The Irish standard., 1919-09-27
DENIAL OF TREI IAND'S CLAIM
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and the Poles were handed
over body and soul, to Russia BRIGHTLY
enough) in the secret treaty of Feb
ruary, 1917.
Secrecy Was Fortunate.
1T was fortunate that these and all
the other arrangements were success
fully kept secret for so long. They
would have hampered especially the
anti-Irish propaganda which we were
forced, by their own insane behavior,
to keep up. 1t would, for example,
have been more difficult than it was to
explain the burning of a portion of
Dublin and the execution of dozen
ringleaders in that pathetic, foolish
rebellion of 1916, If the secret treaty,
signed in the same month, partitioning
the Turkish subject nationalities, had
been generally known.
Luckily, the Liberals were still
in power. They have a gift for deal
ing with these delicate situations
which we blunter militarists lack. Mr..
Asquith throughout showed unsur-
passed tact.
"Now l come to the ardent Mr.. Will
son, the enlarged formulas, and our
supposed adherence to his universal
principles Here join issue squarely.
We were not committed to his crazy
excesses of idealism. In truth, he had
spoken at such length and with such
ambiguity all through the war that the
people over here, fighting for their
lives, had ceased almost to listen.
would he come in? That was the
point. And when he did at last come
in, so far as anyone knows to the
1,n
could have tried to stipulate for free
Togoland or anything he pleased, but
he did not do so, and probably he
could not have done so, because his
own people, hot for war, and respond
ing admirably to our antiIrish prOga-
ganda, had developed a very robust
militarism which was out simply to
thrash the Germans and avenge Bel
gium. Besides, there were the Philip
pines. We, ourselves, were out to win
the war. Do not you perceive that we
should have lost the war worse
than lost it-if we had subscribed to
the universal principles?
Wilson Himself shaky.
"Let me point out, too, that Mr..
Wilson himself was shaky. On De-
cember 4, 1917, in declaring for war
upon Austria-Hungary, he expressly
disclaimed any wish to impair or re-
arrange the Austro-Hungarian En-
pire' (an empire which was con-
geries of rebellious little nationali-
ties.) He retracted this month
later in the fourteen points speech
but in the interval the Russian Soviet
Government called upon all the Pow
ers at war to discuss peace at least
kh@ r{c ~ md
self-determination,' two words which
summed up all his ardent orations.
"He was silent like the rest Of US.
A lucid interval. Occasionally, you
see, somebody explained to him some
of the racial facts of Europe, of
which he was quite ignorant. But he
always returned to the clouds and he
came only half way down to con.
struct the founteen points.
"No doubt the speech containing
them was aimed against the Allies as
well as against the enemy. The con
demnati0n Of secret covenants and
conquest and aggrandizement' shows
it, independently of the passage you
quoted, but we really agreed only to
the points themselves-an what a
medley they are of obvious platitudes
grandiloquent antiquities and Utop
ian impossibilities!
well, 1 am not going to quibble-
admit that the SPIRIT as you call it
underlying them was that of self-de
termination. How could we carry Il
out? It was bad enough to be rushed
into using at all as basis of peace
But Mr.. Wilson, himself, saved thu
situation. He came down at last from
the clouds and helped us to make tht
best of very embarrassing business
Six Points Disappear.
The first six points have dfsap
peared (virtually), and note that thu