HISTORY
_(b) Plain_
In those days war was the most lucrative industry open to a young man of
breeding, courage, and ability. Owners of capital regarded it as a sound
investment. What Professor Oman tells us of the Normans in 1066 was
equally true of them in 1169:
"Duke William had undertaken his expedition not as a mere feudal
lord of the barons of Normandy but rather as the managing director
of a great joint-stock company for the conquest of England, in
which not only his own subjects but hundreds of adventurers, poor
and rich, from all parts of Western Europe had taken shares."
The Normans, then, came to Ireland with their eyes on three objects. In
the first place, property. This was to be secured in the case of each
individual adventurer by the overthrow of some individual Irish
chieftain. It necessitated war in the shape of a purely local, and
indeed personal grapple. In the second place, plunder. This was to be
secured by raids, incursions, and temporary alliances. In the third
place, escape from the growing power and exactions of the Crown. This
was to be secured geographically by migration to Ireland, and
politically by delaying, resolutely if discreetly, the extension in that
country of the over-lordship of the King. Herein lies the explanation of
the fact that for three and a half centuries the English penetration
into Ireland is a mere chaos of private appetites and egotisms. The
invaders, as we have said, were specialists in war, and in the
unification of states through war. This they had done for England; this
they failed to do for Ireland. The one ingredient which, if dropped into
the seething cauldron of her life, must have produced the definite
crystallisation of a new nationality, complete in structure and
function, was not contributed. True, the Cymro-Franks proved themselves
strong enough in arms to maintain their foothold; if that physical test
is enough to establish their racial superiority then let us salute Mr
Jack Johnson as Zarathustra, the superman. But in their one special and
characteristic task they failed lamentably. Instead of conquest and
consolidation they gave us mere invasion and disturbance. The disastrous
role played by them has been unfolded by many interpreters of history,
by none with a more vivid accuracy than we find in the pages of M.
Paul-Dubois:
"Had Ireland," he writes, "been left to herself she would, in all
human probability, have succeeded, notwithstanding her decadence,
in establishing political unity under a military chief. Had the
country been brought into peaceful contact with continental
civilisation, it must have advanced along the path of modern
progress. Even if it had been conquered by a powerful nation, it
would at least have participated in the progress of the conquering
power. But none of these things happened. England, whose political
and social development had been hastened by the Norman Conquest,
desired to extend her influence to Ireland. 'She wished,' as Froude
strangely tells us, 'to complete the work of civilisation happily
begun by the Danes.' But in actual fact she only succeeded in
trammelling the development of Irish society, and maintaining in
the country an appalling condition of decadent stagnation, as the
result of three centuries and a half of intermittent invasions,
never followed by conquest."
On the other hand the triumph of Irish culture was easy and absolute.
Ireland, unvisited by the legions and the law of Rome, had evolved a
different vision of the life of men in community, or, in other words, a
different idea of the State. Put very briefly the difference lay in
this. The Romans and their inheritors organised for purposes of war and
order, the Irish for purposes of culture. The one laid the emphasis on
police, the other on poets. But for a detailed exposition of the
contrast I must send the reader to Mrs Green's "Irish Nationality." In a
world in which right is little more than a secretion of might, in which,
unless a strong man armed keeps house, his enemies enter in, the
weakness of the Gaelic idea is obvious. But the Roman pattern too had a
characteristic vice which has led logically in our own time to a
monstrous and sinister growth of armaments.
