"THE CO-OPERATIVE COMMONWEALTH"
It was very dark. I could not find the number. The flat-faced little row of
houses was set far back on the green. But at last I mounted some lofty
steps, and entered a brown linoleum-covered hallway. In the front parlor
sat the hostess. She was like some family portrait with her hair parted and
drawn over her ears, with her black taffeta gown surmounted by a
cameo-pinned lace collar. She poured tea. In a back parlor whose walls were
hung with unframed paintings, a big brown-bearded man was passing teacups
to women who were lounging in chairs and to men who stood black against the
red glow of the grate. The big man was George Russell, the famous AE, poet,
painter and philosopher, the "north star of Ireland."
At last he sat down on the edge of a chair--his blue eyes atwinkle as if he
knew some good secret of the happy end of human struggling and was only
waiting the proper moment to tell. This much he did reveal as he gestured
with the pipe that was more often in his hand than in his mouth: it is his
belief that all acts purposed for good work out towards good. He gives ear
to all sincere radicals, Sinn Feiners and "Reds." But he states that he
believes he is the only living pacifist, and disputes the value of bloody
methods. He advocates the peaceful revolution of co-operation. His
powerfully gentle personality has an undoubted effect on the
revolutionaries, and while neither element wants to embrace pacifism, both
want AE's revolution to go forward with theirs.
His gaiety at the little Sunday evenings which he holds quite regularly,
goes far, I am told, towards easing the strain on the taut nerves of the
Sinn Fein intellectuals who attend them. On the Sunday evening I was
present the subject of jail journals was broached. Darrell Figgis had just
written one. In a dim corner of the room was miniatured the ivory face and
the red gold beard of the much imprisoned Figgis.
"Why write a jail journal?" queried AE, smiling towards the corner. "The
rare book, the book that bibliophiles will pray to find twenty years from
now, will be written by an Irishman who never went to jail."
Some one, I think that it was "Jimmy" Stephens, author of "The Crock of
Gold," who sat cross-legged on the end of a worn wicker chaise longue and
talked with all the facility with which he writes, mentioned the countess's
plan of living in the Coombe district. AE returned that as far as he knew
the countess was the only member of parliament who felt called upon to live
with her constituency.
Then suddenly the whole room seemed to join a chorus of protest against
President Wilson. At the Peace Conference all power was his. He was backed
by the richest, greatest nation in the world. But he failed to keep his
promise of gaining the self-determination of small nations. Was he yielding
to the anti-Irish sentiment brought about by English control of the cables
and English propaganda in the United States--was he to let his great
republic be intellectually dependent on the ancient monarchy?
"Perhaps," said AE to me after a few meditative puffs of his pipe, "you
feel like the American who was with us on a similar occasion a few weeks
ago. At last he burst out with: 'It's no conception which Americans have of
their president that he should take the place and the duties of God
Omnipotent in the world,'"
One day I went to discuss Irish labor with AE. I climbed up to that most
curious of all magazine offices--the _Irish Homestead_ office up under
the roof of Plunkett House. It is a semi-circular room whose walls are
covered with the lavender and purple people of AE's brush. AE was ambushed
behind piles of newspapers, and behind him in a grate filled with
smouldering peat blocks sat the black tea kettle. As a reporter, one of the
few things for which I am allowed to retain respect is the editorial dead
line. So I assured AE that I would be glad to return when he had finished
writing. But with a courtesy that is evidently founded on an inversion of
the American rule that business should always come before people, he
assured me that he could sit down at the fire with me at once.
Now I knew that he had great sympathy with laborers. I recalled his
terrible letter against Dublin employers in the great strike of 1913 when
he foretold that the success of the employers in starving the Dublin poor
would necessarily lead to "red ruin and the breaking up of laws.... The men
whose manhood you have broken will loathe you, and will always be brooding
and seeking to strike a new blow. The children will be taught to curse you.
The infant being moulded in the womb will have breathed into its starved
body the vitality of hate. It is not they--it is you who are pulling down
the pillars of the social order."[1] But I knew, too, that he was opposed
to violence, so I wondered what he would say to this:
"A labor leader just told me that it was his belief that industrial
revolution would take place in Ireland in two or three years. Labor waits
only till it has secured greater unity between the north and south. Then it
will take over industry and government by force."
"I had hoped--I am trying to convince the labor leaders here," he said
finally, "of the value of the Italian plan for the taking over of industry.
The Italian seaman's union co-operatively purchased and ran boats on which
they formerly had been merely workers."
Russia he spoke of for a moment. People shortly over from Russia told him,
as he had felt, that the soviet was not the dreadful thing it was made out
to be. But a dictatorship of the workers he would not like. He wanted, he
said with an upward movement of his big arms, he wanted to be free.
"Now I am for the building of a co-operative commonwealth on co-operative
societies. Ireland can and is developing her own industries through
co-operation. She is developing them without aid from England and in the
face of opposition in Ireland.
"England, you see, is used to dealing with problems of empire--with nations
and great metropolises. When we bring her plans that mean life or death to
just villages, the matter is too small to discuss. She is bored.
"Ireland offers opposition in the person of the 'gombeen man.' He is the
local trader and money lender. And co-operative buying and selling takes
away his monopoly of business.
"Paddy Gallagher up in Dungloe in the Rosses will give you an idea of the
poverty of the Irish countryside, of the extent that the poverty is due to
the gombeen men, 'the bosses of the Rosses,' and of the ability of the
co-operative society to develop and create industry even in such a locality.
"Societies like Paddy Gallagher's are springing up all over Ireland. The
rapid growth may be estimated from the fact that in 1902 their trade
turnover was $7,500,000, and in 1918, $50,000,000. These little units do
not merely develop industry; they also bind up the economic and social
interests of the people.
"In a few years these new societies and others to be created will have
dominated their districts, and political power will follow, and we will
have new political ideals based on a democratic control of agriculture and
industry, and states and people will move harmoniously to a given end.
"Ireland might attain, by orderly evolution, to a co-operative commonwealth
in fifty to two hundred years.
"But these are dangerous times for prophecy."