And here I make a wide digression to discourse on nationalism and
peasant states. The world conspires to believe that the spirit of
nationality is a desirable one, filling men with the purest ideals;
but we begin to realize now that the spirit of nationality, while
it has animated many noble men and brought them to a condition of
extraordinary selflessness, more often reduces a race to a state
of mean brutality and insufferable smugness. The self-satisfaction
of a Sinn Feiner is as sickening as the ruffianly behaviour of a
Black-and-Tan, and the outrages committed by the former are more
despicable than the outrages of the latter, because the Black-and-Tan
makes no pretences about himself, whereas the Sinn Feiner covers his
blackguardly behaviour with a cloak of virtuous nationalism and high
ideals. What is there to choose between the Sinn Feiners who seized
an old man of seventy and dragged him from a tram-car in Dublin and
murdered him in the presence of terrorized Irishmen (not one of whom
had the common pluck to risk his life in an effort to save him) and
the Black-and-Tans who dragged the Mayor of Limerick from his bed and
brutally murdered him? What is there to choose between the noble-minded
Sinn Feiners who took old Mrs. Lindsay, a woman of more than seventy
years, and shot her and her aged servant dead because she had done
what any spirited woman would do, warned soldiers who were on her
side, that they were walking into an ambush--what is there to choose
between them and the Orangemen who threw bombs into the midst of little
Catholic children playing games in Belfast? What is there to choose
between the Sinn Feiners who murdered four sick men (one of them dying
of pleurisy) in their beds in a Galway hospital and the Orangemen who
murdered the McMahon family in Belfast? Very little. If one side is
more condemnable than the other, it is those who, professing noble
motives, practice foul deeds. One may, perhaps, find excuses for the
evil acts of men whose minds are inflamed with patriotic emotions which
cannot be found for a civilized government committing similar deeds of
atrocity. Murder by the former may be less reprehensible than murder
by the latter, but the difference between them is too slight to be
worthy of consideration. Murder remains murder, whether it be done for
imperial or national purposes, and I confess to feeling more respect
for the plain Black-and-Tan, making no bones about his brutality and
his murders, than I do for the Sinn Feiner who commits crimes and
calls them acts of virtue. "A. E.'s" restless ploughman may pause and
turn and wonder, but is more likely to find himself, "deep beneath his
rustic habit" a Sinn Fein gunman than "a king." I do not know how "the
incorruptible atom" is to be developed in men who have made a virtue
of crime and covered up their infamies with hypocrisy; and "A. E."
amazingly omits to tell us how it is to be done.
We Irish people--and I am as Irish in my origins and emotions as any
man--suffer from the sin which afflicts all subject peoples: the sin
of self-pity; and I desire self-government for Ireland, not because
I believe that the Irish people can govern themselves better than
the English have governed them--I take leave to doubt that when I
remember the achievements of the Irish in America--but because I can
see no hope of the Irish people acquiring a sense of reality until
they have freed themselves from the complacency, the smugness, the
self-satisfaction, the self-pity which are inevitable in subject
peoples. When they have discovered the truth about themselves, they may
be able to govern themselves. And the truth about the Irish people,
whether they be Protestant or Catholic, from the North or the South,
is that they are a brutal, cruel, greedy, mean and treacherous people
who have humbugged the rest of the world into the belief that they are
a faithful, generous, high-minded, kindly, noble and tolerant race. We
have our virtues, but by our insufferable contentment with ourselves
we have made vices of them. Our literature, particularly our modern
literature, plainly reveals the truth about us. Synge, Padraic Colum,
Lennox Robinson, Daniel Corkery, James Joyce--all these have shown us
an Irish people completely false to the world's common belief about
them. I remember, when Mr. Robinson's bitter comedy, "The White-Headed
Boy," was first performed in London, being asked by an English dramatic
critic whether I recognized my countrymen in Mr. Robinson's characters.
I said "Yes," and he replied in accents of disgust, "But they're
_horrible_ people! There isn't one of them for whom any decent person
can feel sympathy!..." "Exactly," I said. And what our literature is
now revealing, our acts and history have long made clear. We are at
the culmination of centuries of oppression and cruel treatment. To
the natural treachery and brutality of the Celt must be added the
treachery and brutality which are provoked by misgovernment. The broad
fact about us is that we have been so accustomed, by nature and by
circumstances, to occasions of harsh and violent conduct that we find
nothing startling in them, provided we can give them a patriotic gloss.
