Part 1 (2/2)

The truth is, the Nationalist Party was accused of the vices inseparable from the parliamentary system by those who very humanly imagined that such vices were not inherent in the system itself, but were peculiar to British parliamentarianism. In all criticism there was lacking any suggestion of the possibility of similar defects in a purely Irish parliament. That is natural for two reasons. First, because the political development of Ireland makes it as premature for her to doubt the wisdom of her own elected a.s.semblies, as it would have been for revolutionary France to question the practical value of the Declaration of the Rights of Man. Second, because the immediate cause of dissatisfaction with const.i.tutional nationalism was the evident impossibility of its ever realizing the true aims of nationalism. Consequently, it is in vain that the Nationalist Party appeals for recognition of its actual services. A generation has arisen which accepts as a matter of course the fruits of a hard struggle, and insists upon the one vital and essential fact, namely, that the Irish members at Westminster have not brought Ireland a step nearer independence, and in the very nature of things, they cannot do so.

Meanwhile, the burdens of over-taxation and misgovernment press every year more heavily on the country. Party achievements are dismissed as of slight importance by impatient and perhaps ungenerous critics, who a.s.sert--and rightly--that the Nationalist Party did not represent merely a section of public opinion in the House of Commons, but represented the Irish nation.

Therefore, the test of party politics cannot be allowed. To which it is open to the apologist of const.i.tutionalism to reply: you cannot partic.i.p.ate in the game of party politics and then refuse to recognize the rules of that game. It is no more reasonable to believe that the Irish nation can be represented in the British Parliament, than to believe that the British nation is represented there. In both cases the elected persons vaguely correspond to actual phases of popular opinion, elicited, as a rule, under conditions which would make it difficult for a crowd of philosophers to express their judgment, not to mention a semi-educated, newspaper-fed mob.

We can observe over the same period a gradual disintegration of confidence in elected representatives both in England and Ireland, though the operative causes have not been the same, to the superficial glance.

Intelligent Englishmen have been driven to doubt the efficacy of parliamentary government by the exposure of party corruption, and by the realization of the fact that political power is the shadow of which economic power is the substance. Irishmen, on the other hand, having being baulked of the opportunity of arriving at the same conclusion as a result of actual political experience in Ireland, found themselves, by force of national circ.u.mstances, confronted with evidence of the futility of Westminster politics. They have reached the stage of disillusion, but are unable to see clearly the intervening stages, owing to the thwarted and abnormal political evolution of the country. If it seems a paradox to claim that a country which has demanded a parliament of its own is dissatisfied with the parliamentary system, it should be recalled that there is no necessary obligation upon the Irish people to set up in Dublin a legislature upon the English model. The national political inst.i.tutions of Ireland, as competent authorities have pointed out, are susceptible of meeting the needs of a community, whose social and intellectual conditions are quite unlike those of England. Moreover, as our national economists, Molyneux, Berkeley, Swift, Lalor, and Connolly have shown, the Irish case against government from Westminster has been based, from the beginning of modern history, upon this fundamental necessity for a combination of political and economic power, without which there can be no freedom. If one aspect of the question has been over-emphasized, the fault is common to more countries than Ireland, and is peculiarly comprehensible in a people whose political development has been interrupted and delayed.

The perversity of the fate which governs the relations of England and Ireland obtrudes itself once more in this connection. It might be thought that the simultaneous movement of revolt against the sham of politics would lead to sympathetic understanding of the Sinn Fein point of view. It is true, to some extent, that during the pre-war years of constant Sinn Fein activity, friendly references were made in certain English quarters to the regenerate nationalism which was manifesting itself in literature and industry. Under less ominous names the Sinn Fein spirit had developed and spread until, at the outbreak of the war, the country was apparently absorbed in various enterprises which had received the benediction of benevolent commentators, relieved to find Ireland at last in a practical mood. But the war has changed all that. Not only have these innocent undertakings been revealed as part of the malign machinations of Sinn Fein, but the term itself has become a.s.sociated with an event undreamt of in the essential pacific and economic philosophy of those who expressed some twelve years ago the growing tendencies in the direction of national self-help. Sinn Fein did not repudiate the task which destiny thrust upon it in Easter 1916, but accepted the hitherto rejected theory of physical force, at the cost of the platonic affection of many who had previously smiled approvingly at the programme of social reconstruction contemplated by the founders of the Sinn Fein movement.

It is doubtful, however, if the Sinn Fein policy could have continued, after the war had broken out, to escape the hostile attention of England.

