words, there were, as it were, two layers through the country, and
each layer represented its own State-idea. The topmost layer was the
landlordry, which, being in power, had enforced its own State-idea.
When it became, as it finally did, an absentee landlordry, that
State-idea did not voice any of the desires, expectations or intuitions
of the resident population. In fact, it outraged them at every point.
The more truly was this the case when, under the Penal code, the
submerged layer of the rent-paying tenantry was denied every right
in the existent State. In the words of the Lord Chancellor of that
State, “The law” (that is to say, the law of the imported State)
“did not suppose any such person to exist as an Irish Catholic.” The
two State-ideas were not only mutually contradictory, but they were
deliberately kept apart; and there is no indication to show that those
who carried in their instincts or memories the old State-idea took any
interest in the foreign State except the interest of sufferers.
Such was the position during the eighteenth century. The Nation seemed
dead and buried, with a stone rolled across its sepulchre. Any thought
of its resurrection would have been treated by its jailers as a proper
subject for comedy. Certainly its Polity seemed to have passed into
history--indeed, to have passed beyond history, for those jailers did
not intend to let intellectual curiosity, their’s or others’, stray
into that neglected field. But at this moment, when the Nation lived on
sorrel boiled up with blood let from cattle while the tillage of their
land went to rents, a strange parenthesis in the history of Ireland
occurred. The jailers themselves arose and demanded the liberty for
which the ancient Nation had fought over whom they had been placed in
guard. They demanded it with cannon, musket and pike; and with these
persuasive arguments they won a great measure of that liberty. They
established a Sovereign Parliament under a Dual Monarchy, but with
an utterly unworkable constitution. It was unworkable because they
remembered the source from which they sprang; and would not, and indeed
could not, carry victory to its logical conclusion. If they severed
themselves from the source of their power, they were thrown into the
arms of the Nation over whom they were in guard, and who formed the
overwhelming majority of the population of the country. It was also
unworkable in itself. In the Regency debate they asserted their right
to appoint their own Regent; and that logically meant the right to
appoint their own king; but, as FitzGibbon pointed out, the Seal was
in the care of the English Chancellor, and that gave England the final
word in all matters. It was an independence that needed force at every
moment to make it of any avail; but it was independence, nevertheless,
and therefore by the Act of Union England struck down her own jailers
and abolished their little hour of liberty.
The parenthesis was concluded, and history was able to take its
course again. The liberty that Grattan had won had been the liberty
of the English State in Ireland; the liberty, that is to say, of
the State-idea of the uppermost layer. The overwhelming mass of the
population was comprised of the old Nation with its own and separate
State-idea. It had no part in, and no interest in, the liberty their
jailers had won for themselves; and the State in which that liberty
had been held (if State it may be called that represented nothing of
the population) voiced none of its instincts or desires. But when the
watcher at the gate had been struck down the Nation arose, feebly at
first, and marched into the nineteenth century to claim satisfaction
for those desires and instincts.
The course of the nineteenth century in Ireland is like a resurrection
from the dead. It is full of memories--memories prior to 1603 and the
destruction of the Irish State. The very order is significant. The
Nation had lost certain things in a certain order; in its resurrection
it set about to regain them in the inverse order. It had lost, first,
its State; then its language and culture, the flowers of that State,
had been penalised; then its land, on which the State had been based,
was taken; and finally its liberty of faith. It won back, first, its
liberty to faith; then its land; then its separate culture; and now it
seeks its State.
Literally and precisely the nineteenth century in Ireland is one of
the most remarkable movements in history. It is like a great hall
full of ghostly memories, but ghosts that bewilderingly become flesh
and blood before our very eyes. It is a haunted hall where memories
become realities again, instead of realities passing into memories.
The struggle for Catholic Emancipation, it is true, was not of this
order. It was part of a larger world movement into which the Nation
was compelled by the leadership of one man. It may or may not have
been the best beginning to have made; its fruits were unreal; and the
victory was soon lost sight of by the Nation. But the land-war arose
spontaneously from the people in a form that suggested an ancient
memory. Before it found expression the compiler of the Devon Commission
Digest remarked “that the tenant claims what he calls a tenant-right
in the land, irrespective of any legal claim vested in him, or of any
improvement effected by him.” He mentions it as a curious thing; and to
him, with his foreign State-idea, it was indeed a curious thing; yet it
was only the first re-assertion of a very old memory. For the Nation
was not asserting a tenant’s right, but re-asserting a freeman’s right.
And inasmuch as the landlordry was now mainly absentee it was making
that re-assertion in a solid national formation.