To those who recognise in this deification of war the blackest menace of
our day the vision of a culture State is not without charm. The
shattering possibilities enfolded in it would have fevered Nietzsche and
fascinated Renan. But, be that as it may, Ireland played Cleopatra to
the Antony of the invaders. Some of them, indeed, the "garrison" pure
and simple, had all their interests centred not only in resisting but in
calumniating her. But the majority yielded gaily to her music, her
poetry, her sociability, that magical quality of hers which the Germans
call _Gemütlichkeit_. In a few centuries a new and enduring phrase had
designated them as more Irish than the Irish themselves. So far as any
superiority of civilisation manifests itself in this first period it is
altogether on the side of Ireland. This power of assimilation has never
decayed. There never was a nation, not even the United States, that so
subdued and re-fashioned those who came to her shores, that so wrought
them into her own blood and tissue. The Norman baron is transformed in a
few generations into an Irish chieftain, and as often as not into an
Irish "rebel." The Jacobite planter of the first decade of the
seventeenth century is in the fifth decade found in arms against
Cromwell; the Cromwellian settler is destined in turn to shed his blood
for James II. and Catholicity. Protestant colonists who, in the early
eighteenth century, enforce and defend the abominable Penal Laws, will
in 1782 demand, with drawn swords, that henceforth there shall be no
longer a Protestant colony but in its place an Irish nation. The
personal history of the captains of the Irish cause in modern times is
no less remarkable. O'Connell begins his public career in the Yeomanry
called out to put down the insurrectionary movement of Emmet. Isaac
Butt comes first into note as the orator of the Orange Party in Dublin.
Parnell himself steps out of a Tory milieu and tradition into the
central tumult of agitation. Wave after incoming wave of them, her
conquerors were conquered. "Once again," cried Parnell in the last
public utterance of his life, "I am come to cast myself into the deep
sea of the love of my people." In that deep sea a hundred diverse
currents of blood have met and mingled; they have lost their individual
drift to become part of the strong tide of national consciousness and
national unity. If Irish history is to be regarded as a test of racial
superiority then Ireland emerges with the crown and garlands of victory.
We came, we the invaders, to dominate, and we remained to serve. For
Ireland has signed us with the oil and chrism of her human sacrament,
and even though we should deny the faith with our lips she would hold
our hearts to the end.
But let us translate her triumph into more concrete speech. The
essential lesson of experience, then, is that no device, plan, or policy
adopted by England for the subjugation of Ireland has ever been anything
except an abject failure. And the positive of this negative is that
every claim that ever formed part of the national programme of Ireland
has won its way against all enmities. No plough to which she ever put
her hand has been turned back or stayed eternally in mid-furrow. It does
not matter what period you call to the witness-box; the testimony is
uniform and unvarying. Until Tudor times, as has been noted, there
cannot be said to have been in any strict sense an English policy in
Ireland; there was only a scuffle of appetites. In so far as there was a
policy it consisted of sporadic murder for the one half, and for the
other of an attempt to prevent all intercourse that might lead to
amalgamation between the two peoples. The Statute of Kilkenny--which is,
all things considered, more important than the Kilkenny cats though not
so well known in England--made it a capital offence for a settler to
marry an Irishwoman or to adopt the Irish language, law, or costume. The
Act no doubt provided a good many ruffians with legal and even
ecclesiastical fig-leaves with which to cover their ruffianism, and
promoted among the garrison such laudable objects as rape and
assassination. But as a breakwater between the two races it did not
fulfil expectation. The Statute was passed in 1367: and two centuries
later Henry VIII. was forced to appoint as his Deputy the famous
Garrett Fitzgerald whose life was a militant denial of every clause and
letter of it. With the Tudors, after some diplomatic preliminaries, a
very clear and business-like policy was developed. Seeing that the only
sort of quiet Irishman known to contemporary science was a dead
Irishman, English Deputies and Governors were instructed to pacify
Ireland by slaughtering or starving the entire population. The record of
their conscientious effort to obey these instructions may be studied in
any writer of the period, or in any historian, say Mr Froude. For Mr
Froude, in his pursuit of the picturesque, was always ready to resort to
the most extreme measures; he sometimes even went so far as to tell the
truth. The noblest and ablest English minds lent their aids. Sir Walter
Raleigh and Edmund Spenser were both rather circumambulatory on paper;
the work of each is 'a long monotone broken by two or three exquisite
immortalities. But they were both as concise in action as an Elizabethan
headsman. Sir Walter helped Lord Grey, the recognised pattern in those
days of the Christian gentleman, to put to death seven hundred
prisoners-of-war at Smerwick. Spenser, being no soldier, leaned rather
to famine. In his famous book he recommends the destruction of crops,
houses, cattle, and all necessaries of life so that the Irish should
"soon be compelled to devour each other." The Commanders-in-Chief and
the Deputies specialised in poison, as became men whose wealth and
learning enabled them to keep in touch with the Italian Renaissance.
