.cr
EPUBLIC
'
?| STUDV °f NEW IRELAND'S
SOCIAL ftND
POLITICAL BIMS
BX AODH DE B LAC AM
KIERSEY
PRICE
I
TOWARDS THE REPUBLIC
I
By A. de Blacam
In Irish: DORNAN DAN. [Lyrics]
In English:
(Shortly)
THE SHIP THAT SAILED TOO SOON. [Short Stories]
TOWARDS THE REPUBLIC
A Study of New Ireland's Social and Political Aims
BY AODH de BLAGAM
" Pour epater le bourgeois
THOMAS Mj> KIERSEY
PALMERSTON li^^\ GARDENS X
--^4P" DUBLIN
So
in (Jtlemorg
of Connoffg
CONTENTS.
PAGE
The Object of this Book . . . ix
CHAPTER
I. — The Secret Ireland . ... 1
II.— The Makings of the Nation . . .12
III.— The Gaelic State . . . .19
IV. — The Workers' Eepublic : Irish Industry's
Aim . . .30
V. — The Workers' Eepublic : Ireland, Eussia,
and Germany — Who Next ? .43
VI. — The Workers' Eepublic : Some Catholic
Authorities . . . . .53
VII. — Away with Parliaments ! . .60
VIII.— On Thinking Imperially . . .68
IX. — Church and State —
I. Orange and Green . . .81
II. Politics a«d Eeligion . . .85
X. — The Moral Necessity of Separation . 98
CEANQAL . 108
THE OBJECT OF THIS BOOK.
THE ideals which are the inspiration of the advancing Irish-Ireland movement, are summed up in the Gaelic League's watchword : Ndisiiin saor Gaedhealach a dh&anamh d'Eirinn : to make a Free Gaelic Nation of Ireland. The object of this book is to trace the meaning of the large aim in some degree of detail. What do Freedom and Gaelicism mean in " real politics " ?
For completeness of argument, it has been needful to touch on some obvious first principles. No Irish- man has doubts as to the justice of the people's cause and methods in the Land War, but it has been neces- sary to set forth the people's position in such cases in order to exhibit the validity of Irish-Ireland's whole claims. Gaels will have patience with these apologetic touches, remembering that what is axiomatic truth to Ireland is " extremism " to the stranger, and blas- phemy to the Briton.
Many opinions advanced in these pages will be condemned as "Extremist," and extreme they are as contrasted with the utterances of your Redmonds and Dillons, who have been at pains to reconcile Irish Nationality and English Imperialism, or to mix oil and water. For almost a century, through the baleful influence of O'Connell, those who claimed to speak with the voice of Ireland (all save Parnell) have glossed over the real meaning of Ireland's case,
x. TOWARDS THE REPUBLIC.
and have pleaded for " amelioration," or other benefits such as an English shire might seek. Now that Ireland has rejected the Anglicisation, Materialistic Liberalism and Benthamism that O'Connell substi- tuted for Nationality ; now that a Nation's Rights are claimed, the most elementary of those Rights appears " extreme " as compared with the trivial benefits hitherto begged for.
It thus happens that to assert that the Irish language must become the medium of business, culture and social life in Ireland, and that the English tongue must only be taught to such as have leisure or need for a second language — and then only as an alternative to French, German or Spanish (the com- mercial tongue of the future) — is to startle the Anglicised Irishman and exasperate our English friends. Yet, if Ireland is a Nation, and that assumption has been nominally adhered to even by the Dillons of a degene- rate generation, it is the most elementary axiom that her National tongue should be supreme within her borders, and other tongues studied merely on their merits.
So, too, with the issues of Self-Determination, Republicanism, and Separation from the English Empire. If Ireland is a Nation, she has as much right to freedom of choice in these matters as any of the submerged Nations of the Central Empires, and there is nothing " extreme " in her claims. To describe Young Ireland's aims as " extreme " is to call Nationality " extreme," and, indeed, that is the real claim of English parties, whether Tory or Liberal.*
*0r even Labour, for did not English Labour, with that crass insolence towards democratic principles which it has not yet shaken off, declare the other day for " Irish self-determination within the British Empire" — a contradiction in terms?
THE OBJECT OF THIS BOOK. xi.
Mr. Dillon may ask for anything short of elementary National Rights, and may play at " Ireland a Nation " so long as Nationality goes no further than shamrocks and coarse English songs about Tipperary ; but let him talk of the application of President Wilson's principles to Ireland, and the Chief Secretary will say : " I cannot believe that the hon. member is speaking seriously." Such a proposal — as Tories and Liberals and all the great bourgeois conspiracy unanimously agree — is extremism, revolutionary intransigeancy, madness, pro-Germanism. " Ireland a Nation " may be played at, but if ever efforts be made to take it seriously, England bids her world-wide chorus of subsidised organs shout it down with one tremendous roar of pained indignation or ridicule.
It is claimed, then, that there is nothing " extreme " in this book, unless the claim of Nationality be extreme. Some opinions expressed have, indeed, taken on a stronger colour than one would have given them a year or two years ago. He whose opinions have not strengthened and clarified since 1916 may be, indeed, one of those rare and far-seeing folk who were right in advance, one of those uncompromising heroes who shaped the course of history. But if he be not one of that choice band, he must be either dishonest or impenetrably dull. Average men, who groped with varying success in the darkness of the days before the war, now see their path with clearness in the light of the new world. Many of us whose instincts are con- servative, and who would by nature shrink from the great adventurous cast with which so much was won, find now that all old prejudices and hesitancies must be put aside. Thus, to many, the Workers' Republic seemed a vague and even perilous ambition until
xii. TOWARDS THE REPUBLIC.
most recent days. But now, in the new conditions, its feasibility and its inevitableness to Gaelic evolution are as clear to the common man as formerly to the seers.
The opinions set down in the following pages are not drawn from official utterances of Sinn Fein and Labour representatives. They are quite personal, and are offered as an attempt to describe the view reached by an average, commonplace individual in the pilgrim- age of the Nation through these latter years. It is the first dim view of the Promised Land, whose fair and long-sought lineaments now charm our eager eyes.
Cuirim mo shaothar fa choimirce naomh na n-Gaedheal agus toirbheirim mo leabhar do lucht- oibre na h-Eireann i g-cuimhne Sheumais Ui Chonghaile.
A. DE B.
ATH-CLIATH,
Samhain, 1918.
TOWARDS THE REPUBLIC.
UJ
CHAPTER I.
THE SECEET IEELAND.
. . . In the dear lost Ukrania Which is not ours, though our land.
— SHEVCHENKO, national poet of Ukrania
(now a free Republic),
E are witnessing in Ireland to-day one of the most remarkable national rediscoveries of his- tory. The sudden change that has come over the country — the startling progress and triumph of the Sinn Fein movement — the transformation of the One Bright Spot into a mightily-resolved nation loudly demanding that privilege of Self -Determination which is being bespoken for every other submerged nationality — these are phenomena for which the labouring imagina- tion of British statesmen and the Irish Times can find no explanation save that so patriotically volunteered by Mr. John Dillon — German Gold.
But it was not to earn payment from some mysterious paymaster that men of genius in 1916 took the road that they knew led to a place before the firing squad ; it was not for a foreign subsidy — even of £400 a year — that the released prisoners worked with their lives in their hands and suffered renewed incarceration, declining food-supplies and correspondence ; it was not for money that Thomas A she gave his life in agony ; it was not for any visible reward that men
2 TOWARDS THE REPUBLIC.
were found in every Irish townland ready to brave the same fate. As we contemplate these three years' sacrifices — wise or foolish, justified or unjustifiable — the most hostile critic is impressed. We are impelled to repeat John Mitchel's protest : " No man proudly mounts the scaffold or coolly faces a felon's death, or marches with head high and defiance on his tongue to the cell on a convict hulk FOR NOTHING. No man, be he as young or as vain as you will, does this in the insolence of youth, or the intoxication of vanity."
No, we must look more deeply for the explanation of the renaissance of Irish National spirit. We must glance into history for the motive springs of present- day events. If we do this, we shall find that the phenomena of to-day are the workings-out of a situa- tion created 220 years ago.
In our schools history is dated from 1066 — the date of a battle on the south coast of a foreign country that had no more significance for Ireland than a battle in Bohemia. The true turning-points of history for Irish people are : the Invasion ; the Death of Bruce ; the Battle of Kinsale ; the Disarmament of the Irish Nation after the Willia'mite War, and lastly, Easter Week. It will be noted that the Union is not quoted, for the truth is that for the bulk of the nation, the Union was a matter of indifference. The nation was submerged at the Disarmament (1695) and the introduction of the Penal Laws, and for the masses the Union was merely a negligible change in the affairs of the Ascendancy.
From the date of the Invasion to the Battle of Kinsale, the struggle between Ireland and England was a straightforward national war, with no side- issues. For the greater part of this time England
THE SECRET IRELAND. 3
was a 'Catholic country— in name and profession — and the struggling powers were of different race, different language, different laws. At Kinsale, in 1601, the Gaelic chivalry went down, and it appeared that the Irish Nation, after its age-long gallant struggle, had seen its last days. English law now ran at last in Ulster, and with Ulster beaten, England thought her power secure. The Irish annalists at this time wrote as though they regarded the nation as destroyed, and hoped only to save from the destruction the name and fame of the heroes of the past.
Wonderful is the resiliency of the Irish race. Within a generation of Kinsale, the nation was in arms again. In 1641 Ulster was ablaze ; two years later, when the arrival of Eoghan Rua O'Neill, fresh from his Conti- nental triumphs, woke confidence in the waverers, the whole country was up. At Kilkenny a legislative body displayed an enlightenment in democratic prin- ciples that was far ahead of England or Europe. But the issue was now clouded by religion. O'Neill stood for the nation, and the national aspiration was the driving force of the Confederation's successes. But the New Irish were loyal to the English King, and professed to be standing for the Catholic Faith alone. Trying to humour them the nation came to its fall. It is not surprising to Irish readers to read in Rinnuccini's impressions of Confederate Ireland that these •' old English Catholics " who stood for a religious cause and betrayed the nation had little of the devout faith of the Old Irish, who were fighting for liberty : political religion has unchanging traits. The Old Irish failed to make O'Neill king and sever the fatal link when the chance was theirs, and so, when O'Neill was dead, Cromwell trampled the land. Now came
4 TOWARDS THE REPUBLIC.
the great expulsions into Connacht. The only repre- sentatives of the old race to live on in the three provinces were the hewers of wood to the planters, or the fugitives in the bogs and stony mountain places. There fol- lowed the war against William, but this was a war for an English King, and for the welfare of Irish Catholic landlords. It had not the magnitude of the wars that ended at Kinsale, and it was less a national war than any that had gone before in Ireland. But it gave the victor the excuse and the means to complete Cromwell's outlawry of the body of the Irish Nation. The Penal Code and Disarmament were imposed, and the submersion of the nation was complete.
It was said during the period of the Penal Laws that " the law does not presume such a person as an Irish Catholic to exist." This phrase has been quoted so often that, through weariness, we have forgotten its meaning. It was not against Catholics as such that the Penal Code was aimed : it was intended to destroy the Gaelic Nation under the cover of religion. Thanks to the march of civilisation and the* loyalty- proving of O'Connellised Catholics, the law no longer discriminates against people who go to Mass, but it is still true — true in every phase of life — that such a person as an Irish Gael is " not supposed to exist." Before the Penal Laws, Irish nationality was never ignored — the Irish people were always ': the Irish enemy." But from the enactment of the Penal Laws down to this day, Irish nationality has been concealed. Every law, every act of the English executive, every book written in England, every newspaper, every politician, and all expressions of the English mind, have been unanimously directed to fostering the great lie regarding Ireland : the lie that denies the existence
THE SECRET IRELAND. 5
and authority in Ireland of Ireland's independent mind and soul.
At the present day, just as truly as when we were denied the right to practise our religion, we " are not supposed to exist." The whole superstructure of English rule in Ireland is based on the assumption that the bulk of the nation has no rights. Our educational system is directed by the principle that the children must have the land they live in concealed from them, and their minds filled with the ideas, events, aspira- tions and ideals of a land foreign to their race in every detail. Our claim to Self-Determination is waived aside on the plea that we — inheritors of one of the world's most rich and unique cultures — are but a domestic province of cockneydom. In the courts of Ireland, the national language is refused recognition, and girls are imprisoned and insulted by a coarse con- stabulary for not giving their names in the form of a foreign jargon. The elementary right of a trial secured for all Englishmen by Habeas Corpus simply does not exist for the Gael. He may be arrested without warrant, exiled and imprisoned without trial, slandered without the right to offer a defence. A Convention of English nominees, drawn solety from parasite classes in Ireland, lacking any representa- tive of the principles embraced by the mass of the nation, is appointed from abroad, and this body is pointed to as representative of Ireland's mind and wishes — the mind and wishes of the national Irishman not being " supposed to exist." Political leaders, a slave Press, and the clergy of an alien Church planted among us and called Irish, use the expression " the nation " — meaning England — with aggressive repe- titions intended to strengthen the denial of the Gael's
6 TOWARDS THE REPUBLIC.
existence. Everywhere in public life irritating profes- sions of loyalty to a foreign country, tacit hints and open sneers, and a whole devil's paraphernalia of suggestion are used to keep the Gael continually conscious that he is an outlaw, a person in the wrong, an interloper, or an inferior. Judges use the bench to make wordy, unscrupulous attacks upon the ideals of the people and the people's champions, to talk with dogmatic assurance of matters of the most highly debatable kind with the obvious suggestion that holders of other views are dangerous and worthless people — those people being the Gaels, who have no right to opinions. And so justice, law, administration and the whole bourgeoisie are rightly regarded by the mass of the Irish people as a big, cumbering, diabolical imposition.
The most tragic feature of the submersion of the Irish Nation is, that in course of time and by dint of oft-repetition of the lie, England persuaded many of Ireland's own children to accept their past at her valuation. The measure of the loss of the Irish tongue was ever the measure of denationalisation. Daniel O'Connell, who — consciously or otherwise — was the most effective ally ever England had in this country, abused his wonderful power in Ireland to induce the Irish people to adopt the English language. Had he told them to adhere to their own, they would equally have followed his advice, and the renaissance of our own days might have come seventy years earlier. But when a large proportion of the nation adopted the foreign tongue, that mass was cut off from the memories and traditions of nationhood. In the English tongue it found nothing but falsehood regarding Ireland. The few Irishmen who had
THE SECRET IRELAND. 7
written in English hitherto had been ignorant of the splendours of Gaelic literature, and in their writings the national figures moved like unreal creatures of the stage. Cut off from Gaelic scholarship, a new generation accepted without suspicion the estimates of Ireland offered by Englishmen pledged to the propagation of the great denial. So utterly was the sense of separate cultural nationality lost in a single generation that even great John Mitchel wrote of English as " our own language." Lalor Shiel, who defended O'Connell, expressed vehement indignation at an English statesman's description of the Irish people as " alien in race, language and religion." Thus the O'Connellised Nationalist regarded as an insult what was really the prime claim of Nationality.
To illustrate the amazing forgetfulness of their past which descended on an Anglicised people, we may recall that oft-told tale of how, when Thomas Moore was composing his "History of Ireland" [1839] he visited O'Curry at the Royal Irish Academy, in company with Petrie. O'Curry had before him the Books of Ballymote and Lecain, The Leabhar Breac, The Annals of the Four Masters, and other ancient volumes. Seeing this formidable array of dark and time-worn docu- ments, Moore (writes O'Curry) " looked a little dis- concerted, but after awhile plucked up courage to open the Book of Ballymote and ask what it was. Dr. Petrie and myself then entered into a short explanation of the history and character of the books as well as of ancient Gaelic documents in general. Moore listened with great attention, alternately scanning the books and myself, and then asked me, in a serious tone, if I understood them, and how I learned to do so. Having satisfied himself on these points, he turned
8 TOWARDS THE REPUBLIC.
to Dr. Petrie and said : ' Petrie, these huge tomes could not have been written by fools or for any foolish purpose. / never knew anything about them before, and I had no right to have undertaken the HISTORY OF IRELAND.' "
Moore's humility has in it something pathetic. Here was the most notable Irish literary man of his day suddenly discovering himself to be totally dis- qualified to speak for or of his country. Imagine an Englishman who should set out to write a history of old France from the documents of the English marauders of the Hundred Years' War, who should be ignorant of French and should refuse to consult 'all writings by native Frenchmen : what a distorted picture would he present ! The Gentle France of history would be as absent from his pages as though he were writing of Thibet. Yet this is precisely the plan on which Moore had been working, and the plan on which large masses of people base their conceptions of Ireland to the present day. The history of any country written without the use of the native annals is not worth the paper it is written on. Yet for a whole century, Irishmen have relied for their notions of their past on books written by men with all Moore's ignor- ance of the real Ireland, and with less than his patriot instincts and sympathies. So many hundreds of books have been written by people ignorant of the language of the land they write of, and ignorant or contemptuous of the native annals and literature, that the false story has drowned the truth by dint of noisy repetition, and to-day quite well-educated people are found who are ignorant of all Ireland's past save that insignificant and inglorious section of it which is concerned with English-speaking people in Ireland.
THE SECRET IRELAND. 9
The awful obscurity into which the essential features of Irish history fell is emphasised by the statues set up in the Irish capital. Parnell and Father Mathew are the only two of Ireland's greatest to be commemorated. Beside these, there are statues of men decent and agreeable, like Goldsmith and Moore ; utterly foreign like King William and Nelson ; insig- nificant nobodies like the figures in Stephen's Green, and often bitter enemies of the Irish people and of morality. But where is Hugh O'Neill, Ireland's greatest layman ? Where is Eoghan Rua O'Neill or great Luke Wadding ? Where is Art MacMurrough or Bruce, or any other Irish King ? Where is Keating, who stands to Irish letters as Shakespere to English ? There is, indeed, a handsome Celtic Cross, erected by Mr. W. M. Murphy, in the grounds opposite the Mater Hospital, to the memory of the Four Masters, but, apart from that solitary example, the stranger might search all Dublin for memorials of the historic Irish Nation, and at the end be as poor in discovery as if that nation never was.
Throughout Irish life to-day, the same dreadful slavish acceptance of England's will stands before us like the dirt of the Augean stables. Gaelic Ireland, traditional Ireland, the real Ireland, living its secret life, is ignored, or recognised only in a perfunctory way, as when in speeches lip tribute is paid to " the grand old Irish tongue." In the Irish-speaking counties, if there be but five per cent, of English speakers in the congregation, sermons in English are provided, and the tongue of the people ignored. In Dublin where, between Intermediate pupils, Gaelic Leaguers and native speakers, some twenty per cent, of the congregations can understand and are eager for Irish
10 TOWARDS THE REPUBLIC.
sermons, the national language is used in the pulpit only on St. Patrick's Day, and then only in a few churches. Everywhere the story is the same — the Gael is " not supposed to exist," even by his own people.
