CHAPTER IX
IRELAND TO-DAY
Why does present-day Ireland need Home Rule? I put the question in that way because I am not going to question the fact that she wants Home Rule. She has always said she wanted it: she says so still, and that is enough. There is a powerful minority in Ireland against Home Rule. There always have been minorities more or less powerful against Home Rule in all ages and places. That does not alter the national character of the claim. If once we go behind the voice of a people, const.i.tutionally expressed, we court endless risks. National leaders have always been called "agitators," which, of course, they are, and non-representative agitators, which they are not. To deny the genuineness of a claim which is feared is an invariable feature of oppositions to measures of Home Rule. The denial is generally irreconcilable with the case made for the dangers of Home Rule, and that contradiction in its most glaring shape characterizes the present opposition to the Irish claims. But Unionists should elect to stand on one ground or the other, and for my part I shall a.s.sume that the large majority of Irishmen, as shown by successive electoral votes, want Home Rule. Precisely what form of Home Rule they want is another and by no means so clear a matter, on which I shall presently have a word to say. But they want, in the general sense, to manage their own local affairs. Her best friends would despair of Ireland if that was not her desire.
What, in the Colonies, Ireland, and everywhere else, is the deep spiritual impulse behind the desire for Home Rule? A craving for self-expression, self-reliance. Home Rule is synonymous with the growth of independent character. That is why Ireland instinctively and pa.s.sionately wants it, that is why she needs it, and that is why Great Britain, for her own sake, and Ireland"s, should give it. If that is not the reason, it is idle to talk about Home Rule; but it is the reason.
Character is the very foundation of national prosperity and happiness, and we are blind to the facts of history if we cannot discern the profound effect of political inst.i.tutions upon human character.
Self-government in the community corresponds to free will in the individual. I am far from saying that self-government is everything. But I do say that it is the master-key. It is fundamental. Give responsibility and you will create responsibility. Through political responsibility only can a society brace itself to organized effort, find out its own opinions on its own needs, test its own capabilities, and elicit the will, the brains, and the hands to solve its own problems.
These are such commonplaces in every other part of the Empire, which has an individual life of its own, that men smile if you suggest the contrary. But ordinary reasoning is rarely applied to Ireland. There "good government" has been held to be "a subst.i.tute for self-government"
and a regime of benevolent paternalism to be a full and sufficient compensation for cruel coercion and crueller neglect. In this paternal regime it is impossible to include those great measures of land reform pa.s.sed in 1870, 1881, and 1887, which revolutionized the agrarian system, and converted the cottier tenant into a judicial tenant.[42]
Although these measures, which fall into an altogether different category from the subsequent policy of State-aided Land Purchase,[43]
were inspired by an earnest desire to mitigate frightful social evils, they cannot be regarded as voluntary. They were extorted, shocking as the reflection is, by crime and violence, by the spectacle of a whole social order visibly collapsing, and by the desperate efforts of a handful of Irishmen, determined at any cost, by whatever means, to save the bodies and souls of their countrymen. The methods of these men were destructive. They were constructive only in this, the highest sense of all, that while battling against concrete economic evils, they sought to obtain for Ireland the right to control her own affairs and cure her own economic evils. It is often said that Parnell gave a tremendous impetus to the Home Rule movement by harnessing it to the land question. True; but what a strange way of expressing a truth! Anywhere outside Ireland men would say that self-government was the best road to the reform of a bad land system.
With the tranquillity which was slowly restored by the alterations in agrarian tenure and the immense economic relief derived from the lowering of rents, a change came over the spirit of British statesmanship. With the exception of the short Liberal Government of 1892-1895, which failed for the second time to carry Home Rule, Conservatives were responsible for Ireland from 1886 to 1905. They felt that opposition to Home Rule could be justified only by a strenuous policy of amelioration in Ireland, and the efforts of three Chief Secretaries, Mr. Arthur Balfour, Mr. Gerald Balfour, and Mr. George Wyndham--efforts often made in the teeth of bitter opposition from Irish Unionists--to carry out this policy, were sincere and earnest. The Act of 1891, with its grants for light railways, its additional facilities for Land Purchase, and its establishment of the Congested Districts Board to deal with the terrible poverty of certain districts in the west, may be said to mark the beginning of the new era. The Land Act of 1896 was another step, and the establishment of a complete system of Irish Local Government in 1898 another. In the following year came the Act setting up the Department of Agriculture, and in 1903 Mr. Wyndham"s great Land Purchase Act. Then came the strange "devolutionist" episode, arising from the appointment of Sir Antony (now Lord) MacDonnell to the post of Under-Secretary at Dublin Castle, the Government who selected him being fully aware that he was in favour of some change in the government of Ireland. He entered into relations with a group of prominent Irishmen, headed by Lord Dunraven, who were thinking out a scheme for a mild measure of devolution. When the fact became known, there was an explosion of anger among Irish Unionists. Mr. Wyndham, who had been a popular Chief Secretary, resigned office, and was succeeded by Mr. Walter Long; perhaps the most dramatic and significant example in modern times of the policy of governing Ireland in deliberate and direct defiance of the wishes and sentiments of the vast majority of Irishmen.