Political realists ceased to recommend themselves to the favourable notice of a people embarking upon a crusade for the Good, the True, and the Beautiful, and whose minds were glamoured by the idealisms so prodigally proclaimed since August 1914. In a burst of enthusiasm the ”free peoples of the world” undertook to restore the right of small nations, and since they knew of only one transgressor, they could not wait to consider their own possible sins against the spirit of nationality. At the same time, the discredit and futility of the parliamentary system became more and more obvious as it failed to meet the exigencies of the crisis which had come in the history of the political democracies. From the moment when the latter undertook to vindicate their superiority they were obliged to compromise hastily, when not to abandon entirely, the principles upon which they rested. Normally one might have thought that this would give the final blow to a fiction previously weakened, but the seriousness of national peril, coupled with the mobilization of thought, has helped to obscure that conclusion. Once the system had become a gage of battle, and a challenge to the enemy, it was endeared to its defenders, who clung to it all the more desperately, the more elusive and illusory it appeared.

So it happened that Irishmen were invited to share the enthusiasm for an ideal about which they entertained no more illusions, except the one which experience had not had a chance to confirm or dispel. Pseudo-democracy they knew and rejected, as revealed in the light of a spurious political liberty under the control of English Capitalism, but they had not yet been allowed to make the experiment of politico-economic freedom on their own account. Meanwhile, by an amazing inconsequence, the imposition of these pseudo-democratic conditions became the ambition of precisely the most restive and acute critics of the political system upon which those conditions repose. The complete demoralization of the intellectuals by the present war will supply some future critic material for sceptical reflection. In the past, both remote and immediate, the educated have succeeded in differentiating themselves from the mob by refusing, in times of crisis, to be stampeded by appeals to ignorance. But gradually the _Intelligentsia_ had been learning the expediency of attaching themselves to some social or political propaganda until, when the war broke out, they found themselves everywhere imprisoned by the new status they had a.s.sumed.

They were no longer free to serve their real master, but had sold their intellectual birthright for a mess of official pottage. Their conscripted minds have definitely lowered their prestige, since they have set themselves to bl.u.s.ter and shout across their respective frontiers, in a manner indistinguishable from that of the plain people, without pretensions to mental discipline and rational speech. Though financially strengthened the intellectuals have been bankrupted, as a cla.s.s, by the war for liberty.

Without postulating the incompatibility of reason and mob patriotism, although the divergence of the two has been recorded in prominent examples, one may legitimately ask: Why this religious enthusiasm for an ideal whose discredit and disintegration were the chief preoccupation of intelligent men during the years leading up to the war? The greatest iconoclasts, so far as the idols of political democracy are concerned, have become the most fervent advocates of such ”democratization,” seized with a malign altruism which would share its ills with those untroubled by them. Benefits, which would be extravagant if claimed for a Utopia, are promised on behalf of a social organization whose human imperfections were never more indecently exposed than during the crisis when it was exalted as the panacea of civilization. But, in inverse ratio to their own hasty abandonment of the fictions tenable only in the uncritical times of peace, the pseudo-democrats urge the adoption of methods which even they find useless in the stress of national crisis. The foxes having lost the ornament of intellectual and economic freedom in the trap of capitalist politics are convinced that the whole world should be handicapped in like manner. The new gospel of equality of sacrifice, internationally interpreted, means the equality of weakness.

It is natural that the great resources of the English-speaking world should be pledged to the defence of the form of democracy which is the special creation of Anglo-Saxon culture, and that Britishers and Americans, rather than Frenchmen and Italians, should be most insistent upon the blessings of ”democratization.” That peculiar conception of liberty which has fostered the ign.o.ble individualism of mediocrity, at the expense of intellectual independence and social strength, has evolved, under the aegis of England to her own satisfaction and advantage, until, at last, she came to be admired by foreigners unblessed by so unique a possession. Hence the fiction of British freedom, hymned by hara.s.sed outlaws or academic critics, concerned only for the more obvious advantages of a system which offered a refuge to the one and a guarantee of respectable stability to the other. When England was the safe haven for continental refugees, the admiring grat.i.tude of the latter was untroubled by the reflection that it is one thing to harbour persons likely to cause trouble with an immediate neighbour, whose frontier is invitingly near, and quite another to give them the shelter of insular isolation. Moreover, the governments of more inflammable peoples, susceptible to the contagion of revolutionary ideas, cannot afford to take risks, which have no reality in the case of a people protected from that contagion by semi-education and an innate servility. Perhaps the greatest illusion of the last century has been the innocent admiration of other nations for the security of a system which postulates a race inhibited by ignorance, sn.o.bbishness, and mal-nutrition, from all revolutionary desires. They envy the impunity with which scandals, whose publication would elsewhere inspire a.s.sa.s.sination, if not revolution, may be revealed in the reports of Royal Commissions, without provoking more than a few columns of newspaper summary and comment. But these benighted foreigners know the temper of their own populations too well not to pay them at least the compliment of being afraid to provoke popular fury. Blue Books and parliamentary questions are not yet universally accepted subst.i.tutes for democratic control.

