Art. 14.-SINN FEIN.

I.-Sinn Fein and Germany.

THIS article deals only with the period before the war, during which the Sinn Fein movement originated and became allied with Germany, and its home and foreign policy was formulated. The Irish rebellion of Easter week 1916, and the recent revelation by the United States Government of the plots in America, have given the public some insight into the dangerous connexion between Sinn Fein and Germany. The meaning and ultimate aim of the insurrectionary leaders in Ireland, when they refer in their speeches and resolutions to the Peace Congress and the Freedom of the Seas,' may perhaps be gathered from the following pages.

During the first six months of 1904, a series of articles on the Resurrection of Hungary' appeared in the United Irishman.' The writer was Arthur Griffith, the creator of the policy of Sinn Fein ('Ourselves Alone'). His object, as he stated in the preface to his book,t was

'to point out to his compatriots that the alternative of armed resistance to the foreign Government of Ireland is not acquiescence in usurpation, tyranny and fraud. . . . A century ago in Hungary a poet startled his countrymen by shouting in their ears, "Turn your eyes from Vienna or you perish." The voice of Josef Karman disturbed the nation, but the nation did not apprehend. Vienna remained its political centre until fifty years later. The convincing tongue of Louis Kossuth cried up and down the land: "Only on the soil of a nation can a nation's salvation be worked out."

'Through a generation of strife and sorrow, the people of Hungary held by Kossuth's dictum and triumphed gloriously. The despised, oppressed and forgotten province of Austria is to-day the free, prosperous and renowned Kingdom of Hungary.... Hungary is a nation. She has become so because she turned her back on Vienna. Sixty years ago Hungary realised that the political centre of the nation must be within the nation. When Ireland realises this obvious truth and turns her back on London, the parallel may be

A weekly paper first published in Dublin in 1899. It claimed to be the 'pioneer organ of Irish-Ireland.'

The Resurrection of Hungary.' Dublin: Duffy, 1904.

completed. It failed only when two generations back Hungary took the road of principle, and Ireland the path of compromise and expediency.'

The Resurrection of Hungary' had an enormous circulation, and the preface to the second edition claimed that no book published in Ireland within living memory had been so widely read.' This was the genesis of Sinn Fein. In the forefront of the pamphlet were the words of Sydney Smith: 'It is impossible to think of the affairs of Ireland without being forcibly struck with the parallel of Hungary'; and in a hundred pages was compressed a vivid sketch of the history of the Hungarian constitutional struggle against Austria from 1849 to 1867, when, after Sadowa, the emancipation of Hungary was achieved and the Emperor Francis Joseph was crowned King at Pesth.

'Hungary won her independence under Déak (Griffith urged) by refusing to send members to the Imperial Parliament at Vienna or to admit any right in that Parliament to legislate for her. She demanded absolute territorial and political integrity, and declined to regard the Emperor of Austria as King of Hungary or to regard Austria as other than her enemy until these things were granted.'

It was no consideration of justice, he wrote, that moved Beust to settle the Hungarian question.

'The sole consideration that moved him was that, if the Hungarian question was not settled to the liking of the Hungarians, the Hungarians would settle it themselves by disrupting the Empire. . . . Twenty years later, Beust frankly stated the position. Austria had been beaten after a short but most disastrous war; Prussia had forbidden her any more interference in German affairs; the country was almost in a state of latent revolution; and an outbreak in Hungary, promoted by foreign agents and foreign gold with Klapka doing Bismarck's bidding, was in the highest degree probable, and would, had it occurred, have led to the almost overwhelming disaster. Knowing this he felt bound to accede to the views of the Déak party.'

It seemed clear to Griffith that, as the ancient Hungarian constitution was revived, so could Irish independence again be won, as acknowledged in the English Renunciation Act of 1782, which enacted that

'the right claimed by the people of Ireland to be bound only by laws enacted by His Majesty and the Parliament of that Kingdom in all cases whatever shall be and is hereby declared to be established and ascertained for ever, and shall at no time, hereafter, be questioned or questionable.'

'One strong able honest man (said Griffith) in Ireland in 1867, after the failure of the Fenian insurrection, apprehending the significance of the coronation of Francis Joseph at Pesth, could have rallied and led the country to victory. Ireland did not produce him.. Ireland produced Isaac Butt, the apostle of compromise, who, by himself and his successors, has led the country to the brink of destruction. . . . The Act of Union was never valid. . . . The members of the Irish Parliament had no legal powers to terminate the existence of that Parliament.'