The Liberal Government of 1906, coming into office under a pledge to refrain from a full Home Rule measure, confined itself to the introduction of the Irish Council Bill of 1907, which, rightly, in my opinion, was repudiated by the Irish people, and accordingly dropped.
But the Government was in general sympathy with Nationalist Ireland, so that a number of useful measures were added to the statute books; for example, the Labourers (Ireland) Act of 1906, empowering Rural Councils, with the aid of State credit, to acquire land for labourers" plots and cottages; the Town Tenants Act, extending the principle of compensation for improvements at the termination of a lease to the urban tenant; the very important Irish Universities Act of 1908, which gave to Roman Catholics facilities for higher education which they had lacked for centuries, and, lastly, Mr. Birrell"s Land Act of 1909, which was designed partly to meet the imminent collapse of Land Purchase, owing to the failure of the financial arrangements made under the Wyndham Act of 1903, and partly to extend the powers of the Congested Districts Board.
To these measures must be added another which was not confined to Ireland, but which has exercised a most potent influence, and by no means a wholly beneficial influence, on Irish life and Irish finance, the Old Age Pensions Act of 1908, under which the enormous sum of two and three-quarter millions is now allocated to Ireland.[44]
The best that can be said of the legislation since 1881 is that it has laid the foundations of a new social order. Agrarian crime has disappeared and material prosperity has greatly increased. Government in the interests of a small favoured cla.s.s has almost vanished. It survives to this extent, that civil administration and patronage, which are still, be it remembered, removed from popular control, remain, in fact, in Protestant and Unionist hands to an extent altogether disproportionate to the distribution of creeds, cla.s.ses, and opinions.
And, of course, in the major matter of Home Rule, the power of the Unionist minority, as represented in the Commons by seventeen out of the thirty-three Ulster representatives, and in the House of Lords by an overwhelming preponderance of Unionist peers, is still enormous. But within Ireland itself, central administration apart, the exceptional privileges and exceptional political power of Protestants and landlords, which lasted almost intact until forty years ago, is now non-existent.
The Disestablishment Act of 1869, while immensely enhancing the moral power and religious zeal of the Church of Ireland, and even strengthening its financial position, took away its political monopoly, and through the final abolition of t.i.thes, its baneful and irritating interference with economic life. The successive measures of land legislation, culminating in the transfer of half the land of Ireland from landlord to peasant proprietorship, and the Local Government Act of 1898, surrendering at a stroke the whole local administration of the country into popular control, destroyed the exceptional political privileges of the landlord cla.s.s.
Ascendancy, then, in the old sense, is a thing of the past. What has taken its place? What is the ruling power within Ireland? Is it a public opinion derived from the vital contact of ideas and interests, and taking shape in a healthy and normal distribution of parties? Is thought free? Has merit its reward? Is there any unity of national purpose, transcending party divisions? If it were necessary to give a categorical "Yes" or "No" to these questions, the answer would be "No." Sane energizing politics, and the sovereign ascendancy of a sane public opinion, are absolutely unattainable in Ireland or anywhere else without Home Rule. It is all the more to the credit of Irishmen that, in the face of stupendous difficulties, and in a marvellously short s.p.a.ce of time since the attainment, barely twenty years ago, of the elementary conditions of social peace, they have gone so far as they have gone towards the creation of a self-reliant, independently thinking, united Ireland. The whole weight of Imperial authority has been thrown into the scale against them. Whatever the mood and policy of British upholders of the Union, whether sympathetic or hostile, wise or foolish, their constant message to both parties in Ireland has been, "Look to us. Trust in us. You are divided. We are umpires," and the reader will no doubt remember that the theory of "umpirage" was used in exactly the same way in the Colonies, notably in Upper Canada,[45] to thwart the tendency towards a reconciliation of creeds, races, and cla.s.ses. Fortunately, there have been Irishmen who have laboured to counteract the effects of this enervating policy, and to reconstruct, by native effort from within, a new Ireland on the ruins of the old. Whether or not they have consciously aimed at Home Rule matters not a particle. Some have, some have not; but the result of these efforts has been the same, to pull Irishmen together and to begin the creation of a genuinely national atmosphere.