The Irish people have more wisely adopted the ancient device, _oderint, dum metuant_, as the more intelligent att.i.tude of a people towards its rulers, who have essayed in vain the process of demoralization so effective elsewhere. In Ireland alone the familiar ostentatious displays of Blue Book liberty fail in their purpose of disarming criticism, and consigning vital questions to an oblivion of official words. The capacious and retentive Irish memory actually feeds on those indigestible slices of British freedom, whose price and mode of distribution render them inaccessible to the vast majority of taxpayers at whose expense these sepulchres of truth are constructed. The effect of such serious attention to utterances designed as soporifics is a profound contempt for precisely that democratic virtue which has excited the admiration of certain foreigners, so consoling to the Anglo-Saxon sense of superiority. When the Irish-Irelander learns of England's claim to be the leader of democratic progress in Europe, and finds that claim endorsed by apparently disinterested critics, his instinctive movement is one of revulsion from all implied in the laudation. If English rule involves the acceptance of the democratic ideal, then he rejects the ideal, for he knows that its irradiations have not lightened his political darkness, and its practical workings have effected the ruin of his country. If democratization be synonymous with anglicization, Ireland begs to be excused. She is, therefore, thrown back upon herself, brooding and indifferent to the issues which convulse the peoples for whom the problems of the war have a definite meaning. This scepticism, however, does not bring Ireland into contact with any current of internationalism, based upon a conviction of economic evil existing in all capitalistic countries alike. The egoism of Sinn Fein determines the Irish att.i.tude towards the war. ”Ourselves alone,” not German gold, determines Ireland's foreign policy.

III

THE SPLENDID ISOLATION OF SINN FeIN

The prevalence of the illusion of British liberty has been an obstacle to the understanding of Ireland's problem for many years, and correspondingly the Sinn Fein foreign policy is not a recent phenomenon, since its objective has been the same for centuries as it is to-day. The French critic, Emile Montegut, writing in 1855 of Mitchel's _Jail Journal_, admitted the difficulty when he said: ”If the oppressor of Ireland were Austria or Russia, no invective, no anger, would suffice to denounce the injustice and cruelty of the tyrant. Unhappily, the oppressor of Ireland is England, Protestant England, const.i.tutional, liberal, industrial, and trading England, the most accomplished type of the modern nation, the model of nineteenth century civilization.” In recent times circ.u.mstances have tended to correct and modify the enthusiasm of an opinion which has been fortified, nevertheless, by the current identification of British commercial democracy with an ideal condition of society which must be protected at all costs. The neutral world is blandly a.s.sured of the necessity for accepting every humiliation, in view of the precious heritage at stake. The tacit, and often avowed, a.s.sumption is that the human race is deeply indebted to the n.o.ble altruism of the belligerents, who have brought devastation and famine upon the world for the greater glory of civilization.

As a consequence of this Sinn Fein view of foreign affairs, the Irish themselves are at a disadvantage in presenting their case, for again, it is a question of an unauthorized egoism, an egoism not upon the official schedule of edifying war-aims. Montegut became aware of this when he tried to diagnose John Mitchel as a revolutionary, who might expect the sympathy of Europe. ”The most anarchical Irishman,” he wrote, ”the most fiery partisan of physical force is, in fact, less versed in liberal ideas than the most obstinate monarchist on the Continent.” As for John Mitchel, his French critic estimated him in terms which are as true of his disciples to-day as of the Young Ireland Movement and its predecessors. ”He is revolutionary on the surface, in his accent and expression, but not in spirit or in principle”; such was the judgment of the first impartial admirer who was attracted to Mitchel by the purely literary qualities of that masterpiece of pa.s.sion and irony, _The Jail Journal_. The most learned of the leaders of Sinn Fein, with a carelessness incredible in a professional historian, has tried to dismiss Emile Montegut as a hack journalist of the _Entente_! This sixty year old essay on John Mitchel contains, nevertheless, a cla.s.sic description of the Irish rebel, as he exists, and has always existed, to the discomfiture of those who do not appreciate the ”splendid isolation” of the Sinn Fein idea. Summing up the Young Ireland leader's att.i.tude in foreign affairs, Montegut says:

”Do not ask the author if he is Catholic, Liberal, or Republican, do not ask what government he would give to Ireland. He hardly knows. He does know that he hates England with all the forces of his soul, and that he is ready to rebel against her on every occasion, and that there is no party of which he is not prepared to declare himself the defender, provided that England perish: French _sans-culottes_, Austrian aristocrats, Russian despotism please him in turn. The revolution of February drove him to revolt; but do not think that he was consistent with himself, and that he was much afflicted by the death of the Republic! Of all succeeding events he asks but one thing; will they or will they not hurt England? Do they contain an occasion for the humiliation of Carthage? He applauds Mazzini, the enemy of Catholicism; likewise he would applaud an Ultramontane Bishop of Ireland blessing the standards of a Celtic insurrection.

