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The Open Secret of Ireland by T. M. Kettle

T >> T. M. Kettle >> The Open Secret of Ireland




Then there is education. English public men have been brought up to
assume that in Ireland education must be a battleground inevitably, and
from the first. It would be a mere paradox to say that this question,
which sunders parties the world over as with a sword, will leave opinion
in Ireland inviolately unanimous. But our march to the field of
controversy will be over a non-controversial road. Union policy has left
us a rich inheritance of obvious evils. The position of the primary
teachers is unsatisfactory, that of the secondary teachers is
impossible. When we attempt improvement of both will "Ulster" fight? And
there is something even more human and poignant. The National Schools of
this country are in many cases no better than ramshackle barns. Unless
the teacher and the manager, out of their own pockets, mend the broken
glass, put plaster on the walls, and a fire in the grate, the children
have got to shiver and cough for it. Winter in Ireland, like the King in
constitutional theory, is above politics. When its frosts get at the
noses, and fingers, and sometimes the bare toes, of the children it
leaves them neither green nor orange but simply blue. Then again other
schools, especially in Belfast, are shamefully over-crowded. Classes are
held on the stairs, in the cloak-room, the hall, or the yard. For the
more fortunate, class-rooms are provided with an air-space per
individual only slightly less than that available in the Black Hole of
Calcutta. All over the country, children go to school breakfastless and
stupid with hunger, and the local authorities have no power to feed them
as in England, and in most European countries. Then again, even where
the physical conditions are reasonable, the programme lacks actuality.
It is unpractical, out of touch with the facts of life and locality, a
veritable castle hung absurdly in the air and not based on any solid
foundation. The view still lingers in high places that the business of
education is to break the spirit of a people, to put them down and not
to lift them up. In token of this, the teachers are denied the civil
rights of freemen. Now all these ineptitudes are contrary to the humane
tradition of Ireland. Go they must, but, when an Irish Parliament starts
to remove them, I cannot imagine Captain Craig, with a Union Jack
wrapped around his bosom, straddling like Apollyon across the path. The
Captain has far too much sense, and too much feeling in him.

It will be observed that we are getting on. A nation so busy with
realities will have no time to waste on civil war. _Inter leges arma
silent_. But this is a mere outline sketch of the preliminary task of
the initial sessions of an Irish Parliament. Problems with a far heavier
fist will thunder at its doors, the problems of labour. The democratic
group in Ireland, that group which everywhere holds the commission of
the future, has long since declared that, to it, Home Rule would be a
barren counter-sense unless it meant the redemption of the back streets.
The Titanic conflict between what is called capital and what is called
labour, shaking the pillars of our modern Society, has not passed
Ireland by like the unregarded wind. We can no longer think of ourselves
as insulated from the world, immune from strikes, Socialists, and
Syndicalism. The problems of labour have got to be faced. But will they
be solved by a grapple between the Orange Lodges and the Ancient Order
of Hibernians? It is obvious that under their pressure the old order
must change, yielding place to a new. Every Trade Union has already
bridged the Boyne. Every strike has already torn the Orange Flag and the
Green Flag into two pieces, and stitched them together again after a new
and portentous pattern.

What does it all come to? Simply this, that Ireland under Home Rule will
be most painfully like every other modern country of western
civilisation. Some Unionists think that, if they could only get rid of
the Irish Party, all would be for the best in the best of all possible
worlds. Why then are they not Home Rulers? For Home Rule will most
assuredly get rid of the Irish Party. It will shatter the old political
combinations like a waggon-load of dynamite. New groups will crystallise
about new principles. The future in Ireland belongs to no old fidelity:
it may belong to any new courage.