Our satisfaction with ourselves is so intense that we imagine our
little efforts in literature to be greater than those of the rest of
the world. We prate incessantly about the ancient Gælic literature, but
are reluctant to produce the evidence for our boasting. We forget that
the Irishmen of distinction in literature, Goldsmith, Sheridan, Wilde,
Shaw, Yeats, Moore and Synge, are not Celtic at all, but Anglo-Saxon
in origin.[3] All of them, with the exception of Mr. Moore, are
Protestant, and even Mr. Moore became a Protestant. "A. E." himself is
an Ulster Protestant with a Scotch name. The O's and the Macs, who are
reputed to be compounded of poetry and noble thoughts have furnished
the world with little but soldiers, cattle-drivers, Sinn Fein gunmen
and Tammany bosses. We have sponged upon the world, and the world is
utterly sick of us.
Our absorption in ourselves is so complete that we demand consideration
for our academic grievances which rightly belongs to the ruined races
of Europe. Ireland is the only country in the world which made a profit
out of the War, yet her behaviour during it was that of an hysterical
woman who should rush into the presence of a man bleeding to death and
exclaim, "My God, I've got toothache!" Millions of Russians are dying
of disease and hunger with less complaint than a Sinn Feiner makes
about his obsolete language which he cannot speak, will not write
and does not wish to learn. Millions of Austrians are without the
elementary decencies of life, but they do not whine over their ills as
Sinn Feiners whine over ills which they have not got. Snivelling and
whining, indeed, are the most obvious characteristics of the modern
Irishman, Catholic or Protestant, added to an impudent demand that his
affairs shall be treated as of greater consequence than those of the
rest of mankind.
To crown all, we are allowing ourselves to be dominated by peasant
ideals: the little narrow demands of men who care only for their own
interests and not at all for their neighbours'. We have seen how the
curse of nationality together with the curse of peasant principles
have helped to ruin Europe. When we are asked to believe in "the
incorruptible atom" of the peasant, we look to the Balkan States and
see a foulness which spread a plague across a continent. When we are
told of "the spiritual dignity" of the peasant community, we look to
France and see a nation so corrupted with peasant greed and peasant
fright that the Peace Treaty threatens to be a more potent force
for war and bloodshed than all the Kaisers that have ever lived put
together. And when we are told that the patriotic peasant "deep beneath
his rustic habit finds himself a king" we look to Ireland and see young
men, masked and armed, seizing old, unarmed men and old, unarmed women
and sick and dying men and little children, and brutally murdering
them. These be your Gods, O Israel. These be your high-minded patriots,
your selfless peasants, your noble army of idealists!
If we are to govern ourselves, we can only hope to do so manfully
if we begin by humiliating ourselves before God and man. We have
made claims on the world's regard which we are not entitled to make
and cannot maintain. If "the incorruptible atom" is in our national
being at all--if we are not a foul and cantankerous race destined by
Almighty God to perish utterly from the earth because we are unfit to
survive--then for each of us the principal purpose of life must be a
prolonged process of purification. We have sinned, we have sinned, we
have sinned, but we have not repented. We have pretended that our sin
was a virtue and have demanded admission to the society of our betters
on the plea that we are their equals, if not their superiors, when in
fact we are not fit to be in their company at all; and our task now
and for a long time must be the bitter one of acknowledging the truth
to ourselves and striving to justify our boasting to other men. We
have to rid ourselves of vain-glory and self-pity, of cant and humbug,
of cruelty and hatred, of backbiting and slander, of false pride, of
whining and snivelling, of corrupt living and a mean religion. There
are evil things in our nature and more evil things in our circumstances
which we must somehow subdue if we are to come to equality with the
civilized races of the world, but they will not be subdued until we
have learned to acknowledge facts and have discovered that hatred is
a device of the devil whereby men are destroyed and the world is made
a wilderness. We can neither live nor let live until we have filled
our hearts with love and charity. Nor will there be any hope in our
lives until we have abandoned the mean divisions which keep the North
Irishman in bitter enmity with the South Irishman. These two are
necessary to each other, the first for his stability and judgment and
governing ability, the second for his vision and faith and docility.