It is not part of my scheme to describe in detail the various movements, agricultural, industrial, economic, literary, political, which in the last twenty years have contributed to this national revival. Some have a world-wide fame, all have been excellently described at one time or another by writers of talent and insight.[46] My purpose is to note their characteristics and progress, and to estimate their political significance. In the first place it must be remembered that some of the most important of the modern legislative measures have been initiated and promoted by Home Rulers and Unionists, Roman Catholics and Protestants, acting in friendly co-operation and throwing aside their political and religious antagonisms. Such was the origin of the great Land Purchase Act of 1903, which Mr. Wyndham drafted on the basis of an agreement reached at a friendly conference of landlords and representatives of tenants. But a far more interesting and hopeful instance of co-operation had taken place seven years earlier. One of the very few really constructive measures of the last twenty years, the Act of 1899 for setting up the Department of Agriculture and Technical Instruction, was the direct outcome of the recommendations of the Recess Committee brought together in 1895 and 1896 by Sir Horace Plunkett; a Committee containing Nationalist and Unionist Members of the House of Commons, Tory and Liberal Unionist peers, Ulster captains of industry, the Grand Master of the Belfast Orangemen, and an eminent Jesuit.[47] In its reunion of men divided by bitter feuds, it was just the kind of Conference that a.s.sembled in Durban in 1908, six years after a devastating war, to discuss and to create the framework of South African Union. That Conference was the natural outcome of the grant of Home Rule to the defeated Boer States. The Irish Conference, succeeding a land-war far more destructive and demoralizing, was brought together in spite of the absence of Home Rule, and the prejudice it had to overcome,[48] is a measure of the fantastically abnormal conditions produced by the denial of self-government. There lay Ireland, an island with a rich soil and a clever population, yet terribly backward, far behind England, far behind all the progressive nations of Europe in agriculture and industry, her population declining, her land pa.s.sing out of cultivation,[49] her strongest sons and daughters hurrying away to enrich with their wits and sinews distant lands. There, in short, lay a country groaning for intelligent development by the concentrated energies of her own people.
"We have in Ireland," runs the first paragraph of the Report of the Committee, "a poor country practically without manufactures--except for the linen and shipbuilding of the north, and the brewing and distilling of Dublin--dependent upon agriculture, with its soil imperfectly tilled, its area under cultivation decreasing, and a diminishing population without industrial habits or technical skill."
The leeway to make up was enormous. To go no farther back than the inst.i.tution of the Penal Code and the deliberate destruction of the woollen industry, two centuries of callous repression at the hands of an external authority had maimed and exhausted the country whose condition the Committee had met to consider. These facts the members of the Committee frankly recognized in that part of the Report which is ent.i.tled with gentle irony "Past Action of the State." Here, then, was a purely Irish problem, intimately concerning every Irishman, poor or rich, Roman Catholic or Protestant, a problem of which Great Britain, though responsible both for its existence and its solution, knew and cared little. The really strange thing is, not that representative Irishmen should have met together to consider and prescribe for the deplorable economic condition of their country, but that they should not also, like the South African Conference, have drafted a Const.i.tution for Ireland, on the sound ground that a system of government which had promoted and sustained the evils they described could never, with the best will in the world, become a good government for Ireland. Yet for a brief s.p.a.ce of time these men actually had Home Rule, and by virtue of that privilege they did better work for Ireland in six months than had been done in two centuries.
What is more, they used the Home Rule principle in their recommendations for the establishment of a Department of Agriculture and Technical Instruction. "We think it essential," they reported on p. 101, "that the new Department should be in touch with the public opinion of the cla.s.ses whom its work concerns, and should rely largely for its success upon their active a.s.sistance and co-operation." Its chief, they added, should be a Minister directly responsible to Parliament, and on p. 103 they advocated a Consultative Council, whose functions should be--(1) To keep the Department in direct touch with the public opinion of those cla.s.ses whom the work of the Ministry concerns; and (2) to distribute some of the responsibility for administration amongst those cla.s.ses. Now these, in Ireland, were revolutionary proposals. The idea of any part of the Government "being in touch with public opinion" was wholly new. The idea of "distributing responsibility for administration" amongst the subjects of administration was startlingly novel. Ireland, both before and after the Union, had always been governed on a diametrically opposite principle. Since the Union, when Irish departmental Ministers, never responsible to the people, disappeared, not one of the host of nominated Irish Boards was legally amenable to Irish public opinion. Not one had a separate Minister responsible even to the Parliament at Westminster, which was not an Irish Parliament. _A fortiori_, not one relied on the co-operation and advice of the cla.s.ses for whose benefit it was supposed to exist.
Proposed, nevertheless, by a group of representative Irishmen, the scheme for a democratically const.i.tuted Department of Agriculture pa.s.sed smoothly into law as soon as the machinery for ascertaining public opinion on the matters at issue had been brought into existence. Mr.
Gerald Balfour, the Chief Secretary, was engaged at the time upon his measure for the extension of Local Government to Ireland. This measure became law in 1898, and the Department Act in 1899. Under that Act, the duty was laid upon each of the new County Councils of electing two members to serve upon a Consultative Council of Agriculture, to which a minority of nominated members was added, and this Council in its turn elects two-thirds of the members of an Agricultural Board, and supplies four representatives to a Board of Technical Instruction, which, like the Council and the Agricultural Board, has a predominantly popular character.[50]
At the summit stands the Minister, or Vice-President, as he is called (for in accordance with ancient custom, the Chief Secretary is nominally in supreme control of this as of all other Irish Departments), and a large and efficient staff of permanent officials. He and his staff have a large centralized authority, but this authority is subject to a const.i.tutional check in the shape of a veto wielded by the Boards over the expenditure of the Endowment Fund. What is more important, policy tends to be shaped in accordance with popular views by the existence of the Council and the Boards.