Anglicisation has meant that the Gael, hypnotised by the assurances of all in power, came at last to forget his own existence. He forgot his past, forgot his individuality, and so became the will-less, wandering creature that allowed the Redmonds and the Dillons to forswear his national rights and declare him the friend of his oppressor. That which we are witnessing to-day is the Gael's awakening to a sense of his separate existence. How the revival came we know. From the days of Davis and O'Curry, memories have' been stirring in the submerged people. Historical research, poetic reminders, literary reconstruction, have recalled to the nation its individuality. Above all, the language revival has stirred the deeps of national memory. The war merely hastened towards completion a process long at work. The events that followed Easter Week brought the stirring memories to a sharp point. A sudden rush of self-realisation brought the nation back to the attitude of 220 years ago — the normal attitude of race-consciousness. Now, as then, the nation knows itself to be the true owner of this island, and all that is English in these shores to be usurping and intrusive.
It is natural enough that those who persist to the present day in denying the Gael's existence, do not understand what has happened. They, whose minds are filled with England's might and England's culture, and who are as ignorant of Irish culture as a blind- born man of the nature of colour, do not understand that however highly we respect the achievements of
THE SECRET IRELAND. 11
Englishmen in their own country, we regard all English institutions, manners, customs, words, and works as so much annoying lumber in Ireland, so much rubbish that must be swept out and destroyed so as to enable us to make of Ireland an Irish island. As a matter of fact, Anglicised folk probably understand this better than they pretend. They know well enough — as their studiously aggressive attitude shows — that they are intruders, usurping the place of native sovereignty ; and though they will never admit it, lest their own claims be destroyed, they are really fully conscious that the Gael and his rights exist.
The mysterious thing that has happened in our days is simply that the Secret Ireland has once more come forth into the light. The submerged people have risen and asserted themselves. The Gael has realised himself and has taken steps to convince the world of his existence. The thoroughness with which Irish Nationality has been ignored, denied and hidden adds to the vehemence of the national re-assertion, while the example of a dozen less notable submerged nationalities which have won their complete resur- rection in these Apocalyptic days, has given to the Gael a hope on which all his energies are bent. For ages, in his outlawry, he has dreamed of a time when the power of might should pass and the principle of public right be restored to the world. His oppressor to-day is loud in profession of those principles on which his right to existence and self-development are based. He thus finds in his hands a moral weapon with which he will either achieve the Self -Determination accorded to all far lesser peoples, or, in the alternative, expose strong England as the most hypocritical mouther of lies that the world has seen.
CHAPTER II.
THE MAKINGS OE THE NATION.
I conceive that my testimony ought the more readily to be admitted from the fact I treat therein more par- ticularly of the Gaels, and if any man deem that I give them too much credit, let him not imagine that I do so through partiality; praising them more than is just through love of my own kindred, for I belong, according to my own extraction, to the Old Galls or the Anglo- Norman race.
— KEATING, Preface to History of Ireland.
CHE aim of the resurgent Gael is expressed in the motto of the Gaelic League : The achievement of a free Gaelic nation, for Gaelicism is the fount and origin of all modern Irish Nationalism. Patriotism has two phases. There is firstly the zeal for liberty that springs from economic or material oppression. It was this spirit that animated the Irish Protestant Republicans in 1798, when Irish freedom was fought for in the name of the Rights of Man. There is secondly the innate, God-implanted desire of every spirited people for self-expression, and patriotism of this apostolic sort will demand liberty even where slavery is softened by luxury and disguised. Were Ireland but a province or a colony, she would speedily become loyal to the English Empire on the removal of her economic grievances and the opening up of her material resources. But because Ireland is a nation by virtue of her native Gaelic culture, material prosperity only emboldens her to seek yet further means for self- expression. It is not true that Irish Nationality
THE MAKINGS OF THE NATION. 13
thrives on grievances— were that so, England would remove those grievances. It thrives, like all healthy organisms, on prosperity. The acquirement of the land, instead of killing the Irish farmers' zeal for political liberty, created a sturdy, resource-possessing population doubly eager to get this country completely into their hands so as to shape it according to the dream of their hearts and the design of God.
The_sole bond of Irish Nationality, is — and always .was — the native Gaelic culture^ and whatever the chanting details may be, the underlying motive of every strong national movement can be traced to the restoration of Gaelici-stn-. ITovenK'iiLs and causes in Ireland may always be observed to succeed_or fail in proportion as they approximate to Gaelic tradition—. The existence of the Gaelic norm as the public ideal is the most unmistakable phenomenon of Irish life. In proportion as artists work back to Gaelic origins, so does their work gain in conviction, colour and success. In proportion as they have read deeply of Gaelic literature, the work of our poets and story-tellers possesses for the general Irish public " grip " and reality. In proportion as our publicists are absorbed in Gaelic ideals are they trusted and loved like the Sinn Fein leaders, in distinction to the distrusted and contemned children of Anglicisation.
It is not to be supposed that Gaelicism is a narrow racial cause. When we say that all things non-Gaelic in Ireland are foreign we do not mean that nobody has any part in Irish-Ireland save people who, like many folk in Donegal to-day, can trace their personal descent back to Niall of the Nine Hostages, and thence, theoretically, to the ancestor of the Milesian race. We merely mean that the Gael is the normal national
14 TOWARDS THE REPUBLIC.
type, and that divergence of that type is a mark of foreign influence, interests or allegiance. Indeed, nobody with an elementary knowledge of modern racial science would so far err as to suppose that anything like homogeneity of race exists in Ireland any more than in any other European nation. Even an unscientific glance at any Irish assembly will detect a score of different types. The old mythological story of the Milesian nation has now long gone by the board. We know that primitive Ireland was popu- lated by immigrations from many sources — the earliest large immigration, that of the Tuatha de Dannan, being, according to Dr. Sigerson, of a Teutonic origin ; for did they not come from the North, as Scandi- navians would, and were they not, Teuton-like, famed for their musical and magical arts ? As for the Celts, no one knows who they were, and we know from the Latin authors that when they populated Gaul they were already a race of mixed types. We know that an Ireland - of mixed tribes was compounded into a nation sometime early in the Christian Era [query : by the universal change from pasturage to agriculture ? ] and that the united nation received numerous immi- grations of Norsemen and Normans, and later of Anglo- Saxon Englishry.
So long as Gaelic culture remained dominant in Ireland, all these races were in turn absorbed and moulded to the national type. In a patriarchal country, names count for nothing as evidence of origin, for in such countries nothing is commoner as a social custom than the legal fiction by which foreigners are admitted to the body corporate on the adoption of the clan name. Hence, nobody knows less about his origin in Ireland than an 0 or a Mac. He may be
THE MAKINGS OF THE NATION. 15
y
descended from any race which ever entered Ireland before modern times when names were fixed. It is impossible to estimate, therefore, what proportion of bearers of Celtic names are of Celtic origin — until such time as ethnologists shall measure all our skulls, when surprising conclusions may be looked for. The possession of a non-Celtic name, again, is no evidence of non-Celtic ancestry, for Celtic names were for long illegal, and those who, in the Pale, adopted English names and entered the towns, thus cutting themselves from the clan influence, transmitted those foreign names to later generations. On the other hand, we find bearers of names like Keating, Nugent, Walsh, Hackett and Fitzgerald, of known non-native origin, among the leading classics of Irish literature and the leading champions of Gaelic nationality.
Hence it is clear that any attempt to base the Irish Nation on racialism is absurd from the outset. Such an attempt has never been made by any Nationalist of authority. Gaelicism, then, is in no sense racial, and the Gaelic nation offers a welcome to its citizen- ship to the child of any race if he, living in Ireland, accepts the sovereignty of the Irish Nation. But for all this, Gaelicism is none the less real : it is no whit artificial. We shall see what is the position in Ireland of the national Gaelic type if we look at the case of England. That country is populated by even more mixed races than is Ireland, but there is no mistake possible as to the existence of the English national type. Celts, Teutons, Mediterraneans, Slavs, Semites, and even Asiatics are found among " typical English- men," eminent in English politics, English letters, English social hie. A wholly insignificant little tribe called Angles, which populated a little corner of the
16 TOWARDS THE REPUBLIC.
country, has given its name to the national type, and probably not five per cent, of the most English Englishmen have in them a drop of -"Angle" (or " English ") blood. The English national type, like the Irish, has drawn its talents from many sources, but it is an unmistakable reality, with illimitable resources for absorption and assimilation. The foreigner who settles in England finds the atmosphere of the national type strong upon him. In England, he does as the English. To win the confidence of the people he lives among, he talks and acts as they do. His children are indistinguishable from their English companions. Every virile and free country possesses this power of impressing the national type upon settlers. The Frenchified Englishman, the Americanised Jew, are familiar enough as examples.
Irish Nationalists, seeking a free Gaelic nation, expect nothing unreasonable when they look for all citizens of Ireland— of whatever origin — to conform to the type named after the Gaels, as settlers in England conform to the type that is named after the Angles. It is not proposed to achieve this absorption by coercive means. In national matters, more than in any others, " the man who complies against his will is of the same opinion still," and the nation would profit nothing by seeking to make Irishmen of strangers — -many of whom in a country mean increased national wealth — against their will. The Irish State will, indeed, have the right to demand that all children educated in Ireland are taught the language of the country, but there all compulsory measures towards enforcing national culture will cease. The Gael will rely solely upon the virility of his culture for its triumph.
Already we see it at work. In former years, when
THE MAKINGS OF THE NATION. 17
the Gael was completely submerged and Anglicisation stood unchallenged in Ireland, foreigners who came to Ireland lost their private characteristics to acquire only the watery English culture propagated by Trinity College. They saw nothing of Irish-Ireland — paid heedless ears to stories, maybe, of the alleged indolence and worthlessness of the "Irish .peasantry" — and followed the fashions set by the imitation-English viceregal court. To-day a complete change has set in. The National University, the Abbey Theatre, the Anglo-Irish literary movement, the several schools of National Art ; all these have contributed to make the native culture the most interesting feature of life in the metropolis. The intellectual barrenness and artistic sterility of the Ascendancy in Ireland — Trinity College has not produced a dozen scholars in all its history who have left names that the average man can - recall — are glaringly obvious beside the mental vigour of the resurgent people, and the stranger in Ireland finds that Gaelicism alone offers him any matter of interest or attraction. Hence, all visitors in search of intellectual, artistic, or social life in Ireland wholly ignore the Ascendancy classes, and seek the functions and circles of the national and reviving Gaelic life. The foreigner* who writes of Ireland writes of Irish- Ireland : his pen can find no subject of interest in the doings of the tawdry Castle sets, the art-barren, cultureless, Unionist classes. Our visitors, thus at last find the Gael sovereign in intellectual life in Ireland — as soon, we hope, he will be in economic and social life. We have won in the mental realm, and the phenomenon of Gaelic absorption has begun. Only the other day we heard of a family of Dutch origin,
*Such as Dubois, Treguiz, Mgr. Buonaiuti, etc.
18 TOWARDS THE REPUBLIC.
settled in Ireland, adopting a Gaelic dress for its name, as but a few years ago it would have adopted an English form. Everywhere a similar process is at work. Young men of partially foreign blood, born overseas, feel the attraction of the resurgent spirit, and come home from America and the English colonies to seek absorption in the reviving nation. Ascendancy people of goodwill desert their class to throw in their lot with Ireland. Anglicisation sees itself attacked at every hand, and it has no moral or cultural defence to oppose to so formidable a foe, or preserve its unnatural existence.
CHAPTER III.
THE GAELIC STATE.
A Thrionoid 'ga dta an chumhacht,
An mbiaidh an dream-sa choidhche ar deoraidheacht,
Ni is sia 6 chathair-lios Chuinn,
No an mbiaidh an t-ath-aoibhneas againn ?
— FEARFLATHA 0 GNIMH.
CHE Nationalist population of Ireland are the rightful, though dispossessed, owners of this island, its harbours, minerals, soil, fisheries, and stock. It is on this principle that the Gael has set before himself the aim of recovering complete economic control of all Irish resources. It is intolerable that, as at present, the veins of wealth in Ireland should be governed in foreign interests, by men of a foreign allegiance, and the true owners of Ireland exist merely as the wage-slaves of strangers. The struggle for economic sovereignty has two phases — the agricultural and the industrial — and it is one of the principal sources of strength to the Gaelic revival that in the former of these phases a large measure of success has already been achieved. In national matters, success increases the hunger for success.
Our English friends are continually reminding us that their Imperial Parliament backed the cheque with which the Irish landlords were bought out, and the land of Ireland transferred to the possession of the farmers. An examination of this transaction shows it to have been far less of an act of supernatural virtue than is represented. English investors were
20 TOWARDS THE REPUBLIC.
offered one of the finest securities ever placed upon the market, and have been receiving their interest ever since, while the Imperial Parliament was relieved of a difficult problem that had long impeded its machinery. England's petted class of planters was given a cash settlement which mightily delighted those children of Mammon, and while English investors, the English Parliament, and England's faithful garrison all derived immense benefits, the entire cost was shouldered by the Irish farmer. It is well for the Irish farmer jthat he isjrelieved nfjiayjn£_renit, eithp.rfA.ir nrp.Yt.nri-.innfl.tej and it is well that^ he has secure tenure of possession. But it is~ablmrd to say that he is under any obligation for having restored to him that which is his own. Had England bought out her planters and handed over the land to its true owners as a free act of restora- tion, she would have performed an act of international equity. But when she performs an act of (comparative) social justice in calling off her landlords, she makes sure that the act shall cost her nothing, and that the injured party whose grievance she is redressing shall pay — and pay well — for his restored goods. - — So the Irish Nation, dispossessed of its lands by Cromwell and the Penal Code, is at last restored a section of those lands, after an age of rack-renting and torture by titleless adventurers, backed by Imperial bayonets. It is granted this small area of its once wide territories on the condition that 100 millions be paid over to the thieves who have flourished so long, and to the English capitalist who expects a big commission in the form of interest. Every penny that is taken from Irish farmers for their land is plunder — a war indemnity — an unjustifiable levy upon the victims of a marauding excursion. Not one penny
THE GAELIC STATE. 21
received by the Irish landlords is other than stolen money. The Irish farmers are paying for what is already indisputably their own.
It is not on the general moral principle that, in any country, the nation possesses sovereign rights over the country's resources that we declare that the farmers are the owners of the Irish soil. This moral principle is denied by the economic systems of many states, which declare that a class may justly hold the monopoly of the nation's wealth. We are prepared to meet even the capitalist theory of economic morality with proofs of our case. Setting aside, then, the natural right of the people to possess the soil, we look back to the days of the Gaelic State, and inquire who were its owners then. If we find it owned by a class of native landlords, from whom it was wrested by the new- comers, we are obliged to admit that according to capitalist morality, the Irish farmers have no more right to the land to-day than they had when it was owned by its former masters. If the land was owned by Irish landlords who have since perished, then the new holders can claim possession by right of pre- scription, for where one party to a dispute has ceased to exist, the other party has, by virtue of occupation, a natural right over claimants from outside, like the right of the finder of an unclaimed article. When we examine the landlords' title-deeds, however, we find in them no such authority.
We find that before the tide of (unprovoked) war swept the Irish people from their homesteads, the land was both de facto and de jure owned by the nation as a communal possession. The Irish farmer enjoyed perfect security of tenure, and was as much possessor of the land he tilled as the shareholders of a modern
22 TOWARDS THE REPUBLIC.
company are possessors of that company's assets. The Brehon law by which this ownership was decreed and regulated prevailed everywhere until it was sus- pended by exterior force. No person or power had any moral or legal right to disturb those possessors, nor could their land pass to other hands save by their volunta^ concession. They were driven from their lands by arms, but they never voluntarily surrendered their right of ownership, and the intruders never established any claim save the claim of thieves' might. It cannot be pretended that any right of prescription grew with time, for the actual owners, i.e., the nation, still lived on, eking out existence among bogs and rocks, and ever seeking the recovery of their rightful means of decent subsistence for which no substitute was offered.
As we look back to the communal Gaelic State, we see in its constitution the explanation of the Gaelic nation's survival through ages of unparalleled bloody persecution. The communal ownership of the land accounts for that sturdy personal independence which preserved the physical virility of the race, and which, by giving every man his personal stake in the state, made settled, patriotic citizens. Under systems where the farmers are the creatures of large landlords, inde- pendence, security, expansive virility are less to be looked for. But it was not alone the fact that every man had his stake in the Gaelic State that made the nation so hard to destroy. It was the many- headedness, as of the hydra, of the Irish constitution that perplexed the enemy, who knew not where to strike. It is true that the Irish State of pre-Invasion days was weak in central authority. Long peace — the Norsemen round the coast had long softened into useful
THE GAELIC STATE. 23
commercial Irish citizens — had left Ireland careless of the need for a strong military monarchy, and when the most unscrupulous and most militaristic nation of Europe sent ravaging armies into Ireland, there was a tragic want of ruthlessness in the opposition that was offered. A strong mediaeval monarchy would not have been content to pen the invaders into Dublin ; it would have swept the last intruder into the sea, and with a strong naval effort carried the war into the enemy's camp to teach a wholesome lesson.
And yet this want of centralisation proved, in a sense, the nation's salvation. Had the Irish State hung upon central institutions, the destruction thereof would have meant the nation's destruction. Thus one great battle might have ended Irish independence. As it was, the_real bond of Irish ISfatirmality wa,s enthusiastic loyalty tr> the n,a,tfinrm.l nnltnrft. It was a spiritual bulwark that no material force could break. Economically, the state was based on self-supporting stateships, and before foreign power could establish itself, each of these stateships had separately to be reduced. Each stateship had its pasturage, tillage, lea, wood, and fresh or salt-water fisheries ; in all of which each of its citizens had his stake. Each state- ship, again, had its own craftsmen, jurists, physicians and bards : a complete apparatus for independent and varied life. Each stateship produced its own food, clothing, weapons, and cultural ministrations. The arts and crafts were, so to speak, by-industries of agriculture ; and hence, so long as the land was held, the complete life of the Gael could thrive in local perfection. A nation thus vitally strong in every part was, as a whole, an organism that could not be
24 TOWARDS THE REPUBLIC.
quelled save by the extirpation of the race. So long as the people could cling to the soil — and often a clan swept completely from its holdings won its way back — the national life continued in almost full intensity, while the self-sufficiency of every clan made strangers seek absorption so as to enjoy the civic privileges that were otherwise denied.
We thus may learn one of the most important lessons of Irish history, viz., that the national war was also a social war. The Irish Nation, when truly Gaelic, fought its battle upon the social plane. J3y preserving a Gaelic society, the nation survived. Gaelicism of life was the hardest thing for the enemy to destroy, and it was only in the last century, when he partially succeeded, with his National Schools^ (wickedest weapon ever forged) that the nation lost for awhile resiliency and the power of absorption and recovery. There is a lesson in this for to-day. England can deport our politicians, defeat our armed men, strangle with her censorship our diplomatic efforts ; but while no means of resistance on our part is to be discarded because it can in the extreme be overborne, yet we do well to remember that England's only argument, Force, cannot prevail against social endeavour. England cannot prevent us from forming and preserving a Gaelic society, and in proportion as Irish social endeavour is united and resolved, the might of England in Ireland will be rendered nugatory.
