Lenin paying close attention to events in Ireland as a Home Rill is passed (never to be implemented because of the ’emergency’ of the First World War) and the resulting Curragh Mutiny of British officers refusing to obey combined with Lord Carson’s protestant-supremacist call to arms, literally to prevent Home Rule. Two years later and the working class of Dublin would force the issue on Easter, 1916.

‘Home Rule for Ireland and the Ulster Crisis’ (1914) by V.I. Lenin from On Britain. International Publishers, New York. 1934.

HOME RULE FOR IRELAND

WHAT is now taking place in the English Parliament in connection with the Home Rule Bill is a matter of outstanding interest from the standpoint of class relationships and serves to explain national and agrarian problems.

For centuries England has enslaved Ireland and has reduced the Irish peasants to incredible torments of famine and extinction from starvation, has driven them from the land and has compelled them to leave their native country in hundreds and thousands and emigrate to America. In the beginning of the nineteenth century, Ireland had a population of five and a half millions, now the population is only four and one-third millions. Ireland has become depopulated. During the nineteenth century, more than five million Irish emigrated to America, and there are now more Irishmen in the United States than in Ireland.

The unparalleled destitution and sufferings of the Irish peasantry are an instructive example of the lengths to which the landlords and the liberal bourgeoisie of a “ruling” nation will go. England created its brilliant economic development and the “prosperity ” of its industry and commerce, to a large extent, by perpetrating exploits towards the Irish peasantry that recall those of the Russian lady serf owner, Saltychikha1

England “flourished,” Ireland decayed and remained an un- developed half wild, purely agrarian country, a land of poor tenant farmers. But, however much the “enlightened and Liberal ” bourgeoisie of England desired to perpetuate the enslavement of Ireland and its poverty, reform inexorably approached, the more so that the revolutionary struggle of the Irish people for liberty and land became more and more threatening. In 1861, the Irish revolutionary organisation of the Fenians was formed. The Irish emigrants in America rendered this organisation every assistance.

The year 1868, and the coming into power of the government of Gladstone, this hero of the liberal bourgeoisie and dull philistines, ushered in the era of Irish reform, an era which has dragged on to our time, i.e., little less than half a century. Oh, the wise statesmen of the liberal bourgeoisie know very well how to ” hasten slowly ” in the matter of reform!

Karl Marx, who had already lived in London for fifteen years, watched the struggle of the Irish with great interest and sympathy. On November 2, 1867, he wrote to Frederick Engels: “I tried to call forth this demonstration of the English workers in favour of Fenianism by all possible means…Formerly, I considered the separation of Ireland from England to be impossible. Now I think it is inevitable although after the separation there may come federation…” In a letter dated November 30th of the same year, Marx reverts to the same subject and says: “The question is, what should we advise the English workers to do? In my opinion they ought to make the Repeal of the Union” (the abolition of the union between Ireland and England) a point in their programme–briefly to restore the 1783 affair, only democratised and adapted to modern conditions. This is the only legal form of Irish liberation, and hence, the only possible form in which it can be admitted in the programme of an English party.” And Marx went on to show that Ireland stood in need of Home Rule and independence from England, of an agrarian revolution and of tariffs against England.

Such was the programme that Marx suggested to the English workers in the interests of Irish liberty, of the acceleration of social development and of the liberty of the English workers; because, the English workers cannot secure liberty as long as they keep (or even permit the keeping of) another nation in slavery.

But alas! Owing to a number of special historical causes, the British workers in the latter end of the nineteenth century found themselves dependent upon the Liberals and were imbued with the spirit of Liberal Labour politics. They were found, not at the head of nations and classes fighting for liberty, but at the tail of the contemptible lackeys of the moneybags, Messieurs the English

Liberals.

And the Liberals dragged out the liberation of Ireland for half a century, and have not even completed it yet!

It was only in the twentieth century that the Irish peasant began to be transformed from a tenant farmer into a free landowner. But Messieurs the Liberals imposed upon them the system of buying out the land at a “fair” price. They have paid, and will continue to pay for many years, millions and millions in tribute to the English land- lords as a reward to the latter for having plundered them for centuries and for having reduced them to constant famine. The English Liberal  bourgeoisie compelled the Irish peasants to thank the landlords for this, in hard cash.

Now a Home Rule Bill for Ireland is passing through the House of Commons. But in the North of Ireland there is a province called Ulster, which is inhabited partly by people who originally came from England, and who are Protestants, unlike the rest of the people of Ireland, who are Catholics. The English Conservatives, led by that Black Hundred landlord, that Purishkevich 38 i.e., Carson, have raised a frightful howl against Irish autonomy. That means, they say, subjecting Ulster to an alien people of an alien religion! Lord Carson threatened to rise in rebellion, and organised armed gangs of Black Hundreds 39 for this purpose.

This is an empty threat of course. The rebellion of a handful of hooligans is out of the question. Nor can there be any talk about the Irish Parliament (whose power would be determined by English law) “oppressing the Protestants.”

The whole point is that the landlord Black Hundreds want to frighten the Liberals.

And the Liberals are scared; they bow to the Black Hundreds, make concessions, offer to take a referendum in Ulster and to postpone the application of the reform to Ulster for six years!

The bargaining between the Liberals and the Black Hundreds continues. The reform can wait: it waited half a century–the Irish can wait a little longer; we cannot “offend” the landlords!

Of course, if the Liberals appealed to the people of England, to the proletariat, Carson’s Black Hundred gangs would melt away and disappear. The peaceful and complete liberation of Ireland would be secured.

