AFTER HOME RULE
The advocates of Home Rule are invited to many ordeals by way of
verifying their good faith; perhaps the heaviest ordeal is that of
prophecy. Very well, people say, what are you going to do with Home Rule
when you get it? What will Irish politics be like in, say, 1920? If we
show embarrassment or offer conflicting answers, the querist is
persuaded that we are, as indeed he thought, vapouring sentimentalists,
not at all accustomed to live in a world of clear ideas and unyielding
facts. The demand, like many others made upon us, is unreal and
unreasonable. What are the English going to do with Home Rule when they
get it? What will German or Japanese or American politics be like in
1920? These are all what Matthew Arnold calls "undiscovered things." The
future resolutely declines to speak out of her turn. She has a trick of
keeping her secrets well, better than she keeps her promises. Professor
Dicey wrote a Unionist tract, very vehement and thunderous, in which he
sought to injure Home Rule by styling it a leap in the dark. But the
whole conduct of life, in its gravest and its lightest issues alike, is
a perpetual leap in the dark. Every change of public policy is a raid
across the frontiers of the unknown; or rather, as I prefer to put it,
every fundamental reform is essentially an Act of Faith in to-morrow,
and so it is with Home Rule.
But while none of us can prophesy all of us can conjecture, and in this
case with a great deal of confidence. On the one hand, Ireland is a
country of very definite habits of thought; on the other, her immediate
problems are obvious. These two circumstances facilitate the process
which the learned describe as an attempt to produce the present curve of
evolution into the future. First, then, as to the temper of mind in
which an autonomous Ireland will face the world. The one clear certainty
is that it will not be rhetorical or Utopian. Of all the libels with
which we are pelted the most injurious to our repute is a kindly libel,
that which represents us as a nation of orators. To the primitive Tory
the Nationalist "agitator" appears in the guise of a stormy and
intractable fiend, with futility in his soul, and a College Green
peroration on his lips. The sources of this superstition are easily
traced. The English have created the noblest literature in the world,
and are candidly ashamed of the fact. In their view anybody who succeeds
in words must necessarily fail in business. The Irishman on the contrary
luxuriates, like the artist that he is, in that _splendor verborum_
celebrated by Dante. If a speech has to be made he thinks that it should
be well made, and refuses altogether to accept hums and haws as a token
of genius. He expects an orator not merely to expound facts, but to
stimulate the vital forces of his audience. These contrary conceptions
of the relation of art to life have, throughout the Home Rule campaign,
clashed in the English mind much to our disadvantage. And there has been
another agent of confusion, more widely human in character. Every idea
strongly held and, on the other side, strongly challenged, kindles
spontaneously into passion, and every great cause has its poetry as well
as its dialetics. Men, forced to concentrate all their thought on one
reform, come to see it edged with strange, mystical colours. Let justice
only triumph in this one regard, and our keel will grate on the shore of
the Fortunate Islands, the Earthly Paradise. All the harshness of life
will be dulcified; we shall lie dreaming on golden sands, dipping full
goblets out of a sea that has been transmuted into lemonade. This, the
Utopian mood of humanity, is inextinguishable, and it has embroidered
the Home Rule idea in common with all others. Before the complexity of
modern economic organisation was as well understood as is now the case,
there is no doubt that certain sections of opinion in Ireland did regard
self-government as a sort of Aladdin's Lamp, capable of any miracle. The
necessity of pressing all the energy of the nation into one channel had
the effect of imposing on political life a simplicity which does not
belong to it. But all that is over and past. The Ireland of to-day does
not pay herself with words. She is safe from that reaction and
disillusionment which some prophets have discerned as the first harvest
of Home Rule, because she is already disillusioned. Looking into the
future we see no hope for rhetoricians; what we do see is a strong,
shrewd, indomitable people, at once clear-sighted and idealistic, going
about its business "in the light of day in the domain of reality." No
signs or wonders blaze out a trail for them. The past sags on their
shoulders and in their veins, a grievous burden and a grievous malady.
They make mistakes during their apprenticeship to freedom, for, as
Flaubert says, men have got to learn everything from eating to dying.