Here, then, is the germ of responsible government. At first sight a critic might exclaim: "Why, here is democracy pushed to a point unknown even in Great Britain, where Government Departments are wholly independent of Local Councils." That is in a limited sense true, and it is quite arguable that British Departments would be the better for an infusion of local control. But we must not be misled by a false a.n.a.logy.
Great Britain reaches the Irish ideal by other means. Her departmental Ministers are directly responsible to a predominantly British House of Commons where a hostile vote can at any moment eject them from office.[51] There is no Irish Parliament, nor any kind of predominantly Irish body which is vested with the same power. The Vice-President of the Irish Department of Agriculture, an inst.i.tution concerned exclusively with Irish affairs, whether he sits in the House of Commons or not (and for two years Mr. T.W. Russell had not a seat at Westminster), could not be ejected from office even by a unanimous vote of Irish Members of the House, with the moral backing of a unanimous Irish people.[52] That is one of the anomalous results of the Union, and it was a recognition, though rather a confused one, of this anomaly, that inspired the ingenious compromise invented by the Recess Committee for introducing an element of popular control. But what a light the compromise throws on the anomaly which evoked it! Is it common sense to make these elaborate arrangements for promoting an Irish Department on an Irish popular basis while recoiling in terror from the prospect of crowning them with a Minister responsible to ah Irish Parliament? The consequence is that even in this solitary example of an Irish Department under semi-popular control we see the subtle taint of Crown Colony Government. Popular opinion, acting indirectly, first through the Council and then through the Boards, can legally paralyze the Department by declining to appropriate money in the way it prescribes, while possessing no legal power to enforce a different policy or change the personnel of administration. This is only an object-lesson. I hasten to add that such a paralysis has never taken place, though some acrimonious controversy, natural enough under the anomalous state of things, has arisen over the office of Vice-President. There is now only one means by which Irish opinion can, if it be so disposed, displace the holder of the office, and that is a thoroughly unreliable and unhealthy means, namely, through pressure brought to bear by one or other of the Irish Parliamentary parties upon a newly elected British Ministry.[53] But why in the world should the British party pendulum determine an important Irish matter like this? Why, _a fortiori_, should it determine the appointment to the office of Chief Secretary, the irresponsible Prime Minister, or, rather the autocrat of Ireland? It is the _reductio ad absurdum_ of the Union.
The Department commands a large measure of confidence. It would command far greater confidence if it were responsible to an Irish Parliament; but Irishmen are sensible enough to perceive that as long as the Union lasts, everyone is interested in making the existing system work smoothly and well. The general policy as laid down in the first instance, by the first Vice-President, Sir Horace Plunkett, has been sound and wise;[54] to proceed slowly, while building up a staff of trained instructors, inspectors, organizers; to devote money and labour mainly to education, both industrial and agricultural, and to evoke self-reliance and initiative in the people by, so far as possible, spending money locally only where a local contribution is raised and a local scheme prepared. The last aim met with a fine response. Every County Council in Ireland raises a rate, and has a scheme for agricultural and technical instruction. I can only enumerate some of the multifarious functions which the Department evolved for itself or took over from various other unrelated Boards and concentrated under single control. It gives instruction in agriculture and rural domestic economy (horticulture, b.u.t.ter-making, bee-keeping, poultry-keeping, etc.) through schools, colleges, or agricultural stations under its own direction, through private schools for both s.e.xes, and through an extensive system of itinerant courses conducted (in 1909) by 128 trained instructors. It gives premiums for the breeding of horses, cattle, a.s.ses, poultry, swine. It conducts original research, it experiments in crops, and, among other things, is slowly resuscitating the depressed industry of flax-growing, and starting a wholly new industry in the southern counties, that of early potatoes. It sprays potatoes, prescribes for the diseases of trees, crops, and stock, advises on manures and feeding-stuffs, teaches forestry, and gives scholarships at various colleges for proficiency in agricultural science. On the side of Technical Instruction it teaches and encourages all manner of small industries, such as lace-making. It superintends all technical instruction in secondary schools, and organizes and subsidizes similar instruction in a mult.i.tude of different subjects under schemes prepared by local authorities, while at the same time carrying on an important and extensive system of training teachers. It also superintends sea-fisheries and improves harbours.
