Part 4 (1/2)
But why recall all this ”dead history”? For two reasons: first, because it ill.u.s.trates the fundamental wrongness of Unionism; secondly, because it is not dead.
On the first point no better authority can be found than Mr W.A.S.
Hewins, the intellect of Tariff Reform. The differences between England and Ireland, he writes in his introduction to Miss Murray's book, are of ”an organic character.” In that phrase is concentrated the whole biology of Home Rule. Every organism must suffer and perish unless its external circ.u.mstances echo its inner law of development. The sin of the Union was that it imposed on Ireland from without a sort of spiked strait-jacket which could have no effect but to squeeze the blood and breath out of every interest in the country. What was meat to England was poison to Ireland, and even honest Englishmen, hypnotised by the economists of the day, were unable to perceive this plain truth. Let me give another ill.u.s.tration. The capital exploit of Union Economics was, as has been said, its dealing with the land question, but perhaps its most pathetic fallacy was the policy with which it met the Great Famine.
Now the singular thing about this famine is that during it there was no scarcity of food in Ireland; there was only a shortage of potatoes.
”In 1847 alone,” writes Mr Michael Davitt in his ”Fall of Feudalism,” ”food to the value of 44,958,000 sterling was grown in Ireland according to the statistical returns for that year. But a million of people died for want of food all the same.”
The explanation is obvious: the peasants grew potatoes to feed themselves, they raised corn to pay their rents. A temporary suspension of rent-payments and the closing of the ports would have saved the great body of the people. But the logic of Unionism worked on other lines. The government opened the ports, cheapened corn, and made rents harder to pay. At the same time they pa.s.sed a new Coercion Act, and reorganised the police on its present basis to ensure that rents should be paid. To the wisdom of this policy, history is able to call witnesses by the million--unhappily however it has to call them from famine graveyards, and the waste womb of the Atlantic.
This essential wrongness of Unionism, so amply ill.u.s.trated in every year of its working, continues. But at least, our bluff Englishman urges, the dead past can be suffered to bury those crimes and blunders of Unionism which you have enumerated. Let us start with a clean slate.
Now, as will have been gathered from a previous chapter, we recognise in this invitation an accent of soundness. We modern Home Rulers desire above all to be loyal to the century in which we live. We are sick of that caricature which depicts Ireland as the mad heroine of a sort of perpetual suttee, in which all the interests of the present are immolated on the funeral-pyre of the past. But let us come closer to things. How do you clean a slate except by liquidating the debts of which it keeps the record? The late Vicomte de Vogue wrote an admirable novel, ”Les Morts qui Parlent.” The dead are always speaking; you cannot stop their strong eloquence with a mouthful of clay. The ”business man”
thinks no doubt that the Napoleonic War is no more than Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba. But he pays annual tribute to it, for he has to make annual provision for the 600,000,000 which it added to the National Debt. And just as Mr Pitt's foreign policy is in that respect a living reality of our own time, so also, but in a much graver form, are the past depredations and inept.i.tudes of Unionism living realities in the present economy of Ireland.
The ruling fallacy of the English mind on these matters consists in the a.s.sumption that the mere repeal of an old oppression restores a people to the _status quo ante_. In the case of Ireland the old oppressions have not been repealed except in two or three points, but even if they had been wholly cancelled it would be absurd to expect immediate recovery from their effects. If you have been beating a man on the head with a bludgeon for half an hour, and then leave off, there is no sense in saying to him: ”There, I have given over bludgeoning you. Why on earth don't you get up, and skip about like me?” If you have been robbing a man's till for ten years, and then decide--by the way you have not yet decided--to leave off, there is no sense in saying to him: ”Why the devil are you always hard up? Look at me doing the same sort of business as you on absolutely equal terms, and I'm able to keep two motor-cars and six servants.” But that is precisely what is said to us.
You are eternally expecting from Ireland new miracles of renaissance.
But although she does possess recuperative powers, hardly to be paralleled, even she must have time to slough the corruptions of the past. You cannot, as some Englishmen imagine, cancel six centuries before breakfast. Your Penal Laws, for instance, have been long since struck out of the Statute Book, but they have not yet been eliminated from social habitudes or from certain areas of commercial life.
