XVIII.

I have not in all this written anything about the relations of Ireland

with other countries, or even with our neighbors, in whose political

household we have lived for so many centuries in intimate hostility.

I have considered this indeed, but did not wish, nor do I now wish,

in anything I may write, to say one word which would add to that old

hostility. Race hatred is the cheapest and basest of all national

passions, and it is the nature of hatred, as it is the nature of love,

to change us into the likeness of that which we contemplate. We grow

nobly like what we adore, and ignobly like what we hate; and no people

in Ireland became so anglicized in intellect and temperament, and even

in the manner of expression, as those who hated our neighbors most. All

hatreds long persisted in bring us to every baseness for which we hated

others. The only laws which we cannot break with impunity are divine

laws, and no law is more eternally sure in its workings than that which

condemns us to be even as that we condemned. Hate is the high commander

of so many armies that an inquiry into the origin of this passion is

at least as needful as histories of other contemporary notorieties. Not

emperors or parliaments alone raise armies, but this passion also. It

will sustain nations in defeat. When everything seems lost this wild

captain will appear and the scattered forces are reunited. They will be

as oblivious of danger as if they were divinely inspired, but if they

win their battle it is to become like the conquered foe. All great

wars in history, all conquests, all national antagonisms, result in an

exchange of characteristics. It is because I wish Ireland to be itself,

to act from its own will and its own centre, that I deprecate hatred as

a force in national life. It is always possible to win a cause without

the aid of this base helper, who betrays us ever in the hour of victory.

When a man finds the feeling of hate for another rising vehemently in

himself, he should take it as a warning that conscience is battling

in his own being with that very thing he loathes. Nations hate other

nations for the evil which is in themselves; but they are as little

given to self-analysis as individuals, and while they are right to

overcome evil, they should first try to understand the genesis of the

passion in their own nature. If we understand this, many of the ironies

of history will be intelligible. We will understand why it was that our

countrymen in Ulster and our countrymen in the rest of Ireland, who

have denounced each other so vehemently, should at last appear to

have exchanged characteristics: why in the North, having passionately

protested against physical force movements, no-rent manifestos, and

contempt for Imperial Parliament, they should have come themselves at

last to organize a physical force movement, should threaten to pay no

taxes, and should refuse obedience to an Act of Parliament. We will

understand also why it was their opponents came themselves to address to

Ulster all the arguments and denunciations Ulster had addressed to them.

I do not point this out with intent to annoy, but to illustrate by late

history a law in national as well as human psychology. If this unpopular

psychology I have explained was adopted everywhere as true, we would

never hear expressions of hate. People would realize they were first

revealing and then stabbing their own characters before the world.

Nations act towards other nations as their own citizens act towards each

other. When slavery existed in a State, if that nation attacked

another it was with intent to enslave. Where there is a fierce economic

competition between citizen and citizen then in war with another nation,

the object of the war is to destroy the trade of the enemy. If the

citizens in any country could develop harmonious life among themselves

they would manifest the friendliest feelings towards the people of other

countries. We find that it is just among groups of people who aim

at harmonious life, co-operators and socialists, that the strongest

national impulses to international brotherhood arise; and wars of

domination are brought about by the will of those who within a State are

dominant over the fortunes of the rest. Ireland, a small country,

can only maintain its national identity by moral and economic forces.

Physically it must be overmastered by most other European nations. Moral

forces are really more powerful than physical forces. One Christ changed

the spiritual life of Europe; one Buddha affected more myriads in Asia.

