The Sacred Egoism of Sinn FéinBoyd, Ernest Augustus
History
The Sacred Egoism of Sinn Féin
Boyd, Ernest Augustus
Ireland -- Politics and government -- 1910-1921; Sinn Fein
"Do not ask the author if he is Catholic, Liberal, or Republican, do
not ask what government he would give to Ireland. He hardly knows. He
does know that he hates England with all the forces of his soul, and
that he is ready to rebel against her on every occasion, and that
there is no party of which he is not prepared to declare himself the
defender, provided that England perish: French _sans-culottes_,
Austrian aristocrats, Russian despotism please him in turn. The
revolution of February drove him to revolt; but do not think that he
was consistent with himself, and that he was much afflicted by the
death of the Republic! Of all succeeding events he asks but one
thing; will they or will they not hurt England? Do they contain an
occasion for the humiliation of Carthage? He applauds Mazzini, the
enemy of Catholicism; likewise he would applaud an Ultramontane
Bishop of Ireland blessing the standards of a Celtic insurrection.
He salutes the French Republic with hope; but when on the pontoons of
Bermuda he learns of Louis Napoleon's election to the Presidency, he
gives a great shout of joy; on his arrival in America he learns the
news from the east, and he echoes the warlike trumpets of the Tsar
which resound on the Danube. In each of these events he hears the
good news: England's agony!"
European history moves on, but Ireland's hymn of hate is still unaltered,
and to its accompaniment Sinn Fein adapts the incidents, great and
trivial, which mark the progress of a conflict that is changing the world.
Cut off from the war by intellectual and geographical barriers, Ireland
is, therefore, not exactly the most fruitful ground in which to sow the
ideas which have aroused to a frenzy all but a few disillusioned neutrals.
The pathetic dreams of Liberal forward-lookers, the pious platitudes of
Dr. Woodrow Wilson, and the prize-fighting rhetoric of embattled
bureaucrats and newspapermen fall alike upon deaf Irish ears, which listen
only for the rending and cracking of an abhorred political system. To
speak of the sufferings of Belgians, Poles, and Serbians is merely to
suggest analogies from Irish history; the reaction to the stimulus of
atrocity-mongering is unexpected. Even the Russian revolution aroused only
a passive, almost academic interest, until Lenin and Trotsky referred
specifically to the question of Irish freedom. Then messages of
congratulation to the Bolsheviki were sent from those who had been openly
supporting Count Czernin in his amazing debate with the representatives of
the first Social Democracy to engage in diplomatic _pourparlers_ with a
foreign power. But the capitalist press had scarcely published its
execration of Irish "Bolshevism," when the Ukrainian peace was joyously
greeted by Sinn Fein spokesmen, who were unperturbed in their unholy
innocence of international capitalism, by the discreditable circumstances
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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