There are millions of Irishmen or men of Irish origin in the United
States, yet no Irish Catholic or man of Irish Catholic origin has
risen to Presidency of his country. Three men of Ulster Protestant
origin have done this. The Irish Catholic has given corrupt politics
to America. He has not given anything else. The Ulster people, the
only compact people in Ireland, whose blood has hardly been mingled
with other blood in three centuries and more--there is not a drop of
English blood in my veins, a claim which cannot easily be maintained
by Irishmen south of the Boyne--contemplate the scene in Ireland now
with misgiving and astonishment. They, whatever their faults, chose
an Irishman for their leader, but the Sinn Feiners could not throw
up from among themselves a man to lead them. They chose, first, an
Englishman, called Padraic Pearse. They chose second, an American Jew,
called De Valera, whose principal adviser is an Englishman, called
Erskine Childers, whose domestic urge is his American wife, infatuated
with the thought that she is the reincarnation of Joan of Arc. And the
Ulstermen, free from dialectical intricacies, listen to the tortured,
worn-out sentiments uttered by Mr. De Valera, not in fear, but in
contempt. That long, lean Jew, trained by Jesuits, possessed in double
measure of the narrow, uninspired idealism of his race and furnished
with the casuistical devotion of his teachers, is an honest man, with
cold, humourless, fanatical eyes, whose unreceptive mind guards itself
against knowledge by barriers of bigotry, hatred, obstinacy, disbelief
and self-deception. He has the dishonesty that is sometimes found in
a very honest man, the dishonesty one might expect to find in a man
trained in a Jesuit school: for there are few acts of unscrupulousness
that he will not commit to achieve the end he devoutly desires. When
he was asked on one occasion what his attitude would be to the Ulster
people if they refused to give allegiance to an Irish Republic, he
replied that he would blast Ulster from his path, unaware seemingly
that blasting is a bad business in which more than one party can
participate. I put the question to him myself in the Commodore Hotel
in New York at a meeting of the League of Free Nations; and his reply
was that he would present the Ulster people with these alternatives:
they might remain in Ireland under the Republic or they might go out
of Ireland altogether with compensation for their property. It did
not occur to Mr. De Valera that of these alternatives, Ulstermen would
choose neither. How far he had considered the question of finance
involved in schemes of compensation, I do not know, although I suspect
his mind to be innocent of much financial knowledge; but I wonder how
he would raise the money with which to compensate a single firm in
Belfast, that of Harland and Wolff, the shipbuilders, if they elected
to build their ships in Southampton; and I wonder still more how he
would raise the men and the money to carry on those works after Harland
and Wolff had taken themselves away! But such suppositions are idle,
for Ulstermen will not let themselves be disturbed in their homes by
one who is not their countryman. The story of my family in Ulster is
typical of the story of hundreds and thousands of families there.
All my forefathers, on my mother's side and my father's side, for
three hundred years of which we have record and for a longer period
of which we have incomplete records, were born and bred and buried in
the County of Down, with the exception of my maternal grandfather who,
although born and bred in Down, died and was buried in America. And
we, so indigenous to the soil as that, are bidden to acknowledge Mr.
De Valera for our President or clear out of our homes, although Mr.
De Valera is an American citizen, born in New York, whose first act,
if he were President of the Irish Republic, would have to be one of
naturalization! We will see Mr. De Valera damned first. This strange
intruder into Irish politics has brought in his trail a terrible
procession of young men trained to take life lightly, to listen to no
argument but that of the revolver; and the end of that procession is
out of sight. It is more easy to train men to take life than it is to
train them to preserve it. We cannot say to a man, "Thus far shalt thou
kill, but no further!" and those whom we have taught to commit crime
in the name of patriotism, may continue to commit crime for personal
profit. "And so, to the end of history," as Cæsar says in Mr. Shaw's
play "murder shall breed murder, always in the name of right and honour
and peace, until the gods are tired of blood and create a race that can
understand."