It was for this moment it had clung to the land with such fidelity.
During the first forty years of the century rents were increased by
thirty, forty, and in some cases fifty per cent. On an average it took
a man 250 days of the year to clear his rent; and this meant that the
people could only live on the dregs of the land and on sorrel and
cattle-blood. Yet still they clung. When Pestilence and Starvation
stalked through the land, and the young men and girls had to fly
over-seas, the families still clung to their holdings. Those young
men and girls lived in penury in America in order that their earnings
should be sent home to maintain the grip on the land. The Nation was
holding its old property, and meant to win it back. They arose in war
and shot the usurpers on their ancient property. And then at the height
of that war they suddenly, in a new awakening of memory, put their old
law into operation--the very law by which the land had been ensured
to them as a freeman’s possession. “The body of the law which all
Ireland enacted none dared to transgress; and he that perchance did so
was outlawed from the men of Ireland.” The landlord transgressed that
law, so the people outlawed him. Boycotting according to the foreign
State-idea was lawlessness, yet it was truly the assertion of the law
of one State against the usurpation of another State. Not being the
enactment of its own central authority it was naturally subject to
local abuse; yet it was not lawlessness but the revival of a legal
procedure. And finally the land was won back, though the people were
compelled to pay for the property that had been robbed from them. So
potent a thing was the old expectation.
So deep a national stirring was not without its effects far and wide,
especially as it was less an event in itself than part of a greater
whole. The century was continually shaken by a series of revolutions,
the pulsations of its re-awakening life, each of which struck its
roots down deeper into the past, and brought forth memories like
blossoms that became completer and more perfect with the years. After
the broken attempt for freedom in 1848 a new impetus was given to the
cultural movement that had begun with the Young Irelanders, but this
now took the form of a search into the forgotten manuscripts in the
Irish language, in which the elder culture was stored. After 1867 the
active publication of these records began by a number of societies, and
the Society for the Preservation of the Irish Language was started.
Irishmen’s minds turned to the annals of their own elder history, and
viewed with alarm the perishing, under tense economic strain, of their
national speech, the only adequate vehicle of their distinctive thought
and intuitions. After the Land War the Gaelic League was started as an
organised attempt, not only to save the national language and to compel
its study and use, but to revive all that was distinctively national
by means of that language. It became a shame among Irishmen not to
speak their own language, not to delight in their own music, not to
dance their own dances, and not to make their national past, especially
the past of the days of glory, their intellectual possession. For, as
was inevitable, the awakening had passed out of spontaneity into an
organised intellectual effort, as the spontaneous hours of youth pass
into the discipline of intellectual manhood. Yet neither is artificial,
for both partake of the growth that is part of life.
Both instinct and intellect were present, and each was part of the
other. When an Irishman threw the co-operative idea among farmers as
a means by which they could combat the great organised farming of the
Americas, the people took slowly to the idea as a foreign economic
theory. Then they seized it, and turned their co-operative societies
into rural communities that were a re-birth in modern conditions of
their old stateships. Most of them, as the fruit of the Land War, were
now beginning to own their farms, and that gave them the foundation
of which the stateships had been built. In the central hall of the
co-operative society the economic business of the community was
discussed, and around it its artisans and artificers collected. That
was done naturally, as the result of instinct, but then intellect
saw the natural drift, and (not too bravely perhaps, through fear
of “political” consequences) sought to guide it definitely in the
direction indicated by history.
If there were greater courage and clearer thought, together with the
freedom within which thought and courage could act, such communities,
instead of being, as they now are, only economic and social units of
the national life, could also become the recognised political units of
that life. In other words, they could become stateships awaiting their
final integration into a State that would equally be a translation
into modern conditions of the old Irish State. Though they are social
units their social life is stagnant, because (again for what are called
“political” reasons) those who control their guidance are afraid to
guide it into the only cultural life any nation can know and within
which can find liberty: its own. Were the enthusiasm of the Gaelic
League--that is to say, the national enthusiasm--linked to the economic
life of such communities, were Irish music, Irish dance, Irish history
and Irish tale-telling provided in its halls of a winter’s evening,
the flowing together of both streams would make these communities,
not only stateships, but centres of national life as they were in
the days of old. They would maintain their own musicians and their
own historians and professors, would vie with one another in their
excellence and exchange them with one another. They would maintain
their own physicians as the older stateships did. They would elect
their own administrative heads, and, under their presidency, would meet
in their own assemblies to order and control, not only their business
transactions, but all the life contained within them. In their own
arbitration courts they could control all their internal litigation,
and compel recognition of the findings of such courts by the force of
the whole community as the old stateships did.