The co-operative ideal of brotherhood in industry has helped to make

stronger the ideal of the brotherhood of humanity, and no body of men in

any of the countries in the great War of our time regarded it with more

genuine sorrow than those who were already beginning to promote schemes

for international co-operation. It must be mainly in movements inspired

with the ideal of the brotherhood of man, that the spirit will be

generated which, in the future, shall make the idea of war so detestable

that statesmen will find it is impossible to think of that solution

of their disputes as they would think now of resorting to private

assassination of political opponents. The great tragedy of Europe was

brought about, not by the German Emperor, nor by Sir Edward Grey, nor by

the Czar, nor by any of the other chiefs ostensibly controlling foreign

policy, but by the nations themselves. These men may have been agents,

but their action would have been impossible if they did not realize that

there was a vast body of national feeling behind them not opposed to

war. Their citizens were in conflict with each other already, generating

the moods which lead on to war. Emperors, foreign secretaries,

ambassadors, cabinet ministers are not really powerful to move nations

against their will. On the whole, they act with the will of the nations,

which they understand. Let any one ruler try, for example, to change by

edict the religion of his subjects, and a week would see him bereft of

place and power. They could not do this, because the will of the nation

would be against it. They resort to war and prepare for it because the

will of the nation is with them, and this throws us back on the private

citizens, who finally are individually and collectively responsible for

the actions of the State. In the everlasting battle between good and

evil, private soldiers are called upon to fight as well as the captains,

and it is only through the intensive cultivation by individuals and

races of the higher moral and intellectual qualities, until in intensity

they outweigh the mood and passion of the rest, that war will finally

become obsolete as the court of appeal. When there is a panic of fire

in a crowded building men are suddenly tested as to character. Some will

become frenzied madmen, fighting and trampling their way out. Others

will act nobly, forgetting themselves. They have no time to think. What

they are in their total make up as human beings, overbalanced either for

good or evil, appears in an instant. Even so, some time in the heroic

future, some nation in a crisis will be weighed and will act nobly

rather than passionately, and will be prepared to risk national

extinction rather than continue existence at the price of killing

myriads of other human beings, and it will oppose moral and spiritual

forces to material forces, and it will overcome the world by making

gentleness its might, as all great spiritual teachers have done. It

comes to this, we cannot overcome hatred by hatred or war by war, but

by the opposites of these. Evil is not overcome by evil but by good; and

any race like the Irish, eager for national life, ought to learn this

truth--that humanity will act towards their race as their race acts

towards humanity. The noble and the base alike beget their kin.

Empires, ere they disappear, see their own mirrored majesty arise in the

looking-glass of time. Opposed to the pride and pomp of Egypt were the

pride and pomp of Chaldaea. Echoing the beauty of the Greek city state

were many lovely cities made in their image. Carthage evoked Rome. The

British Empire, by the natural balance and opposition of things, called

into being another empire with a civilization of coal and steel, and

with ambitions for colonies and for naval power, and with that image

of itself it must wrestle for empire. The great armadas that throng the

seas, the armed millions upon the earth betray the fear in the minds of

races, nay, the inner spiritual certitude the soul has, that pride and

lust of power must yet be humbled by their kind. They must at last meet

their equals face to face, called to them as steel to magnet by some

inner affinity. This is a law of life both for individuals and races,

and, when this is realized, we know nothing will put an end to race

conflicts except the equally determined and heroic development of the

spiritual, moral, and intellectual forces which disdain to use the force

and fury of material powers.

We may be assured that the divine law is not mocked, and it cannot be

deceived. As men sow so do they reap. The anger we create will rend us;

the love we give will return to us. Biologically, everything breeds true

to its type: moods and thoughts just as much as birds and beasts and

fishes. When I hear people raging against England or Germany or Russia I

know that rage will beget rage, and go on begetting it, and so the whole

devilish generation of passions will be continued. There are no nations

to whom the entire and loyal allegiance of man's spirit could be given.

It can only go out to the ideal empires and nationalities in the womb

of time, for whose coming we pray. Those countries of the future we must

carve out of the humanity of today, and we can begin building them up

within our present empires and nationalities just as we are building

up the co-operative movement in a social order antagonistic to it.

The people who are trying to create these new ideals in the world are

outposts, sentinels, and frontiersmen thrown out before the armies of

the intellectual and spiritual races yet to come into being. We can all

enlist in these armies and be comrades to the pioneers. I hope many

will enlist in Ireland. I would cry to our idealists to come out of this

present-day Irish Babylon, so filled with sectarian, political, and race

hatreds, and to work for the future. I believe profoundly, with the most

extreme of Nationalists, in the future of Ireland, and in the vision

of light seen by Bridget which she saw and confessed between hopes and

tears to Patrick, and that this is the Isle of Destiny and the destiny

will be glorious and not ignoble, and when our hour is come we will have

something to give to the world, and we will be proud to give rather than

to grasp. Throughout their history Irishmen have always wrought better

for others than for themselves, and when they unite in Ireland to

work for each other, they will direct into the right channel all that

national capacity for devotion to causes for which they are famed. We

ought not only to desire to be at peace with each other, but with

the whole world, and this can only be brought about by the individual

citizen at all times protesting against sectarian and national passions,

and taking no part in them, coming out of such angry parties altogether,

as the people of the Lord were called by the divine voice to come out of

Babylon. It may seem a long way to set things right, but it is the swift

way and the royal road, and there is no other; and nobody, no prophet

crying before his time, will be listened to until the people are ready

for him. The congregation must gather before the preacher can deliver

what is in him to say. The economic brotherhood which I have put forward

as an Irish ideal would, in its realization, make us at peace with

ourselves, and if we are at peace with ourselves we will be at peace

with our neighbors and all other nations, and will wish them the

goodwill we have among ourselves, and will receive from them the same

goodwill. I do not believe in legal and formal solutions of national

antagonisms. While we generate animosities among ourselves we will

always display them to other nations, and I prefer to search out how it

is national hatreds are begotten, and to show how that cancer can be cut

out of the body politic.