But a few years farther on we see the recuperative powers of the nation
once more triumphant. The past is at last dead enough to be buried, the
virus of oppression has been expelled. The creative impulse in industry,
literature, social habit, working in an atmosphere of freedom, has added
to the wealth of humanity not only an old nation renascent, but a new
and kindlier civilisation. In other words, political autonomy is to us
not the epilogue but the prologue to our national drama. It rings the
curtain up on that task to which all politics are merely instrumental,
namely the vindication of justice and the betterment of human life.
From the first, the economic note will predominate in a Home Rule
assembly, not only in the sense in which so much can be said of every
country in the world, but in a very special sense. For the past decade
Ireland has been thinking in terms of woollens and linens, turnips and
fat cattle, eggs and butter, banks and railways. The conviction that the
country is under-developed, and in consequence under-populated, has been
growing both in area and in depth. With it there has been growing the
further conviction that poverty, in the midst of untapped resources, is
a national crime. The propagation of these two beliefs by journals of
the newer school such as _The Leader, Sinn Fein,_ and _The Irish
Homestead_ has leavened the whole mass of Irish life in our time. The
Industrial Development Associations, founded on them as basis, have long
ago "bridged the Boyne." At their annual Conferences Belfast sits side
by side with Cork, Derry with Dublin. It is not merely that the
manufacturers and traders have joined hands to advance a movement
beneficial to themselves; the best thought of every class in the country
has given enthusiastic support to the programme on grounds not of
personal interest but of national duty. We may therefore take it that
the watchword of the Second Empire, _Enrichissez-vous,_ will be the
watchword of a self-governing Ireland. What Parliament and the State can
do to forward that aim will naturally be a subject of controversy. To
Free Traders and Tariff Reformers, alike, the power that controls the
Customs' tariff of a country controls its economic destiny. Both would
seem bound to apply the logic of their respective gospels to Ireland.
But as it is not the aim of this book to anticipate the debates of next
year, but rather to explain the foundations of the Home Rule idea, we
may leave that burning question for the present untouched. Apart from it
we can anticipate the trend of policy in Ireland. The first great task
of a Home Rule Parliament would be above controversy; it would be
neither more nor less than a scientific exploration of the country. No
such Economic Survey has ever been made, and the results are lamentable.
There has been no mapping out of the soil areas from the point of view
of Agricultural Economics, and, for the lack of such impartial
information, the fundamental conflict between tillage and grazing goes
on in the dark. We know where coal is to be found in Ireland; we do not
know with any assurance where it is and where it is not profitably
workable. The same is true of granite, marble, and indeed all our
mineral resources.
The woollen industry flourishes in one district and fails in another, to
all appearance as favourably situated; it seems capable of great
expansion and yet it does not expand greatly. What then are the
conditions of success? Here is a typical case that calls for scientific
analysis. One can pick at random a dozen such instances. Ireland,
admirably adapted to the production of meat, does not produce meat, but
only the raw material of it, store cattle. Is this state of things
immutable? Or is a remedy for it to be found, say, in a redistribution
of the incidence of local taxation so as to favour well-used land as
against ill-used land? Is the decline in the area under flax to be
applauded or deplored? Can Irish-grown wool be improved up to the
fineness of the Australian article? And so on, and so on. It is to be
noted that of the statistics which we do possess many of the most
important are, to say the least, involved in doubt. The Export and
Import figures are little better than volunteer estimates; there is no
compulsion to accuracy. As to the yield of crops, all that can be said
is that our present information is not as bad as it used to be. But
above all we have no comprehensive notion of the condition of the
people. Whenever there has been an inquiry into wages, cost of living,
or any other fundamental fact, Ireland has come in as a mere tail-piece
to a British volume. All this we must change. The first business of an
Irish Parliament will be to take stock; and this will be effected by the
establishment of a Commission of a new kind, representative of science,
industry, agriculture, and finance, acceptable and authoritative in the
eyes of the whole nation, and charged with the duty of ascertaining the
actual state of things in Ireland and the wisest line of economic
development. Such an undertaking will amount to a unification of Irish
life altogether without precedent. It will draw the great personalities
of industry for the first time into the central current of public
affairs. It will furnish them with a platform upon which they will have
to talk in terms of the plough, the loom, and the ledger, and not in
terms of the wolf-dog and the orange-lily, and will render fruitful for
the service of the country innumerable talents, now unknown or estranged
by political superstitions. It will do all that State action can do to
generate a boom in Irish enterprises, and to tempt Irish capital into
them in a more abundant stream. And the proceedings and conclusions of
such a body, circulated broadcast somewhat after the Washington plan,
will provide for all classes in the community a liberal education in
Economics. Will "Ulster" fight against such an attempt to increase its
prosperity? Will the shipbuilders, the spinners, and the weavers close
down their works in order to patronise Sir Edward Carson's performance
on a pop-gun? It is not probable.