To such a point has the national resurrection come in the awakening of
its distinctive State, that these things could be brought to pass by
the smallest manipulation and arrangement. Yet in the early centuries
their completion and organisation required the function of a State with
its central authority. Not only did the parts make the State but the
State also made the parts. Each acted together, and flowed together.
So it will be again; and the Nation has come to a point when it only
awaits its State.
VII. AT THE GATES OF THE FUTURE.
If there is one thing sure for the future of an Ireland free to
develop its own State it is this, that one by one the moulds shaped
by England for its governance will be thrown back into the cauldron
and new moulds made to accord with the Nation’s own sense of wisdom
and economy. Urban Councils, District Councils, Poor Law Guardians,
and County Councils, all that they are and all that they represent are
destined for the cauldron in the forms in which they at present are
known. The whole English political configuration of Ireland is destined
to rejection (it never really existed otherwise than in a partial
state of rejection) simply because it expresses little that is real in
the life of the people. No organisation is good or bad in itself as a
scheme; it is only good or bad in the degree in which it does, or does
not, effectively and economically organise a flexible life for some
definite end which it has to serve. In fact, the better it is the less
will it be in evidence as a thing in itself, apart from the elements
comprising it. The old Irish State was a good organisation, because
it is almost impossible to think of it apart from the life which it
contained and conveyed, so nearly identical were the two things. The
stateships were the people and the people were the stateships; and
that is why the conqueror found plantations necessary; for it was
impossible to break one without removing the other. The modern state
of Ireland is not, in that sense, an organisation at all; it is simply
a configuration imposed upon its life, not fitting that life at all,
neither expressing, containing nor conveying that life, and therefore
used or abused by it according as occasion offers.
Even the very counties, those results of the breaking up of the
stateships and the making of English shire-lands, are unreal things
that express little of the life of the people. Their long continuance
has made them familiar, and so has given them a fictitious reality;
but they again are a configuration and not an organisation. They may
persist for awhile with that fictitious life, chiefly because they have
become themes of local partisanship; but in the degree in which the
Nation sets about to displace its configuration by a real organisation,
they must inevitably pass into a historical memory, and not a very
pleasing historical memory at that.
Everything that has been introduced by England into Ireland is destined
to rejection, and not as a matter of prejudice, but as an inevitable
fact in statesmanship. Suits cut for other people, or demanded by other
people’s necessities, are the proper wear for clowns. At best these
things were wrung as concessions given with poor grace after long and
bitter war; at worst they were anticipations of further war and the
spontaneous creation of an alien thought. The first was better than the
second because it did spring from the initiative of the people, and
partially and ineffectually answered that demand, while the second
sprang from the same alien intention that has created three centuries
of almost unremitting warfare. And whether that intention stalk as an
undisguised foe, or prank about with the antics of a philanthropist,
the result in statesmanship is the same. Instead of effecting an
organisation it creates a configuration; instead of producing human
contentment, comfort and ease it produces irritation, exasperation
and enmity; instead of being as flexible as the life it contains it
is as rigid as the thought that made it; instead of being capable of
development it is only capable of being broken or abused; instead of
being a National State it is a national despair and futility. Therefore
statesmanship must neglect its achievements (though continuity of
government may compel their continuance for awhile) and must make a
direct approach to the national life, and its needs and necessities,
human and economic, in order to build again, however slowly to build,
from the foundations the structure that those foundations decree and
suggest.
It is in the discovery of those foundations that history becomes a
matter of first importance. Not a portion of that history; not the
history of the eighteenth century, which did not express the life of
the people but the life of a small colony the proportion of which to
the whole is even smaller now than it was then, besides being under the
influence of the awakening of the nineteenth century; but the whole of
that history, from the beginnings to the present, for in Irish history
probably more than in any other the end is in the beginning and the
beginning in the end. That we have already seen. We have seen, first,
the National State as it existed, and we saw that it was indeed a
National State although it was not finally centralised before it was
assaulted. We have seen the assault that suspended its completion, and
we saw that that assault meant for some centuries the war of a State
against a State, a Polity against a Polity, a foreign and alien polity
seeking to break and displace the polity of the Nation. We have seen
that polity broken and displaced, and we saw the ideas that went to
the building of that polity lying resident in the people and creating
a continual warfare with the alien polity that had been imposed upon
the country from without. We have seen that those ideas maintained the
warfare unceasingly, it being the first principle of life to find an
outlet for the ideas of the mind and the impulses of the blood, and to
war for them when they are thwarted; and we saw that warfare successful
in winning back much of what had been lost, and especially winning
back the land on which the old polity had been based. We have seen
those ideas breaking out in some remarkable acts reminiscent of the old
process of law; and we saw that when some scheme was advocated to the
people that could be worked independently of the alien polity it was
taken and bent into the form of the stateships in which the old polity
had been expressed. In a word, we have seen the end in the beginning,
and the beginning in the end, with a persistent continuity throughout.