Bluff, straightforward troopers like Mountjoy, Malby, Wilmot, Bagenal,
Chichester, and the rest, not pretending to such refinements, did their
best in the way of hanging, stabbing, and burning. In those days as well
as ours the children had their Charter. "Nits," said the trustees of
civilisation, "will grow to lice." And so they tossed them on the points
of their swords, thus combining work with play, or fed them on the roast
corpses of their relatives, and afterwards strangled them with tresses
of their mother's hair.
I do not recall these facts in order to show that Elizabethan policy was
a riot of blackguardism. That is obvious, and it is irrelevant. I
mention them in order to show that the blackguardism under review was an
unrelieved failure. At one time, indeed, it seemed to have succeeded.
"Ireland, brayed as in a mortar, to use Sir John Davies' phrase," writes
M. Paul-Dubois, "at last submitted. In the last years of the century
half the population had perished. Elizabeth reigned over corpses and
ashes. _Hibernia Pacata_--Ireland is 'pacified.'"
* * * * *
The blunder discloses itself at a glance. Only half the population had
perished; there were still alive, according to the most probable
estimate, quite two hundred thousand Irishmen. The next generation helps
to illustrate not only the indestructibility of Ireland, but her all but
miraculous power of recuperation. So abundant are the resources of his
own vitality that, as Dr Moritz Bonn declares, an Irish peasant can live
where a continental goat would starve. And not having read Malthus--Mr
Malthus at that time being even less readable than since--the Irish
remnant proceeded to develop anew into a nation. In forty years it was
marching behind that _beau chevalier_ Owen Roe O'Neill to battle and
victory. O'Neill, a general famous through Europe, the one man who might
have measured equal swords with Cromwell, was removed by poison, and
then came the massacres. In eleven years, Sir William Petty assures us,
616,000 out of a total population of 1,466,000 perished by the sword or
by starvation. For the remainder the policy of root and branch
extermination was abandoned in favour of a policy of State-aided
migration and emigration. As an alternative to hell the Irish were
deported to Connaught or the Barbadoes. Henceforth there were to be
three provinces of loyal English, and one of rebelly Irish. This again
was not a radiant success. The transformation of the Cromwellian settler
has been indicated; if you were to search for him to-day you would
probably find him President of the local branch of the United Irish
League. The story repeats itself period after period. The Penal Laws did
not protestantise Ireland. The eighteenth century may be said to mark
the lowest ebb of national life, but the tide was to turn. After Aughrim
and the Boyne, the new device of England was to sacrifice everything to
the "garrison." "Protestant Ireland," as Grattan put it, "knelt to
England on the necks of her countrymen." In one aspect the garrison were
tyrants; in another they were slaves. They were at once oppressors and
oppressed. There was a sort of "deal" between them and the English
Government by which the public welfare was to be sacrificed to the
English Government, the Irish Catholics to the "garrison." A vile
programme, but subtle and adroit, it bore its unnatural fruit of
legislation, passed by the Westminster Parliament and the Dublin
Garrison Parliament alike, for the destruction of every manufacturing
and commercial interest in Ireland that was thought to conflict with a
similar interest in England. But another debacle has to be chronicled.
Out of the very baseness of this regime a new patriotism was begotten.
The garrison, awakening abruptly to the fact that it had no country,
determined to invent one; and there was brought to birth that modern
Ireland, passionate for freedom, which has occupied the stage ever
since. In our own time it has knit, as a fractured limb knits, into one
tissue with the tradition of the Gaelic peasantry. Hanging and burning,
torture and oppression, poison and Penal Laws, bribes and blackguardism
so far from exterminating the Irish people actually hammered them into a
nation, one and indestructible, proud of its past and confident of its
future.
Take instances still more recent and particular--the struggle for
religious freedom or the struggle for the land. Catholic emancipation is
a leading case: obstinacy against obstinacy, the No! of England against
the Yes! of Ireland, and the former sprawling in the ditch at the end of
the tussle. "The Law," ran the dictum of an eighteenth-century Lord
Chancellor, "does not suppose any such person to exist as an Irish
Roman Catholic." At this moment a Catholic holds the seals and purse of
the Chancellorship. Never did ministers swallow their own stubborn words
more incontinently than did Peel and Wellington. So late as 1828 Peel
was loudly declaring that the continuance of these bars, which excluded
the Catholics from the acquisition of political power, was necessary for
the maintenance of the Constitution and the safety of the Church, and
Wellington was echoing his words. A year later, utterly defeated by
O'Connell, Peel was introducing the Catholic Relief Bill in the Commons.