Along the western counties, where the Irish language still predominates, traces of the life of the stateships linger to this day. There are little groups of parishes almost completely self-supporting, although imported food and manufactured goods are now beginning to penetrate through the accursed gombeen-shops. Here
THE GAELIC STATE. 25
neighbours co-operate to build the houses and make furniture. The superb bedding, of touch-delighting woollen texture, and the clothing of the people are from local looms. The food is mainly the good local produce— oatbread and heather-honey are there. In co-operative labours and in a thousand pleasing social traits, the observer may see relics of a very different life from that of Anglicised Ireland, and may cast himself back in vision to the full-blooded Hie of pre-Famine days, and so to the Ireland of days before the Dispossession. Here there are literature and song and social wealth of life nourishing in the Gaelic tongue, and a happy existence is enjoyed in complete independence of all the tawdry works and pomps of the English-speaking world. You may meet strong farmers who have never heard of John Redmond, so virile, so self-sufficient, are the surviving fragments of the Gaelic polity.
Gaelicism is not so artificial a thing that it can be killed by a break in its continuity. Its principles are instinctive to the Irish people, and though the traditional Gaelic State has been beaten back to the Atlantic verge, its familiar lineaments have strangely begun to re-appear in the fields that it seemed forever to have left. The nation having recovered the land and so acquired security for self-expression, has myste- riously begun, as we may say, to crystallise out in its old form. As by some strange avatar the old economic methods have begun to assert themselves in modern conditions. Mr. Darrell Figgis, in two remarkable historical studies, has showed how the old stateships have, as it were, been re-established in the co-operative societies into which the emancipated farmers formed themselves.
26 TOWARDS THE REPUBLIC.
" Irishmen were now " he writes of recent years, " coming into the possession of their land. They had won, that is to say, that on which the National Polity had been built without the power to re-create the State. Their holdings were small, and in the new world-wide com- petition they were unable to compete against farming syndicates all over the world. So the Organisation Society grouped them into co-operative societies with a view to giving them a corporate responsibility and power. And a remarkable thing happened. The new societies became in many ways the modern counterparts of the old Stateships. They are (though only in matters of business) legislative and economic units ; they have their central townships, where they meet, and about which reside the artisans of those units ; they enact their own limited governance of themselves. With Ireland a Sovereign State it would take very little to make of them what the Old Stateships had been, and to rebuild from them the wise and distinctive National Polity that was once so ruthlessly destroyed."*
That the future of Ireland lies in Co-operation no observer of the signs of the times can doubt. Every great revolution of opinion takes a full generation to effect. The Parliamentary Party and movement survived a score of blunders — lived on after innumerable betrayals of trust — because the rising of a new genera- tion was necessary before a sweeping change of vision could come to the country. In the meantime, Sinn Fein — Irish-Ireland — had to wait patiently in the wilderness. Co-operation, too, had to be preached, as in the wilderness, for the space of a generation, but to-day every young man of intelligence, almost as a matter of course, accepts co-operation as the
* The Historic Case for Irith Independence.
THE GAELIC STATE. 27
progressive policy. The land is passing into the hands of an intellectual generation completely converted to the cause. The young farmer, eager, as youth always is, for the progressive path, reads modern Irish literature, and finds, every one of the intellectual leaders of the country preaching co-operation — sees no one defending the cause of the old regime of traders who grew rich on selling bad seeds and inferior manures — save the representatives of an inefficient and dis- credited party. All the forces of enlightenment advocate the co-operative cause, and the new generation has no doubt as to its course.
With Young Ireland resolved to organise the countryside on co-operative lines, it is to be expected that the co-operative societies will shortly take on the complete colour of Young Ireland's ideals and ambitions. Co-operation, at present solely an economic movement, will be worked to its full potentiality as a means for advancing the resurgent Gael's cultural and social desires. The co-operative societies will take over the leadership of all communal activities. As they pass into the hands of the younger men, their business will, gradually, come to be conducted in Irish, and the fact that they are controlled by the democracy will render them friendly to the advance- ment of Irish in business life, where the capitalist economic institutions are hostile to the use of the national tongue. The movement presently afoot to equip each co-operative society with a rural library is again indicative of the lead which co-operative societies are destined to take in promoting national culture. Only the other day, to take another example of co-operative activities, we saw the Enniscorthy society establishing its own cinema. Here we see the
28 TOWARDS THE REPUBLIC.
possibility of Irishising the people's amusements. In time, every co-operative society will have its hall, in which the public will enjoy dramatic and other fare selected by their own folk, instead of being obliged to accept, as heretofore, the trivial and often offensive entertainments offered them by foreign and capitalistic theatrical syndicates. Thus the co-operative societies may become the most effective patrons of Irish music, Irish drama and Irish talent that these have ever enjoyed. We can also foresee the societies inviting the thinkers and scholars of the nation, and dis- tinguished foreign visitors, to lecture in their halls ; and in this, and other ways, leading the restoration of the democratic culture of old.
When the co-operative societies have thus reached their full entelechy, when the whole soil of Ireland, including the rich midlands now held by graziers, is back in the hands of its owners, either by the payment of indemnity or otherwise, the control of Irish Me, so far as the countryside is concerned, will have been almost completely won back by the nation. But if Ireland, securing Self-Determination, has won her independence, these democratic stateships will become the vital framework of the most distinctive of civilisa- tions. The National Government, when raising revenue, will draw from the communal wealth of these stateships, and so the harsh and unequal incidence of taxation will no longer fall upon the individual. The common wealth will pay the common expenses, and we shall have an end of the present shifting of the burden by the rich classes to the bourgeoisie, and by the bourgeoisie to the poor, who have no one below them to pass it on to. The decentralisation effected by the stateships will, as of old, keep the professions
THE GAELIC STATE. 29
and the industries healthily in touch with the land, and, in turn, will keep the farmer agreeably in touch with other phases of life than the agricultural. Thus there will be no excessive growth of artificiality in the towns — no cockney-ising of the youth — and at the same time there will be no isolation, as at present, of the farmer from the mobile world, no rustication. Extreme divergences between classes will be reduced. The diffusion of small private property, which will follow a widespread stake in the land, will increase stability, personal independence and good citizen- ship. In short, the greater the degree of adhesion to traditional Gaelic social principles, the greater will be the beauty, security and nobility of the restored Gaelic State?
CHAPTER IV.
THE WOBKEBS' BEPUBLIC : IRISH INDUSTRY'S AIM.
" Capitalism is the most foreign thing in Ireland."
— JAMES COMMOLLT.
MONO the many startlingly swift revolutions which have been brought about by the War, there are few more striking than the revolution of attitude effected in the Irish working class. People familiar with Dublin before the War who should re- visit the Irish capital to-day would suppose that not five, but fifty years had passed, so great a change is obvious in the attitude and condition of the city's democracy. The change is not confined to Dublin, nor to Dublin and Cork, although they lead in the industrial social movement ; for all through the country labour is organising with a thoroughness and a deter- mination that before the war the most sanguine democrat hardly hoped to live to see. It is obvious to the student who takes the pains to go among the people to learn their views, and who reads the literature of the movement, that Irish labour has envisioned the aim of effecting in the industrial world the same recovery of national control as has been achieved — at least in principle — in the land. The labour move- ment owes its strength and enthusiasm to the fact that it has all the driving force of national resurgence behind it. In the labour movement we see the town- dwelling Gael fighting the national cause on the social
THE WORKERS' REPUBLIC. 31
plane exactly as his brother in the counties has fought it. It is not merely because he wants better food, cheaper fuel, and housing something better than a, beast's, that the Irish workingman is seeking to link up the country's labour in " One Big Union " : it is because he wants to live a completely Irish life — to rear sturdy Irish children — to share with the men on the land a common Gaelic heritage. His inspiration is seen in the phrase in which James Connolly so vividly described the true nature of the democratic movement : " The Re-Conquest of Ireland"
The bullet that killed James Connolly slew also the Capitalistic Order. It sanctified labour with a martyrdom, and damned labour's enemies with a mortal crime. Whether it is agreeable to our wishes or not, we have to recognise that the doctrine of James Connolly has completely conquered industrial Ireland since his death. His work has also affected develop- ments in Russia and Revolutionary Germany, and may yet show its fruits in France, America and Australia. This is a big saying. Yet it is known to all that the Bolsheviks, the only protagonists in the great world- struggle who performed a great act of renunciation in the name of Conscience, Justice and Liberty, were led by men who studied Connolly's writings and watched his career. Just here we are not concerned with Connolly as an international force, or the influence of the Irish Insurrection upon the world. But it is necessary to observe that Connolly, besides being an Irish leader, was a man with a political creed of historic importance. His formula of a Workers' Republic has set Republicanism on a hope- fuller path than that which it has trodden in France and America. What is most interesting of all is,
32 TOWARDS THE REPUBLIC.
that after he had formed his political creed, Connolly examined Irish history, and found the cause of Irish Nationalism to be historically in harmony with the social principles that he had deduced from unirersals. In other words, he found that the great heroes of Ireland's cause had always been men acting in accord with the aim of social justice. He examined the Gaelic State, and found it to have been in the past an actual embodiment of the State that he was seeking in the future. Hence, from beginning with formulas neces- sarily of a somewhat doctrinaire character, he came to declare, not that the Irish people must construct a state on such-and-such theoretic lines, but that they must restore their native and submerged constitution. This I take to be his mental attitude as traced from his early propaganda to his great final testaments, Labour in Irish History and The Re-Conquest of Ireland. It is regrettable that we have no Credo from the pen of the " ultimate " Connolly. No close student of the times can doubt that Connolly was one of the pillars of new Europe ; that his influence will prove as great as, though more salutary than, that of Rousseau. Hence, we could wish that in that epoch-making Spring of 1916 he had set down a considered testament. We know at least that love of Ireland and earnest sincerity had brought him to a position in regard to Nationalism that cancelled many of his early and groping theories, and made him perfectly orthodox in attitude towards Irish spiritual tradition. We know, too, that his comrade-in-arms at the last, Padraic MacPiarais, that great representative figure of Irish Catholicity, whose writings are eminent in the Catholic literature of the age, had adopted Connolly's creed, so that Connolly's faith is sealed, not only by
THE WORKERS' REPUBLIC. 33
his own, but by the ratifying blood of the Coluracille of our days. Connolly's Republic was proclaimed in Easter Week by men who were as representative of Catholic tradition as if they had learnt from the lips of Brigid and Breandan. The creed of the Workers' Republic was signed by the true children of Holy Ireland of old.
When he spoke in the international vocabulary, Connolly said : " We seek a Workers' Republic." When he spoke in Irish terms, he said : " We want the free Irish State of old restored." The phrase " Workers' Republic " is an excellent modern translation of Gaelicism. It enables us correctly to grasp the plan of old Irish civilisation, and Irish history in turn throws light on the possibilities of modern Labour- Republicanism. Thus we are often told that advanced Labour's aim of securing communal possession of the national wealth would result in the insecurity of the individual for want of personal property. Yet the example of the Gaelic State shows that when the national wealth is owned by the nation, it is possible for the most stable and widely-diffused personal security to exist. Never was the farmer more firmly set in his holding than when he was unable, on the one hand, to amass more land than his share and reduce his rivals to being his tenants, or to alienate their share from his family on the other. The example of old Ireland shows us, further, that even where the power to expropriate the means of production from the people, and to destroy their personal independence is denied to the capitalist, it is still possible for the fortunate individual, through industry, genius, or public gratitude for services, to amass legitimate objects of enjoyment, and enjoy as jolly a life as the
34 TOWARDS THE REPUBLIC.
world can offer. One luxury is to be prohibited hereafter — the luxury of power. The arbitrary power to make or mar the happiness of thousands is forever to be removed from the rich. The luxury of being able to unsettle the lives of scores of workers, to fill homes with anxiety, to tear up rooted associations, to sway markets, to overthrow the labours of patriots by impoverishing districts and shifting the economic balance hither and thither — this is to be denied, like the luxury of furious driving on the public road. But this does not necessarily mean that no one shall enjoy rare wines, big houses, gardens, costly books and the means of travel.
The aim of Irish Labour — to take over from foreign, anti-Irish and usurping powers the commerce and industry of Ireland — is this Socialism ? Reactionaries storm at the movement, quoting all the shibboleths of Anti-Socialistic theory. The workers are being led astray by evil teachers, are being betrayed into conflict with rightly-constituted authority, are seeking what is not their own. These are the cries. The same were raised against the United Irishmen, the Land Leaguers, the Fenians, the Parnellites and Sinn Fein : against every party, in fact, which has stood for the submerged nation, and which time has justified. But those who attack Irish Labour, rarely do their opponents the compliment of studying their case. In conse- quence their accusations fly wide of the mark, and are rightly disregarded by the nation, strong in the conscientious knowledge of the justice of its cause. Mr. Thomas Johnson, a brilliant upholder of Connolly's faith, said but recently that when he was asked whether he was a Socialist, he knew not what to answer, for the practical work of the rapidly-advancing Labour cause
THE WORKERS' REPUBLIC. 35
so completely absorbed the attention, that the brain was never troubled with the academic problem of whether this or that label was proper to the measures which the course of events directed Labour to take. That is the attitude of Irish Labour — an attitude of complete indifference to formulas.
Nothing could be more futile in the opponents of the Labour uprising than to seek to check it with the bonds of academic argumentation. If any dogma of theorists stands in the way of the nation's march, so much the worse for the theorists. The nation sees the road clearly before it. But when we examine the theoretical problem : Is it Socialism ? we find, on the whole, that there need be no particular anxiety on that score. Connolly, who gloried in the name of Socialist, had the most eclectic of minds. He drew, not from one school of Socialism, but from all sources that could prove serviceable to the case of Ireland. So far from seeking to impose on Ireland the rigid doctrine of any special Socialistic school, Connolly was prepared to welcome any movement that would advance his central purpose — the restoration of economic Ireland to the dispossessed Irish masses. Thus he strongly advocated the Agricultural Co- operative Movement, and himself used with approval the co-operative leader's formula of " a Co-operative Commonwealth." He accepted this phrase as a synonym for his own " Workers' Republic." No mere doctrinaire would be thus liberal. Connolly was a follower of Marx, the classic of Socialism, in hoping for the overthrow of the Capitalist Order. Yet he was also a follower of Thompson, the Irishman who founded Socialism, whose formula was : that the workers must be their own capitalists, a doctrine that
36 TOWARDS THE REPUBLIC.
paralyses Anti-Socialistic reasoning. Thus, Connolly was not concerned to pledge Ireland to a theory. His plan was to work along whatever roads proved open towards the substitution of the People's sovereignty for the sovereignty of the nationless capitalist. Connolly stands or falls, not by the theory of Socialism, but by the ideal of Popular Control, however it be achieved.
It follows, then, that academic denunciations of Socialism such as are given prominence from time to time in the newspapers, have no bearing upon the real problems of the hour. We take a typical utterance of an opponent of the movement inaugurated by Connolly. The speaker, states the report, " said that labour had a perfect right to combine to safeguard its interests, and so had employers. All the labour troubles we had now were due to the Reformation, which destroyed the Christian guilds (first started by the Dominicans in Italy), making them give place to competition between wealth at the top and misery at the bottom. . . . Those who wanted to interfere with peace and social order must be put down. . . . Labour had no right to organise itself to interfere with the rights of other classes in the Nation."
Let, us examine this characteristic example of the attacks which are made every day upon Irish demo- cracy. Passing over the question of the origin of the Christian guilds, let us observe first that the guild system did not exist in the Gaelic State. The abolition of guilds, therefore, had no effect on Irish history. Guilds existed only in the English Pale and other Anglicised centres. 'The mass of the nation's industry was conducted without them. Is it not, then, verging on the preposterous to admonish the Irish Nation for the faults of other lands ? Thus the attackers of Irish National movements ever ignore (like the Penal Code)
THE WORKERS' REPUBLIC. 37
the existence of the Irish people and their personal history.
As to the alleged merits of the guilds, which throve in England, it is a well-known fact that they proved economically inefficient. Religion had nothing to do with their disappearance. They upheld apprentice- ship and maintained a good standard of work — like trades unions. But in origin they were workers' unions formed to combat merchants' (or capitalists') unions, and once they were established they proved as tyrannous as the merchants' associations before them. They exploited their monopolies to the full : that was the cause of their fall. We read that in Coventry once, the barbers agreed to raise their prices " to the damage of the whole people," and the one honest man who declined to profiteer was threatened with violence and " brought before a spiritual court to answer for his treason." Some dyers in the same town once refused to be bound by the guild's rates, and that most religious body " hired Welshmen and Irishmen to waylay and kill them" So far from serving the state loyally, we read of the guilds that in the sixteenth century, the joiners and carvers of Chester, instead of supplying the citizens at fair prices, " sold their wares to Ireland and other places beyond the sea at unreasonable prices, to their own enrich- ment and the community's expense." The guilds again refused membership to strangers and yet denied the strangers the right to work. Thus in the fifteenth century the guilds of Bristol excluded aliens and " rebels of Ireland." Bristol was then as Irish as Liverpool is to-day, but here was English democracy declaring " No Irish need apply."
From these examples it is clear that the so-called
38 TOWARDS THE REPUBLIC.
" Catholic Guilds " of England, with which efforts are made to side-track Irish Labour from Irish ideals, had developed during the Middle Ages into unscrupu- lous monopolistic institutions, displaying all the arbitrary and anti-social abuses of power which to-day we object to in capitalism. They quarrelled one with another and, according to the opinion of many, tended to restrict the volume of national production. At least, guildless Ireland produced such good and cheap cloth in the Middle Ages that guild-constituted England had to resort to arms to destroy the rival trade. Cloth was then the principal commodity of exchange, and Ireland's Continental cloth trade was attacked by an English navy. The essential fault of the guild system of society was, as all authorities admit, the fact that the guild- member's public spirit was li mi ted by his trade. He thought of and worked for the enrichment of the bootmakers, if he was a boot- maker, and he cared little how ironworkers or hatmakers fared — tried, indeed, to benefit by their misfortunes. Under the Gaelic system, the clothworker did not look for succour in distress to brother cloth- makers, but to the stateship to which he belonged. When a man looked outside himself, it was not to an artificial corporation, like a trade guild, but to his natural brotherhood, the community. This placed public spirit in the place of trade jealousy, and bound together farmer, artisan, and professional man in the sense of a common heritage. That trade societies must exist in the modern world is obvious, but Irish Labour's ambition of federating all the workers of Ireland into " One Big Union " means that the evils of guild sectionalism shall not appear in the new Gaelic State. The union of unions will keep before the
THE WORKERS' REPUBLIC. 39
nation its substantial solidarity, and the principle that an injury to one is an injury to all.