He salutes the French Republic with hope; but when on the pontoons of Bermuda he learns of Louis Napoleon's election to the Presidency, he gives a great shout of joy; on his arrival in America he learns the news from the east, and he echoes the warlike trumpets of the Tsar which resound on the Danube. In each of these events he hears the good news: England's agony!”

European history moves on, but Ireland's hymn of hate is still unaltered, and to its accompaniment Sinn Fein adapts the incidents, great and trivial, which mark the progress of a conflict that is changing the world.

Cut off from the war by intellectual and geographical barriers, Ireland is, therefore, not exactly the most fruitful ground in which to sow the ideas which have aroused to a frenzy all but a few disillusioned neutrals.

The pathetic dreams of Liberal forward-lookers, the pious plat.i.tudes of Dr. Woodrow Wilson, and the prize-fighting rhetoric of embattled bureaucrats and newspapermen fall alike upon deaf Irish ears, which listen only for the rending and cracking of an abhorred political system. To speak of the sufferings of Belgians, Poles, and Serbians is merely to suggest a.n.a.logies from Irish history; the reaction to the stimulus of atrocity-mongering is unexpected. Even the Russian revolution aroused only a pa.s.sive, almost academic interest, until Lenin and Trotsky referred specifically to the question of Irish freedom. Then messages of congratulation to the Bolsheviki were sent from those who had been openly supporting Count Czernin in his amazing debate with the representatives of the first Social Democracy to engage in diplomatic _pourparlers_ with a foreign power. But the capitalist press had scarcely published its execration of Irish ”Bolshevism,” when the Ukrainian peace was joyously greeted by Sinn Fein spokesmen, who were unperturbed in their unholy innocence of international capitalism, by the discreditable circ.u.mstances of that event, and its subsequently disintegrating effect upon Russia.

These patriots, as Montegut said of their forerunner, Mitchel, ”would unhesitatingly sacrifice modern civilization if there were no other means of striking England to the dust.” Unfortunately, on this occasion, their ignorance of the solidarity of the capitalist Internationalism betrayed them into an easy acceptance of a situation by no means repugnant to the aims of their adversaries. The defeat of Bolshevism was the first great Allied victory of the war, tempered only by the melancholy reflection that Germany would be the immediate beneficiary of this restoration of ”Law and Order”--that marvellous euphemism which covers a mult.i.tude of sins.

If the isolation of Ireland from European politics has stultified her erratic excursions into foreign affairs, it has even more seriously affected the political relations of England and Ireland during the past four years. The Britisher, sympathetic or otherwise, is apparently quite incapable of realizing the fathomless indifference of the vast majority of the Irish nation towards the issues of the present conflict in Europe.

Naive Liberals have been heard inquiring with plaintive optimism: ”But surely you Irish can appreciate the seriousness of a German victory, even if you are not willing to fight for England”? And a look of incredulous despair follows, when the composure of the Irishman is evidently undisturbed by the lurid tableau of the victorious super-Hun, composed for sceptics on such occasions. He usually is polite enough to convey to his interlocutor his belief that no such triumph is possible for any of the belligerents. This perfectly intelligible and essentially neutral att.i.tude has never failed to exasperate even more profoundly than pro-Germanism, the legendary malady of all neutrals who fail to accept the Allies and their policies unreservedly. As it is those who themselves denounce the Treaties in which the real aims of the Allied ”democracies” were secretly formulated who also insist with the greatest unction upon the moral superiority of the Allies, the embarra.s.sment of the impartial is not diminished by this demand upon their credulity.

While one may expect the average man to put faith in his country ”right or wrong,” he has exceeded the bounds of patriotic gregariousness when he asks foreigners to display an identical devotion. The imposition is all the more intolerable when made, not by the plain man in the street, but by intellectuals, professing the use of reason. It is positively revolting to the Irishman who, not being a citizen of those small nations happily outside the dominion of the belligerents, is prohibited from detailed neutral argument in defence of his own position. Denmark can speak through a Georg Brandes, but Ireland may not even quote the Allied press in support of her contentions. The Irish case for neutrality is expurgated of necessity--of military necessity! The possibilities of arriving at any understanding with the Allied countries have, therefore, been seriously hampered, apart altogether from the inherent obstacles to an admission on the part of Anglo-Saxondom that its statecraft is not an admirable combination of the choicest maxims of Holy Writ. Naturally, such conditions have in no wise modified the splendid isolation of Sinn Fein, since they have rendered free intercommunication between Ireland and the outside world impossible.

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