Assuredly we must not seem to suggest that, in an autonomous Ireland,
public life will be all nougat, velvet, and soft music. There will be
conflicts, and vehement conflicts, for that is the way of the twentieth
century, and they will no doubt centre, for the most part, about
taxation and education. But the political forces of the country will
have moved into totally new formations. One foresees plainly a vertical
section of parties into Agrarian and Urban, a cross section into Labour
and Capitalistic. Each of these economic groupings is indefinitely
criss-crossed by an indefinite number of antagonisms, spiritual and
material. In a situation so complicated it is idle to speculate as to
the conditions of the future. A box of bricks so large, and so
multi-coloured, may be arranged and re-arranged in an infinity of
architectures. The one thing quite certain is that all the arrangements
will be new. In taxation, as I have suggested, a highly conservative
policy will prevail. In education the secularist programme, if advanced
at all, will be overwhelmed by a junction of Catholic and Protestant.
For religion, to the _anima naturaliter Christiana_, of Ireland is not
an argument but an intuition. It seems to us as reasonable to prepare
children for their moral life by excluding religion as to prepare them
for their physical life by removing the most important lobe of their
brains.

The only other prognostication that appears to emerge is the probable
predominance in a Home Rule Ireland of the present Ulster Unionist
party. That group is likely, for many reasons, to retain its solidarity
after ours has been dissipated. Should that prove to be the case,
self-government will put the balance of power on almost all great
conflicts of opinion into the hands of Sir Edward Carson and his
successors. The "minority," adroitly handled, will exploit the majority
almost as effectively after Home Rule as before it. Captain Craig will
dictate terms to us not from the last ditch, but from a far more
agreeable and powerful position, the Treasury Bench. And we undertake
not to grumble, for these are the chances of freedom.




CHAPTER X

AN EPILOGUE ON "LOYALTY"


According to precedent, well-established if not wise, no discussion of
political Ireland must end without some observations on "loyalty." The
passion of the English people for assurances on this point is in curious
contrast with their own record. It is not rhetoric, but crude history,
to say that the title-deeds of English freedom are in great part written
in blood, and that the seal which gave validity to all the capital
documents was the seal of "treason." No other nation in the world has so
clearly recognised and so stoutly insisted that, in the ritual game of
loyalty, the first move is with governments. With that premised, the
difference between the two countries is very simple. England has
developed from within the type of government that her people want. She
expresses satisfaction with the fact. This is loyalty. Ireland, on the
contrary, has had forced on her from without a type of government which
her people emphatically do not want. She expresses dissatisfaction with
the fact. This is disloyalty. Loyalty, in brief, is the bloom on the
face of freedom, just as beauty is the bloom on the face of health.

If we examine the methods by which England attained her very desirable
position we are further enlightened. It is a study admirably adapted to
inculcate liberty, not at all so well adapted to inculcate "loyalty."
The whole burden of English history is that, whenever these two
principles came in conflict, every man in England worth his salt was
disloyal even to the point of war. Whenever the old bottle was
recalcitrant to the new wine of freedom it was ignominiously scrapped. A
long effort has been made to keep Irish history out of our schools in
the interests of "loyalty." But it is English history that ought to be
kept out, for it is full of stuff much more perilous. You teach Irish
children the tale of Runnymede, covering with contempt the king of that
day, and heaping praise on the barons who shook their fists under his
nose. This is dangerous doctrine. It is doubly dangerous seeing that
these children will soon grow up to learn that the Great Charter, which
is held to justify all these tumultuous proceedings, has never even to
our own day been current law in Ireland. You introduce them to the Wars
of the Roses as a model of peaceful, constitutional development; to the
slaying of Edward II., Richard II., and I know not how many more as
object-lessons in the reverence which angry Englishmen accord to an
anointed king when they really dislike him. Later centuries show them
one Stuart beheaded outside his own palace, another dethroned and
banished in favour of a Dutch prince. Of romantic loyalty to the person
of a sovereign they find no trace or hint in the modern period. Lost
causes and setting suns, whatever appeal they may have made to Ireland,
do but rarely fire with their magical glimmer the raw daylight of the
English political mind. As for that more facile, after-dinner
attachment, in which it is charged that we do not join with sufficient
fervour, it seems to us always fulsome, and often mere hyprocrisy. In
the development of English ceremonial, "God Save the King!" gets to the
head of the toast-list only when the king has been thoroughly saved from
all the perils and temptations incidental to the possession of power. So
long as he claims any shred of initiative his English subjects continue
in a perpetual chafe and grumble of disloyalty; as soon as the Crown has
been rasped and sand-papered down to a decorative zero their loyalty
knows no bounds.