So far from the guilds having anything to do with Irish history, so far from them having been destroyed by the Reformation, we see that they concerned Ireland not at all. But observe the suggestion that the Reformation is responsible for Ireland's economic ills. Here we have another characteristic attempt to side-track the democratic movement with a false suggestion. The Reformation had no more to do with Ireland's economic case than had the spread of Buddhism in Japan. For whatever the Reformation may have done in England, this is certain, that Ireland's economic troubles all date from the expropriation of the Irish race — the overthrow of the Gaelic State by the attempted extirpation of the Irish people. The vitality of the state was such that all efforts to suppress it failing, England decided to wipe out the population in which it lived. And attempts to put this policy of extirpation into effect were first made by the Catholic English Queen Mary, the mortal enemy of the Reformation. It was she who first began the God- defying and murderous policy of expropria- tion, clearances and plantations — the policy finally brought to perfection by the Penal Code. Apart from the fact that Ireland's most relentless enemies have always been found in the ranks of English nominal Catholics, the fact that the destruction of the Irish State was first taken in hands by " Bloody Mary " is sufficient evidence that the Reformation has nothing to do with our affairs. To talk of the Reformation in regard to Irish Labour, merely amounts to an attempt to substitute sectarian hatred for historical fact and practical politics.
40 TOWARDS THE REPUBLIC.
Much use is made by the Anglicised bourgeoisie of sectarian cries. Thus Connolly's occasional tussles with Catholic publicists are being continually referred to. Controversial phrases of Connolly's are flaunted in the face of the Catholic worker by those who have no sympathy with his national and social aspirations, in hope of terrifying with the suggestion that Connolly was a bad Catholic and a teacher of anti- Catholic doctrine. This policy is treachery to the Church. No course of action could do more to create distrust in the worker's mind. Conscience and reason, all the most-deep-seated instincts of the Irish nature, tell the worker that his objects are just and right. When men of authority and learning accuse him of heresy in theoretic terms that he cannot grasp, he is dangerously bewildered. When he is told that Catholic guilds, such as Ireland has never heard of before, are the remedy for his ills, and that he must forsake the path before him that he knows to be right, he is doubly perplexed. It is then that the Red-Flaggery of your jejune Revolutionist begins to sound reasonable. When right authority sides with wrong authority it commits a suicidal act.
To preserve our people from rash Red-Flaggery, though the danger is very small — the Irish people's good sense and deep faith have preserved them from this peril in their other struggles — it is much to be wished that an Irish Lacordaire should arise to champion in high places the workers' cause. He would show, in the terms of learning, the vital justness of the resurgent nation's aims. We claim that those aims are perfectly in accord with the Moral Law and with Catholic Social Philosophy. No one has claimed for Connolly " verbal inspiration." Many of his
THE WORKERS' REPUBLIC. 41
controversies and contentions are by many regretted. But it is a true proverb that says : " He who never made a mistake never made anything else," and in all the essential, substantial features, we claim that Connolly's teaching is acceptable to the most orthodox. We claim that " Catholic Social Reform " must, in the very nature of the case, be based upon the basic principle of Connolly's teaching — the Re-Conquest of Ireland. Justice cannot exist in a state that is rooted in injustice. Without re- conquest, reform cannot begin. The first act of Catholic Social Reform, therefore, must be to throw itself into the re-conquest struggle. The Land War was a piece of Catholic Social Reform of the most practical kind. When the Turks swept into Christendom, stamping out the Christian State, murdering and exiling the Christian population, King John Sobieski, leading the armies of Catholic Poland, drove back the infidel hordes before the heart of Christendom could be pierced. Sobieski died, and Poland's military power ended. But all Catholic historians join in praising her great struggle against the Turk as a holy war. Now there was not one detail of formal difference between Poland's war against the invading Turks and Ireland's war against the invading landlords. Both were fought by good Catholics to drive out the enemies of civilisation from the threatened Christian State, for the securing of the Christian community in its home. Catholic formulas were not much used in the Irish war, for it is not the Irish way to make a parade of principles. But if the salvation of a Catholic community from extermination by invading thieves be not a Catholic cause it is hard to imagine circumstances worthy of that name. The holy intentions of the Irish people
42 TOWARDS THE REPUBLIC.
in the struggle are seen in the self-sacrifice, the risk, the restraint and the courage with which the guerilla war was fought. Guerilla war, like insurrections, and strikes and other appeals to force, is to be resorted to only with the gravest circumspection, because of the temptation that is offered to irresponsible violence. But it stands eternally to the honour of the Irish people, and as evidence of their firm respect for the Moral Law, that in their guerilla war, the enemy garrison was never shot at save in the *' way of business." There was no disorderly violence, no act of personal revenge. In any other country, the police and other spies who gave Irish citizens into the hands of the enemy garrison would have fallen victims to the vengeance of the bereaved.
The industrial movement, as has been pointed out, is the town phase of the same holy war as the struggle for the land. It is thus, in its essence, a cause in accord with the principles of Justice and Right. But it is not, like the land war, a fight against individuals. The employers are not in the position of the landlords. The artisan dismissed from employment can, theoreti- cally at least, secure employment elsewhere. He is not like the land tenant who, deprived of his holding, was torn from the very roots of his existence as an Irish citizen. The industrial quarrel is with a foreign system imposed on the Irish people and their country, by which self-realisation of the nation is rendered impossible, and the control of Irish wealth invested in anti-Irish powers. With an object in view, then, the achievement of which will be a victory for Christendom, and firm in the resolve to achieve it by moral means, the Irish democracy resents with bitterness attacks made upon its purposes in the name of ethical theory.
To develop this we must start another chapter.
CHAPTER V.
THE WOEKBRS' EEPUBLIC : IRELAND, RUSSIA, AND GEBMANY — WHO NEXT?
. . . Of the great European political edifice there shall not rest a stone upon a stone. For the seat of Liberty shall be changed. . . . Sow ye then the love of the Fatherland and the spirit of sacrifice, and be certain that there shall spring therefrom a fair and great Republic.
— THE BOOK OF THE POLISH PILGRIMS.
IT is an excellent thing that workers should be exhorted to moderation, charitableness and equity. It is also desirable that the rich should be reminded of their duties to their employees. But to wait for reform until Christian charity shall govern the acts of the rich classes, would be to act on the principle of " Live, horse, and you'll get grass." Lectures on moral duties addressed to a tiger would be a poor means of defence ; and not much is to be hoped for from appeals to the moral sense of a class which owes its position to immoral operations. So far from Labour — which is the body of the nation — having " no right to interfere with the rights " (i.e., monopolies and privileges) of the present capitalistic class, the fact is that the nation which gave these people their wealth and power has the right to drive them forever from the positions which they have so hideously abused. The Capitalistic Order has been tried. It has trampled on art and virtue, and has favoured craft and cunning. It has made the basest qualities the most profitable, and has left refinement to languish and genius to beg. Its rich men are the crafty
44 TOWARDS THE REPUBLIC.
honest ability is offered none of its rewards. It was a social experiment and has failed. Society has the right to cast it and its machinery aside.
The individuals of the Capitalistic Order have a right to consideration in the substitution of a new order. But in Ireland this right is very small. The basis of wealth in this country is plunder. The rich classes are largely those who were set up by the con- fiscation of the Irish Nation's goods. In the second phase, wealth has been amassed by the exploitation of the dispossessed people. Where free institutions are lacking, and unemployment is rife, the masses are the easy victims of the adventurer. An unprotected people has been obliged to buy all its goods at prices above " just value," and wealth has been amassed by advantage taken of the plight of the people. Thus, business houses by the score have been raised in Dublin on the foundation of wickedly-underpaid labour, the nation being thus doubly robbed. Thirdly, the iniquity of Irish wealth has been added to by the fact th^t till recent times it has been almost impossible for a Catholic Nationalist to earn a good salary or set up in business without first selling his principles. Unless he saluted a flag which he knew to be piratical and cut himself off from his race, he was ostracised and ruined. It therefore happens that only a small minority of commercial concerns exist in Ireland which have not been founded with stolen capital, or built up on underpaid labour and over-priced goods and bartered principles. Confronted with a bourgeoisie so base in origin, the Gael is not surprised to find that he has to deal with one of the most unscrupulous, unintelligent and cruel of vested classes. No bourgeoisie in Europe is more materialistic than
THE WORKERS' REPUBLIC. 45
the Irish — none voider of public spirit, none more barren of fruits meet for repentance. All remember that historic indictment of the " Masters of Dublin " in " .ZE's " Open Letter in the Great Strike year. He accused them of being uncultivated — proved by their utter ignorance of cultured things. Of being incom- petent— as shown by their dwindling enterprises. Of being bad citizens — none were found to endow their city as is done with pride by the merchants of other lands. Of immorality — they had grown rich amid scenes of bestial poverty unequalled, while doing nothing with their wealth for the victims around them. Of savagery — for they sat in council and decreed that a city should starve ere a Union be recog- nised. Of insolence — for they cast aside the rights recognised in every other state.
It is not the greatest employers who are the worst. There are a few big employers who pay fair wages, like the efficient business men of other lands. But the overwhelming majority, with their semi-efficient concerns, are relentless, narrow- browed, irredeemable exploiters. This is not invective. It is history. Against the nation's resolve to sweep away a system that leaves such a class in the place of power, it is urged that the ideal is impracticable. Capital and Labour, Employers and Employed, will always exist ; the order cannot be changed, says the bour- geoisie's defender. Let us examine this.
In the ancient world slavery was universal : the absolutely normal basis of political institutions. The greatest philosopher of those ages, Aristotle, drew all his political theories from the assumption that slavery (the use of " animated tools ") would always exist, as a natural outcome of human nature. So persistent
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was this conviction, that in the thirteenth century we find the greatest of Catholic philosophers, St. Thomas Aquinas, regretfully following Aristotle in the belief that human chattels would always be bought and sold. Yet Christianity succeeded in abolishing throughout the world this horrible enormity.* Serfdom suc- ceeded slavery on the Continent. (Ireland escaped till the new serfdom of the Penal Code was devised). And so firmly did serfdom hold the masses in Feudal centuries, that all mediaeval Catholic philosophers write in the full conviction that " men " will always be subject to " lords," i.e., tenants with no power to move so long as they live from the estate they are born in, obliged to render armed service in whatever cause their arbitrary master may choose to fight. All the philosophers were as firmly convinced of the permanence of serfdom as Aristotle was of that of slavery. But unforeseen events smashed the whole institution of serfdom in its turn, and the masses secured a further concession of liberty. The worker now had — though circumstances reduced its advan- tages— freedom of contract. He could move where he liked, if employment was available, and had no insuperable barrier to prevent him bettering his position. Wage slavery, indeed, ensued, when the exploitation of the New World and other great reser- voirs of newly-discovered wealth began to near exhaustion. This evil has many of the traits of slavery and of serfdom, but it must be candidly admitted that, except in extreme cases, it is not so terrible as either. The workers' chain has lengthened. Now
* The hideonsness of slavery is scarcely realised by modern readers. In the years of Rome's highest culture, it shocked no one for a hundred slaves to be put to death for the disobedience of one.
THE WORKERS' REPUBLIC. 47
to declare that wage-slavery must remain forever is obviously unphilosophic in view of the explosion of similar gloomy prophecies as to slavery and serfdom — prophecies not made lightly, but by the greatest thinkers of the world. Twice changes have come that the wisest thought impossible. It would be foolish to suppose that a third and feebler bond than the others could not be broken.
We therefore see nothing impossible in the abolition of the Capitalistic Order — least of all in Ireland, where we have the example of a non- capitalistic and suc- cessful state in our history. Nor do we see aught illegitimate in our aim. Capital acquires its power over the destinies of the people, not by the productive labour of the capitalist — no individual could produce half-a-million of wealth by his innate productive energy — but by the impersonal multiplication of figures. When Catholic economics ruled the world, not only did the Canonists demand that goods should be sold at their " just value " instead of their fortuitous market rate — thus preventing all those excessive profits of fortune on which the capitalist to-day relies for his lucky increases of wealth — but they also forbade usury, or interest on money, on the principle that money was not an organic thing like an animal or the soil, to be able of itself to produce. The plain man cannot see why, if usury was immoral in the Middle Ages, a check placed on the power of money to go on multi- plying at the expense of the workers' liberty should be unjust to-day. He even ventures to hold that his war on Capitalism is the modern embodiment of the Canonist's aim. He contends that the doctrines of the " just price " and the injustice of usury, were intended to check exactly the abuses which he now attacks. He finds in the Canonists, allies.
48 TOWARDS THE REPUBLIC.
Finally, the Irish democrat rejects the charge (advanced by the reactionaries from their arsenal of Anti-Socialistic arguments) that the Workers' Republic will abolish that practice of Private Ownership which the famous Social Encyclical of Leo XIII. declared to be necessary to a stable and just order of society. We have already exposed the falsity of the allegation that the Workers' Republic or the Gaelic State would deprive the individual of reasonable enjoyment of the world's good things. But we go farther, and assert that the national ownership of Ireland, and the pro- duction of wealth by co-operative endeavour — these in the sense of the Gaelic State of former times, and hence of the Workers' Republic for to-morrow — will be found in no particular to conflict with the principles of property set forth by the great Papal Letter. Criticising Socialist doctrinaires, Leo XIII. points out that those who till the bare soil, make that which was wild, fruitful ; their labour has been mingled with the land till in the cultivated form they are indistinguish- able. " Is it just that the fruit of a man's own sweat and labour should be possessed and enjoyed by anyone else ? As effects follow their cause, so it is just and right that the results of labour should belong to those who have bestowed their labour." This penetrating criticism is directed against those who would make of all productive workers mere tenants or employees of the state — civil servants with no place of their own. This is not sought by the Gaelic State. The Irish farmer is to hold his land with undisputed tenure, though he shall not own more than he can work, at the expense of landless men. It is not proposed to interfere with his liberty to use the land how he likes — to order him to grow oats or barley ; nor to restrict
THE WORKERS' REPUBLIC. 49
his choice as to the disposal of its fruits. He will adapt his private activities to the prevailing Co- operative Order, not because he will be forced to, like a slave, but because to harmonise with the National ideal will, in the future as in the past, be the most beneficial and attractive course open to the individual. National sovereignty in national wealth will not deprive the individual of that use and control of property that amounts to ownership.
We submit that this offers the farmer all the benefits of property as defined in the Encyclical. But the right to abuse property is to be refused him. No Catholic economist has ever denied that the state has the right to check the disposal of goods within its realm, to prevent anti-social uses, and to safeguard the interests of the community. To take an extreme example: it has always been held that were the farmers to cease tillage and leave the community without food, the state could justly override the farmers' normal right to do what they liked with their land. The necessity of the people overrules all personal rights. Again, so far from private property possessing sovereign rights, the Canonists declare that the relief of poverty is a legal obligation. The possessor of goods may not, in the presence of necessity, deny them to those who need. Should he refuse to relieve the poor, the state may assert control of his possessions. Hitherto, in the interests of capital, which besides engrossing wealth, has engrossed political power, the rights of private property have been one-sidedly emphasised. Sove- reignty has been claimed. The obligations of property have been obscured and the rights of the community ignored. Labour proposes merely to redress the balance — to establish the rights of the community
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as well as the liberty of the individual. The Workers' Republic will not destroy private possessions, but will assert, with the Canonists, their limitations, and the right of the community to control them. Its advocates claim, therefore, to be working for objects quite in accord with what is permissible to a Catholic people ; nay, to be the champions of Catholic Reform.
States and social orders that fall always contribute to their own defeat by lethargy, indifference, stupidity or stubbornness. If the capitalist class in Ireland finds itself suddenly overthrown, it will have but itself to thank. At present it ignores Labour — refuses to suppose Democracy to exist. This is fatal Democracy to-day has in it the same force as the Land Movement or Sinn Fein. If it is ignored, it will suddenly achieve as sweeping and revolutionary a change as those two movements. A mighty surprise is in store for the ostrich- headed bourgeoisie. But if there be wise or conscientious employers in Ireland, they may escape the destruction that threatens their class by compounding with the resurgent nation. Let them cease to seek huge percentages of profit, such as double their capital at a rapid rate, while their workers live from week to week on weeks' earnings, never growing richer for their labour, which is the fertiliser of capital. Let the workers be offered a share in profits bearing an exact ratio to the employers' profits. Let them, too, be partly paid in shares in the enterprise, and given ownership and a voice in direction. So may the employers become organic parts of the Irish Nation as the landlords might have done. Let it be remembered that all constitutions appear more rigid on paper than they work out in real life. Even the Capitalistic Order has allowed co-
THE WORKERS' REPUBLIC. 51
operative enterprises to exist and flourish. So, too, the Workers' Republic will not subdue the nature of humanity and impose an utter uniformity. The prevailing order under Capitalism is anti-social. That order, which creates slums and slave-minds, and pollutes social life, must be replaced by an order more in harmony with prevailing needs. But it is quite con- ceivable that while the main industry of the country will be in the hands of industrial republics, there will be many a case of a big private enterprise under a patriotic and able director. Yet the place which really able business men of the Capitalist Order — and there are exceedingly few of such among the inefficient employers of Ireland — may seek in the Workers' Republic, is that of great entrepreneurs, or enterprise- directors, in which position they will be honoured and well-rewarded servants of the Commonwealth.
The change which is coming to Ireland is coming to all Europe. To defend the Capitalist Order is to seek to keep out the tide with sand. For good or ill, it is going. In Ireland, the change is but a return to the Gaelic State. For the rest of Europe it is a great experiment actuated by the workings of natural impulse. The reason for the difference is obvious to the student of history. In Ireland, the native social order which lived on till the submersion of the nation, and lived even then as an ideal and objective, was an order of immemorial age. It was evolved from the Natural Law in the almost-innocent ages of pastoral and early agricultural life, and being a natural organism, it adapted itself to new conditions — such as the coming of Christianity, of navigation and of organised com- merce— with that easy response to new needs that a natural organism alone can display. The Capitalistic
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Order was imposed on Ireland violently from without, and the submerged nation was even denied the right to practise industry according to Capitalistic rules. The Capitalistic State was ever as foreign to the nation as its chains. But on the Continent, the natural state- organism, so familiar to us in Ireland, is scarcely even a memory. In the distant ages, the so-called Barbarians enjoyed free and natural institutions, finely- devolved Republican manners, like those of the Irish State ; but when these Barbarians swept down on the Roman world and founded the nations of modern Europe, they broke with their native sim- plicity. They attempted a compromise with an alien order. They were unable to control a vast artificial organisation like the Empire (though Charlemagne made an eternally-glorious effort) on the basis of their homeland liberties, and so in those tumultuous con- ditions, Militarism got control, and under the usual militaristic pretence of restoring order, Feudalism was founded. The Roman Empire had been sustained by vast industrial armies of slaves. Feudalism now administered Europe, with the Barbarian democracy, reduced to serfs, in their place. Feudalism, with its lords and barons, yielded to Capitalism, an equally unnatural and in essence Militaristic Order, and the serfs became wage-slaves. The rise of Workers' Republics in Europe is the people's uprise against the unnatural despotism to which they fell victim a thousand years ago. It is the natural liberties and homely laws of the " Barbarian " Republics reasserting them- selves against age-old, artificial tyrannies. Ireland cried to Russia, and Russia to Germany, and Liberty, wakened in Ireland, has begun once more to walk the earth.
