1 The Spectator
1 Wellington Street,
Strand, London. W.C. Private Newlands Corner
Merrow Downs
Guildford. Friday July 27th. 1916. My dear Carson, I feel I must write to you to express my unbounded
admiration for the manly, honest and generous part you have
played in the late negotiations. i have tried to say this
publicly in the "Spectator", both in my leaders on the
Fiasco and on the Future and also in a Note to your letter
in regard to Hugh Cecil. But I desire to go beyond a mere
public laudation. After all that has passed you could not
have stultified yourself by changing your ground and in
effect refusing to accept exclusion and the 'clean cut' when
it was offered to you as it was. But quite beyond this,
for of course I realize that there was nothing Machiavellian
but only what was perfectly straightforward in your attitude,
you have by your wise action made the British public understand
in a way they never understood before that the Union
is a necessity, not a arbitrary evil, and that if you try
to abrogate it on just terms, i.e. with exclusion, you bring —
Ireland being Ireland and the Irish people the Irish people—
the whole Home Rule structure down. This is why ever since I have been in the Irish
controversy and especially in the two years before July 1914
I always rubbed in Ulster for all I was worth and tried to
force people to concentrate on Exclusion. I knew that if
they would do this, exclusion, though honestly asked for,
was almost certain to act as a chemical which would dissolve
Home Rule. Exclusion was the thing that brought all the
unrealities, all the rhetoric, invective and flummery of
the Irish question to the test and showed that the Union,
whatever else it might be, was a grim necessity. Further the
"exhibition', as the doctors might say, of exclusion, might
prove how false were all the Colonial analogies and force
people to understand the existence of the two Irelands. 2 Do you remember the marvellous passage in the "Duncaid"
where Pope talks of the "uncreating word". The exclusion
of Ulster is absolutely just per se and absolutely
necessary if Civil War is not to be permanent, but it
is also the "uncreating word" as far as Home Rule is
concerned. In some ways I am very sorry that Exclusion should
both be necessary and "the uncreating word" for I like
other people am weary of the Irish problem and would be only
too thankful to see it got rid of. But after all facts are
facts and weariness cannot alter them, or rather if one
tries to let it alter them one is sure to commit some
hideous cruelty. To my mind we have just got to bear
the Irish question and admit that it is one of the many
problems in life which are insoluble, or at any rate
insoluble under existing conditions - unless of course
some miracle is somehow worked in the next few days.
Perhaps some day the nature of the Southern Irish will
change and we shall get a new heaven and a new earth across
the water, Bothas instead of Redmonds, Smuts' instead of
Dillons. Then of course there will be a dozen easy
solutions. I am ashamed to have inflicted so long a letter upon
you, but I have been deeply moved by the injustice with
which you have been treated by Unionists who ought to
have known better. Yours very sincerely, J. St Leo Strachey