CHAPTER XI

THE COMING OF SINN FEIN

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N the surface of events the downfall of Parnell

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looked more tragic, more ruinous, than any episode of two centuries. It tore the nation in two: it ended a great militant's career.

Parnell in one sense was the best general Ireland had ever had. When he entered the house of commons he found the Irish parliamentarians like sheep without a shepherd, contemptuously patronized by British Tories and mildly tolerated by Liberals. Parnell contrived in a few years to get rid of those Irish members who took their tone not from Ireland but from the house of commons, feeling they were members of a gentlemanly club in which their chief duty was to conciliate their Tory neighbors. He recruited earnest men who saw themselves as the representatives of a nation perhaps the most desolate and surely the most outraged in northern Europe. This new party, organized as shock troops under a strict command, stamped the

Irish cause and Parnell's personality into British political consciousness. Anxious apprehension sup

planted the old tolerant, patronizing attitude. Parnell aroused class superstition and race prejudice, he was feared and hated, but he forced British Liberalism to make the Irish cause its own, and he drove the Tories into competition for his support. Even when he relaxed his agitation and followed the Liberals in their conduct of the fight, he remained the most formidable figure in British politics.

With the fall of Parnell this instantly changed. The constitutional movement passed from Ireland to Britain, from nationalism to Liberalism, from insistence to compromise, from life to death. Gladstone did not relax. In 1893 he re-introduced the Home Rule bill and fought for it with supreme skill, but his greatest efforts could not procure a British majority inside the commons. The Irish vote alone brought the bill to the house of lords: there it was dismissed with disdain.

When Gladstone retired in 1894 the Irish cause lost its position even in the Liberal program. The gallantry of English sympathizers like Wilfrid Scawen Blunt had done little to alter the leaden indifference of Britain. But this feebleness of Liberalism was the negative side

of the Parnell tragedy. The positive side was felt in Ireland itself, where counsel was divided and passion was fierce and barren.

At no period, perhaps, had the faults and pitiful weaknesses of human character been more revealed than in this day of Parnellism: the politicians running here and there looking for the best bargain, the newspapers full of windy preachments, the priests and the bishops influencing the people in outrageous partisanship, the whole country a seething mass of prejudice, anger, savage insult, personal abuse, and terrorism, with England enjoying the spectacle and feeding the flame. Such rancorous words were spoken in this period, and so little charity was preserved even by the heroes of the occasion, that sane public life seemed an impossibility for the future. It was, without bloodshed, a period of civil war.

So, to all appearances, the fall of Parnell was a dark calamity. It cost Ireland its leader, it created a mania of controversy, revealing above everything else the lack of trained political mind.

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But this wildness of Parnellite and anti-Parnellite was not fatal to Ireland. In its destructive eruption

the country was to purge itself of its preoccupation with parliament. It was to turn away from Westminster and to regain its national spirit.

For conflict with England was, in the end, an accident and interruption of Irish life. Since 1800 politics had indeed been compulsive. The Penal Laws had stripped the native Irish of property and power in the eighteenth century. The rising of '98 had been a convulsion due to the return of native vitality. Brought handcuffed into the Union, the Irish people had been forced to seek whatever practical social amelioration was possible. The people were without Catholic representatives even in the imperial parliament. They were, as observers like Sir Walter Scott had testified, the most miserable of serfs. They had no capital, no economic or political control, no strength even to throw off so unjust an exaction as the tithe. Poverty, the result of bad land tenure, was the first fact of Irish life. It swamped Ireland like a Holland with the dykes open. It kept the land in a sub-national condition. Until the nineties a few thousand landlords lived luxuriously but most of them really lived meanly. A few thousand merchants and liquor-dealers had good bank-accounts and fat investments (outside the country), but most of the small traders and hun

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dreds of the publicans were submerged in dingy, melancholy, poverty-stricken routine. The bishops received many large contributions from generous and pious Catholics. New cathedrals and numerous churches, one or two of them beautiful, replaced the poor chapels which had served Ireland during its harassed centuries. But outside Northeast Ulster, which was independent of agriculture, Ireland was a land the most wretched and forlorn in northern Europe. Two million of the people were practically in servitude still. Two things were needed to change this abnormal social state-one, to get rid of landlordism; the other, to move from agrarian to agricultural reform. Only by new laws could land tenure be corrected; and this necessity drove Ireland to Westminster.

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Driven to Westminster in the fight against landlordism, the native Irish naturally kept their eyes on Westminster so long as Parnell was battling for home rule. But home rule was of little or no interest to Ireland, regarded simply as a measure of autonomy. It was not discussed in Ireland in its details as an intricate piece of legislation. It was of interest and concern only as a symbol of nationalism; and when