CHAPTER VI.
THE WORKERS' REPUBLIC : SOME CATHOLIC AUTHORITIES.
Labour seeks ... to vest in the free Irish Nation all property rights as against the claims of the individual, with the end in view that the individual may be enriched by the Nation, and not by the spoiling of his fellows.
— JAMES CONNOLLY in The Workers' Republic,
April Btlt, 1916.
I.
CO show that the mode of holding property under the Gaelic State was not, and hence that under the Workers' Republic it will not be, in conflict with Catholic Ethics, as reactionaries declare, some quotations exhibiting the views of Catholic authorities on the Rights of Property will be interesting.
The following are the leading principles of the most eminent Catholic writers : —
1. — Absolute community of possession, as theoreti- cally advocated by doctrinaire Socialists, is opposed solely on the grounds that, human nature being frail, this system " would not work." Thus we read : It is by no means right that here on earth fallen humanity should have all things in common, for the world would be turned into a desert, the way to fraud would be opened, and the good would have always the worse and the bad always the better, and the most effective means of destroying all peace would be established, .... Hence, such a community of goods could never benefit the state. — John de Repa, a Franciscan authority.
Even supposing it as a principle of positive law that
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" life must be lived in a state of polity " it does not forth- with follow tJiat " therefore everyone must have separate possessions." For peace could be observed even if all things were in common. Nor even if we presuppose the wickedness of those who live together is it a necessary consequence. Still, a distinction of property is decidedly in accord with a peaceful social life. — Duns Scotus, the eminent Irish Philosopher.
2. — Complete communal ownership, however, is not regarded as morally wrong. Rather it is regarded as desirable were it only feasible. In monasteries, of course, it is actually practised. Thus : Community of goods is not impossible, especially among those who are well disciplined by the virtue of philanthropy — that is, the common love of all ; for love, of its own nature, is generous. — Albert the Great, the father of thirteenth-century Catholic Philosophy.
3. — Division of property is needed by human nature in its present state, and such division draws its validity from the State, and not directly from Xature. Thus : Each field considered in itself cannot be looked upon as naturally belonging to one rather than to another. . . . Distinction of property is not inculcated by Nature. . . . The common claim upon things is traceable to the Natural Law, not because the Natural Law dictates that all things should be held in common, and nothing as belonging to any individual person, but because, according to the Natural Law, there is no distinction of possessions. Distinction of possessions comes by human convention. — St. Thomas Aquinas, the greatest of Catholic Philosophers.
4. — It being the State which gives individuals authority to possess individually this or that field, this or that section of the world's wealth, the State
THE WORKERS' REPUBLIC. 55
holds the right, for the public good, to re-adjust the property held by individuals. Thus : Just as the division of property at the beginning of historic time was made by the authority of the State, it is evident that the same authority is equally competent to reverse its decision, and return to its earlier social organisation. — • St. Antonino.
5. — Apart from the authority of the State " to arrange everything for the best advantage of the citizens " [St. Thomas], ownership has in its very nature limita- tions. Thus : The limitations of the right of Ownership arise partly from the nature-of the goods committed to our dominion, and partly from our own nature, which is that of a rational and social being, (a) We must not disregard the design of Providence concerning each thing. To destroy a thing out of mere caprice, with no purpose in view for oneself or for others is certainly to disregard its end. ... (6) The moral law forbids us to use our possessions for purely selfish motives. Man is a social being, and must behave as such. . . . // he possesses a superfluity, he will share with those who are in want of the bare necessities of life. — Cardinal Mercier's " MANUAL or SCHOLASTIC PHILOSOPHY." Vol. II., p. 281.
A man ought not to hold exterior things as his own, but as common to all, that he may portion them out readily to others in time of need. . . In urgent necessity a man may succour his need by taking the property of another, either openly or secretly, and this is not, properly speaking, theft. . . . A rich man does not act unlaw- fully if, making use of a possession which in the beginning was common, he also shares it with others ; it is sinful for him to withhold the use of it from others. — St. Thomas Aquinas.
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6.— Summing up the social theory of the Catholic Ages, a modern Catholic writer says : They held . that private property . . . was entirely lawful ; that it was even necessary on account of certain evil con- ditions which otherwise would prevail ; that the State, however, had the right . . . for a just cause to transfer private property from one to another ; that it could, when the needs of its citizens so demanded . . . re-establish its earlier form of common ownership. — Bede Jarrett, O.P., M.A., in " MEDIEVAL SOCIALISM." (Chapter on " The Schoolmen")
7. — Pointing out that " many sound reformers " go under the name of Socialists, the standard English Catholic Manual of Political Economy offers a test by which a social theory hostile to Catholic tradition may be detected : As a practical test . . . perhaps the best is a man's affection or aversion towards owners and holders of property. If ... he desires to create, increase or strengthen a class of peasantry or yeomanry [terms of different value in Ireland and England — we in Ireland would substitute the term small-holders], his Socialism is but nominal and innoxious ; whereas hostility to small ownership is a sign that his Socialism is to be labelled real and dan- gerous.— C. S. Devas, " POLITICAL ECONOMY." [Stony- hurst Series.]
We submit that orthodox Catholic opinion, as sum- marised in these quotations, shows the aims of Irish- democracy to be both legitimate and laudable.
II.
In the days when the Catholic Faith reigned unchal- lenged in Europe, the authorities laid down three important economic principles as the basis of social
THE WORKERS' REPUBLIC. 57
justice. Let us see them defined, and then ask whether the Capitalist Order or the constitution of the Workers' Republic comes the nearer to Catholic economic ideals.
1. — The " JUST PRICE." — The Canonists laid it down that goods must be sold, not at the price deter- mined by the need or resources of the buyer, but at the price fixed by their actual worth. Thus, if I buy ten shillings' worth of raw material, and expend on it two hours of labour and something from my reserve of skill, I could sell the finished article, allowing for a reasonable profit above my expenditure in material, labour and skill, for, say, something between fifteen shillings and £1. This would be the just price! Now, suppose there are many artisans capable of the same work, and that only a small demand exists for their goods. A purchaser would not be allowed to trade on the hunger of one to buy his article below the " just price," i.e., at cut prices that lower labour's remuneration. On the other hand, if I should be the sole producer, and a buyer, urgently needing my article, should be willing to pay me £2 or £3 for it in his urgency, I would not be permitted thus to charge above the " just price."
It is obvious that this. principle of the Just Price, if enforced, would completely cripple the Capitalistic Order, for it would end the possibility of competing on cheap labour, or taking advantage of human need to secure inflated profits and unworked-for dividends.
2. — The ILLEGALITY OF USURY. — The Canonists would not allow interest to be charged on money. Should I lend my small savings to a needy person, I could legitimately charge him a small sum to com- pensate me for the inconvenience that I may suffer. But this charge is not interest. The Capitalist who
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writes a cheque for £50,000 suffers no more incon- venience by the act than if it were a postal order for ten shillings. If the cheque is transferred from his bank to mine, his name disappears for the time from the Directors' Reports of some mine at the back of the Andes Mountains, but he is not deprived of a single legitimate object of enjoyment. His capacity for consuming objects of enjoyment is limited, and reaches saturation long before his bank account runs into five figures. After that, increases in his banking account do not mean any increase in his legitimate happiness ; they merely gratify his love of power over labour — a pleasure not necessary to the con- summation of human happiness. It costs the rich ]v;cin no more inconvenience to lend £100 than it would cost me to lend 100 shillings. If I charge 5s. for my inconvenience, the rich man has no right to charge more than 5s. too, despite the largeness of his loan. For him to charge more would be to seek profit out of dead gold instead of out of his own labour and paius.
We see, then, that the old Catholic prohibition of interest on money did not restrict reasonable borrowing, but it prevented men from making figures work for them. It prevented the invisible accumulation of wealth. Capitalism clearly could not rise so long as this principle of the Catholic Ages ruled ; nor could Capitalism survive if the principle were restored.
3. — The DUTY OF ALMSGIVING. — In the Catholic Ages, the relief of the poor was not a mere counsel. It was laid down as a duty. The State was not yet highly-enough organised on the Continent for State supervision of wealth distribution to prevail. More- over, wealth was itself in but a rudimentary stage, society being as yet not very complex. Poor people
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were easily recognised as such, and it was not neces- sary for relief to be more elaborate than the distribution of bread and clothes. There was no Congested District problem, no Blind Alley Employment difficulty. Yet the Canonists declared that the rich had no right to consume their wealth selfishly. Their duty towards their neighbour — their duty of sharing out their own possessions if necessary— was asserted to be an actual obligation.
Thus we see that the Canonists utterly denied that right of sovereignty over Property claimed by Capitalism to-daj^ and taught that the individual's possessions were never so inviolable that the com- munity had no right over or claim upon them in certain circumstances. It cannot be doubted that the complex needs of the poor to-day present exactly those circumstances which, in the Canonists' doctrine, gave the community the right to draw from the riches of the wealthy.
We submit (i.) that the Capitalist Order as we know it could never have arisen if Catholic economic teaching had not been departed from, and (ii.) that the Workers' Republic is the only constitution among the many for which men are working which is in harmony with the principles of the Catholic Ages.
CHAPTER VII. AWAY WITH PARLIAMENTS.
" That Parliament is a lie, an imposture, an outrage — a game in which our part and lot is disgrace and defeat forever ; to Ireland it is nothing besides a conduit of corruption, a workshop of coercion, a storehouse of starva- tion, a machinery of cheating, and a perpetual memento of slavery."
— JOHN MITCHEL on Westminster.
0 long as grass grows or water runs, National Ireland will never again be seen begging at West- minster, fighting the battle on ground chosen by the enemy. How the Gael was betrayed into wasting half-a-century playing with a useless weapon need not be discussed. It is not alone that Ireland is awake to the tactical blunder which she committed in the period of Anglicisation ; it is not alone that re- a wakened national dignity recoils from a policy that involves in its very adoption the renunciation of the prime national claim and the recognition of a foreign authority, the taking of a perjuring oath ; but that Ireland has turned from Parliamentarianism with an eager resolve to follow a definite and inde- feasible plan of campaign.
In many of the attacks made by the bourgeois press on the policy of Abstention, the objection is advanced, either through ignorance of Sinn Fein propaganda, or through unscrupulous misrepresenta- tion, that Abstention is a policy of Inactivity on the one hand, or futile bloodshed on the other. Sinn Fein is asked — in order to secure the support of " moderate
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men " (i.e., the Anglicised bourgeoisie) — to turn from its councils all men of advanced views.
The allegation of Inactivity is as unjust to Absten- tionists as that of irresponsible revolution. It is wrong to suggest that when candidates are returned for Irish seats, pledged to abstain from Westminster, they must henceforth twiddle their fingers when they are not using gun and pike. The representatives of the Irish Nation, duly elected, will, both by the natural law and the first principles of democracy, be the de jure National Authority. A National Authority, with a loyal nation behind it, will have far more constructive work ready to its hands than any forsworn party could in a foreign parliament, where Irish business is considered only once in a long period, and then with six foreign representatives ready to vote down every one Irish member. No, the nation has not exhausted its ammunition now that the votes are cast at the polls. The real effort now begins.
Self-reliance will now be supplemented by self- help. A hundred activities, authorised and co- ordinated by the national leaders, will be launched. Just as the farmers, by co-operation, have taken rural reconstruction into their hands, so Ireland will take up the task of National reconstruction, instead of waiting for legislation to that end by a body indifferent, when not hostile, to the object in view. The early Manifestoes of Sinn Fein set forth a complete pro- gramme of reconstruction, which a nation drowsed by Anglicisation then ignored, but which the Ireland of 1919 will enter on with determination. The nation realises now that to get a child taught Irish instead of English, to buy an Irish suit instead of a foreign.
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to get an artisan family to eat home-produced food instead of American canned chemicals and English biscuits, to set up a young man in a productive and promising business, to plant a tree in the wild or reclaim a rood of waste land, to train Irish actors and playwrights, or to enrich an Irish fisherman with effective equipment and offer him an inland market for his catches, is to cut through a strand in Ireland's bonds. Every chapter of O'Growney learnt, every penny saved from foreign manufactures, is a brick built into the edifice of a Free Gaelic Nation. Practical endeavour in all these matters, and in greater issues, though it is in many small victories that the most effective progress will be made, is now to be organised. English power in Ireland will be killed by denial to it of sustenance.
In the great national boycott of the English language, English manufactures, English institutions, Labour will play a large — perhaps the largest — part. Labour has practical work before it no less than Sinn Fein. Neither is a mere agitation or a theory turned into a party. Sinn Fein is the nation's expression of its identity and right to Self-Determination, and its mandate does not authorise it to declare for any specific programme save in so far as that programme proves to be the out-working of the Self-Determining Nation. Once in history Capital stood for liberty. In the Polish war against Russia a hundred odd years ago, the capitalists — Jewish bankers — of Poland cast in their lot with the weaker side. Were the wonder to be repeated, and were Irish capitalists to stand in with the nation, Sinn Fein would accept their aid. But Irish patriotism has proved .to be solely resident in the democracy, and Labour is the only party which
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has waived its private aims for the National cause. In the Labour movement, harmonising as it does with reviving Gaelicism, we see the nation determining itself. Sinn Fein, that asks all citizens to work for Ireland in their individual ways, is by its principles and nature bound to sanction the patriotic endeavours of the Labour Party, and to use the weapons which a truly- national body places in its hands. By sheer force of patriotism, the Labour Party is engrossing political power, and by forming — let us not say the workers but, what is synonymous, the nation — into " One Big Union," it is forging the most powerful weapon ever held by the Gael. Before the united action of the One Big Union, English capitalism, and with it, English political power, are to be rendered impotent. The one-day anti-conscription strike showed how a nation, wakened by Labour to a sense of its economic solidarity, even though deprived of political power, can assert its will.
Just as Sinn Fein has its practical programme, so Labour has means of direct action. The farmers by co-operative action have found a means to trade at a '' just price," and rid themselves of the exploitation of a gombeen- middleman. Labour has it in its power analogously to escape the exploitation of bad employers. Doing away with exorbitant dividends, high payments to non-productive middlemen, and economically-absurd huge expenditure on advertise- ment (for the public at present has to pay not only for its soup and the packing, but for wildly-expensive booming, so that the newspapers levy a tax on every workman's meal), it will be possible for workers' industries to undersell the capitalist, with the One Big Union like a great National Trades Union, to
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protect them against retaliation by subsidised selling below cost price. The One Big Union will control more than half the buying-power of Ireland, and no tactics of capital will then divert that buying-power from native and democratic enterprises.
In view of the passing of political power into Labour's hands, it might be considered regrettable that the elected authority in Ireland should have "no specific representatives of the Labour Party in its composition. On the other hand, it is well to remem- ber that in speaking of the Irish Authority we are not considering a Parliament, or even a Parliamentary institution. For the Parliamentary institutions of the British culture, Ireland has not, as an Irish speaker would say, a " dog's respect." During the war, their inefficiency as democratic organs was amply exposed. All the civil rights upon which Englishmen prided themselves were suppressed — only " for the period of the war," indeed ; but at what period did the indi- vidual need them more ? Representation was com- pletely overruled by a self-appointed clique of three or four men, and the boasted Parliament existed only to vote for and ratify their decisions when told to. The common man was robbed of conscience — forced to give his life far overseas in causes that he knew nothing about, and for secret treaties in the provisions of which he had no interest. He was told at first that Tsarist Russia was fighting beside old England for democracy — Russia that had been a by- word for bloody brutality up to six months before the war. The only class in England to raise the voice of principle and conscience — the C.O.'s — were condemned to actual torture, and Parliament was mute. Ireland has no use for the corrupt, inefficient and decivilising institution called
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Parliament, and if her national agitation has been, during a century, shaped as a claim for a " national parliament," this is merely because the suppressed Anglo-Irish Parliament offered a convenient symbol and catch-cry. Had Irish Nationality been recog- nised by the setting-up of a Parliament in Ireland, the native genius would have " re-shaped it nearer to the heart's desire."
The fault which is obvious in parliamentary institu- tions is, that Parliament arrogates powers that it cannot possibly exercise. It seeks to become the Nation-in-little. It attempts to administer labour, economics, international affairs, education, farming and sugar distribution. It is a " Jack-of-all-trades and master of none." To attempt to handle all the matters which Parliament takes in hands is like trying to add ten yards to seven ounces and divide them by four and threepence. Seeking to deal with contra- dictories, Parliament cannot but fall victim to the Party System, and so to corruption. It promises every industry and interest representation at the seat of power, and behind this camouflage of freedom it hands true power to a non- responsible cabal. The man who wants Protection for his industry has to vote for the Unionist Party, which is opposed to (say) Welsh Disestablishment, which he happens to favour, though he is less eager for it than for Protection ; and thus his vote goes to strengthen in minor matters things he hates. It is obviously absurd that an economic theory and a sectarian problem should be cast for with the one vote, and decided by the one body of men, instead of by separate expert institutions.
Ireland has a different conception of the right way to conduct a state. Mr. Figgis, in the books already
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quoted, has shown how the Gaelic state devolved the direction of the nation's many interests into the hands of those concerned therewith, and has shown how the Irish constitution of the future may restore this prin- ciple. The governing body of the state will not attempt the expert handling of the agricultural industry, as is done in Parliaments, where men who never saw a spade have a vote on Agricultural Bills, and must either blunder or else blindly vote as they are asked to by others who are seeking private ends. The Irish State will make the agricultural industry, the educa- tional profession, and all other great agencies of public service, self-directing (and thus free them from being the sport of parties), just as in ancient Ireland the Bardic Order had its own directorate, and just as in all ages in Ireland the Church has enjoyed autonomy. " Just as in the old State, each council held authority in its own concerns" writes Mr. Figgis, the philosopher of Gaelicism, " LEAVING TO THE MONARCH THE CO- ORDINATION OF THE WHOLE, so the modern councils would each rule their own affairs, subject to the control of the assembly of the Nation. There would thus be two kinds of represen'ation gathered together. There would be the direct representation of the Nation, and there would be the representation of the special interests, the union and pattern of which create the national life. Both would meet in the Government" *
With that strange though predictable instinct which characterises the evolution of modern Ireland, the present political movement has begun to shape exactly on these lines. The wise, the brave and the good are being invested with national authority, but there is no effort being made to override specific
* The Gaelic State in the Past and Future.
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movements by the inexpert. The Labour Party, the Gaelic League and other institutions that are not less national than Sinn Fein itself (that are vital, too, to the nation's welfare), are being called into council by the nascent national authority, but no attempt is made to appropriate their powers, usurp their government, or dictate their measures. The liberalism and wide tolerance that made the Gaelic State of old so attractive to the stranger, so secure in the affections of its citizens, are thus reappearing in the beginnings of the Workers' Republic.