Work is the best remedy against such vapours, and an Ireland, occupied
in this fashion-with wealth-producing labour, will have no time for
civil war or "religious" riots.
As for concrete projects, the Irish Parliament will not be able to
begin on a very ambitious scale. But there are two or three matters
which it must at once put in hand. There is, for instance, the drainage
of the Barrow and the Bann. These two rivers are in a remarkable degree
non-political and non-sectarian. Just as the rain falls on the just and
the unjust, so do their rain-swollen floods spoil with serene
impartiality Nationalist hay and Orange hay, Catholic oats and
Presbyterian oats. Will "Ulster" fight against an effort to check the
mischief? Then there is re-afforestation. As the result mainly of the
waste of war, Ireland, which ought to be a richly wooded country, is
very poor in that regard. In consequence of this, a climate, moister
than need be, distributes colds and consumption among the population,
without any religious test, and unchecked winds lodge the corn of all
denominations. Re-afforestation, as offering a profit certain but a
little remote, and promising a climatic advantage diffused over the
whole area of the country, is eminently a matter for public enterprise.
Are we to be denied the hope that fir, and spruce, and Austrian pine may
conceivably be lifted out of the plane of Party politics? Further, to
take instances at haphazard, the State, whatever else its economic
functions may be, will be one of the largest purchasers of commodities
in the country. It is thinkable that the Irish State may give its civil
servants Irish-made paper to write on in their offices. It may even so
arrange things that when Captain Craig comes to the House of Commons at
College Green he shall sit on an Irish-made bench, dine off a cloth of
Belfast linen, and be ruthlessly compelled to eat Meath beef, Dublin
potatoes, and Tipperary butter. In such horrible manifestations of Home
Rule I do not discern the material for a revolution. Again, it may be
proposed that in order to develop manufactures, municipalities and
county councils may be given power to remit local rates on newly
established factories for an initial period of, say, ten years. It may
occur to evil-minded people to increase the provision for technical
instruction in certain centres for the same end. The Irish State may
think it well to maintain agents in London, New York, and some of the
continental capitals with a view to widening the external market for
Irish products. I do not say that a Home Rule Parliament will do all
these things, but they are the sort of thing that it will do. And the
mere naked enumeration of them is sufficient to show that such an
Assembly will have ample matter of economic development upon which to
keep its teeth polished without devouring either priests or
Protestants.
There are other urgent questions upon which unanimity exists even at
present, for example Poor Law Reform. I have outlined in an earlier
chapter the honourable record of Ireland in this regard. We were agreed
in 1836 that the workhouse should never have come; we are now agreed
that it must go. Whether in Antrim or in Clare, the same vicious system
has produced the same vicious results. Uniform experience has issued in
unanimous agreement as to the lines upon which reform ought to proceed.
At the same time there are differences as to detail, and the task of
fusing together various views and hammering out of them a workable Bill
will be an ideal task for a representative assembly. But it is difficult
to believe that the discussion will be, in all particulars, governed
either by the Council of Trent, or by the Westminster Confession.
Then there is education. English public men have been brought up to
assume that in Ireland education must be a battleground inevitably, and
from the first. It would be a mere paradox to say that this question,
which sunders parties the world over as with a sword, will leave opinion
in Ireland inviolately unanimous. But our march to the field of
controversy will be over a non-controversial road. Union policy has left
us a rich inheritance of obvious evils. The position of the primary
teachers is unsatisfactory, that of the secondary teachers is
impossible. When we attempt improvement of both will "Ulster" fight? And
there is something even more human and poignant. The National Schools of
this country are in many cases no better than ramshackle barns. Unless
the teacher and the manager, out of their own pockets, mend the broken
glass, put plaster on the walls, and a fire in the grate, the children
have got to shiver and cough for it. Winter in Ireland, like the King in
constitutional theory, is above politics. When its frosts get at the
noses, and fingers, and sometimes the bare toes, of the children it
leaves them neither green nor orange but simply blue. Then again other
schools, especially in Belfast, are shamefully over-crowded. Classes are
held on the stairs, in the cloak-room, the hall, or the yard. For the
more fortunate, class-rooms are provided with an air-space per
individual only slightly less than that available in the Black Hole of
Calcutta. All over the country, children go to school breakfastless and
stupid with hunger, and the local authorities have no power to feed them
as in England, and in most European countries. Then again, even where
the physical conditions are reasonable, the programme lacks actuality.