You began to tax Ireland beyond her capacity in 1801, and you are still overtaxing her. In the interval you withdraw from her economic life a tribute of not less than 325,000,000. You broke her industrial tradition, injured her credit, depressed her confidence. You forced upon her a fiscal system devised to suit your needs in utter contempt of hers. To clean that slate you must first, by some measure of rest.i.tution, clean your conscience. And when that has been done you will have to wait for the curative effects of time to undo the Economics of Unionism.
You suffered landlordism to devastate Ireland unchecked. The capital that should have gone to enrich and develop the soil was squeezed out of it in rack-rents, largely absentee. The whole agricultural economy of the country was stricken with a sort of artificial anaemia. Then very late in the day you enact in shreds and fragments a programme of reform proposed half a century before by the leaders of the Irish people.
To-day rural Ireland is convalescent, but it is absurd to rate her if she does not at once manifest all the activities of robust health. It is even more absurd to expect her to glow with grat.i.tude.
You muddled our whole system of transportation; your muddle stands to-day in all its ruinous largeness unamended, and, it may be, beyond amendment. You muddled the Poor Law; and, in the workhouses which you thrust upon us, 8000 children are year by year receiving on their lives the brand of degradation. You marred education, perverting it into a discipline of denationalisation, and that virus has not yet been expelled.
What economic, what intellectual problem in Ireland have you not marred and muddled, England, my England (as the late Mr W.E. Henley used to say)? You have worsened the maledictions of the Bible. The sins of _your_ fathers will lie as a _d.a.m.nosa haereditas_, a d.a.m.nable heritage, upon the mortgaged shoulders of _our_ children. It is better, as Plato taught, to suffer injustice than to inflict it. In the light of that ethical principle you are long since judged and condemned. But with the customary luck of England you are allowed what others were not allowed, the opportunity of penitence and reform. The messengers of the new gospel are at your doors, offering you in return for the plain rudiments of justice not only forgiveness but friends.h.i.+p. It is for you to accept or reject. We, the Irish, whom you have wronged, look to your decision with interest rather than with concern. Why should we be concerned? Our flag has been an Aaron's serpent to swallow yours. Your policies, your ambitions, your administrations have pa.s.sed by us like the transient and embarra.s.sed phantoms that they were. We remain. All the roads lead to Rome, and all the years to retribution. This is your year; you have met the messengers on your threshold. Your soul is in your own wards.h.i.+p. But yet we cannot wholly separate your destiny from ours. Dedicated as we are to the general progress of humanity and to all the generosities of life, we await expectantly your election between the good and the evil side.
CHAPTER VII
THE HALLUCINATION OF ”ULSTER”
Ulster Unionism, in the leaders, is not so much a programme of ideas as a demand for domination. In the rank and file it is largely a phenomenon of hysteria. I do not know whether my readers have ever partic.i.p.ated in an agreeable game known as odd man out. Each player tosses a penny, and whoever disagrees with the rest, showing a head to their tails or vice versa, captures the pool. Such is in all essential particulars the ”Ulster Question.” We find ourselves there in presence of a minority which, on the sole ground that it is a minority, claims that in the government of Ireland it shall be not merely secure but supreme. Sir Edward Carson as odd man out (and I do not deny that he is odd enough for anything) is to be Dictator of Ireland. If eighty-four Irish const.i.tuencies declare for Home Rule, and nineteen against Home Rule, then, according to the mathematics of Unionism, the Noes have it. In their non-Euclidean geometry the part is always greater than the whole.
In their unnatural history the tail always wags the dog. On the plane of politics it is not necessary to press the case against ”Ulster” any farther than that. Even majorities have their rights. If a plurality of nine to two is not sufficient to determine policy and conduct business in a modern nation, then there is no other choice except anarchy, or rather an insane atomism. Not merely every party, but every household and, in last resort, every individual will end as a Provisional Government. Separatism of this type is a very ecstasy of nonsense, and none of my readers will think so cheaply of his own intelligence as to stay to discuss it. It is in other terms that we must handle the problem of ”Ulster.”
The existence in certain nooks and corners of Ireland of a democratic vote hostile to Home Rule is, let us confess, a conundrum. But it is a conundrum of psychology rather than of politics. It may seem rude to say so, but Orangeism consists mainly of a settled hallucination and an annual brainstorm. No one who has not been present at a Twelfth of July procession can realise how completely all its manifestations belong to the life of hysteria and not to that of reason. M. Paul-Dubois, whom we may summon out of a cloud of witnesses, writes of them as ”demagogic orgies with a mixed inspiration of Freemasonry and the Salvation Army.”