The material results have been great; the moral results perhaps even greater. Just as we should expect, wherever education goes, and wherever men work together for economic improvement, unnatural antagonisms of race and religion tend to disappear. This is not the result of any direct influence wielded by the Department, which never finds it necessary to lecture people on the duty of mutual tolerance; it is the result of common sense and a small experience in Home Rule. High officials of the Department have informed me that their work, for all intents and purposes, is unhampered by local religious prejudices. A spirit of keen and wholesome rivalry permeates the people. County and Borough Committees in districts almost wholly Roman Catholic, with large powers of patronage, almost invariably appoint the best men, regardless of creed and local influence. Anyone who wishes to gain a glimpse of the real Belfast of the present and the future, as distinguished from the ugly, bigoted caricature of a great city which some even of its own citizens perversely insist on displaying to their English friends, a Belfast as tolerant and generous as it is energetic and progressive, should visit the magnificent Munic.i.p.al Technical Inst.i.tute, where 6,000 boys and girls, Roman Catholic and Protestant, mix together on equal terms, and derive the same benefit from an extraordinary variety of educational courses in a building furnished with lecture-rooms, laboratories, experimental plant, and gymnasia, of a perfection hardly to be surpa.s.sed in any city of the United Kingdom.
Here is something grand and fruitful accomplished in eleven years, and it is the outcome, be it remembered, of original, constructive thought devoted by Irishmen to the needs of their own country.
Let us also remember that it represents the application of State-aid to economic development. But with the utmost caution, and the utmost efforts to elicit self-help, one may go too far in the direction of State-aid, and even in this sphere it is by no means certain that Ireland is free from danger. Let us pa.s.s to another movement whose essence is self-help: I mean the movement for Agricultural Co-operation.
Here again Sir Horace Plunkett was the originator. Indeed, with him and his able a.s.sociates and advisers, of whom Lord Monteagle and Mr. R.A.
Anderson, the Secretary of the I.A.O.S., were the first, the twin aims of self-help and State-aid were combined as they should be, in one big, harmonious policy. Self-help must, indeed, they held, be antecedent to, and preparatory for, State-aid. The position confronting them was that half a million unorganized tenant farmers, for the most part cultivating excessively small holdings, and just beginning to emerge after generations of agrarian war from an economic serfdom, were face to face with the compet.i.tion of highly organized European countries, and of vast and rapidly developing territories of North and South America. It was as far back as 1889 that the first propaganda was begun, and in 1894, a year before the Recess Committee met, the Irish Agricultural Organization Society was formed. By unwearied pains and patience, seemingly hopeless obstacles had been overcome, apathy, ignorance, and often contemptuous opposition from men of both political parties. For, with that ruinous pessimism always endemic in countries not politically free, and exactly paralleled in the Canada described by the Durham Report of 1839, extremists were inclined to suspect any movement which drew recruits from both political camps. Nevertheless, the island is now covered with a network of 886 co-operative societies, creameries, agricultural societies (for selling implements, foodstuffs, etc.), credit banks, poultry societies, and other miscellaneous organizations.
The total membership is nearly 100,000, the total turnover nearly two and a half millions.[55] Nearly half the b.u.t.ter exported from Ireland is made in the 392 co-operative creameries, and at the other end of the scale extraordinarily valuable work is done by the 237 agricultural credit banks, which supply small loans, averaging only 4 apiece, for strictly productive purposes on a system of mutual credit.
Moral and material regeneration go together. The aim is to build up a new rural civilization, to put life, heart, and hope into the monotony of country life and unite all cla.s.ses in the strong bonds of sympathy and interest: a splendid ideal, applicable not to Ireland alone, but to all countries, and Ireland may truly be said to be pointing the way to many another country, Great Britain included.
The Co-operative movement attracts the most intelligent and progressive elements of the rural population. Strictly non-political itself, it unites creeds and parties. It is as strong in predominantly Roman Catholic districts as in predominantly Protestant districts, strongest of all in Catholic Wexford. Probably two-thirds or more of the co-operators are Home Rulers, but that only accidentally reflects the distribution of Irish parties. On the local committees political animus is unknown. The governing body contains members, lay and clerical, of all shades of opinion. Step into Plunkett House, that hospitable headquarters of the Organization Society, and if you have been nurtured in legends about inextinguishable cla.s.s and creed antipathies, which are supposed to render Home Rule impossible and the eternal "umpirage" of Great Britain inevitable, you will soon learn to marvel that anyone can be found to propagate them. Here, just because men are working together in a practical, self-contained, home-ruled organization for the good of the whole country, you will find liberality, open-mindedness, brotherhood, and keen, intelligent patriotism from Ulsterman and Southerners alike. The atmosphere is not political. But you will come away with a sense of the absurdity, of the insolence, of saying that a country which can produce and conduct fine movements like this is _unfit_ for self-government. I should add a word about a new organization which only came into being this year, and which also has its home at Plunkett House, the United Irishwomen, whose aim, in their own words, is to "unite Irishwomen for the social and economic advantage of Ireland." "They intend to organize the women of all cla.s.ses in every rural district in Ireland for social service. These bodies will discuss, and, if need be, take action upon any and every matter which concerns the welfare of society in their several localities. So far as women"s knowledge and influence will avail, they will strive for a higher standard of material comfort and physical well-being in the country home, a more advanced agricultural economy, and a social existence a little more in harmony with the intellect and temperament of our people." Anyone who wants to understand something of the spirit of the new self-reliant Ireland which is springing up to-day should read the thrilling little pamphlet (I cannot describe it otherwise) from which I quote these words, and which introduced the United Irish-women to the world, with its preface by Father T.A. Finlay, and its essays by Mrs.
