# Chapter Twenty-Two — National Uprisings

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## The Easter Uprising

Right in the middle of World War I, Great Britain had to deal with a battle at home.

The last time we visited the country of Ireland, just off England’s western coast, the people of Ireland were fretting under British rule. Ireland had been part of the British Empire for more than three hundred years. For the last hundred years, Ireland had to send its representatives to the British Parliament and had no government of its own. The Irish had suffered from famine—and the English had done little to help. And when the prime minister, William Gladstone, had tried to convince Parliament to pass the “Home Rule” bill that would give the Irish the freedom to govern themselves, Parliament refused.

Gladstone had long been convinced that the way the English treated the Irish was not only wrong, but also stupid. The worse the English treated the Irish, the more the Irish would hate the English. He called the English rule of Ireland “seven centuries of misgovernment,” and warned the English that this misgovernment was bound to bring trouble: a “cloud in the west, the coming storm.” The Irish would remember being forced to pay “rent to absentee landlords” and being “forced \[into\] obedience to the laws” those landlords had made, “to the end of time.”

William Gladstone’s fiery speeches did convince Parliament to pass laws that gave Irish peasants the right to buy back some of the land they had lost to greedy English landlords. Parliament hoped that this would help to make Ireland a little more peaceful. William Gladstone also helped to pass a law that would give Protestants and Catholics equal rights in Ireland.

Meanwhile, the people of Ireland were beginning, more and more, to speak of themselves as Irish, rather than “British.” The Irish poet William Butler Yeats wrote poems that celebrated Irish ideas and Irish words. The Gaelic League was founded; its members hoped that the Irish would be able to abandon speaking English, in favor of the ancient Irish language called Gaelic. An organization called the Gaelic Athletic Association taught Irish boys to play ancient Irish games like hurling. Resistance groups—like those that had grown up in countries all over the world—had formed. The group Young Ireland wanted to work towards freedom from England by changing the laws of Great Britain. The Irish Republican Brotherhood, also called the Fenians, wanted to fight for freedom. And the Irish Land League organized poor tenants against their landlords. The Land League taught poor Irishmen and women that they could resist the English by refusing to work for English employers and by not buying from English merchants. One of the English landlords who found that his Irish employees were no longer willing to work for him, or buy from him, was named Charles Boycott. From then on, this form of resistance was known as “the boycott.”

But the most powerful of these resistance groups was organized in 1905. It was called Sinn Féin, which is Gaelic for “Us Alone.” Sinn Féin wanted Ireland to remain under the British crown, but to get its own parliament and its own self-rule back again. Ireland would be a separate, independent country, but it would be loyal to the English monarch—just like Canada.

Many Catholics in Ireland liked Sinn Féin’s ideas. But Protestants in the north of Ireland were afraid of what might happen if Ireland—which still had more Catholics than Protestants in it—got self-government back again. Under British rule, Protestants and Catholics were equal. But if Irish self-rule were restored, Catholics would be in the majority. What if Catholics then turned around and treated Protestants badly?

Most of the Protestants who didn’t want Ireland to have home rule lived in the north of Ireland, in six counties called “Ulster.” Ulster was very different from the rest of the country. Because Scottish Presbyterians had settled there many years ago, many Ulster Irish were Presbyterians. The rest of Ireland was filled with farms, but Ulster was filled with factories and ship-building companies.

Almost half a million people in northern Ireland, most of them Protestants, joined together to sign a document called the Ulster Covenant. It read:

\[We are\] convinced in our conscience that home rule would be disastrous … \[that it would destroy\] our civil and religious freedom … our citizenship and … the unity of the Empire. … \[We will use\] all means which may be found necessary to defeat the present conspiracy to set up a Home Rule Parliament in Ireland.

“All means necessary” meant that, if the British government gave Ireland home rule, the northern Irish Protestants would fight back. A secret army called the Ulster Volunteer Force formed. It had a hundred thousand soldiers in it! The Ulster Volunteer Force was well-armed, because it bought hundreds of guns and many tons of ammunition from Germany. (Germany was happy to do anything that would cause the British trouble at home—and distract them from the war!)

Now there were two different sides in Ireland, one threatening to fight if Ireland wasn’t given home rule—and the other threatening to fight if it was. Violence was inevitable. And it erupted on April 24, 1916, the Monday right after Easter Sunday.