Ireland has turned her back forever on the English Parliament, and now realises that not only is that concern unauthorised to control so much as a hen- run in Ireland, but that her late absorption with it inhibited her from practical work that might have saved half her emigrants. And her experience of that Parliament has doubled the intensity of her resolve to have no institution modelled upon it. She is determined to shape her constitution in the only way in which a Government can secure health and equity — by adhering in all details to the dictates of nature and tradition.
CHAPTER VIII. ON THINKING IMPERIALLY.
Imperii dignitas non in vocabuli voce ted in gloriosae pietatis culmine consistit.
— LEWIS II., Holy Roman Emperor.
IF Ireland secures Self-Determination from the Peace Conference, there can be no doubt as to the outcome. Her people will vote themselves free forever from the Empire that was built on the ruins of her freedom. But it may be that the Allies and America will rule that the oldest and most illus- trious of European nations is not entitled to the privileges being offered to the little peoples who, up to the last months of the war, fought loyally on Prussia's side. In this case the struggle will be lengthened, though the outcome will be the same. The policy of restoring the Gaelic State by fighting the battle in Ireland and on the social plane, instead of at West- minster and on the political field, will go on. Against the Competent Military Authority will be set up the Competent Moral Authority. Sooner or later, for her own sake, England will offer us terms. What terms shall we accept ?
There were times in the past when we were prepared to accept the Dual Monarchy. It is true that though in theory there was a King of Ireland and a King of England who happened to be the same individual, the arrangement was always one-sided. The King was always an Englishman — rarely by blood, indeed, for the present Royal Family is German, but always in manners and ideals — and never displayed one shred
ON THINKING IMPERIALLY. 69
more of interest in Ireland than your insular Briton is capable of feeling for any country but his own. Ireland's sensibilities were always ignored and out- raged. Only the other day the British Royal Family insulted every Catholic in the world by contemptuously casting off the grand old Catholic name of Guelph — so redolent of Church history — in favour of the shoddy title of " Windsor." Never was the English King a man with whom an Irishman could pass a dozen sentences. Think of any of the English monarchs (save the Stuarts, whom the English murdered and exiled) and you cannot select one whom you would, as a man, invite to tea. What could you think of as a topic of common interest for conversation ? Their mentalities were as the Poles asunder from an Irish- man's. They were, indeed, odd " fathers of their people."
Yet we would accept the Dual Monarchy in former days because kings have one use — that of offering a serviceable camouflage for political arrangements. It is so the English ever use their crowned heads. If it pleased the English that their King should be King of Ireland, if they would on that condition withdraw their imposed force, we were not prepared to surrender practical control of our country for the luxury of refusing the Briton the pleasure of putting a harp upon his coins. The " gold link of the crown " might itself be snapt, while invisible bonds in the form of capitalistic domination remained, and we know well to-day that the English tongue is stronger far to hold us in subjection than any political or economic institu- tion ever invented. It would be foolish, indeed, to cavil about a crown when more real things were neglected.
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To-day we demand the severing of all links because we know England's methods better. We know that crown or any other link will be used by England to advance Anglicisation. We know that while she has any trace of authority here, she will use it to recover in the future anything that she may yield in the present. The only concessions that we are prepared to make are those that a free state may make by free treaty with another. Now that England has " destroyed the last stronghold of Militarism in Europe " and " made the world safe for democracy," she need have no fear of us even as an independent country. She has no rival with whom we may intrigue (though in any case we could have no motive for doing so), and we are willing to give her reasonable assurances that we will never, with our four millions, make a surprise attack upon and subjugate her forty. Our resolve to accept no less than the freedom thrust upon the Jugo-Slavs is not a little strengthened by the Ally statesman's reminder that " autumn leaves are falling." It would be foolish to yield a compromise to the Devil when St. Michael had him by the tail.
Our attitude to the English Empire is analogous to our attitude towards the English Crown. In our struggle against the Union we were prepared to accept, after Repeal, the status held by the Ascendancy Parliament, which was one of theoretic sovereignty within the economic circle of that capitalistic institution called the Empire. We philosophically accepted the Empire's existence, even as we accepted the existence of Original Sin. Our position was that of the Gauls and other subjected races within the unshakable Roman Empire. Their presence within the universal order was no indignity, and without shame they could
ON THINKING IMPERIALLY. 71
seek the most advantageous terms for themselves. Others besides ourselves were condemned to live beneath the gaudy emblem of the Union Jack — the Republican Afrikanders, the democracy behind Cardinal Mannix, the brave and cultured French-Canadians, our kinsmen of Scotland — whose national sense is now re- a wakening — and the mighty population of India, custodian of one of the fairest and noblest cultures which ever beautified the earth. Combination between these fellow-victims might ultimately lead to the overthrow of the cockney hegemony and release a group of free peoples to enter the United States of Civilisation.
The Englishman makes it impossible for the Irish- man or any other lover of culture and freedom to accept the English Empire save under constraint. That Empire is based on the principle of the survival of the vulgarest. Of all the races which inhabit its territories the English is the most backward in culture and morals. And yet the English claim the right to impose their inferior institutions and their inferior *language on all the gracious and refined peoples who fall beneath their sway. The magnificent and charac- teristic Mogul architecture of India is left to fall into ruin, and colourless jerry-built imitations of White- hall (that artistic horror) are set up in India to remind the native that he, like the Irishman, " is not supposed to exist." The natural modesty of decent native peoples is outraged by the moral-less living of the English civil servants and military garrisons which
* English is admittedly inferior to Irish in music, expressiveness, versatility and grammar, or educational value. As a spoken language, it is certainly inferior to the French of Quebec. Those qualified to judge declare Bengali to be as flexible and subtle a tongue as either Irish or French. All these ;three tongues are threatened by that of Horatio Bottomley.
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claim to represent " Christianity and civilisation." Wherever they are not too numerous, the coloured peoples — like the splendid race of the Maoris and the decent folk of Australia, Africa and Canada — are exterminated. The English Empire is the only one which has ruled by extermination.
No people are less fitted than the English for authority. They make excellent servants. The Sam Wellers and Mark Tapleys are quite lovable folk. But as in Austria (according to Lecky) so in England, the affability and long-suffering ass-like patience of the " lower classes " has enabled the whole direction of the State to be appropriated by a militarist caste or governing race, and the entire upper classes and higher bourgeoisie of England inherit and practise the tradition of the ascendant Normans. The domineering and intolerant spirit of official England renders the English the worst rulers in the world. The English nation is so thoroughly drilled, personality and free thought are so completely quenched, that every untruthful formula sent out by the ruling classes is implicitly believed. All England is convinced that " Catholic countries are backward," " Freedom exists under the Union Jack," " English rule is as good as self-rule," " The Irish are lazy and quarrelsome," " All races are inferior to ourselves," " Nothing foreign is worth attention," " The Kaiser caused the war," " England was not prepared," etc., etc. It is thus natural that the English nation inflicts itself on all its victims, and never " supposes them to exist." The Englishman is incapable of respecting native culture, as did the Germans when they built their colonial buildings in harmony with native archi- tectural styles ; or of endearing himself to " inferior
ON THINKING IMPERIALLY. 73
black races," as did the French in Northern Africa where black and white mingled like human brethren ; or again, of respecting native literature as did even Russia in the hour of her greatest tyranny, for Mickiewicz, the Polish Davis, was feted by the Russian literary circles when he " deported " from his own country.
Decent Englishmen always speak sheepishly and apologetically for their Empire, as if for a " poor relation." No English writer of cultural status can be found to say a word for it. There is no English Imperial literature, no idealistic Imperial utterance like Virgil's exhortation to Rome :
Tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento ; Hae tibi erunt artes : pacisque imponere morem, Parcere subjectis, et debellare superbos. The Englishman would be satisfied, indeed, by the admonition, " Remember, Briton, that it is yours to boss the world " (to venture a free adaptation of the first line), but he would gape when the poet proceeded : " These be thine arts : establish the ways of peace, spare the lowly and bring the mighty down." For the English Empire has spread not peace, but blood- shed. Every acre has been won by violence and retained by cruelty. The lowly have not been " spared," but annihilated, and England has never attacked the mighty, though when they were her competitors she formed Leagues of Nations to attack them for her. And what binds this Empire together ? Force, and the imposed English tongue. During the Great War blood was shed in almost every constituent territory, from Ireland to Canada and Ceylon and South Africa, and only the defeat of conscription by Cardinal Mannix prevented blood from flowing in
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Australia, too. No other Empire — not even the Russian — was rebelled against through its length and breadth by outraged discontents. Mr. John Dillon asks for Ireland " her place among the self-governing nations of the Empire." It is a lurid comment on the illiberality of English rule that, except England, there is not a single self-governing nation within the. Empire. For only the English colonies are allowed autonomy ; wherever nationality lifts its head, as in Lower Canada, India or Ireland, the smallest vestige of freedom is withheld. In the Englishman's Empire there is no room for any but Englishmen — other peoples, for him, " do not exist." Ireland might compromise with the Empire if the Englishman would recognise nationality within it, as Austria recognised Hungary, and Germany Bavaria. But the English- man's non-possumus attitude towards our nationality renders rapprochement impossible. Ireland has learnt from sad experience that John Bull is incapable of an honest contract. To enter his Empire is to enter the spider's parlour.
Seedy in origin, the English Empire is disreputable in its objects. No great dream of civilising the world inspires it, as the Roman, and it has crushed many fair civilisations in its march. No moral idea,* no creed, no vision directs its development. It has no achievements — the world's culture and welfare are not advanced one iota by its existence. One might accept or tolerate it, but no man of education and principle could ever feel one heart's beat of pride in it. It can boast nothing but power. It is as shoddy and vulgar as the garish Union Jack, its symbol. As we meditate and seek a reason for so useless an institution, we discover that one object alone founded this Empire,
ON THINKING IMPERIALLY. 75
preserved it, and directed its policy and expansion — that of amassing wealth for the ruling English caste. To-day the Empire is solely a great capitalistic enter- prise for the exploitation of subject peoples and their lands. The native peoples of India and Burma and the Indies are made to labour for a minute wage — labour is almost a negligible part of the cost of pro- duction, thanks to this godless exploitation of the ignorant — for day-long hours, extorting from their own soil its wealth in rubber and tea, and these fruits of their land and labour enrich idlers in London with fortunes running to millions. To protect these Quaker investors in their dishonest undertakings, the whole bloody machinery of armies of occupation is main- tained, and the school-books are filled with propaganda inventions regarding benefits conferred by English rule upon its happy victims. This is called the " White Man's Burden." The extortion of millions from the Irish farmers for their own land was similarly repre- sented as a liberal act. The English Empire is a business proposition. But it could no more inspire noble emotions than could a Meat Trust.
A leading " Empire-builder," who rose from nowhere on a fortune made by manufacturing screws, cried to the English people " to think Imperially." If he were taken at his word the English Empire would fall asunder, for the meanness of English Imperialism would be thrown into relief by the true Imperial idea. By thinking Imperially the Irish people may shame West Britain in its proudest haunts. When Ireland remembers the Imperialism of Charlemagne and the Ottos, the Imperialism of the Holy Roman Empire, the Gael will have a boast that will expose the nouveau- riche vulgarity of English Imperialism as the true
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diamond exposes the falsity of paste. When, in 801 A.D., Charlemagne, crowned by Pope Leo in Rome, began to federate all Christendom into a mighty Catholic Empire, the Irish High-King sent him gifts of free accord, and in later years, though the Holy Roman Empire never exerted military or political power in Ireland, the Irish Brehon jurists proudly wrote of Ireland as a constituent part of the Empire. " When the King of Eire is ivithout opposition, he does homage to the King of the Romans [i.e., the Catholic Emperor] " they wrote, and in commentary, added that the King might pay that homage to the successor of Patrick as the Emperor to the Pope.* Observe that here the jurists of free Ireland in her prime had the conception of Christendom as a federated state of states on the model of the Gaelic State itself. So that nearly 1,000 years ago, the theory of a League of Nations was embodied in Irish law.
It must be remembered that Charlemagne's Empire left to every constituent race or nation its own laws and sovereignty. Militarily it embraced Central Europe, but nations beyond its military marches, west and east, gave adhesion to this splendid con- ception of a great Christian state of states. This vision is the true Imperialism. Only by the solidarity of the human race being established can its parts enjoy health and liberty. Divide the world from one empire into wholly independent empires and states, and each will seek to strengthen itself by the subjection of foreign man-power to oppose its competitors. A single empire or super-state alone can prevent the continual outbreaks of violence that come from the swingings of the balance of power. England, with * See Bryce, Holy Roman Empire, note to Chapter XII.
ON THINKING IMPERIALLY. 77
its anti-Catholic separatism, split the unity of Christen- dom, and consequently the existence of the English Empire has been the source of all great wars in modern history down to the last. But for the dominant position arrogated by England, the German peoples,who so long had lived as peaceful little states, would never have been tempted to organise as a military machine. Friedrich List's National System of Political Economy, written in the early days of the German uprise, shows how resentment provoked by English economic monopolies was the chief stimulus of the German imperial movement. Thus Continental militarism is ever the reaction of English militarism. From her island, England ever menaces Europe with her capital- istic and naval power, and every nation whose fortunes rise, sees itself condemned to a struggle with that ruthless outsider. While one power perpetually bears the naked sword in hand, the peaceful evolution of Europe as a commonwealth of little nations is impossible.
To restore the solidarity of humanity is the pro- fessed object of President Wilson's League of Nations. It remains to be seen how far the President's high declarations will be adhered to by other Allied diplo- mats, but the most sanguine could hardly hope that English policy will effect so amazing a change of front as to agree to the practical application even of the Fourteen Points — except to Germany. A hundred years ago, when the flag of democracy and the hopes of Ireland went down at Waterloo, the victorious Powers, at the Congress of Vienna, carved up Europe to their liking. England forsook Poland, and Poland vanished from the map. Holland and Belgium were unnaturally coalesced. Sweden -was given Norway.
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Prussia was given half Saxony. Austria got the richest part of Italy. Then three European Powers formed a League of Nations called the "Holy Alliance" and ruled the Continent with the most edifying professions anent the maintenance of religion, justice and order, until in course of time all the patching of the Congress was torn apart by successive bloody struggles. There is no evidence at present that the coming League of Nations will not be a mere revival of the Holy Alliance — a League of Victors seeking to safe- guard their gains under the name of " making the world safe for democracy," etc., changing the formula of the Holy Alliance to one more likely to impose on present-day minds. The admission or otherwise of Republican Ireland to the Peace Conference will be a luminous evidence as to whether this is another Congress of Vienna. The falsity of the Holy Alliance's claims was obvious in the fact that the Alliance was based on suppressed nationalities. The new League of Nations will be as evil as the old if it is built on the same foundation. No League of Nations can restore human solidarity unless it is a League of All Nations, each nationality having equal voting powers, as each is an equal " moral person " — Burma having an equal vote with Britain, and Czecho-Slovakia (or Ireland) with France. A big nation has no more right to more votes than a little nation than a big man has to more votes than a little man. Unless the Peace Conference and subsequently the League of Nations are framed on the plan of equal recognition and equal rights for all nationalities, we shall know that the victors are seeking to subject the world to their capitalistic mastery, as the Congress of Vienna and the Holy Alliance sought to subject it to their
ON THINKING IMPERIALLY. 79
reactionary and obsolete monarchies. We shall know that the League of Nations exists to preserve the mighty from being cast down from their seat, and those of low degree from being exalted.
There is hope for Europe to-day that was absent when the helpless and blind masses were re-enslaved after the Napoleonic Wars; for to-day, although the victor league has no effective military enemj'" left, as happened, too, when Napoleon was beaten, it also happens that there are new forces abroad that promise trouble to capitalistic schemes of world-subjection. There is Bolshevism (born in Ireland) and Nationality. Large sections of the most advanced populations are forming themselves into Republics. Most of these new states are Catholic, and hence may be expected to display a social virility and a sense of moral issues that we seek in vain in the After-Christian communities. Republicanism, when free from the disproportionate centralisation of France, is congenial to Catholicity, as is to be clearly seen from the Reformation con- troversies, when the Protestant Kings' claims to divine right (re-asserted to-day in the English doctrine of state- absolutism) were controverted by the great Jesuits by the enunciation of the law that rulers hold authority only by delegation from the people in whom the power to revoke it resides. In the new Republics we may see hope for the revival of Charlemagne's ideal of a federate community of free peoples. Catho- licity may yet prove the force by which democracy will establish itself in independence of Capitalism and military might.
The dissolution of the Empires into free Republics, and the subsequent restoration of humanity's solidarity will find its chief enemy, as civilisation and peace
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have always found it, in English pseudo-Imperialism. It may be Ireland's part to lead in the assault which moral force must make upon the strongholds of violence and exploitation. In the conscription crisis, she proved that a people strong in faith could command resources of power that are stronger than any arms. If the near future sees an attempt to establish Allied Capitalism on the ruins of German Militarism, it may be Ireland's destiny to call together the freedom- lovers of the world. Her insistence on recognition at the Peace Conference may blast the moral pretence on which Capitalism is relying, and so may Ireland " teach the world the might of moral beauty."
The rights of Small Nations are not in a just order to be protected by strong powers any more than to be trampled on by them. The rights of the Small Nations are to own the earth, as it is the workers' right to own the wealth of the nation. The strong powers are but groups of suppressed little peoples overruled by castes, and they have no place in civilisation until they are dissolved into their proper elements. The little nations are not to be " protected " ; they are to rule. Theirs, as the Polish national poet prophesied, is the heritage of the future. It may be international Labour will bring them together, or it may be Catholicity. But as surely as Capitalism is passing, having failed to serve civilisation, so surely must pseudo-Imperialism pass, and the Holy Roman Empire come again as a League of Little Nations.
Let us, then, think Imperially !
CHAPTER IX.
CHURCH AND STATE. I. — ORANGE AND GREEN.
— Yet start not, Irish- born man,
If you're to Ireland true, We heed not race, nor creed, nor clan,
We've hearts and hands for you.
— DAVIS.
DANIEL O'CONNELL, styled "the Liberator," was no more responsible for Catholic Emanci- pation than he was for the " big wind " remem- bered by the old age pensioners. The Premier who saw Emancipation placed on the Statute Book declared that it was passed to prevent insurrection — in other words, for fear of the people, not fear of O'ConnelPs tongue. Yet, apart from Irish agitation, it is obvious that the Penal Code could no more persist than could stage-coaches. O'Connell, however, thrust himself into the course of events with that torrential invective that he had learnt from the tradition of the Anglicised Ascendancy Parliament. The sweet charity and liber- ality of the Gael were trampled under his feet, and when the struggle was over, and Irish Catholics had been granted a market for their souls in Dublin Castle, a new situation was seen to have arisen — the situation which brought about the Ulster Problem.
