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
If only the Hun had served the Bible as he served Bernhardi, the Lord
would not have deserted him in his hour of need. In Ireland, however, the
devil of imperialism quoted the Scriptures to no purpose, for this is an
island, not only of Saints and Scholars, but also of theologians and
politicians, who proved equal to this ingenious conflict of moralities.
This alliance was particularly obnoxious to those who had engineered the
politico-religious Carsonade of North-East Ulster. Just as the Allied
governments have standardized the business of rescuing small
nationalities, so the dominant British statesmen have the exclusive right
to combine religion and politics. A Covenant of "loyalists," in full
Protestant regalia, organizing treason to the King and Parliament
recognized by them, is but an incident on the path to political preferment
and the honours of public life. A national pledge to resist the greatest
infamy one nation can inflict upon another becomes a Papist plot. An Irish
bishop is a sinister intruder only when he does not wear the shovel-hat
and apron of the Episcopalian minority.
In the greater Anglo-Saxondom across the seas, particularly in the
Wilsonian Republic, the spectacle of Irish freedom was most offensive. An
American critic once summed up the different characteristics of North and
South in the Civil War by saying: "The Southerner was an imitation of an
English gentleman, the Northerner was an imitation of an English cad." In
other words, society in the South was a shadowy reflection of the British
landed aristocracy, in the North, it followed the example of the
capitalist class. In terms of present day America this definition must be
modified to meet the change effected by the triumph of the North, and the
general disappearance of the old South. An American to-day is an English
Liberal ... only more so. He combines the anti-social commercialism of the
industrial early nineteenth century with the empty, verbal radicalism of
the Cocoa Press tear-squeezers. Needless to say he has shown, on the
whole, a more ferocious intolerance of minorities and individuals than any
other belligerent in the present war. His hatred is more bestial; his
patriotic zeal more inquisitorial. The slowly mounting tide of perverted
Puritan legislation has broken over America, swollen by the tributaries of
war lust, until the country is a vast wilderness of freak prohibitions
aimed at the destruction of freedom. In these circumstances it is not
surprising to find American journals occasionally protesting against the
excessive zeal of the Administration in suppressing opinions and harassing
individuals, because of pro-Irish sympathies which have been granted
expression even in England. The New York _Nation_, a respectable and
orthodox journal, written by and for intellectually anaemic college
professors, sighs in vain for such toleration in Irish affairs as that of
the _Manchester Guardian_. A striking tribute to the decadent
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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