Wellington had it for his task to induce, or rather frighten the king to
assent. Ireland not only emancipated the Catholics, she went on to
emancipate the Dissenters, a service of freedom of conscience which is
too often forgotten.
The Tithe System was similarly declared to be part of the fabric of the
Constitution, to be upheld at the point of the bayonet. Scythe in hand,
the Irish peasant proclaimed that it must go. It went. Still more
fundamental was the existence of the Protestant Established Church. To
touch it was to lay hands on the Ark. Orange orators threatened civil
war; two hundred thousand Ulstermen were to shoulder their Minie
Rifles, and not merely slaughter the Catholics but even depose Queen
Victoria.
Ireland said that the Establishment too must go; and, with the echoed
menace of Fenianism ringing in his ears, Mr Gladstone hauled down the
official blazon of Ascendancy. "Ulster" did not fight. But the fierce
struggle for the land affords the crucial test. Landlordism of that most
savage type which held for its whole gospel that a man may do what he
likes with his own was conceived to be the very corner-stone of British
rule in Ireland. It controlled Parliament, the judiciary, the schools,
the Press, and possessed in the Royal Irish Constabulary an incomparable
watch-dog. It had resisted the criticism and attack loosened against it
by the scandal of the Great Famine. Then suddenly Ireland took the
business in hand. On a certain day in October 1879, some thirty men met
in a small hotel in Dublin and, under the inspiration of Michael Davitt,
founded the Land League. To the programme then formulated, the
expropriation of the landlords at twenty years' purchase of their rents,
England as usual said No! The proposal was thundered against as
confiscation, communism, naked and shameful. To any student, with
patience sufficient for the task, the contemporary files of such
journals as the _Times_ will furnish an exquisite chapter in the
literature of obtuseness. England sustained her No! with batons,
bullets, plank-beds, Coercion courts, and an occasional halter; Ireland
her Yes! with "agitation." Is it necessary to ask who won? Is it
necessary to trace step by step the complete surrender of the last
ditchers of those days? The fantastic and wicked dreams of the agitators
have in thirty years translated themselves into Statute Law and solid
fact. An English statesman of the period, say Mr Balfour or Mr Wyndham,
is fortunate if, with a few odd rags pilfered from the Land League
wardrobe, he can conceal from history his utter poverty of ideas.
This, then, is the essential wisdom of Irish history: Ireland has won
all along the line. The Normans did not normanise her. The Tudors did
not exterminate her. She has undone the Confiscations, and drawn a
cancelling pen through the Penal Laws. The Act of Union, so far from
suppressing her individuality or overwhelming it, has actually brought
it to that full self-consciousness which constitutes the coming of age
of a nation. Tears, as we read in Wordsworth, to human suffering are
due; if there be anyone with tears at command he may shed them, with
great fitness, and with no profit at all, over the long martyrdom of
Ireland. But let him, at least if he values facts, think twice before he
goes on to apply to her that other line which speaks of human hopes
defeated and overthrown. No other people in the world has held so
staunchly to its inner vision; none other has, with such fiery patience,
repelled the hostility of circumstances, and in the end reshaped them
after the desire of her heart. Hats off to success, gentlemen! Your
modern God may well be troubled at sight of this enigmatic Ireland which
at once despises him, and tumbles his faithfullest worshippers in the
sand of their own amphitheatre. Yet, so it is. The Confederate General,
seeing victory suddenly snatched from his hands, and not for the first
time, by Meagher's Brigade, exclaimed in immortal profanity: "There
comes that damned Green Flag again!" I have often commended that phrase
to Englishmen as admirably expressive of the historical role and record
of Ireland in British Politics. The damned Green Flag flutters again in
their eyes, and if they will but listen to the music that marches with
it, they will find that the lamenting fifes are dominated wholly by the
drums of victory.