A French writer has paid the English a very well-deserved compliment. He
says that they never commit a useless crime. When they hire a man to
assassinate an Irish patriot, when they blow a Sepoy from the mouth of a
cannon, when they produce a famine in one of their dependencies, they
have always an ulterior motive. They do not do it for fun. Humorous as
these crimes are, it is not the humour of them, but their utility, that
appeals to the English. Unlike Gilbert’s Mikado, they would see nothing
humorous in boiling oil. If they retained boiling oil in their penal
code, they would retain it, as they retain flogging before execution in
Egypt, strictly because it has been found useful.
This observation will help one to an understanding of some portions of
the English administration of Ireland. The English administration of
Ireland has not been marked by any unnecessary cruelty. Every crime that
the English have planned and carried out in Ireland has had a definite
end. Every absurdity that they have set up has had a grave purpose. The
Famine was not enacted merely from a love of horror. The Boards that
rule Ireland were not contrived in order to add to the gaiety of
nations. The Famine and the Boards are alike parts of a profound polity.
I have spent the greater part of my life in immediate contemplation of
the most grotesque and horrible of the English inventions for the
debasement of Ireland. I mean their education system. The English once
proposed in their Dublin Parliament a measure for the castration of all
Irish priests who refused to quit Ireland. The proposal was so filthy
that, although it duly passed the House and was transmitted to England
with the warm recommendation of the Viceroy, it was not eventually
adopted. But the English have actually carried out an even filthier
thing. They have planned and established an education system which more
wickedly does violence to the elementary human rights of Irish children
than would an edict for the general castration of Irish males. The
system has aimed at the substitution for men and women of mere Things.
It has not been an entire success. There are still a great many thousand
men and women in Ireland. But a great many thousand of what, by way of
courtesy, we call men and women, are simply Things. Men and women,
however depraved, have kindly human allegiances. But these Things have
no allegiance. Like other Things, they are for sale.
When one uses the term education system as the name of the system of
schools, colleges, universities, and what not which the English have
established in Ireland, one uses it as a convenient label, just as one
uses the term government as a convenient label for the system of
administration by police which obtains in Ireland instead of a
government. There is no education system in Ireland. The English have
established the simulacrum of an education system, but its object is the
precise contrary of the object of an education system. Education should
foster; this education is meant to repress. Education should inspire;
this education is meant to tame. Education should harden; this education
is meant to enervate. The English are too wise a people to attempt to
educate the Irish, in any worthy sense. As well expect them to arm us.
Professor Eoin MacNeill has compared the English education system in
Ireland to the systems of slave education which existed in the ancient
pagan republics side by side with the systems intended for the education
of freemen. To the children of the free were taught all noble and goodly
things which would tend to make them strong and proud and valiant; from
the children of the slaves all such dangerous knowledge was hidden. They
were taught not to be strong and proud and valiant, but to be sleek, to
be obsequious, to be dexterous: the object was not to make them good
men, but to make them good slaves. And so in Ireland. The education
system here was designed by our masters in order to make us willing or
at least manageable slaves. It has made of some Irishmen not slaves
merely, but very eunuchs, with the indifference and cruelty of eunuchs;
kinless beings, who serve for pay a master that they neither love nor
hate.
Ireland is not merely in servitude, but in a kind of penal servitude.
Certain of the slaves among us are appointed jailors over the common
herd of slaves. And they are trained from their youth for this degrading
office. The ordinary slaves are trained for their lowly tasks in dingy
places called schools; the buildings in which the higher slaves are
trained are called colleges and universities. If one may regard Ireland
as a nation in penal servitude, the schools and colleges and
universities may be looked upon as the symbol of her penal servitude.
They are, so to speak, the broad-arrow upon the back of Ireland.