A CRIMINAL HISTORY OF MANKIND

omb exploded prematurely, blowing him to pieces, but the Observatory was untouched. Eighteen
years later, in December 1910, a group of Russian anarchists broke into a jeweller’s shop in
Houndsditch, east London, and opened fire when the police knocked on the door, killing three
policemen. A nationwide manhunt led to the arrest of several of the gang, and in early January of
the following year, two more members were surrounded by police at a house in Sidney Street. After
an all-night siege and a shooting match that lasted all morning, the house burst into flames and both
anarchists were burnt to death. Even this failed to provoke the government into trying to suppress
anarchist ideas. So in England, the ideals of anarchism faded away gently, suffocated by the British
failure to take them seriously. In Spain, where repression continued (and another premier,
Canelejas, was assassinated in 1912), they lived on, to play a major role in the civil war of the
1930s.
The anarchists were not entirely mistaken to believe that governments have been responsible for
some of the world’s worst problems. But they failed to grasp that it is not a question of individual
wickedness; merely of policies that, at the time, struck honest men as reasonable. The blame for
‘the horrifying sense of sin manifest in the conduct of human affairs’ cannot be laid at the door of a
few wicked individuals, or even a few thousand. England is an interesting case in point. By 1900,
the British Empire was several times larger than the Roman Empire had ever been. But the British
did not regard themselves as conquerors; merely as a civilising influence, like missionaries. The
upper-class Englishman of the 1890s saw himself reflected fairly accurately in Conan Doyle’s
portrait of Dr Watson: decent, honest, not very bright, but infinitely loyal. He would have found it
difficult to believe that the empire’s foreign subjects saw him as an oppressor and exploiter.
Yet this, in practical terms, is what the British were. In Ireland, there had been political problems
since the time of Henry VIII, when England became Protestant and Ireland remained Catholic. The
English solution to every outbreak of dissatisfaction was to send an army to massacre the Irish.
They called this ‘pacification’. The Encyclopaedia Britannica remarks: ‘Ireland was now so
“pacified” that even in the year of the Armada it scarcely moved.’
In 1607, the old Irish earls fled in disgust and died abroad, and the English decided to try a radical
solution: taking Ulster away from the Irish and settling English Protestants there. In 1641 the Irish
rebelled again and massacred the Protestants in Ulster. Eight years later, Cromwell went to Ireland
and massacred a great many Catholics in revenge - so many that it more or less settled the Ulster
question once and for all. James II asked the Irish to help him recover his throne, but was defeated
at the battle of the Boyne and fled abroad. Again, the Irish had to bear the brunt of another
‘pacification’.
When the Irish rebelled in 1916, the trouble-makers were a few cranky nationalists who had little
general support; the English suppressed the rising without difficulty. But instead of putting the
rebels in jail - or better still, letting them go free to live with their unpopularity - they decided to
shoot them. Old wounds re-opened; there was a full-scale rebellion; British troops went in to
suppress the Irish Republican Army. Eventually, the British public itself became disgusted by the
bloodshed, and in 1921, Southern Ireland became a republic. But the old problem of the
‘plantation’ of Ulster with Protestants refused to go away and, in the last decades of the twentieth
century, is causing as much trouble as ever. We can see that, in the case of Ireland, the British have
constantly over-reacted to their difficulties, and non-stop bloodshed has been the result.