The question is, how may that continuity be carried forward, and some
State be devised that shall express the National intuition and desire,
and be the old State re-born into modern conditions while perfectly
fitting and conveying the requirements of a new and intricate life?
Manifestly in the first place the incompleted work of the nineteenth
century, where the nation clearly asserted its desire, must be brought
as speedily as possible to an end. That is to say, Land Purchase
must be completed. This is necessary for several reasons, all of
which vitally affect each part of the country, since nations are not
tissues of separate interests, nor even an entanglement of separate
interests, but co-ordinated wholes. It is economically necessary.
Industrial centres, such as Belfast, depend for their enterprise on
capital accumulated, not primarily from their own reserves, but from
other sources. In Ireland those other sources are mainly derived from
farmers’ deposits. The sooner, therefore, farmers can be relieved from
the uneconomical drain on their industry known as rent the sooner
will they be able to accumulate balances that will be available for
industrial enterprise. Sound economy suggests that the main source of
a nation’s wealth, its land, should be freed from the burden of rents,
especially as these rents are usually spent to the advantage of other
countries. It is also politically necessary. It is not at all likely
that an agitation that convulsed the nineteenth century will die away
with its work incompleted; and no nation can afford to let its path
be encumbered by a continual agitation the justice of which has been
admitted. The necessity in statesmanship follows closely upon this.
The nation has clearly indicated that, just as the old State was built
on the free possession of the land, so must the new State be built.
It being the task of statesmanship to give expression to the desires
of a nation while preserving the unity and balance of the whole, this
particular desire must be satisfied, and built into the Polity, if the
work of statesmanship is not to fall into ruin in its hands.
Yet in order that Land Purchase should be completed the Nation must be
financially free, without burdens placed upon it by any considerations
outside its shores. Needless to say, Land Purchase under an Irish State
will be a different matter from the same purchase as devised by foreign
governments. The Nation will pay a single-minded attention to its own
interests. Its good faith will be an essential part of those interests;
but it will not be easily embarrassed by fictitious prices and delaying
methods to inflate values. Nevertheless, much of the world’s wealth
having somehow escaped in gas and shell-splinters, and Ireland being
as the result of long oppression a poor nation, the completion of Land
Purchase will require a nation absolutely unencumbered by any other
demands on its wealth than the demand of its own problems.
That is to say, before any building can proceed its foundation must
be assured, the foundation being the same as preceded the building in
the old State. That building, it will be remembered, was not possible,
and the State could not be said to have begun, till there was a
central authority strong enough to make the parts out of earlier, more
independent units, and frame them into a national whole. That central
authority will again be necessary; and in asking the question, of what
sort shall it be, it will be well to suppose nothing but to begin from
the beginnings.
Never in the history of the Irish Nation (if we except the Parliament
of 1689, which was framed on earlier models drawn from other than Irish
sources) has any body ever sat at all similar to a modern Parliament.
In the old Irish State the elected monarch convened great councils
charged with special functions and duties. There was a council of
brehons, a council of administrative rulers, a council of historians,
or public recorders, and a council of poets--all of them public
officials, with their parts to play in their various stateships. Each
council decided in its own affairs, and where necessary, for instance
as between rulers and brehons, or brehons and recorders, the monarch
wrought harmony between their decisions for the smooth working of the
State. But that is not to say that, if the Nation had been left free
to develop and augment its own polity, something in the nature of an
assembly drawn from popular sources would not have been found necessary
to assist or displace the monarch and his personal council. Had it
been possible to create such an assembly early a central stability
would have existed, drawn from all the parts of the State and therefore
holding all the parts together, that would have provided the State
with just that central authority that it needed. However that be,
parliaments, or assemblies of popular representatives, have become an
essential part of the modern mind, as providers and correctives of a
central government. They have proved to be corrupt servers of special
interests; but that is because they have been too much trusted without
supplementing them with councils each representing its own interest,
as the monarch in the Irish State supplemented his executive authority
with councils each having power, subject to the national unity of
administration, over its special concerns.