tenant, as he was motoring from Ashtown station to the vice-
regal lodge. Happily none of the bombs and shots discharged
at the viceregal party took effect; but one of the assailants,
a youth named Michael Savage, was killed. On the aznd the
offices of the Irish Independent were raided and the machinery
smashed, by masked men, because the editor had described
this young man as " a would-be assassin." Murders, assaults,
highway robberies, burnings, attempts to wreck trains such
was the situation in Ireland when, on the eve of the close of
the parliamentary session, the Chief Secretary, Mr. Ian Mac-
pherson, and Mr. Lloyd George, introduced the new Government
of Ireland bill.
This measure proposed to set up in Ireland two parliaments, one
for the six counties of N.E. Ulster, another for the rest of Ireland.
The unity of Ireland was to be preserved by a Council
/ h7/" e ^ I re ' an d, consisting of members nominated by the injn ' two parliaments, " with a view to the eventual establish- ment of a parliament for the whole of Ireland, and to bringing about harmonious action between the parliaments and governments of Southern Ireland and Northern Ireland, and to the promotion of mutual intercourse and uniformity in relation to matters affecting, the whole of Ireland, and to providing for the administration of services which the two parliaments mutually agree should be administered uniformly throughout the whole of Ireland." It was proposed, under Sec. 3, that the two parliaments, by identical Acts agreed to by an absolute majority of the House of Commons of each parliament, should have power to establish, in lieu of the Council, a parliament for the whole of Ireland. Imperial services army, navy, foreign relations, etc. were reserved to the Imperial Parliament; but certain services, e.g. the post-office, were to be transferred if and when the two parliaments should agree to merge into one, while, in this event, the vexed question of customs and excise was to be settled by agreement between the Irish and Imperial Parliaments. The contribution of Ireland to Imperial expenditure was provisionally fixed at 18,000,000 per annum.
The reception met with in Ireland by this attempt to reconcile the principles of the self-determination of Ireland with that of the self-determination of Ulster and the in- . terests of Great Britain and the Empire was not encouraging. The Sinn Feiners and Nationalists generally refused to have anything to say to a scheme which, in view of the temper of Ulster, seemed to make the partition of Ireland permanent, and certainly fell very short of the ideal of national independence. The Unionists in the South, and especially those of the three Ulster counties excluded from the northern parliamentary area, denounced the bill as a betrayal of their interests, since it left the Protestants elsewhere than in the N.E. in a hopeless minority; while the Roman Catholic hierarchy equally denounced " an impossible scheme " which subjected the Catholics of the North to a Protestant parliament. Only the Ulstermen accepted the settlement, not because they liked it, but because they saw in it the only alternative to the automatic coming into force of the Home Rule Act of 1914. l
Even more immediately unhappy was the effort of the Govern- ment to clear the way for Home Rule by removing the deep-seated grievance of the Irish school-teachers, which had been Education one ^ the strongest recruiting agents of Sinn Fein. BW. The teachers had for long past been grossly under-
paid; they were at the mercy of their clerical school managers; and neither of these wrongs could be righted without introducing into Ireland the principle of popular control which had long been established in Great Britain. Two specially appointed viceregal commissions had recently reported on the subject, and their reports had been signed unanimously by the Irish Roman Catholic representatives. When, therefore, on Nov. 24 Mr. Ian Macpherson, the Chief Secretary, introduced in the House of Commons an Education bill embodying the recommendations of the reports, he did so with some confidence that it would be welcomed in Ireland. By the school-teachers
1 Resolution of the Ulster Unionist Council. The Times, March 1 1 1920. " The decisions of the Council that day had been momentous. They would take no responsibility for the Home Rule bill. ... It was all very well to say ' Why don't you go on fighting as you did before?' What were they to fight for? Could they fight for more than the freeing of Ulster from a Home Rule Parliament in Dublin? If the bill passed, they had won, and won without fighting." Sir Edward Carson to the Ulster Unionist Labour Association, ib.
it was indeed welcomed; but the hierarchy at once protested against a measure which threatened their autocratic control of the schools, their protest was supported by the Council of the (Catholic) National University, and after nearly a year of abortive effort the bill was shelved.
One great remedial measure had thus broken down once more on the opposition of the Irish hierarchy ; another, the Labour- ers' (Ireland) Act, passed unnoticed in the general turmoil. The situation, indeed, was rapidly pass- The ing beyond the stage when the Government could campaign. hope to meet it by a policy of alternate " concilia- tion " and " coercion." Hitherto the campaign of murder and of intimidation generally had been sporadic and to a certain extent spontaneous. Early in 1920 it received a definite or- ganization, which was developed during the year with such thoroughness that there was scarce a house in Ireland where the ordinary citizen felt safe from the activities of Sinn Fein spies and agents. To speak with disapproval of the policy of murder was to risk incurring a sentence at least of " banishment," con- veyed by anonymous letter; and, since the police were powerless to give effective protection, the sentence had to be obeyed. Death was the penalty for disobeying the orders of the " Repub- lic " and the executive of this Republic was a body shrouded in mystery. " Executions " of " traitors," or " informers," or of those who dared continue in the service of the " foreign " Government, were carried out ruthlessly in broad daylight, in the crowded streets of cities, in the smoking-rooms of clubs, in the bar-rooms and bedrooms of hotels, and no one knew by whom the sentences were passed nor what process of trial, if any, was used in arriving at them. The murders were, with a few exceptions, carried out with perfect impunity; for such was the terror that no one dared interfere or come forward as a witness, 2 and in the few cases where arrests were effected the Government had generally to depend on the evidence of soldiers and police, if any happened to have been present.
It is impossible here even to outline the terrible tale of crime which stains the annals of Ireland during 1920, the most bloody since the mutual slaughter of 1798. Most of the victims were of humble rank, usually policemen and soldiers, done to death on the instructions issued towards the close of 1919 3 by Sinn Fein or the hidden force of the old Irish Republican Brotherhood masquerading under its name. The comparative numbers tell their own tale. From May i to Dec. 31 1919 1 8 policemen had been murdered in Ireland; the number from Jan. i to Dec. 18 1920 was 176 killed and 251 wounded. 4 From time to time there were more conspicuous victims. On March 20 the Lord Mayor of Cork, Alderman MacCurtain, was done to death in his own house by a band of masked men. The affair was surrounded with mystery, for the victim was a prom- inent Sinn Feiner. The coroner's jury, on April 18, found that the murder had been committed by the R.I.C., acting under the directions of the Government, and brought in a verdict of wilful murder against Mr. Lloyd George, Lord French, Mr. Ian Macpherson, Acting Inspector-Gen. Smith, R.I.C., and District-Inspector Swanzy; 6 on the 24th the Cork Corporation resolved to call on the Executive of the Irish Republic to bring this verdict to the notice of foreign Governments which showed a characteristic lack of the sense of humour. It was very generally believed, however, that the Lord Mayor, who had expressed strong disapproval of the murder campaign, was " executed " as an object-lesson to other weak-kneed supporters of the cause. The same fate was, later, to fall upon the Mayor and Ex-Mayor of Limerick, who, though Sinn Feiners, had used their local influence in favour of peace and order. Of other crimes, three of outstanding atrocity need mention. On March 27 Mr. Alan Bell, an experienced resident magistrate who had
2 i.e. for the prosecution. Witnesses for the defence, to prove an alibi, could always be found in abundance.
3 The instructions to murder police and soldiers were published in the Belfast Newsletter (Jan. 2 1920).
4 In addition 54 soldiers were killed and Il8 wounded. 6 Murdered later at Lisburn.