A Fenian leader named Patrick Henry Pearse led about a thousand Irish rebels in taking control of the post office in the Irish city of Dublin. These rebels, who were fighting *for* Home Rule, also took control of government buildings. British troops marched in to put the rebellion down. After a week of fighting in the streets, the rebels were captured.

This short revolt caused dreadful problems for Great Britain. Almost four hundred people had died—and half of those had been innocent people shot by accident during the gun battles. Many had been killed by British soldiers. And after the “Easter Uprising” ended, the British ordered sixteen captured rebels put to death. One of them was so badly wounded that he had to be tied to a chair in front of the firing squad!

This made both the Irish and many English angry. More Irish than ever now wanted independence. Sinn Féin, the rebel organization, gained even more followers. The Irish poet William Butler Yeats wrote one of his most famous poems about the Easter Uprising, called “Easter 1916.” “Too long a sacrifice,” he wrote, “can make a stone of the heart.” Now, the poem concludes, the times are “changed, changed utterly.” Ireland and England could never go back to their old relationship. They would always be enemies.

Almost three years after the Easter Uprising, Sinn Féin set up its own government in Ireland, calling it the “Dáil Éireann,” or “Irish Assembly.” The Dáil Éireann announced that Ireland would now govern itself—no matter what the British thought. In order to protect their new government, a Sinn Féin leader named Michael Collins organized his own army, the “Irish Republican Army.”

At once, Great Britain sent over soldiers to defeat the Irish Republican Army, or “IRA.” Fighting raged over the island. Houses were burned. Innocent people were killed. More and more British began to think that Ireland should simply be allowed to govern itself. In the United States, where so many Irish now lived, plenty of Irish-Americans agreed with the Fenian movement and began to call for Home Rule too.

When World War I ended, Great Britain and Sinn Féin began to talk about independence. Months and months later, in 1921, Sinn Féin and the British government signed a treaty. This treaty would make most of Ireland into a country called the Irish Free State. Like Canada, the Irish Free State would still be loyal to the British monarch, but it would rule itself, have its own parliament, and make its own laws. William Butler Yeats was invited to become a member of the brand-new Irish parliament.

But Ulster, the six counties in the north of Ireland where so many Protestants lived, would not be part of the Irish Free State. Ulster would remain part of Great Britain.

Not everyone in Ireland was happy with this treaty. Some of the Irish objected to losing Ulster. Others wanted Ireland to be completely independent, without even formal allegiance to Great Britain. Michael Collins himself was assassinated by Irish rebels who believed that Collins had betrayed Ireland by agreeing to be loyal to Britain’s monarch.

Sinn Féin itself didn’t like the idea of Ulster remaining part of Great Britain. But the treaty seemed to be the only way to end fighting between the two countries.

By 1923, the Irish Free State was governing itself. Fourteen years later, Great Britain would agree to allow the Irish Free State to become a completely independent country called “Éire,” or “the Republic of Ireland.” But Ulster, or “Northern Ireland,” remained part of the British Empire—an unhappy and trouble-filled part, where Catholics were too often harassed, robbed, and even beaten by their neighbors.

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## Indian Nationalism

While the Irish were battling for independence, so were the people of India.

When we last left India, the British had put India under the rule of an official called the Viceroy of India. The Viceroy, or “vice-regent,” ruled India in the name of Queen Victoria of England. The British called India the “Raj” (the Indian name for kingdom), because India was now firmly part of the British Empire. The new capital of this Raj was now Delhi, not the old capital city of Calcutta.

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With the rebellion over, the British tried to improve India for their subjects. They built railroads and roads, laid telegraph lines, and improved India’s harbors so that more ships could trade in Indian ports. The British in India thought that they had a duty to bring English customs and ways to India, because they believed that English customs were much better than Indian ways. The writer Rudyard Kipling called this duty the “white man’s burden.”

But Indians wished that the British would set down this “burden.” No matter how much the British talked about doing good for India, the Indians could see clearly that the British had more privileges, more wealth, and a better life. British citizens lived in separate neighborhoods, where the only Indians were servants. Most British in India had plenty of Indian servants, nursemaids, cooks, and nannies. The Indians called the white men *sahibs*, and the white women *memsahibs*—Indian words that meant “master” and “mistress.”

