Dividing Ireland: World War I and Partition

THE GREAT WAR AND NATIONAL IDENTITY 107
conviction that the push for conscription was the outcome of a
conspiracy to completely break up the Asquith Government and
substitute it for a ‘Germanised and Prussianised’
administration. 110 Dillon believed that the gravest issue before
Parliament was whether Britain’s two-hundred-year unbroken
policy of not sending great armies to the continent was to be
totally abandoned, allowing a section of the country ‘which is
saturated to the marrow of their bones with Prussian principles’ to
impose upon Britain the same yoke which brought Germany and
the world to its present catastrophe. He believed that conscription
would fracture British domestic unity and lead to the loss of the
war. He argued that Britain’s strength lay in her fleet and finance,
pointing out that even in the Napoleonic and French Revolutionary
Wars the continental British army never exceeded 50,000. Dillon
warned that a great victory was not always a great blessing to a
nation, citing Prussia’s 1870 victory over France as a curse to
Germany because that war had been fought in pursuit of militarism
and domination, and, when Prussia had conquered her enemies,
she had showed them no mercy. He cautioned Britons not to find
themselves, in victory, another Prussia, a huge continental power
with over a million soldiers, the world’s greatest fleet, and its
richest nation, bringing ‘upon ourselves the hatred of mankind’. 111
Dillon opposed conscription on the grounds that it would mean
the ‘introduction of Prussianism’, the sacrifice of the individual to
the state, and the ‘erection into a kind of a God of military
efficiency over the freedom of the people’. 112
From a domestic political viewpoint, Dillon feared that Redmond
did not fully realise what his position in Ireland would be if the
Cabinet decided in favour of conscription for Great Britain. 113 On
the other hand, T.P.O’Connor, the Irish Party’s only MP
representing a British constituency, believed that Redmond was
fully aware of the dangers associated with British conscription, the
difference being, by October 1915, that Redmond felt that
conscription was not imminent, 114 and counted on the
introduction of a universal conscription bill creating a formidable
opposition of the Labour Party, the Irish Party and sections of the
Liberal Party. 115 By November 1915, however, O’Connor had
realised that opinion in the House of Commons was steadily
moving towards conscription, practically throwing the
responsibility for resisting it upon the Irish Party. ‘It looks…as if
the alternative…was to lose Ireland or to lose England’, concluded
O’Connor, after observing the gloom in Britain concerning the
Serbian and Gallipoli campaigns over which the fall of the
Government was considered possible. 116 Given this situation