But is it conceivable that the Liberal bourgeoisie will turn to the proletariat for aid against the landlords?

The Liberals in England, the lackeys of the moneybags, are capable only of cringing before the Carsons.

March 1914.

THE ULSTER CRISIS

IN number thirty-four of Put Pravdi (The Path of Truth), in describing the interesting events in Ireland, we referred to the policy of the English Liberals who permitted themselves to be scared by the Conservatives.

Since those lines were written, new events have occurred which have transformed the partial conflicts (between Liberals and Conservatives) over the question of Home Rule for Ireland into a constitutional crisis in England.

As the Conservatives have threatened a Protestant “rebellion” in Ulster against Home Rule for Ireland, the Liberal government moved a certain section of the troops in order to compel respect for the will of Parliament.

And what happened?

The generals and officers of the British Army mutinied!

They declared that they would not fight against Protestant Ulster, that that would run counter to their “patriotism” and that they would resign.

The Liberal government was completely overwhelmed by this rebellion of the landlords, who stood at the head of the army. The Liberals were accustomed to console themselves with constitutional illusions and phrases about law, and closed their eyes to the real relation of forces, to the class struggle. And this real relation of forces was and remains such that, owing to the cowardice of the bourgeoisie, a number of pre-bourgeois, mediæval, landlord institutions and privileges have been preserved.

In order to suppress the rebellion of the aristocratic officers, the Liberal government ought to have appealed to the people, to the masses, to the proletariat, but this is exactly what the “enlightened Liberal bourgeoisie were more afraid of than anything else in the world. And so in fact the government made concessions to the mutinous officers, persuaded them to withdraw their resignations and gave them written guarantees that troops would not be used against Ulster.

Every effort was made to conceal from the people the fact that such written guarantees had been given (March 21) and the Liberal leaders, Asquith, Morley and others, lied in the most incredible and shameless manner in their official declarations. However, the truth came to light. The fact that written promises were given to the officers has not been refuted. Apparently, ” pressure was brought to bear by the King. The resignation of the Minister Seely, the fact that Asquith himself took over the latter’s post, the re-election of Asquith, the circular to the troops calling upon them to respect the law all this was but sheer hypocrisy. The fact that the Liberals yielded to the landlords who had torn up the Constitution, remains a fact. Following on this a number of stormy scenes occurred in the English Parliament. The Conservatives poured well-deserved ridicule and scorn upon the government, while the Labour deputy, Ramsay MacDonald, one of the most moderate of the Liberal-Labour politicians, protested in the strongest manner possible against the conduct of the reactionaries.

“These people,” he said, are always ready to howl against strikers. But when it was a matter of Ulster, they refused to fulfil their duty because the Home Rule for Ireland Bill affected their class prejudices and interests.” (The landlords in Ireland are Englishmen and Home Rule for Ireland, which would mean Home Rule for the Irish bourgeoisie and peasants, threatens to affect somewhat the plundering appetites of the noble lords.) “These people,” continued Ramsay MacDonald, “think only of fighting against the workers, but when it is a matter of compelling the rich and the property owners to respect the law, they refuse to do their duty.”*

The significance of this revolt of the landlords against the “all-powerful” (as the Liberal blockheads, especially the Liberal scholars think and have said a million times) English Parliament is extraordinarily great. March 21, 1914, will mark a world-historical turning point, when the noble landlords of England, smashing the English Constitution and English law to atoms, gave an excellent lesson in class struggle.

This lesson emerged from the impossibility of blunting the acuteness of the antagonisms between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie of England by means of the half-hearted, hypocritical, sickening reformist policy of the Liberals. This lesson will not be lost upon the English labour movement; the working class will now very quickly shake off its philistine faith in the scrap of paper that is called English law and Constitution, which the English aristocrats have torn up before the eyes of the whole people.

These aristocrats behaved like revolutionaries from the Right and by that tore up all conventions, tore down all the veils that prevented the people from seeing the unpleasant, but undoubtedly real, class struggle. That was revealed to all which was formerly concealed by the bourgeoisie and the Liberals (the Liberals are hypocritical everywhere, but it is doubtful whether their hypocrisy goes to such lengths and to such refinement as in England). Everybody realised that the conspiracy to break the will of Parliament had been long prepared. Real class rule has always been and still lies outside of Parliament. The above-mentioned mediæval institutions, which had been dormant for many years (or rather seemed to be dormant), quickly got into action and proved to be stronger than Parliament. And the petty-bourgeois Liberals of England, and their speeches about reforms and about the power of Parliament, with which they lull the workers, proved to be in fact frauds, straw men put up in order to fool the people who were quickly “torn down” by the aristocracy with power in their hands.

How many books have been written, especially by German and Russian liberals, in praise of the law and social peace in England. It is well known that the historical mission of the German and Russian liberals is to cringe like lackeys before that which was obtained in England and in France by the class struggle, and to proclaim the results of this struggle as the ” truths of science” which stood “above classes.” In reality, however, the “law” and “social peace” England were merely the brief result of the slumber of the British proletariat in the period approximately between 1850 and 1900.

An end has come to British monopoly. World competition has intensified. The cost of living has risen. Alliances of big capitalists have crushed the small and middle business men and have hurled themselves with all their weight against the workers. After their long sleep since the end of the eighteenth century, after the Chartist movement of 1830-40, the English proletariat has awakened once again.

The Constitutional crisis of 1914 is one of the most important stages in the history of this awakening. April 1914.

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