THE PATHRIOT
Ireland has produced more patriots than any other country under the sun.
The names of them are legion, and from Wolfe Tone down to Dr. Tanner
they have all been men of reasonable parts. O’Connell, Emmet, Butt, and
Parnell shine out perhaps as the greatest of them. The smaller fry do
not require enumeration. But if I mistake not, while it is the fashion
to flatter every Irishman who has done anything at all for Ireland with
the general title of pathriot, it is only within comparatively recent
times that the authentic pathriot has come into being. The fact that in
England people are unkind enough to call him an agitator is of small
consequence. The pathriot is singularly and peculiarly Irish. There is
nothing like him in England, and there never will be anything like him;
for he comes like water and like wind he goes. He begins anywhere—he
may be a butcher, a publican, a schoolmaster or a farmer—he attains a
seat in the House of Commons, and a certain prominence in the press, and
he ends nowhere. Irish editors worship him for a season, then they wax
critical of him, then they forget him altogether. Mr. Timothy Healy is a
good type of the pathriot at his best. He has accomplished great things
for Ireland, and achieved for himself a reputation in Parliament for a
sort of savage brilliance. But there are not a dozen men in England,
Ireland, Scotland or Wales to-day who care twopence where he is, or could
tell you what becomes of him when Parliament is not sitting. He will
end obscurely, inasmuch as it is the fate of Irish pathriots so to end.
As the chief of the pathriots of the less glorious type, who however
succeed in making the best of both countries, we may instance Mr. T. P.
O’Connor. Mr. O’Connor is an Irishman and a Nationalist, but he has
shaken the dust of Ireland from his feet, and he sits for the Scotland
division of Liverpool, and has done himself rather well as a promoter
of heterogeneous newspapers in London. With Mr. O’Connor, however, we
shall deal fully elsewhere. Only for the sake of symmetry, do not let us
forget that he is a pathriot of the finest water. The vital defect in
the character of the Irish pathriot, looking at him squarely, is that
in recent times at any rate he has never been a statesman. A pathriot
with the proper statesmanlike qualities might, it is true, have been
altogether swamped by the frothy eloquence and wild demands of the main
body of pathriots. But such a one, if the Irish could only have managed
to find him and keep him going, whether in the House of Commons or on
English platforms, would in the long run have made a vast difference
to her interests. It may be argued that Ireland did actually find a
statesman in Mr. Gladstone. On the other hand it is abundantly evident
that however sincere and admirable Mr. Gladstone’s proposals for the
betterment of the country may have been, they were not based on anything
like an exact, or for that matter even a working, knowledge of its
necessities and requirements. As for Mr. Parnell, it is no disrespect
to him to say of him, in full view of his amazing career, that he was
not a statesman even in a small way. His aloofness, haughtiness and
chilliness of temper precluded him from a really effective part or lot
in the faction which he led, and ruled with a rod of iron, and, for
himself, he had not sufficient spirits and imagination to carve out an
independent and statesmanlike policy. Mr. Parnell made a great name
and no little dust in the world, yet the verdict of history upon him
will be that he was neither an O’Connell nor an Isaac Butt, and that he
failed to go anything like so far as might have been expected of him.
For the rest of the pathriots, the remnant, as it were, of the National
party, they do not matter, and they know it. In the House of Commons
they are absolutely without other than adventitious power. The English
party system happened to afford them certain mechanical advantages of
which they are never tired of boasting. Their sarcasms and humors and
occasional displays of temper bring them from time to time a passing
notoriety. But taking them as a body they are inept, irresponsible,
feeble and negligible; constituting, indeed, a standing monument to
the undesirable vagaries which might be looked for in the event of
their being granted that much desired “little place of their own” on
College Green. In fine, the Irish pathriot of our own times will not
wash. He means well by his country, and well enough by himself, but he
has no balance, and is entirely blind to the falsehood of extremes. It
is curious to note how easily Ireland is satisfied. In pretty well all
matters that concern her closely her standard of requirement is barely
middling. She knows how to be grateful to the merest nonentities, and
she can bestow reverence and undying fame upon persons who are little
removed from mediocrity. The modern pathriot has never risen above
the foot-hills; yet for Ireland he stands upon the pinnacle, and they
say Hosanna to him. It is a sign of the times, however, that Erin is
beginning to be alive to the fact that in the main the pathriot is just
one of those persons with whom she can very well afford to dispense.
Vaulting ambition hath rather overleaped itself in the matter of these
gentry, and their posturings and screamings and clenchings of the fist
are no longer received with altogether unanimous applause. That there
is reason in all things is a simple lesson which pathriots who are not
wholly careless of their future will do well to learn. Their well-worn
parrot-cries of “tyranny,” “oppression,” “cowardice,” “robbery,”
“murder,” and so forth are become just a trifle stale, flat, and
unprofitable. Irishmen are weary of shrieks; they desire a trifle of
sobriety and good sense.