The refusal of the Irish to merge their sense of nationality in a common
British whole cannot be explained by any difference in blood or race. We
shall get nearer to the heart of the problem if we can discover why the
people on the north-east of Ireland, particularly in counties Antrim and
Down, in contrast with the rest of Ireland, are sharers in the common
British spirit. It is true that, even in ancient times, there was a
community of feeling between Ulstermen and the West Scotch. Even in
Neolithic times their cultures show a free intercourse. Before the
plantation of Ireland by lowland folk in the seventeenth century, Ulster
was frequented by bands of Highland Scots. Neither of these
circumstances explain the unionist spirit of Ulster. Nor is the spirit
of north-east Ulster a matter of British admixture. A careful
examination of all the available data relating to the plantation of
Ireland between 1560 and 1660 will show that an even greater proportion
of British blood was poured into Leinster and Munster than into Ulster.
At the end of the plantation period probably one Irishman out of every
three in the provinces of Leinster and Munster had blood of British
colonists in his veins. In this reckoning no count is made of the people
who landed and settled in Ireland in the five centuries which preceded
1560--Danes, Normans, Welsh, and English. It is not the number of
British colonists which has made north-east Ulster separatist in spirit,
so far as the rest of Ireland is concerned--and unionist, so far as
Great Britain is concerned. The north-east region of Ireland was the
only part which was truly colonized; only a real or spontaneous
colonization can carry a tribal or national spirit to a new land.
For the anthropologist a true or spontaneous colonization is a totally
different process from one which is false or forced. At the very time at
which the English Government was settling or planting colonists on Irish
soil and among Irish people, a spontaneous exodus set in among the North
Sea peoples. This exodus--a people's movement--established a Saxon
fringe along the eastern sea-board of North America. The exodus, which
began in the seventeenth century, has continued to the present
time--three full centuries. Thus fed, the fringe extended until it
reached the Pacific shore. The original fringe represented a true tribal
settlement; within the pioneer communities grew up the consciousness of
nationality and of race-antagonism, which we have already noted in the
Saxon peoples of North America. The break-away--the natural process of
disintegration, represented by the War of Independence--is usually
explained as a result of bad government. The disputes between the
British Government and the colonists were certainly the circumstances
which determined the disruption, but the forces which impelled the
colonists to action were those subconscious impulses which Nature has
planted deep in the human mind as part of her evolutionary machinery.