Carroll Quigley - Tragedy and Hope - A History of the World in Our Time

The chief opposition arose from the fact that Protestant Ulster (Northern Ireland) would be submerged in an overwhelmingly Catholic Ireland. The Ulster opposition, led by Sir Edward (later Lord) Carson, organized a private army, armed it with guns smuggled from Germany, and prepared to seize control of Belfast at a signal from London. Carson was on his way to the telegraph station to send this signal in 1914 when he received a message from the prime minister that war was about to break out with Germany. Accordingly, the Ulster revolt was canceled and the Home Rule Act was suspended until six months after the peace with Germany. As a consequence the revolt with German arms in Ireland was made by the Irish Nationalists in 1916, instead of by their Ulster opponents in 1914. This so-called Easter Revolt of 1916 was crushed and its leaders executed, but discontent continued to simmer in Ireland, with violence only slightly below the surface.

In the parliamentary election of 1918, Ireland elected 6 Nationalists (who wanted Home Rule for all Ireland), 73 Sinn Fein (who wanted an Irish Republic free from England), and 23 Unionists (who wanted to remain part of Britain). Instead of going to Westminster, the Sinn Fein organized their own Parliament in Dublin. Efforts to arrest its members led to open civil war. This was a struggle of assassination, treachery, and reprisal, fought out in back alleys and on moonlit fields. Sixty thousand British troops could not maintain order. Thousands of lives were lost, with brutal inhumanity on both sides, and property damage rose to ^50 million in value.

Lionel Curtis, who helped edit The Round Table in 1919-1921, advocated in the March 1920 issue that Northern Ireland and Southern Ireland be separated and each given Home Rule as autonomous parts of Great Britain. This was enacted into law eight months later as the Government of Ireland Act of 1920, but was rejected by the Irish Republicans led by Eamon de Valera. The civil war continued. The Round Table group worked valiantly to stop the extremists on both sides, but with only moderate success. Amery’s brother-in-law, Hamar (Lord) Greenwood, was appointed chief secretary for Ireland, the last incumbent of that post, while Curtis was appointed adviser on Irish affairs to the Colonial Office (which was headed by Milner and Amery). The Times and The Round Table condemned British repression in Ireland, the latter saying, “If the British Commonwealth can only be preserved by such means, it would become a negation of the principle for which it has stood.” But British violence could not be curtailed until Irish violence could be curtailed. One of the chief leaders of the Irish Republicans was Erskine Childers, an old schoolboy friend of Curtis who had been with him in South Africa, but nothing could be done through him, since he had become fanatically anti-British. Accordingly, Smuts was called in. He wrote a conciliatory speech for King George to deliver at the opening of the Ulster Parliament, and made a secret visit to the rebel hiding place in Ireland to try to persuade the Irish Republican leaders to be reasonable. He contrasted the insecurity of the Transvaal Republic before 1895 with its happy condition under dominion status since 1910, saying: “Make no mistake about it, you have more privilege, more power, more peace, more security in such a sisterhood of equal nations than in a small, nervous republic having all the time to rely on the good will and perhaps the assistance of foreigners. What sort of independence do you call that?”

Smuts arranged an armistice and a conference to negotiate a settlement. From this conference, at which Curtis was secretary, came the Articles of Agreement of December, 1921, which gave Southern Ireland dominion status as the Irish Free State, Northern Ireland continuing under the Act of 1920. The boundary line between the two countries was drawn by a committee of three of which the British member (and chairman) was Richard Feetham of Milner’s Kindergarten and the Round Table group, later Supreme Court judge in South Africa.

De Valera’s Irish Republicans refused to accept the settlement, and went into insurrection, this time against the moderate Irish leaders, Arthur Griffith and Michael Collins. Collins was assassinated, and Griffith died, exhausted by the strain, but the Irish people themselves were now tired of turmoil. De Valera’s forces were driven underground and were defeated in the election of 1922. When De Valera’s party, the Fianna Fail, did win an election in 1932 and he became President of Ireland, he abolished the oath of loyalty to the king and the office of governor-general, ended annual payments on seized English lands and appeals to the Privy Council, engaged in a bitter tariff war with Britain, and continued to demand the annexation of Ulster. One of the last links with Britain was ended in 1938, when the British naval bases in Eire were turned over to the Irish, to the great benefit of German submarines in 1939-1945.

The Far East to World War I

THE COLLAPSE OF CHINA TO 1920

The destruction of traditional Chinese culture under the impact of Western Civilization was considerably later than the similar destruction of Indian culture by Europeans. This delay arose from the fact that European pressure on India was applied fairly steadily from the early sixteenth century, while in the Far East, in Japan even more completely than in China, this pressure was relaxed from the early seventeenth century for almost two hundred years, to 1794 in the case of China and to 1854 in the case of Japan. As a result, we can see the process by which European culture was able to destroy the traditional native cultures of Asia more clearly in China than almost anywhere else.

The traditional culture of China, as elsewhere in Asia, consisted of a military and bureaucratic hierarchy superimposed on a great mass of hardworking peasantry. It is customary, in studying this subject, to divide this hierarchy into three levels. Politically, these three levels consisted of the imperial authority at the top, an enormous hierarchy of imperial and provincial officials in the middle, and the myriad of semi-patriarchal, semi-democratic local villages at the bottom. Socially, this hierarchy was similarly divided into the ruling class, the gentry, and the peasants. And, economically, there was a parallel division, the uppermost group deriving its incomes as tribute and taxes from its possession of military and political power, while the middle group derived its incomes from economic sources, as interest on loans, rents from lands, and the profits of commercial enterprise, as well as from the salaries, graft, and other emoluments arising from his middle group’s control of the bureaucracy. At the bottom the peasantry, which was the only really productive group in the society, derived its incomes from the sweat of its collective brows, and had to survive on what was left to it after a substantial fraction of its product had gone to the two higher groups in the form of rents, taxes, interest, customary bribes (called “squeeze”), and excessive profits on such purchased “necessities” of life as salt, iron, or opium.

Although the peasants were clearly an exploited group in the traditional society of China, this exploitation was impersonal and traditional and thus more easily borne than if it had been personal or arbitrary. In the course of time, a workable system of customary relationships had come into existence among the three levels of society. Each group knew its established relationships with the others, and used those relationships to avoid any sudden or excessive pressures which might disrupt the established patterns of the society. The political and military force of the imperial regime rarely impinged directly on the peasantry, since the bureaucracy intervened between them as a protecting buffer. This buffer followed a pattern of deliberate amorphous inefficiency so that the military and political force from above had been diffused, dispersed, and blunted by the time it reached down to the peasant villages. The bureaucracy followed this pattern because it recognized that the peasantry was the source of its incomes, and it had no desire to create such discontent as would jeopardize the productive process or the payments of rents, taxes, and interest on which it lived. Furthermore, the inefficiency of the system was both customary and deliberate, since it allowed a large portion of the wealth which was being drained from the peasantry to be diverted and diffused among the middle class of gentry before the remnants of it reached the imperial group at the top.