Ellice Pilkington, Sir Horace Plunkett, and Mr. George W. Russell, better known as "ae," poet, painter, and Editor of the Co-operative weekly, the _Irish Homestead_. Nor can I leave this part of my subject without referring to that amazing little journal. No other newspaper in the world that I know of bears upon it so deep an impress of genius.
There are no "politics," in the Irish sense, in it. It would be impossible to infer from its pages how the Editor voted. What fascinates the reader is the shrewd and witty a.n.a.lysis of Irish problems, the high range of vision which exposes the shortcomings and reveals the illimitable possibilities of a regenerated Ireland and the ceaseless and implacable war waged by the Editor upon all pettiness, melancholy, and pessimism.
What the Agricultural Organization Society is doing for agriculture the Industrial Development a.s.sociations, formed only in quite recent years, are doing, in a different way, for the encouragement of Irish industries. The a.s.sociations of Belfast, Cork, and other cities work in harmony, and meet in an annual All-Ireland Industrial Conference. Their effort is to secure the concentration of Irish brains and capital on Irish industrial questions, to promote the sale of Irish goods, both in Ireland, Great Britain, and foreign countries, and to protect these goods against piracy and illicit compet.i.tion.[56] Here again co-operation for Irish welfare brings together the creeds and races, and tends to extinguish old bigotries and antipathies. Here again the truth is recognized that Ireland is a distinct economic ent.i.ty whose conditions and needs demand special study from her citizens. In a country of which that basal truth is recognized it would seem inexplicable that Protestants and Catholics who meet in committee-rooms and on platforms to promote, outside Parliament, the common interests of Ireland, should not unite as one man to demand an Irish Legislature in which to focus those interests and make them the subjects of direct legislative enactment, free both from the paternal and the coercive interference of a country differently situated, and absorbed in its own affairs.
I pa.s.s from the agricultural and industrial movements to another powerful factor in the reconstruction of Ireland, namely, the Gaelic League, founded in 1893, whose success under the Presidency of Dr.
Douglas Hyde in reviving the old national language, culture, and amus.e.m.e.nts, is attracting the attention of the world. Fortunately the League encountered some ridicule at the outset and prospered proportionately. Some of its work is not above criticism, but few persons--and none who have the least knowledge of such intellectual revivals elsewhere--now care to laugh at it. The League is non-political and non-sectarian. Strange, is it not, that such a movement should have to emphasize the fact? Strange paradox that in a country which is being re-born into a consciousness of its own individuality, which is regaining its own pride and self-respect, recovering its lost literature and culture, and vibrating to that "iron string, Trust thyself," the conflict for self-government, that elementary symbol of self-trust, should still retain enough intestinal bitterness to compel men to label national movements as non-political and non-sectarian! It would be idle, of course, to pretend that this national movement, like all others in Ireland, does not strengthen, especially among the younger generation, which grows increasingly Nationalist, the sentiment for Home Rule. If it did not, we should indeed be in the presence of something miraculously abnormal.
Meanwhile the Celtic revival does visible good. The language is no longer a fad; it is an envied accomplishment, a mark of distinction and education. Wherever it goes, North and South, it obliterates race and creed distinctions, and all the terrible memories a.s.sociated with them.
There are Ulstermen of Saxon or Scottish stock in whom the fascination of Irish art and literature has extirpated every trace of Orangeism and all implied in it. The language revivifies traditions, as beautiful as they are glorious, of an Ireland full of high pa.s.sions and stormy domestic feuds, but united in sentiment, breeding warriors, poets, lawgivers, saints, and fertilizing Europe with her missionary genius.
However far those times are, however grim and pitiful the havoc wrought by the race war, it is nevertheless a fact for thinkers and statesmen to ponder over, not a phantasy to sneer at, that Celtic Ireland lives.
Anglicization has failed, not because Celts cannot appreciate the n.o.blest manifestations of English genius in art, letters, science, war, colonization, but because to repress their own culture and nationality is at the same time to repress their power of appreciation and a.s.similation. Until comparatively recent times, it was only the worst of English literature and music, the cheapest newspaper twaddle, the inanest music-hall songs, which penetrated beyond a limited circle of culture into the life of the country. The revolt against this sterilizing and belittling side of anglicization is strong and healthy.
It affects all cla.s.ses. Farmers, labourers, small tradesmen, who had never conceived the idea of learning for learning"s sake, and who had grown up, thanks to the national system of education, in all but complete ignorance of their own country"s history and literature, spend time on reading and study and in the practice of the old indigenous dances and music, which was formerly wasted in idleness or dissipation.
Temperance and social harmony are irresistibly forwarded. Nor is it a question of a few able men imposing their will on the many, or of an artificial, State-aided process. Though the language has obtained a footing in more than a third of the State schools and in the National University,[57] the motive force behind it comes from the people themselves. In the country district, with which I am best acquainted, boys and girls from very poor families are clubbing together to pay instructors in the Irish language and dances, and the same thing is going on all over Ireland.