It was found that Protestant patriotism had been alienated — frightened by O'Connell's pugnacious " Faith-and-Fatherland " bombast. He had identified
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nationality with a religious movement, and the proud Republican faith of Wolfe Tone, that had knit Catholic and Protestant and Presbyterian together and terrified England with the dread of a United Ireland, was now rejected by the " uncrowned King of Ireland."* It would be foolish to excuse Protestant Ireland for its recusancy. It changed its political allegiance in thirty years. It played the coward. But all observers of political hie know that it is bad statesmanship to ignore prejudices and fears and the impressionability of the common man. Disastrous consequences like the creation of the Ulster Problem can be brought about in quite healthy communities when reckless and unprincipled men gain control.
O'Connell blunderingly undid that unifying of Ireland which made such great progress in the latter hah* of the eighteenth century. The heroics of the Protestant Parliament and the Volunteers had been taken quite seriously by the democracy, however Grattan and Flood may have " kept their tongues in their cheeks " as they posed and strutted. The infallible economic advantages of Irish independence were making themselves evident. The Ascendancy Parliament's measures, feeble as they were, had been used by a vigorous population to the full, and both agriculture and industry were making remarkable progress. f The United Irishmen, founded by Protes- tants of the mettle of Wolfe Tone, and seeking to combine with the Catholic agrarian bodies, began to
* O'Connell, who turned out in 1803 to hunt croppies, like a Sir John Maxwell, also attacked in his speeches the men of '98. O'Connell has a statue in Dublin. The '98 men have not.
t For proofs of the economic progress of Ireland under the Ascendancy Parliament, see Mr. Geo. O'Brien's Economic History of Ireland in the Eighteenth Century, where the opinion of Connolly, that the progress owed nothing to the Parliament, is examined.
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fuse the various elements of the nation into a conscious and determined unity. Be it noted that it was not the Parliamentarians of the da}^ with their hostility to Catholic Emancipation and democratic measures, but the 'Republicans, with their " Rights-of-Man " principles; who sought to abolish unnatural distinctions and coalesce the nation. Yet the comrades of Wolfe Tone nourished no mere colonial patriotism. The Irish tongue then lived with undiminished vigour, and there was a rich Irish life that made Ireland as obviously foreign to an English visitor as France. The atmosphere generated by Gaelicism was what made of the Republicans, patriots. In short, Ireland was still Gaelic, and her nationality was exerting all its old powers of assimilation.
O'Connell, as we have said, changed all this. He was one of that chain of Benthamite politicians who, in the early nineteenth century, throughout Europe, were striving by the methods of compromise to check the revolutionary spirit in the interest of the bour- geoisie. O'Connell attacked the democratic principles of the United Irishmen, fought against trades unionism, and, most disastrous of all, bade the Irish people abandon their language, i.e., their culture, nationality, and powers of absorption. Thus he struck down democracy and Gaelicism, the two forces which alone could make a united and free Ireland. Of the true Catholic (i.e., " universal ") spirit, which alwa37s characterised the unanglicised Gael, he had nothing. True Catholicity (with a big or little " c ") abhors sectionalism and clannishness, and wins by an easy tolerance that attracts where militancy would only provoke opposition. But O'Connell's rough and unnecessary militancy gave a welcome excuse to
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England's agencies of propaganda. He had repre- sented Catholicity as a sort of tribal religion, and his enmity to democracy gave colour to the cartoon which showed Catholics as reactionaries and bigots. Thus his influence was all against that Republicanism the growth of which was Ireland 's hope.
Our prospect of re-awakening Protestant patriotism lies in advanced democracy and Gaelicism. By com- promise Ireland has always lost. Whenever she has lowered the flag one inch, she has been called on to lower it a yard. When Ireland has been completely Irish, and has spoken out for the clear principles of Wolfe Tone, the instincts of liberty have been awakened in the good men of all creeds, and the beauty of the Gaelic ideal has won their hearts. But when Irish- men, like the Redmonds and Dillons, have made shifty promises and poses, their unmanly attitude has moved the contempt of those they sought to wheedle. Nothing is to be gained by winning over the time-servers, as the Dillons have learnt, for when won, they cannot be relied on. The uncompromising self-respect which wins the honour of the good, alone is of profit. Hence, Ireland to-day does not pause to truckle with the Protestant bourgeoisie, to argue with the uncivilisable Mahaffys and intolerant Bernards. She relies on her own brave stand for Liberty to stir up whatever there is of old-time independence in Protestant Ireland, and already there are stirrings in the heart of Belfast of that city's Republican tradition, forever sanctified by the martyr- dom of Henry Joy McCracken.
The Gaelic movement alone has made more converts to nationality in Protestant Ireland in a year than all the life-long beggings of John Redmond. Every
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year more and more children of the North are won by the charm of resurgent Irish culture, and so recovered for Ireland. Gaelicism runs in the instincts of the Protestant democracy, and love of Ireland wakens wherever ignorance and bigotry and greed are put aside. The sharp-clipped, classic, sinewy Ulster Irish (the Irish of Bedell's Bible) slips easily on to the Ulster tongue ; the Ulsterman recognises in Gaelic art and manners his own normal environment, and the work of absorption goes on. Mark that all cultured Ulster is being brought under the Gaelic banner. The Ulsterman of refinement looks round him, and sees that there is no living culture in Ireland save the Gaelic, or native, culture, redolent with the odours of his native soil. In consequence, all the spirited and educated of Ulster's youth is growing strangely tolerant of its own country. Unionism sees its most hopeful recruits slipping from its ranks. It has no culture — not an artist nor a poet — of its own ; nothing to hold the imagination or the ideals. Thus the party of Anglicisation in Ulster, like its Dillonite counter- part in the other provinces, has no leaders left save the ignorant, the fanatical, and the venal. It is losing the only classes that could give it a future. For a party cannot live when it has degenerated to a mob.
II. — POLITICS AND RELIGION.
" For our wrestling is not against flesh and blood : but against principalities and powers, against the rulers of the world of this darkness, against the spirits of wickedness in the high places." gT pAUL-
Just as no Protestant whose respect is worth having ever respected an Irish Nationalist who was afraid of his own nationalism ; so, too, no honest
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Protestant was ever offended by an Irish Catholic for being stoutly loyal to his Church, and there is a middle-course between O'Connell's aggressive sec- tarianism and that mistaken liberality which politely ignores the fact that Ireland is a Catholic country. It is partly the fault of seceding Protestants and partly a mere accident of history that " Catholic " and " Irish " are commonly used interchangeably — that Irish speakers in Donegal, who never see a Protestant, save a landlord or a landlord's petted man, or a clergyman who sets his land by conacre to the land-hungry at exorbitant rates, have but one word for the two terms. The essential fact is, that Irish- Ireland has never, in politics, business or social life, imposed a religious test, and has ever been content to see good Protestant folk win to the lead in all these matters. The Irish Catholic takes his Faith with an absolute disregard for controversy. It is a natural and unconscious part of him.
To ignore the part that the Catholic Faith plays in Irish life would be as absurd as to seek to write a story picturing Spanish or Italian life without men- tioning the Church. It would be like trying to paint nature with a paint-box that lacked one of the primary colours. Irish Protestants have to accept the fact that they live in a country where the Catholic religion colours the lives of the people, just as French Protestants have to recognise the same fact ; and that Ireland's history is a history of Catholics' doings, just as German Protestants have to recognise the same regarding German history. The intelligent Protestant can accept the fact that he lives in a mainly non- Protestant country, just as the Evolutionist can accept the fact that he lives where the people are
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mostly unconverted to his doctrine. But what of the place that the Church will take in the future Irish Republic ?
Irish history offers important lessons on the relations of Church and State that could be studied with profit elsewhere, and will certainly not pass unheeded among our own people. The Irish people's fidelity to the Church* is without parallel in the world. Persecution, amounting to almost-successful extermination, failed to overcome the Gael's loyalty to his ancient creed. Bribes failed to tempt him. It is true, of course, that his nationality was being aimed at through his religion, and that, save as an excuse to stab at a race she hated, England was ever indifferent to questions of Faith in international relations. Yet, had the Irish people after the Reformation abandoned their religion with that unmanly surrender to material interest which made the whole English population Protestant, they would have shortened the road to political freedom by three hundred years. For they would have struck away the foundation of English craft, destroyed England's favourite means of dividing to conquer, and secured their land. Thus, Irish religious history is a story of martyr-like sacrifices, of national adhesion to ideals, that must win the admiration of all, and puzzle the materialist philosopher, who professes to see nothing in history but the play of economic forces, and " the map in motion." But there is another aspect of the story to be remembered.
It is this : Catholic Ireland's faithfulness was not merely remarkable in consideration of the persecutions which it resisted. Ireland's triumph was more remark-
*" The Catholic Irish People's fidelity " would be, perhaps, a more accurate lawyer's phrase.
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able in view of the temptations which assailed the Catholic community from within. The Gael detests political religion, and his history demonstrates that his attitude in this respect is right for the whole world. For can it be doubted that had the Irish people identi- fied Church and State, as was done in England, Ireland would have been as easily Protestantised ? Had the Irish people confused, as others have done, the conduct of political churchmen and of church-meddling poli- ticians with the realities of religion, they would have been far more strongly tempted by the attitude towards them of Catholics than by the menaces of Protestants. Terrible as was the Penal Code, the injury which it inflicted on Ireland was less than the injuries which she sustained from Catholic hands, and indeed, as we have seen, it was itself but the final stage in a consistent policy of extermination first planned by Bloody Mary, England's great Catholic queen. From the days when the invader of Ireland secured a Papal Bull to camouflage his scoundrelly excursion, when again an English King secured the excommunication from Rome of the de jure and de facto King of Ireland, Bruce, down to our own days when " old English Catholic families " (that owe their eminence to wealth plundered from their own Church) continue to intrigue for the spiritual thunders of Rome to be lent to atheistical English parties in their perse- cutions of the Irish Nation, just so long the bitterest and most dangerous enemies of Ireland have always been English Catholics.
Newman, the one great and true Catholic reared by England (though he was of foreign blood) since the far days of St. Anselm, himself marvelled at Ireland's indifference to the treatment she received from political
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Catholics. " It is remarkable " wrote that saintly scholar and gentle lover of Ireland, " that the Holy See, to whose initiative the union of the two countries is historically traceable, is in no respect made chargeable by the Irish people with the evils that have resulted to them from it . it does, we say, require some
explanation how an oracle so high and irrefragable should have given its religious sanction to a union apparently so unblessed, and which at the end of seven centuries is as devoid of moral basis or of effective accom- plishment, as it was at the commencement . . . Adrian IV., indeed, the first Pope who countenanced the invasion of Henry II., was an Englishman ; but not on his Butt did Henry rely for the justification of his proceedings. He did not publish it in Ireland till he received a confirmatory brief from Alexander III. Nor was Alexander the only Pope who distinctly recog- nised it ; John XXII., a hundred and sixty years afterwards, refers to it in his brief addressed to Edward II. Such have been the dealings of the Holy See in times past \n Ireland ; yet it has not thereby roused against itself any resentful feelings in the minds of its natives."* Political religion is like that intellectual devil so often quoted by Edgar Allan Poe — the devil that toiled through piles of learned tomes to demolish one soul, " while any common devil could have ruined thousands.'1'' It is one of the most significant facts of history that while Ireland, in its struggle for freedom to develop its old Christian civilisation, nay, in its struggle for very existence, has had to fight against
* Unfinished essay on The Northmen and Normans in England and Ireland. Newman goes on to argue that the Irish people's Catholic loyalty is due to their attributing English persecution to Protestantism, i.e., that they would have accepted English supremacy had England remained Catholic. This is a mistake due to ignorance of Irish history.
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Catholic politicians, England, on the contrary, has been constantly pampered by the same people.
England was never more than superficially Catholic. From the foundation of the Norman monarchy down to the actual Reformation, her history is one of enmity to Catholic ideals. It was her separatism, in Catholic days, that prevented the cementing of Europe into a Christian Commonwealth. Her monarchy was anti- Catholic from the start. King William appropriated two-thirds of the money collected from the people for the Pope. The second William kept vacant bishoprics open and pocketed their revenues. It was he, too, who refused to allow St. Anselm [Archbishop of Canterbury] to enter communion with Pope Urban. There was then a rival claimant for the Holy See, and the King held that no one could acknowledge any Pope till he himself should have decided who was the rightful claimant. That the King's queer notion of spiritual authority was not peculiar to himself is seen by the fact that- when a council of the English bishops was called on the matter, they declined to support St. Anselm, being unwilling to conflict with the King, and "they refused to give any advice at all."* Pre- Reformation English history is full of similar passages. Henry II., John, and Edward III., all fought against Papal authority and tried to gain state control of the Church such as was ultimately achieved when the sixteenth century Jezebel, Queen Elizabeth, was able to unfrock bishops who displeased her. Always, too, the English clergy are seen willing to sacrifice principle and compound with the State, and only the courage of a St. Anselm or a St. Thomas forfends
* A Short History of the Catholic Church in England. Cardinal Gasquet.
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the Reformation. Thus Henry II., who got the Bull to invade Ireland himself, came near to acting Henry VIII .'s part, for his claims to rule the Church in England were only stayed short of a rupture with Rome by the indignation roused by his murder of his stout opponent, St. Thomas a Becket.
Ultimately the rupture came. Henry grasped at spiritual authority and tore the Church in England from Christendom, subjecting it to the State. The clergy of the country meekly acquiesced and trans- ferred their allegiance from Peter to a royal bigamist. The people followed suit. There was, indeed, a rising in the North of England, called the Pilgrimage of Grace, but My Lord of Norfolk, at the head of the King's forces, quickly quenched that. England sur- rendered the Faith with the same unanimous alacrity as that with which Ireland, in the days of Patrick, received it. Despite this discreditable religious record, England has been unceasingly flattered, wheedled and assisted by political Catholics. In her interests, Ireland was betrayed not once, but many times. Our most virtuous leaders were attacked with spiritual weapons. Irish clerical students on the Continent in Penal days were seduced from their nation and educated in English ideas, and it is not wholly without excuse (as the authority of Newman shows) that Connolly wrote of Catholic policy, that it ever treated Ireland in accordance with a " scheme which looks upon Catholic Ireland simply as a tool for the spiritual re-conquest of England to Catholicity."
The policy which sacrificed Ireland in the hope of pacifying England was doomed to failure from the start. The irreligious governing class in England grew only the more arrogant when slave-Catholics worked
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its will. Meanwhile, one of the wickedest falsehoods ever imposed on Ireland by foreign propaganda gained currency in the home country. As the Irish race was rooted from the soil and scattered through the world, slave-Catholics in Ireland sought consolation in the theory that " the dispersal of the Irish people would spread the Catholic religion," and with this excuse they weakened their resistance to the tyranny that was destroying the Christian State in its faithfullest stronghold. So far from the dispersion spreading Catholicity, an appalling percentage of the scattered race was lost forever to the Church. England is full of O's and Mac's who not only have forsaken Catholicity, but lack even a half-faith like Protestantism to bind them to morality. The fantastical creeds of America are headed by Sullivans and O'Donnells. Owing to the dispersion, probably one-third or more of the Irish-named population of the world is ranked among the neo-pagan hosts. That is what political religion has achieved.
It has been unscrupulously argued, too, by slave- Catholics, that the loss of the Irish tongue has recruited the English-speaking world with a Catholic population. The truth is that the adoption of English in Ireland (for which no section is more responsible than the Churchmen, who allowed Irish devotions to cease, and brought the English tongue into the hearts of the people by its use in the Churches) has not enriched the English-speaking world by one great Catholic of influence who might not have equally come from a Gaelic Ireland. But, instead, the use of English has thrust the vilest influences of the modern world into the sanctuaries of Irish home life. Not only is the English tongue materialistic in its very vocabulary,
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but the English-written Press is vicious in both its editorial and advertisement matter, and goes with its demoralising influence into every Irish house every day.
Compare the sweet lives and speech of the people of the Gadtacht with the life of Anglicised counties, and you may see how disastrous has been the work of those who betrayed the sacred and God-inspired cause of Nationality because of a plausible formula. Let it be remembered that it was when Ireland was Gaelic-speaking from shore to shore that all she reared of genius, learning or virtue cast itself in impassioned energy into the work of Christianising Europe. How different were the legions of Gaelic scholars who poured over France, Germany and the Balkans, preaching and 'prevailing, from the dispirited, half-educated, broken- tongued exiles who were driven overseas in latter years to nurse a hatred and to sink in misery and often shame. When Ireland is a free state, the citizens of the Republic who fare into other lands will go with a culture and a self-respect to sustain them, and will command attention by their bearing and their country's fame. Instead of shrinking from the Englishman's scorn, and concealing their religion with their nationality, they will speak boldly of both. Then, too, the missionary spirit will glow again in our colleges ; and having studied the needed tongues, the children of the Gael will go forth into India and China and Arabia, winning hearers as sons of a race that has never made religion a pretext for plunder, a race that has no stain on its standard, where the whiskey-and- Bible-bearing Briton, using religion as a pretext to advance his capitalistic Empire, has made the name of Christianity one to be mocked at. A distinguished
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Italian visitor to Ireland* comments on " the curious fact that the language revival is accompanied by an intensification of missionary zeal, a re-awakening of that ardour for winning converts to the Faith, for which Ireland is renowned in history." Describing an Oireachtas pageant, the same writer says : " Foreigner though I was, I had a vague sense that something notable for civilisation and Catholicism was maturing in the soul of this Irish race."
Ireland's history, in contrast to England's, demon- strates forever the ineffectiveness of the State as an influence to promote true religion. The Irish people have been preserved from the corruption and anarchy of doctrine into which England fell, through the vitally democratic nature of their Faith. The People are the Church. Their creed is not a decree from a caste that they sullenly obey, but a unanimous conviction. How different is the Irish religious attitude from the English may be realised by trying to imagine what sort of response the Irish clergy would have received in the sixteenth century if they, like the English clergy, had apostatised and asked their people to adhere to a newly-contrived code of doctrine. Had bishops and priests gone to their flocks, saying : " The things we have taught so long are now to be disbelieved. The Mass is idolatry. The Sacraments are superstitious. King Harry is head of the Church. Yees can all believe and act as yees like," — what answer would they have received from Gaelic clans- man and farmer, and craftsmen and bard ? The same that rebelly Brian-of-the-Raniparts O'Rourke, as he went to the scaffold, made to the apostate
* Impressions of Ireland. By Very Rev. Prof. Buonaiuti, D.D., Ph.D., Rome.
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Archbishop of Cashel, who talked to him of repentance : " I think thou art a Franciscan who hast broken thy vows."