The simple and honourable truth is that all through her history England
strove after national freedom, and declined to be quiet until she got
it. There could not be a better statement of the methods which she
employed than Mr Rudyard Kipling's:

"Axe and torch and tumult, steel and gray-goose wing,
Wrung it, inch and ell, and all, slowly from the King."

It is, of course, a pity that the liberty thus established was better
fitted for the home market than for export. But this does not affect the
fact that, at the end of the process, the English people were in the
saddle. But the Irish people are not in the saddle, they are under it.
Indeed, the capital sin of Dublin Castle is that it is a bureaucracy
which has seized upon the estate of the people. In Ireland, under its
_regime_, the nation has had as much to say to its own public policy as
a Durbar-elephant has to say to the future of India. There is just this
difference in favour of the elephant: at least he has riot to pay for
the embroidered palanquins, and the prodding-poles, of his riders. We
are all agreed that loyalty is a duty. It is the duty of every
government to be loyal to the welfare, the nobler traditions, the
deep-rooted ideals, the habit of thought of its people. It is the duty
of every government to be loyal to the idea of duty, and to that austere
justice through which the most ancient heavens abide fresh and strong.
And until these prime duties have been faithfully performed, no
government need expect and none can exact "loyalty" from its subjects.

But it seems that we are compromised on other grounds. The inscription
on the Parnell Memorial is trumpeted about the constituencies with equal
energy by opponents wise and otherwise:

"No man has a right to fix the boundary to the march of a nation.
No man has a right to say to his country, 'Thus far shalt thou go
and no farther.' We have never attempted to fix the _ne plus ultra_
to the progress of Ireland's nationhood, and we never shall."

What the precise matter of offence may be one finds it difficult to
discover. Mr Balfour very properly characterises as the utterance of a
statesman, this passage in which Parnell declines to usurp the throne
and sceptre of Providence. But Mr Smith complains that it deprives Home
Rule of the note of "finality." With the suggestion that Home Rule is
not at all events the end of the world we are, of course, in warm
agreement. But if Mr Smith has entered public affairs in pursuit of
static formulae for dynamic realities, if he wants things fixed and
frozen and final, he has come to the wrong world to gratify such
desires. And even if he were to go to the next, he would have to be very
careful in choosing his destination, for all the theologians tell us
that, in Heaven, personalities continue to grow and develop. In fact, if
anybody wants "finality," I am afraid that we can only recommend him to
go to Hell. As for the world, in which we live, it is a world of flux.
Physicists allow the earth a long road to travel before it tumbles into
dissolution, and seers and prophets of various kinds foretell an equally
long cycle of development for human nature, as we now know it. The fate
of all our present political combinations is doubtful, and no nation has
received absolute guarantees for its future. An All-Europe State with
its capital at London, a Federation of the World with its capital at
Dublin, a Chinese Empire with its capital at Paris--these are all
possibilities. Australia may be annexed by Japan, Canada by the United
States, or vice versa; South Africa may spread northwards until it
absorbs the Continent, or shrink southwards until it expires on the
point of the Cape. The Superman may, as I am informed, appear on the
stage of history at any moment, and make pie of everything. And not one
of these appalling possibilities disturbs Mr Smith in the least. But he
is going to vote against justice for Ireland unless we can promise him
that throughout all the aeons, as yet unvouchsafed, and to the last
syllable of recorded time, her political destiny is going to be in all
details regulated by the Home Rule Bill of 1912. This is not an
intelligent attitude.