The brilliant modern school of poets and playwrights who, steeped in the old Celtic thought and culture, have found for it such an exquisite vehicle in the English tongue, speak for themselves and are winning their own way to renown. The only criticism I venture to make is that some of them are too much inclined to look backward instead of forward, to idealize the far past rather than to illuminate the future, and to delineate the deformities of national character produced by ages of repression, rather than to aid in conjuring into being a virile, normal nation.
The name of the last movement to be referred to sums up all the others, Sinn Fein. Unlike the others, it had a purely political origin, and for that reason, probably, never made the same progress. Yet the explanation is simple. In pursuance of the general purpose of inspiring Irishmen to rely on themselves for their own salvation, economic and spiritual, Sinn Feiners, like John Mitchel and others in the past, and like the Hungarian patriots, attacked, with much point and satire, the whole policy of const.i.tutional and Parliamentary agitation for Home Rule. The policy, they said, had failed for half a century; it was not only negative and barren, but positively harmful. Nationalists should refuse to send Members to Westminster and abide by the consequences. Sensibly enough, most Irishmen, while recognizing that there was an element of indisputable and valuable truth in this bold diagnosis, decided that it was premature to adopt the prescription. Public opinion in Britain was slowly changing, and confidence existed that this opinion would be finally converted. If the Sinn Fein alternative meant anything at all, it meant complete separation, which Ireland does not want, and a final abandonment of const.i.tutional methods. If another Home Rule Bill were to fail, Sinn Fein would undoubtedly redouble its strength. Its ideas are sane and sound. They are at bottom exactly the ideas which actuate every progressive and spirited community, and which in Ireland animate the Industrial Development a.s.sociations, the Co-operative movement, the thirst for technical instruction, the Gaelic League, the literary revival, and the work of the only truly Irish organ of government, the Department of Agriculture and Technical Instruction.
Now, where do we stand? Are the phenomena I have reviewed arguments for Home Rule or against Home Rule? Do they tend to show that Ireland is "fitter" now for Home Rule, or that she manages very well without Home Rule? These are superfluous questions. They are never asked save of countries obviously designed to govern themselves and obstinately denied the right. Who would say now of Canada or Australia that they ought to have solved their economic, agrarian, and religious problems and have evolved an indigenous literature before they were declared fit for Home Rule, or--still more unreasonable proposition--that their strenuous efforts after self-help and internal harmony in the teeth of political disabilities proved, in so far as they were successful, that external government was a success?
Yet these questions were, as a fact, asked of the Colonies, as they are asked of Ireland. And misgovernment increased, and pa.s.sions rose, and blood flowed, while, in the guise of dispa.s.sionate psychologists, a great many narrow, egotistical, and bullying people at home propounded these arid conundrums. Where is our common sense? The Irish phenomena I have described arise in spite of the absence of Home Rule, and the denial of Home Rule sets an absolute and final bar to progress beyond a certain point.
That is certain; one cannot live in Ireland with one"s eyes and ears open without realizing it. All social and economic effort, successful as it is up to a certain point, and strong as its tendency is to promote nationalist feeling of the n.o.blest kind, has to struggle desperately against the benumbing influence of abstract "politics." Suspicion comes from both sides. Both Unionists and Nationalists, for example, at one time or another have looked askance on the Co-operative movement and on the Department of Agriculture as being too Nationalist or too Unionist in tendency. Unionists caused Sir Horace Plunkett to lose his seat in Parliament in 1905; and Nationalists, though with some const.i.tutional justification, secured his removal from office in 1907. At this moment there is friction and suspicion in this particular matter which seems to the impartial observer to be artificial, and which would not exist, or would be trans.m.u.ted into something perfectly harmless, and probably highly beneficial, were there any normal political life in Ireland and a central organ of public opinion. As long as Great Britain insists, to her own infinite inconvenience, upon deciding Irish questions by party majorities fluctuating from Toryism to Radicalism, and thereby compels Ireland to send parties to Westminster whose _raison d"etre_ is, not to represent crystallized Irish opinion on Irish domestic questions--that is at present wholly impossible--but to a.s.sert or deny the fundamental right for Ireland to settle her own domestic questions, so long will these dislocations continue, to the grave prejudice of Ireland and the deep discredit of Great Britain. Ireland, like Canada in 1838, has no organic national life. Apart from the abstract but paramount question of Home Rule, there are no formed political principles or parties. Such parties as there are have no relation to the economic life of the country, and all interests suffer daily in consequence. In a normal country you would find urban and agricultural interests distinctly represented, but not in Ireland. We should expect to rind clear-cut opinions on Tariff Reform and Free Trade. No such opinions exist. On the other hand, agreement on important industrial and agricultural questions finds not the smallest reflection in Parliamentary representation.
Education, and other latent issues of burning importance, are not political issues. A Budget may cause almost universal dissatisfaction, but it goes through, and the amazing thing is that Unionists complain of its going through! Most of the Parliamentary elections are uncontested, though everybody knows that a dozen questions would set up a salutary ferment of opinion if they were not stifled by the refusal of Home Rule.
