ABSTRACT
This tradition of British liberalism nevertheless provided a basis for naming the traumas inflicted on others to secure the British Empire. During the Irish War of Independence (1919-21), anti-republican reprisals directed against Irish homesteads and communities by the Black and Tans and Auxiliaries provoked a broadly constituted and vociferous public campaign of protest in England. A Labour Party Commission sent to investigate the condition of Ireland in November 1920 reported that ‘things are being done in the name of Britain which must make her name stink in the nostrils of the whole world’ (ibid.); while in the Peace With Ireland Council, Conservatives and socialists joined with Liberals to publicize and condemn the British ‘terror’, and to call for an end to the conflict (ibid.: 61-102, 229 n. 119). Among its supporters, the radical liberal historian and journalist, J. L. Hammond, demanded a public enquiry into the reprisals ‘on the grounds of justice to the British people’ as well as to the Irish. Attempting to convey, in his reports from Ireland, his sense of the reciprocal damage caused to English civil and political culture by this war waged by the imperial state, Hammond endorsed the truth of a comment made to him by an Irishman: ‘This is a tragedy . . . but it is your tragedy, not ours’ (ibid.: 100).