Of course the real innuendo is that we in Ireland are burning to levy
war on Great Britain, and would welcome any foreign invasion to that
end. On these two points one is happy to be able to give assurances, or
rather to state intentions. As for foreign invasion, we have had quite
enough of it. It is easier to get invaders in than to get them out
again, and we have not spent seven hundred years in recovering Ireland
for ourselves in order to make a present of it to the Germans, or the
Russians, or the Man in the Moon, or any other foreign power whatever.
The present plan of governing Ireland in opposition to the will of her
people does indeed inevitably make that country the weak spot in the
defences of these islands, for such misgovernment produces discontent,
and discontent is the best ally of the invader. Alter that by Home Rule,
and your cause instantly becomes ours. Give the Irish nation an Irish
State to defend, and the task of an invader becomes very unenviable. As
for levying war on Great Britain, we have no inclination in that
direction. The best thought in Ireland has always preferred civilisation
to war, and we have no wealth to waste on expensive stupidities of any
kind. In addition we are handicapped on sea by the smallness of our
official navy which, so far as I can gather, consists of the
_Granuaile_, a pleasure-boat owned by the Congested Districts Board. In
land operations, we are still more seriously hampered by the
non-existence of our army. And although, in point of population, our
numerical inferiority is so trivial as one to ten, even this slight
disproportion may be regarded by an Irish Parliament as a fact not
unworthy of consideration.

But we must not suffer ourselves to be detained any longer among these
unrealities. A Home Rule government will be loyal to the interests of
its people, and actual circumstances demand, for the behoof of Great
Britain and Ireland alike, an era of peace with honour, and friendship
founded on justice. The magnitude of the commercial relations between
the two countries is inadequately appreciated. Not merely is Great
Britain our best customer, but we are her best customer. The trade of
Great Britain with Ireland is larger than her trade with India, and
nearly twice as large as that with Canada or Australia. And while these
surprising figures are far from indicating the existence of a sound
economic structure in Ireland, none the less, the industrial expansion
that will follow Home Rule may be expected to alter the character rather
than to diminish the value of the goods interchanged. For if the
development of textile, leather, shipbuilding, and other manufactures
lessens the British import under these heads into Ireland, it will
increase that of coal, iron, steel, and machinery. And Ireland, without
trenching on the needs of her home market, is capable of much more
intensive exploitation as a food-exporting country. Economically the two
nations are joined in relations that ought to be relations of mutual
profit, were they not eternally poisoned by political oppression. With
this virus removed, the natural balance of the facts of nature will
spontaneously establish itself between the two countries.

The true desire of all the loud trumpeters of "loyalty" is, as it
appears to me, of a very different order. What they really ask is that
Ireland should begin her career of autonomy with a formal act of
self-humiliation. She may enter the Council of Empire provided that she
enters on her knees, and leaves her history outside the door as a
shameful burden. This is not a demand that can be conceded, or that men
make on men. The open secret of Ireland is that Ireland is a nation. In
days rougher than ours, when a blind and tyrannous England sought to
drown the national faith of Ireland in her own blood as in a sea, there
arose among our fathers men who annulled that design. We cannot
undertake to cancel the names of these men from our calendar. We are no
more ashamed of them than the constitutional England of modern times is
ashamed of her Langtons and De Montforts, her Sidneys and Hampdens. Our
attitude in their regard goes beyond the reach of prose, and no adequate
poetry comes to my mind. The Irish poets have recently been so busy
compiling catalogues of crime, profanity, and mania for the Abbey
Theatre that they have not had time to attend to politics; and in
attempting to suggest the spirit that must inform the settlement between
Ireland and England, if out of it is to spring the authentic flower of
loyalty, I am reluctantly compelled to fall back on a weaker brother,
not of the craft:

Bond, from the toil of hate we may not cease:
Free, we are free to be your friend.
But when you make your banquet, and we come,
Soldier with equal soldier must we sit,
Closing a battle, not forgetting it.
This mate and mother of valiant rebels dead
Must come with all her history or her head.
We keep the past for pride.
Nor war nor peace shall strike our poets dumb:
No rawest squad of all Death's volunteers,
No simplest man who died
To tear your flag down, in the bitter years,
But shall have praise, and three times thrice again,
When, at that table, men shall drink with men.

As political poetry, this may be open to amendment; as poetic politics,
it is sound, decisive, and answerable.




THE END

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