The Protestant tenant-farmers of Ulster have identical interests with those of other Provinces, and have profited largely by the legislation extorted by Nationalists; but for the most part, though by no means wholly, they vote Unionist. The two great towns, Dublin and Belfast, are divided by the most irrational antagonism. Labourers, both rural and urban, have distinct and important interests; the rural labourers have no spokesman, the town-labourers only one. It was admitted to me by a Unionist organizer in Belfast that that city, but for the Home Rule issue, would probably return four labour members. Nor have parties any close relation to the distribution of wealth. In the matter of incomes the prosperous traders of Cork, Limerick, and Waterford are in the same case as regards taxation with those of Londonderry and Belfast.
Publicans are Unionists in England, Nationalists in Ireland, both in Ulster and elsewhere. Before the Home Rule issue was raised, Ulster was largely Liberal. Ulster Liberalism is almost dead. Extreme Socialism may almost be said to be non-existent in Ireland, yet Ireland is not only administered on semi-collectivist principles, but continually runs the risk of being involved in legislation of a Socialistic kind, which, rightly or wrongly, she heartily dislikes.
As for the landed aristocracy all over Ireland, their historic alliance with the intensely democratic tenant-farmers of one small corner of Ireland, North-East Ulster, against those of all the rest, presented strange enough features in the past, and is now becoming artificial in the highest degree. Thanks to Land Purchase, no landed aristocracy in the world now has a better chance of throwing its wealth and intelligence into public life for the good of the whole country, of thinking out problems, of conciliating factions, and of enn.o.bling public life. The landlord who has sold his land is a free man, far freer than the English landlord from misgivings caused by divergency of interest.
The opportunity is still there. Will they profit by it? One thing is essential: they must become Nationalists, and in breathing that phrase, one is conscious of all the misleading implications and the bitter historical feuds it suggests. Yet a small but powerful group of landlords is already leading the way. And the way, even before Home Rule, in reality is so simple. I speak from close observation. If a man is a good man, and worthy to represent a const.i.tuency, he has only to declare his belief that he thinks that he and his own fellow-citizens are fit to govern themselves. Irishmen, especially in Roman Catholic districts, and, indeed, as an indirect result of Catholicism, have never lost their belief in aristocracy. When a landlord, or any other Protestant, comes forward as a Nationalist, he is welcomed. His religion, whatever it may be, does not count. Parnell and Smith O"Brien were Protestant landlords. Many of the most trusted popular leaders, Tone, Robert Emmet, John Mitchel, Isaac b.u.t.t, and others in the past have been Protestants. Ten Members of the present Nationalist party are Protestants. The Home Rule issue would have lost some of its bitterness if a Unionist electorate had ever elected a Catholic to Parliament.
Still, it is unfortunately true that the great bulk of the landlords and ex-landlords stand aloof from the Home Rule movement. The collateral result is that far too many of them instinctively stand aloof even from those purely economic and intellectual movements which tend to make a living united Ireland out of chaos. The national loss is heavy; the waste of talent and of driving-power, for Ireland needs driving-power from her leisured and cultured cla.s.ses, is melancholy to contemplate.
Everywhere one sees waste of talent in Ireland. The land abounds in men with ideas and potentialities waiting for those normal chances of development which self-governed countries provide. Much of this good material is crushed under unnatural political tyrannies caused by ceaseless agitation for and against an abstract aim which should have been satisfied long ago, so that the energies it absorbed might have been diverted into practical channels. There is too much moral cowardice, too little bold, independent thought and action. n.o.body knows what Ireland really is, and of what she is capable. n.o.body can know until she has responsibility for her own fate.
Local government, where popular opinion is nominally free, suffers from the absence of free central government. Is it not on the face of it preposterous to give complete powers of local taxation and administration to a country while withholding from it, as unsafe and improper, central co-ordinating control? For any country but Ireland--at any rate, in the British self-governing Colonies and the United States--such a policy would be regarded as crazy. Still more unreasonable is it to complain that local authorities under such a system spend part of the energy which should be devoted wholly to local affairs in abstract politics. I forbear from engaging in the statistical war over the numbers of Catholics and Protestants employed and elected by local bodies. One must remember, what Unionists sometimes forget, that Ireland is, broadly speaking, a Roman Catholic country, and that until thirteen years ago local administration and patronage were almost exclusively in Protestant hands. We should naturally expect a marked change; but, with that reminder, I prefer to appeal to the reader"s common sense. Deny national Home Rule, and give local Home Rule. What would one expect to happen? What would have happened in any Colony? What would Mr. Arthur Balfour himself have prophesied with certainty in the case of any other country but Ireland? Why, this, that each little local body would become an outlet for suppressed agitation, and that national or anti-national politics, not urgent local necessities, would enter into local elections and influence the composition of local bodies. And what would be the further consequence? That numbers of the best local men would stand aloof or be rejected, and that favouritism would find a congenial soil.