The loyalty of the Irish clergy in those tempestuous days doubtless owed not a little to the fact that they were children of a democracy that had so well- diffused and so appreciative a Faith. Do not our religious even to-day speak of the inspiration they derive from the devotions of the dwellers in cabins and slums ? " I learn more from these people than I teach them," said the great Father Sheehan of his simple country parishioners. The unexuberant atmosphere of the Penal Laws is still upon us, and Irish Catholicity has little of the pomp and architecture and incense- burning that, on the Continent, appear to the Briton to be Catholicity's essence. We have no sensational conversions or controversies. Yet Catholic philosophy as well as Catholic Faith flourish on Irish soil, and without any profusion of advertisement, Irish scholars have brought Scholasticism to a new life. The shrewd instinct of a conscientious and unaffected people guides Irish democracy aright where others, who are ever debating formulas, would be in s withers. When threatened with conscription by an alien authority, the Irish People, cTaitkeasc aoin-bheoil, declared their intention to resist it. They were denounced by English theorists with mixed formulas about the duty of the subject to de facto governments. Then the Hierarchy confirmed the masses in their resolve, pro- nouncing the invalidity of an "oppressive and inhuman law." Were the Irish people wrong the day before, and right the day after, the bishops' declaration ? No, their deep Catholic instinct guided them unerringly. But no spectacle in Ireland's history was ever more
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inspiring than that of the bishops and people of Ireland sitting in common council, and seeking in supernatural sources fortitude for a conscientious struggle which, either by arms or passive resistance, seemed certain to involve more terrible suffering than would submis- sion to the principle of foreign sovereignty. The Maynooth Conference recalled that other at which Columcille pleaded with the temporal leaders of the nation.
In the Conscription Conference we may see the norm of future relations between Church and State in Ireland. Only when the sense of national unity stirred the Irish race in the very depths of its emotions could so magnificent, a demonstration of spiritual unity be brought about. The world was shown a great people " pledging themselves to one another " in a common cause sanctified by a profound common ideal. As Gaelicism brings the nation into ever closer communion, the nation will ever more frequently recoil upon its primary sources. We look to see, in the future, the State taking counsel of the Church. We shall never see it subordinated to churchmen. We shall not tempt our clergy, as they have been tempted in other lands. There will be none of that confusion of the temporal and spiritual that works evil to both. Yet the Gaelic constitution, planned on the principle that independent and self-conducting bodies shall come into free consultation on all national issues, as was done in the Conscription Conference, will prevent that disastrous alienation of the Church's brains from the State which in other countries has proved the alternative to political religion. In England and elsewhere, when political churches have been over- thrown, the State has forthwith become a wholly
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non-moral institution, and has rejected the assistance of statesmanlike minds among the clergy for pretended fear of " clericalism." The Gaelic State will seek the aid of the wise and shrewd without fear, because the free councils of the Republic will in their nature be as free of the party spirit as was the Conference at Maynooth that defeated Conscription.
It follows from that courteous recognition of each other's independence that Church and State will allow complete freedom to their constituent members in matters of both faith and citizenship. On the one hand, the State will in its constitution be unable to intrude the smallest interference into the affairs of the self-governing Church— or Churches. It will have no concern with the religious consciences of its people. On the other hand, the Church will respect the privi- leges of the State — will deny the State the services as citizens of none of its members — and will exert the more powerful influence in the councils of the nation, because that influence will be wielded (as ever in Ireland) through consultation and not coercive means.
CHAPTER X. THE MORAL NECESSITY OF SEPARATION.
Biaidh a gcreideamh gan mhilleadh gan traochadh, Biaidh an Eaglais ag teagasg a dtr£ada, Braithre, easbuig, sagairt, 's cl£irchibh, — 'S biaidh sfth go deoidh 'na dheoidh ag Birinn.
— AN SlOGAIDHE ROMHANACH [1650.]
IRISHMEN of all creeds can agree upon this fact, that the more complete a separation is effected between Ireland and England, the better it will be for the moral welfare of this country. It could hardly be seriously denied that England is the most irreligious country in the world. In backward parts of the country the universal materialism is concealed by a disguise of odd superstitions, like the wearing of black clothes on Sundays. There are many places in England where to be miserable on Sundays is a law as rigidly observed as a savage's equally- reasonless taboo. A superstitious dread forbids the touching of a piano's keys or the playing of a healthy game on that day, but there is no restriction on the reading of the notorious Sunday Press or of the still viler stories of the leading English novelists. Novelists in England to-day who are read by hundreds of thousands, and whose services are used to drill public opinion, owe their eminence to the propagation of vice, and one of the four leading magazines of England owes its circula- tion to the lurid description of things unmentionable in Ireland. During the hysterical period of the war,
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old respectabilities have been torn aside, and the English Press has admitted without shame the animal conditions which prevail through the length and breadth of Britain. Vices like those of Pagan Rome in the hour of her fall have been justified with emotional excuses, and sentimentally flaunted, and the last shreds of the moral law have been gaily thrown to the wind. Yet it is not the coarseness and animalism that now are admitted to permeate English life from the ruling classes down to the humblest conscript that are the sole, or even the chief, menace to Ireland in the English connection.
We may rely on the virility and refinement of an undegenerate people to safeguard Ireland from the grosser traits of England, but the materialism which pervades English culture is a real danger. English manners hypnotise all who come within their range of influence. The honest Irishman who goes to West- minster is, save he be of the rare irreconcilable mettle of Parnell, overcome with the constant supercilious parade of English might. In a place where scholars and statesmen and literati and pressmen are unanimous in the agreed fictions of English propaganda, he begins to distrust himself and his simple mentors in Ireland. In a very short time, England has enslaved his mind. He sees the world through English eyes. Irish Nationality becomes unreal to him. Catholicity and its ideals seem foreign and remote. His standards are overthrown. Useless creatures, like Nelson and Clive, who passed through history with no achievement but some conquest for capitalist masters, become greater in his vision than the builders of civilisation or the Saints of the Church. Ultimately, like Mr. Dillon, he babbles of pride in the Empire that has been his
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nation's bane. The cosmopolitan spirit of the Nationalist is replaced with the cramped selfishness of the Jingo.
English literature is as hypnotising as Westminster. It carries the insular faults of English culture into the bosom of Irish homes and schools. The constant reiteration, directly and by suggestion, of materialist conceptions, which marks both classic and modern English literature, insensibly and subtly influences the mind nourished on that literature towards a base opinion of human motives and a despairing outlook upon human hopes. In another place it may be possible to examine English literature home, but the observation will now suffice that it is a disgrace to Catholic Ireland that Catholic schools can be found to accept their programmes from a body that hates all the traditions of the nation — programmes in which the basis of literary teaching is the writings of materialists and jingoes. If we are to have a race true to its past, gracious and idealistic, the English literature on which our education is based, and with it the periodical and book productions of the modern English Press, must be interdicted— and then replaced by the literature of Ireland and Christendom.
It may be said that literature has a full right to treat of the whole range of human experience, and that moral or idealistic issues should not be introduced in a merely literary question. This is true. But education is not a merely literary question. The writers which we place before youth are selected, not solely in respect of their style or their fame, but also writh an eye to those qualities of subject-matter which refine and inspire the young mind, and extol those whom we would fain have youth admire. England,
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to rear an Imperial race, educates her youth on Macaulay, so that they shall learn to admire the character of a Warren Hastings, of whom Macaulay wrote : " He was an unscrupulous, perhaps an unprin- cipled statesman ; but still he was a statesman, and not a freebooter " — a distinction without a difference. It is surely deplorable that this same author should be taught in Irish Catholic schools, instead of Dante and Montalembert and Fenelon, or Ceitinn, O Bruadair and 0 Neachtain. We cannot pretend to have the smallest conception of what a self -deter mining Catholic education should be, when we ignore the proud and pure Gaelic literature of which we should be custodians, and the mighty names of Christendom which should be first in our minds.
If we fail for the present to secure complete separa- tion from Horatio Bottomley's country, we can at least, by the thorough-going revival of Irish, erect an impenetrable wall between us and Bottomley's culture. It is our first duty to civilisation to bring Gaelic litera- ture back into the air of life and scholarship, and to ensure that our students shall draw their first literary inspirations from purely Gaelic sources. It is not less our duty to ourselves. If this course is not fol- lowed, English literature will completely Westminsterise (or demoralise) our coming generations, and the Ireland of Luke Wadding and Brother O'Clery and the Jacobite singers will be lost beyond recovery. The establish- ment of Irish literature as the basis of our culture could be effected, even without free institutions, in a few years. The Sinn Fein principle of self-help, the principle by which the Gaels, in darker days than ours, held fast an untarnished tradition, could effect the salvation of Irish culture with but a small united
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effort. Catholic managers and teachers could refuse, point-blank, to carry out the work of Anglicisation and demoralisation which is delegated to them by the English Government. In the last resource, inde- pendent schools could everywhere be set up — a St. Enda's in every parish. English programmes, beside injecting indiscriminate English literature into our schools, also make Irish history subordinate to English history, and conceal the whole truth about the Conti- nent. These programmes could be rejected, and for the present, Anglo-Irish literature (Mitchel, Ferguson, Mangan) could be taught in their place, with Irish history based on the books of Mrs. Green, Mr. Figgis, James Connolly and D'Arcy McGee, and Continental history based on the works of Ozanam and other representative writers of Christendom.
During the transition period, too, Dante, the world's greatest poet, could be taught through English translations. Good Irish translations of the classics of Christendom would be forthcoming as soon as the demand arose. Meanwhile, teachers would make Irish the medium of ALL teaching. This they would do by introducing it in all their talk with their pupils. In French classes, they would say, not, Translate into French " Where is my hat ? " but Cuir Frainncis ar — " Cd bh-fuil mo bhairead ? " Instead of "dismiss" they would say " scaoilidh" Within a year, pupils having a Junior Grade knowledge of Irish could be brought to the standard of understanding the whole school's discipline and procedure in the national tongue. And as Irish thus became real and pupils thought in the language, the time would come for the complete substitution of Irish for English, and Irish literature would be read with deep understanding
THE NECESSITY OF SEPARATION. 103
and profit. Even to-day, it could be taught to Senior Grade pupils who at present learn Irish without the literature. All this is not mere possibility. It is what MUST be done if the last flickers of Holy Ireland are not to be trodden out under Bottomley's heel, but instead, re-kindled to a new life. In this work the religious will take an important part. Already, Gaelic culture is at its strongest and finest in the convents of Ireland, and we may confidently expect those, who have no peers in patriotism, devotion and enlightenment, to perform so holy and wholesome a task as speedily as qualified workers are available. We may hope, too, that the pulpit, which so tragically assisted the spread of English in Ireland, will power- fully co-operate in the restoration of Irish. The time should not be far when it will be possible for the Gael in every Irish town to attend Irish- conducted devotions, and when the former balance in favour of the English minority will be restored in favour of the increasing Irish minority.
In the restoration of a noble and gracious culture in the place of one falling into corruption, all classes should vie. And wonderful are the hopes that the vision of a re-Gaelicised Ireland awaken. It may even be that the religious reunion of Ireland will thus be hastened and achieved. In the world of the Beurla, the creeds stand apart, filled with suspicions and misunderstandings, the work of English propaganda. In an Anglicised Ireland, no rapprochement may ever be hoped for. The Anglicised Protestant cannot rid himself of the prejudices of Mahaffyism, and the Anglicised Catholic, typified by O'Connell and the Ancient Order of Hibernians, is not an endearing figure. Catholic and Protestant have wandered so far apart
104 TOWARDS THE REPUBLIC.
that they cannot find each other save by going back to where they parted. A thing is found where it is lost. Religious unity was lost in Ireland where Gaelicism was abandoned. Division and sectarian hostility have only existed where the English tongue has triumphed.
The Gael has doubtless his full share of human weaknesses. But the evils of actual decadence he escaped, so long as he was free. These evils — political corruption, jobbery, simony, vice, disbelief, materialism — were never among the faults of which Gaelic Ireland could be accused. They came only with Anglicisation, of which, indeed, they are the fruits. With them came the divisions which always before had been escaped in Ireland. In Gaelic Ireland, Williamite soldiers — alien in race as well as in creed — united with those they settled among. In Anglicised Ireland, Belfast, largely Gaelic in blood, stands aloof with distrust and doubt.
The spiritual union of the Irish people finds its chief obstacles in the Bernards and Greggs and Irwins, with their lesser imitators, who inflame sectarian passion, with blind incitements as though they were the medicine men of a savage tribe. To the senseless, nerve-shattering, uncivilised tom-toms of the fanatical and ignorant drummers, these men, sacrificing truth and charity, add impassioned denunciations that have often led to deeds of blood. The noble faith of Bedell, of Bunyan, of Comenius, which even the most orthodox Catholic must respect, is, and that by educated men to their greater guilt, reduced to a mere catchword for reasonless hatred. Catholicity is not opposed on dogmatic grounds — which would be susceptible of debate — but on the grounds that it is the faith " of
THE NECESSITY OF SEPARATION. 105
the other people," of the other tribe. This sort of Protestantism is purely totemistic. The Bernards and Greggs, with their bloodthirsty appeals during the War for more and more blood (" Smite, and spare not"); their demands for conscription, which they knew would violate the conscience of their peaceful neighbours, and lead to appalling scenes of bloodshed at their doors ; their sneers at Ireland's vital claims as " trivial matters not to be raised in wartime " ; their prating of what England would do for Ireland, if Ireland would do this and that (as though England were divinely appointed in loco parentis) ; their mouthings about " the causes of truth and justice and freedom," amply proved that they stand for unrelenting and unscrupulous enmity to the Irish Nation.
There are Churchmen of high ideals and mild manners, laics of honesty and piety in the Irish Protes- tant Churches. But these churches, as institutions, are political machines, and are not concerned wi|fh anything that is fair or worthy in the Protestant religion. When Bedell, that lovable soul, had an Irish version of the Bible made, the Protestant Primate denounced him, declaring that he remembered nothing " at which the professors of the Gospel did take more offense . . . whereas I wish you had advised with your brethren before you would aventure to pull down that which they have been so long a-building " — meaning the discrediting and destruction of the Irish language.* Thus did the " Church of Ireland " show itself soon after its foundation, to be determined on the extirpation of Irish Nationality. Towards the end of the eighteenth century again, the Protestant Bishop of Cloyne, writing of the small knowledge of English in * HYDE — Literary History of Ireland, page 169.
106 TOWARDS THE REPUBLIC.
the south, said " if it be asked why the clergy do not learn the Irish language, I answer that it should be the object of Government rather to take measures to bring it into entire disuse." At the present day no occasion is lost to oppose Gaelicism in all its forms, and to reiterate the formulas about "the Nation" (i.e., the forcefully-United Kingdom), and " the English-speak- ing world," which are intended to remind the Gael that he does not exist. English jingo festivals are celebrated with services and speeches, and the hanging-out over all church- buildings of the flag which symbolises the subjection of the Irish Nation. Every opportunity is availed of to wound the susceptibilities of the native Irishman, and to remind any Protestant of goodwill who may incline to charity towards the nation, that his inclinations are regarded as treachery to his class. In the name of religion, the Protestant Nationalist is ostracised, outlawed, intimidated.
To despair of the Protestant Churches because they are guided by men so intolerant, so unjust, would be unphilosophic. There was just as much cause to despair of Nationalist Ireland but a few years ago. Irish Nationalism fell into the hands of men as unprin- cipled as the Carsonite medicine-men. Yet the small faithful minority, after patient labour, succeeded in overthrowing the entire Party machine, and bringing health to the national body. There is a minority of men of clear vision and high principle that the Protestant political machine has yet to reckon with. The seed of the Tones and Mitchels has not perished. Gaelicism has given to the Protestant Nationalist a plain and sure objective. The memory of Padraig and Colum has lit within the sullen halls long conse- crated to hatred. The Gaelic tongue has begun to
THE NECESSITY OF SEPARATION. 107
be used in devotions of those " others that are not of this flock, " and the hymns of O'Ddlaigh and Tadhg Gaelach are monthly sung in St. Patrick's Cathedral. As our own Irish Saints, our genii loci, reappear in our memories, as the sweet vocabulary of Irish, with its Diet's Muire and Beannacht an Leinbh comes back to our lips, surely the new Ireland that we discover, so fair, so free from the ugliness of the Beurla world, will be recognised as the familiar mother of us all. In this homely and unmistakable new-old land, shall we not realise our essential brotherhood, and readily drop, with the thoughts and practices of Anglicisation, the prejudices that have sundered us ?
Let us press eagerly along the road before us, then — the Gaelic road — for who knows but that, at the next turn, it may reveal the beauty of the Civitas Dei set among the Irish hills ?
CEANGAL.
have now traced the ideals that animate the Irish-Ireland movement, and the hopes which that movement inspires in its followers. Ireland to-day seems to have a better chance of recovering her freedom than at any time since the Submersion. Should freedom come, the Gaelic ideal will be laboured for as earnestly as freedom has been fought for. We have not had space, so spacious has been our main topic, to discuss the various activities that will leap to life in free Ireland — to speak of how Irish farmers and societies will buy ships forlreland — as the democracy of Norway bought Norway's mighty fleet — and so change Ireland's foreign trade from a 'passive to an active condition, as the economists say ; nor to talk of the beauties that will blossom forth in National art, when Gaelicism inspires our architects to revive Hiberno-Romanesque ; nor yet to set down the charm that National culture will lend to social life. But it must be remembered, that most of the activities that freedom would bring to perfect life can live in some struggling form even in an unfree Ireland. If Ireland has to wait yet another space for what has been accorded to the Czecho-Slovaks, she will not wait to press ahead, with the strength of Self-Reliance, in economic, social, linguistic and artistic activities that an Angli- cised generation neglected. With the Sword of National Boycott, Labour Solidarity, in one hand, and the Trowel of Gaelicism in the other, the Gael
CEANGAL. 109
will labour, even while still menaced by an unfallen English Empire, to build up the walls of the Gaelic State — the Co-operative Commonwealth — the Workers' Republic.
The strength of Ireland is the spirituality of her ideal. Not for material wealth is she striving, but for human liberty and the restoration of a civilisation that enriched the world. Thus, the resurgent forces of the new Republics will befriend her and seek her aid in the reduction of the last strongholds of Capitalism and reactionary might. The liberality, the moral beauty of Gaelic ideals, will in turn win to her the good men who, after all, are really in the majority in estranged people at home. Who could decline to follow a movement that leads to where the Children of Patrick shall know division no more ?
It is not remarkable that Gaelicism counts for so much, that it is a cause summing up all there is of good in Ireland, and linking together so many seemingly unconnected movements. The co-operative work of Mr. George Russell ; the economics, the historical vision, the vast schemes of National reconstruction which lie before us like an architect's plans in the writings of Mr. Arthur Griffith ; the researches of Professor MacNeill ; the language and literary work of An Craoibhin ; the world-changing teaching of Connolly ; the tender love of the Irish Saints and fiery passion of Padraic Mac Piarais — these and many other labours that have called out of the Nation giants for their performance — all work to the same end from their distant beginnings. The reason for this unity is, that a true unit, Irish Nationality, has awakened them. There is really but one cause in the world, the cause of the weak truth against the strong lie. Lenin and
110 TOWARDS THE REPUBLIC.
Trotsky in Russia battling against lies and force ; Labour struggling against its self-appointed tyrants ; the Gaelic tongue striving against the foreign jargon ; Ireland striving against England — all are but phases of the single war that still rages undecided, though certain in its outcome — the warfare of the Christian State against the Gates of Hell.
FOIRCHEANN.
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