To support this contention Griffith proclaimed that the leaders of the Irish Bar, Saurin, Plunkett, Ponsonby, Ball, Bushe, Curran, Burrowes, Moore, Fitzgerald and a hundred others, pointed out the lesson at the time. The fact that England had ignored this constitutional right, and that Ireland had forgotten it, did not affect it in the least. Ireland, in regard to the settlement of 1783, is precisely in the position of Hungary in regard to the Constitution of 1848. Austria illegally suspended that Constitution and declared it abolished. Déak stood for eighteen years insisting that it was not abolished, since it could not be abolished save with the consent of the whole people of Hungary. He refused all compromise and ignored the laws passed for Hungary in defiance of her Constitution. It was inevitable that such an attitude must baffle Austria or any other nation towards which it was assumed, and leave her no alternative to unconditional surrender except government by the sword.

Protesting against the policy of the Irish Parliamentary party, Griffith quoted the adverse criticism which Beust, who arranged the Ausgleich with Hungary, passed on Gladstone's Home Rule Bill of 1886. Beust had pointed out that the Hungarian Parliament had been rendered coordinate with the Austrian Parliament, and that Hungary was thus rendered absolute mistress of her own affairs, while her status in international law was that of a sovereign state. Gladstone's Bill, on the other hand, proposed to erect a legislature in Dublin, Vol. 229.-No. 454.

R

subordinate to the Parliament of London, excluded from having any voice in questions of war and peace, foreign affairs, the army and navy, international treaties, customs, currency, and other prerogatives of a nation.

'It was an opera-bouffe Parliament (wrote Griffith); and, in return for the farcical thing Ireland was to resign for ever her status as a separate nationality and become a province of the Empire.'

Beust, in pursuing the analogy between the Irish and Hungarian questions, admitted that Austria never would have conceded Hungary's demand had Hungary not made it impossible for her to refuse it by the policy she adopted and persisted in for eighteen years. England would similarly never concede Ireland's demands unless Ireland made it impossible not to concede them.

ance.

Griffith's policy was to be a policy of passive resistThe attendance of Irish Members at Westminster should cease, as this proceeding recognised the competency of the British Parliament to make laws to bind Ireland. A General Council should be formed in Ireland from the Irish representatives; Ireland should set up a consular agency of her own, as Hungary did, to secure a profitable market for Irish goods abroad; the British Civil Courts' in Ireland should find their 'supersession by the institution of Voluntary Arbitration Courts' such as the Young Irelanders projected and the Hungarians established; the Irish abroad, especially in America, would form a valuable auxiliary both by rendering aid to Irish industrial enterprises and by obstructing and thwarting the designs of British foreign policy, as the Hungarian exiles did from 1849 to 1867.

'It would of course be a principal duty to keep Irishmen out of the ranks of the British armed forces. In Hungary the County Councils saw so effectively to this, that the Austrian army was rendered ineffective, and went to pieces in seven days before the Prussians.'

In conclusion, he wrote:

'We have merely roughly indicated how the policy which made Hungary what it is to-day may be applied to Ireland. There is no doubt of the readiness of the people to follow. The people of Ireland are not less patriotic and not less intelligent than the people of Hungary. Three-fourths of

their misfortunes are traceable to their pusillanimous, incompetent and sometimes corrupt leaders. An Irish Déak would have found in Ireland a support as loyal and as strong as Déak found in Hungary. But an Irish Déak never appeared, and shallow rhetoricians imposed themselves on the people in his stead.'

Dealing with the question of the Crown, he said:

'We hold that the subsistence of the connexion between this country and Great Britain in any form is not for our country's good, but we recognise the existence of a large mass of our countrymen who believe, as Déak believed in the case of Austria and Hungary, that, provided the countries retain each their independence and exist coequal in power, the rule of a common Sovereign is admissible. With men of such views Nationalists are cordially prepared to cooperate, as the followers of Kossuth's cooperated with Déak. It involves no abandonment of principle on the part of those who desire to see Ireland a sovereign independent state. But an alliance or cooperation with men who are willing to accept a statutory and emasculated legislature as a "settlement of the Irish Question" would be an abandonment of the principles of Irish Nationalism, and can never be entertained by any Irish Nationalist.'

This domestic policy of Sinn Fein was publicly formulated in the following terms at its first convention held at the Rotunda, Dublin, on Nov. 28, 1905:

'National self-development on the lines successfully adopted by the Hungarians in their struggle with Austria by a policy relying on "Sinn Fein" (Ourselves Alone). To give the strongest adhesion to the Gaelic and Industrial Revival Movements and to all movements originating from within Ireland instinct with national tradition and not looking outside Ireland for the accomplishment of their aims; and to carry this policy into effect by utilising to the utmost the powers of all representative bodies, and by the recognition of an Assembly, meeting in Dublin, and composed of delegates from such bodies and other popularly elected representatives, as the sole authority entitled to national obedience.'

At the inaugural meeting the chairman, Edward Martyn, stated that

'the most important of all matters was the anti-enlisting

* See note (1) on p. 268.