The Twelfth of July is, or rather was, for its fine furies are now much abated, a savage carnival comparable only to the corroborees of certain primitive tribes.
”A monster procession,” continues M. Paul-Dubois, ”marches through Belfast, as through every town and village of Orange Ulster, ending up with a vast meeting at which the glories of William of Orange and the reverses of James II. are celebrated in song.... Each 'lodge' sends its delegation to the procession with banners and drums. On the flags are various devices: 'Diamond Heroes,' 'True Blues,' 'No Pope.' The partic.i.p.ants give themselves over to character dances, shouting out their favourite songs: 'The Boyne Water' and 'Croppies Lie Down.' The chief part is played by the drummers, the giants of each 'lodge,' who with bared arms beat their drums with holy fury, their fists running with blood, until the first drum breaks and many more after it, until in the evening they fall half-dead in an excess of frenzy.”
Such is the laboratory in which the mind of Orange Ulster is prepared to face the tasks of the twentieth century. Barbaric music, the ordinary allowance of drum to fife being three to one, ritual dances, King William on his white horse, the Scarlet Woman on her seven hills, a grand parade of dead ideas and irrelevant ghosts called up in wild speeches by clergymen and politicians--such is Orangeism in its full heat of action. Can we, with this key to its intellectual history, be really astonished that Shankhill Road should move all its life in a red mist of superst.i.tion. The North of Ireland abounds in instances, trivial and tragic, of this obsession. Here it is the case of the women of a certain town who, in order to prevent their children from playing in a dangerous swamp close by, have taught them that there are ”wee Popes” in it. There it is a case of man picked up, maimed and all but unconscious after an accident, s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g up his lips to utter one last ”To h.e.l.l with the Pope!” before he dies. I remember listening in Court to the examination of an old Orangeman who had been called as a witness to the peaceable disposition of a friend of his. ”What sort of man,” asked the counsel, ”would you say Jamie Williamson is?” ”A quiet, decent man.” ”Is he the sort of man that would be likely to be breaking windows?” ”No man less likely.” ”Is he the sort of man that you would expect to find at the head of a mob shouting, 'To h.e.l.l with the Pope'?” Witness, with great emphasis: ”No. Certainly not. Jamie was never any ways a _religious_ man.” These bewildering corruptions of sense and sanity overwhelm you at every turn. Ask your neighbour offhand at a dinner in Dublin: ”What is so-and-so, by the way?” He will reply that so-and-so is a doctor, or a government official, or a stockbroker, as it may happen.
Ask him the same question at a dinner in Belfast, and he will automatically tell you that so-and-so is a Protestant or a ”Papist.”
The plain truth is that it would be difficult to find anywhere a more shameful exploitation, intellectual and economic, than that which has been practised on the Ulster Orangeman by his feudal masters. Were I to retort the abuse, with which my own creed is daily bespattered, I should describe him further as the only victim of clerical obscurantism to be found in Ireland. Herded behind the unbridged waters of the Boyne, he has been forced to live in a very Tibet of intellectual isolation.
Whenever he moved in his thoughts a little towards that Ireland to which, for all his separatism, he so inseparably belongs, the ring of blockhouses, called Orange Lodges, was drawn tighter to strangle his wanderings. Mr Robert Lynd in his ”Home Life in Ireland,” a book which ought to have been mentioned earlier in these pages, relates the case of a young man who was refused ordination in the Presbyterian Church because he had permitted himself to doubt whether the Pope was in fact anti-Christ. And he writes with melancholy truth:
”If the Presbyterian clergy had loved Ireland as much as they have hated Rome they could have made Ulster a home of intellectual energy and spiritual buoyancy long ago. They have preferred to keep Ulster dead to fine ideas rather than risk the appearance of a few unsettling ideas among the rest.”
It has not been, one likes to think, a death, consummated and final, but rather an interruption of consciousness from which recovery is possible.
Drugged with a poisonous essence, distilled from history for him by his exploiters, the Orangeman of the people has lived in a world of phantoms. In politics he has never in his whole career spoken for himself. The Catholic peasant comes to articulate, personal speech in Davitt; the national aristocracy in Parnell. The industrial worker discovers within his own camp a mult.i.tude of captains. Even landlordism, although it has produced no leader, has produced many able spokesmen.