It is unpractical, out of touch with the facts of life and locality, a
veritable castle hung absurdly in the air and not based on any solid
foundation. The view still lingers in high places that the business of
education is to break the spirit of a people, to put them down and not
to lift them up. In token of this, the teachers are denied the civil
rights of freemen. Now all these ineptitudes are contrary to the humane
tradition of Ireland. Go they must, but, when an Irish Parliament starts
to remove them, I cannot imagine Captain Craig, with a Union Jack
wrapped around his bosom, straddling like Apollyon across the path. The
Captain has far too much sense, and too much feeling in him.
It will be observed that we are getting on. A nation so busy with
realities will have no time to waste on civil war. _Inter leges arma
silent_. But this is a mere outline sketch of the preliminary task of
the initial sessions of an Irish Parliament. Problems with a far heavier
fist will thunder at its doors, the problems of labour. The democratic
group in Ireland, that group which everywhere holds the commission of
the future, has long since declared that, to it, Home Rule would be a
barren counter-sense unless it meant the redemption of the back streets.
The Titanic conflict between what is called capital and what is called
labour, shaking the pillars of our modern Society, has not passed
Ireland by like the unregarded wind. We can no longer think of ourselves
as insulated from the world, immune from strikes, Socialists, and
Syndicalism. The problems of labour have got to be faced. But will they
be solved by a grapple between the Orange Lodges and the Ancient Order
of Hibernians? It is obvious that under their pressure the old order
must change, yielding place to a new. Every Trade Union has already
bridged the Boyne. Every strike has already torn the Orange Flag and the
Green Flag into two pieces, and stitched them together again after a new
and portentous pattern.
What does it all come to? Simply this, that Ireland under Home Rule will
be most painfully like every other modern country of western
civilisation. Some Unionists think that, if they could only get rid of
the Irish Party, all would be for the best in the best of all possible
worlds. Why then are they not Home Rulers? For Home Rule will most
assuredly get rid of the Irish Party. It will shatter the old political
combinations like a waggon-load of dynamite. New groups will crystallise
about new principles. The future in Ireland belongs to no old fidelity:
it may belong to any new courage.
Assuredly we must not seem to suggest that, in an autonomous Ireland,
public life will be all nougat, velvet, and soft music. There will be
conflicts, and vehement conflicts, for that is the way of the twentieth
century, and they will no doubt centre, for the most part, about
taxation and education. But the political forces of the country will
have moved into totally new formations. One foresees plainly a vertical
section of parties into Agrarian and Urban, a cross section into Labour
and Capitalistic. Each of these economic groupings is indefinitely
criss-crossed by an indefinite number of antagonisms, spiritual and
material. In a situation so complicated it is idle to speculate as to
the conditions of the future. A box of bricks so large, and so
multi-coloured, may be arranged and re-arranged in an infinity of
architectures. The one thing quite certain is that all the arrangements
will be new. In taxation, as I have suggested, a highly conservative
policy will prevail. In education the secularist programme, if advanced
at all, will be overwhelmed by a junction of Catholic and Protestant.
For religion, to the _anima naturaliter Christiana_, of Ireland is not
an argument but an intuition. It seems to us as reasonable to prepare
children for their moral life by excluding religion as to prepare them
for their physical life by removing the most important lobe of their
brains.
The only other prognostication that appears to emerge is the probable
predominance in a Home Rule Ireland of the present Ulster Unionist
party. That group is likely, for many reasons, to retain its solidarity
after ours has been dissipated. Should that prove to be the case,
self-government will put the balance of power on almost all great
conflicts of opinion into the hands of Sir Edward Carson and his
successors. The "minority," adroitly handled, will exploit the majority
almost as effectively after Home Rule as before it. Captain Craig will
dictate terms to us not from the last ditch, but from a far more
agreeable and powerful position, the Treasury Bench. And we undertake
not to grumble, for these are the chances of freedom.