The Indians didn’t want masters and mistresses. The British knew this; as a matter of fact, before World War I, the British had begun to agree that they might try to treat India in the same way that they had treated Canada and Australia, by giving the Indians self-rule.

After World War I, the British no longer paid attention to this promise. They were too occupied with trying to recover from the dreadful fighting that had killed so many Englishmen. But the Indians had also suffered from World War I. Over a hundred thousand Indian soldiers had also died, fighting in British regiments and in defense of Great Britain. At the very least, India should be rewarded with freedom!

The loudest group of Indians calling for independence was called the Congress Party. By the time World War I ended, the Congress Party was led by a lawyer named Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. He had grown up in a Hindu family, studied law in England, and then travelled to South Africa. There, he spent years working to improve the lives of Indian immigrants. In South Africa, Indians were treated as badly as blacks, because their skin was dark.

Gandhi stayed away from India for twenty-one years. When he returned to his home country, he felt like a stranger. But news of his work for Indians in South Africa had spread back to India. Gandhi already had a reputation as a man ready to work for justice and independence.

In the first year after he came back to India, Gandhi decided to travel around his country by train and see the villages and cities that he had not visited for over two decades. What he found was an India in which there was poverty, dirt, disease, and misery. So he joined the Congress Party, and tried to get Indians from every small village in India to join it. The Congress Party swelled to include millions of people!

In 1919, demonstrators from the Congress Party met in the holy city of Amritsar, to protest against British rule. Amritsar, in the north of India, was the most sacred city on earth for the Sikhs (followers of the Sikh religion) who lived in India. Like Muslims, Sikhs believed that there was only one god. In ancient times, Sikhs had been warrior princes; in more recent times, they had served as the royal bodyguard for the emperor of India.

Amritsar was a sacred city because the Golden Temple stood in it. This Golden Temple was at the center of a wide, still pool of water, whose waters were said to give eternal life to those who wash in them. A white stone bridge led to the Golden Temple, so that Sikh worshipers could walk across the water into the Temple and see the Granth Sahib, the holy books that were kept inside it.

The demonstrators gathered in a garden, near the pool and the golden temple, called Jallianwala Bagh. Even though they were unarmed and not causing any trouble, this gathering was illegal. The British had passed laws against large public demonstrations.

The British officer in charge of Amritsar’s soldiers came out to the grassy garden with his troops. But instead of telling the unarmed demonstrators to go away, the soldiers began to fire at them without any warning. Over three hundred unarmed people died. Over a thousand were wounded. Today, if you visit Amritsar, you can still walk in the garden of Jallianwala Bagh and see the bullet holes in the brick archways that surround it.

The whole country was outraged. This seemed like the perfect time to begin a war for independence.

But Gandhi refused to allow his followers to pick up weapons. He told the members of the Congress Party that an armed man could be a coward—but that an unarmed man must be courageous. Real independence had to be won with *satyagraha*—the nonviolent fight for freedom and justice.

Instead of fighting with weapons, Gandhi and the Congress Party began to use other methods of resisting the British. They taught the Indians to resist with “noncooperation”—meaning that Indians simply refused to pay taxes to the British government. They encouraged Indians to “boycott” British goods (refuse to buy anything made in Great Britain). Gandhi told his followers to make their own handmade cloth for their clothes, rather than buying British cotton. When the British put a tax on salt, Gandhi led his followers on a march of 240 miles to go collect salt from the sea, rather than buying the taxed salt. He started with seventy-eight people. By the end of the march, thousands of people were following him.

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Gandhi told Indians to take their children out of British schools. He asked them to give up privileges given to them by the British. He himself sent back a medal that the British government had given him for his work in South Africa. When a factory refused to give its workers enough money to live on, Gandhi went on a hunger strike. He refused to eat until the factory owners agreed to the raise. It took three days for the factory owners to give in and agree. They didn’t want to be responsible for Gandhi starving to death!

The British put Gandhi in jail again and again. But the resistance in India, called a “nationalist movement,” continued to grow. It wasn’t always peaceful. Sometimes, Gandhi’s nonviolent protests inspired other rebels to fight with weapons. Between violent and nonviolent resistance, India had grown impossible to govern.

After the Amritsar Massacre, the British finally agreed that they would start to change the way India was governed, so that the country could slowly become independent. But it would take thirty years for that promise to be fully kept.

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