the past has found his schemes checkmated and foiled by Irish influence at Washington. British diplomacy has struggled in vain for a-footing on the land to T which British tyranny drove the Irish exiles in sorrow 1 and suffering. Shane Leslie tells us that; -

“The important convention agreed upon by*Reverdy Johnson and Lord Clarendon was thrown out of the Senate. Bancroft in his Life of Seward clearly traces this to its source. ‘The Fenian movement had increased the strong public sentiment in favor of waiting for an opportunity to retaliate. This was such an opportunity.’ The play and counter-play of Irish sentiment in American politics became more and more marked. Each President had to deal with it. President Johnson was much at a loss what to do with the Fenian raiders of Canada. The Government could only let them down as gently as possible without offending England. President Grant was much embarrassed by the Irish mission to the American centenary under Parnell, who refused to bo introduced by the British Ambassador. We find Alexander Sullivan interviewing President Arthur on Irish emigration, and causing diplomatic action thereby which Parnell characterised as ‘the best slap England had from America since the war of 1812.’ Sackville-West, whose every move was watched and foiled by an intensely active Fenian party, took refuge, during the time of the Phoenix Park executions on the Presidential yacht ; and indirectly he owed his abrupt dismissal to the force of Irish opinion. An indiscreet letter from his pen at election-time gave the Irish Democrats a distinct breach of etiquette to work upon, and Cleveland handed Sackville West his papers. It was an act of unprecedented rigor, but the Irish-Americans were strong enough to insist. The Times laid it to Boyle O’Reilly’s credit.” Again, inspired by Irish opinion, Cleveland defied Salisbury in the nineties. Michael Davitt was the man who brought about the defeat of the Anglo-American Treaty of 1897. And apropos of that incident we remember that Chamberlain interviewed Archbishop Ireland on its possibilities and that the answer he got was : “It cannot be, Mr. Chamberlain. Ireland —not the man, but the nationblocks the way.” Regarding Davitt’s victory, Sheehy-Skeffington, whom England has since killed, wrote: “It was felt that the occasion was one in which no opportunity ought to be lost of showing England that she really had something substantial to gain from the freedom and friendship of Ireland, apart from theintrinsic value of having a contented nation at her side. It was time to teach the world that Irishmen in the United States were true to their motherland. So he crossed to the States, and in a brief campaign in the proper quarters secured that the Anglo-American Treaty which was expected to be the germ of a formal alliance should be rejected by the United States Senate through Irish influence in that body.” It was a magnificent punishment for the Coercion Acts. And it was by no means the last time that Ireland hit back hard through America when England’s interests were at stake. The exiles of Erin who were driven forth from their own land by British cruelty and robbery did not forget, and they never will forget until the last farthing of the old debt is payed in full. Again and again Irish emigrants : and their children have turned the scale against England in America. They have done so in the past, they are doing so to-day, and will continue to use their powerful influence against the Empire Avhich persecuted them and plundered them for centuries. England never learns. England is now blinder than ever to her best interests. For the sake of the descendants of the “scum of the earth” who were planted on Irish land, she is still sowing the seeds of hatred for herself in the American Continent. And it is not hard to forecast that in future, should Englishpoliticians persist in the policy of Prussianism towards Ireland, a greater and more powerful force than ever will boy-A to be reckoned with in the (United States.

■; 5 ■,'- • • ,-. . ————^—— I i -——~ ' ~ There is talk of an alliance between the German millions and j the ? Irish ',in f America.- Vcltl does riot need great perspicuity to realise what, power can -be wielded by 40,000,000 people who make common cause "against the one nation in the world to-day that 1 strives i to perpetuate the, old traditions of barbarity and feudalism. Between friendship and enmity with Ireland it is more than probable that English statesmen with their traditional sapidity will choose enmity. Ireland is willing to forgive and forget, but the price of forgiveness must be the restitution of her rights. England has all to gain by a policy of honesty and all to lose by continuing, on her ancient path of oppression. The winning of America is one of the cherished schemes of English diplomacy, but America will never be won except by.ways of justice and - righteousness towards Ireland. In spite of past mistakes and sharp disappointments, England has yet to learn her lesson. Will she ever learn it? Will she ever do justice to Ireland for the sake of Justice, or will Ireland's victory be attained by means that will still leavO;,the -old leaven of hatred unpurged ?-«| Just as we cannot'doubt that Ireland will win''"-her?-.freedom, : we cannot doubt that exactly how she wins it is a very important question for England at present.