GRIFFITH, Arthur. The Resurrection of Hungary: A Parallel for Ireland. With Appendices on Pitt’s Policy and Sinn Fein.

Dublin: Whelan and Son, 1918. Third edition. 8vo. 169pp. Portrait frontispiece of Francis Deák. Original blue-green cloth, ruled and lettered in black to upper cover and spine. Spine faded and browned, with wear and a little fraying at head and foot; minor marking and rubbing to boards; occasional light spotting, otherwise a very good, sound copy.

The substantially revised third edition, published in the politically charged year of 1918, with a new preface in which Griffith reflects upon the fourteen years since the work first appeared and draws direct comparisons between Ireland’s position during the First World War and Hungary’s earlier struggle for political independence.

First published in 1904, The Resurrection of Hungary was one of the most influential texts of early twentieth-century Irish nationalism. Griffith used the example of Francis Deák and Hungary’s resistance to Austrian rule to argue that Irish MPs should withdraw from Westminster and establish an independent Irish legislature at home — the policy of passive resistance that became closely associated with the early Sinn Féin movement.

The volume also contains Griffith’s writings on Pitt’s policy and Sinn Féin together with the text of England’s ‘Scrap of Paper’: The Renunciation Act, 1783. Griffith’s arguments for political and economic self-reliance made the work an important intellectual precursor to the revolutionary settlement that followed.

An important 1918 edition of one of Arthur Griffith’s principal political works, published during the transformative period between the Easter Rising and the Sinn Féin general-election victory of December 1918.

[L4 9A]