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 IRELAND A NATION
 
 BY THE SAME AUTHOR 
 
 OLD AND NEW MASTERS 
 
 IF THE GERMANS CONQUERED 
 ENGLAND 
 
 THE BOOK OF THIS AND THAT 
 RAMBLES IN IRELAND 
 HOME LIFE IN IRELAND 
 IRISH AND ENGLISH
 
 IRELAND A NATION 
 
 BY 
 
 ROBERT LYND 
 
 " In Paris our statesmen have dealt with racial 
 problems, like that of Ireland, and in every 
 way as difficult as the Irish problem. They 
 may not shrink from applying to Ireland the 
 same medicine that they have applied io Bohemia 
 and many another part of Europe" 
 
 GENERAL SMUTS. 
 
 LONDON 
 
 GRANT RICHARDS LTD. 
 
 ST MARTIN'S STREET 
 
 MDCCCCXIX
 
 JPRINTKD IN GREAT BRITAIN BY THE RIVERSIDE PRESS LIMITED 
 EDINBURGH
 
 TO 
 CLIFFORD SHARP 
 
 MY PEAR SHARP, 
 
 May I dedicate this book to you, even 
 though I feel sure you will disagree with 
 much that it contains? I do so mainly in 
 friendship, but also partly because it seems 
 fitting to address this cold-blooded appeal 
 to reason on behalf of Irish nationality to 
 one who, like yourself, is brilliantly free 
 from all appearance of sentimentality, and 
 audaciously reasonable. 
 
 I am, yours ever, 
 
 ROBERT LYND.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 I. WHY IT IS IMPORTANT TO REALISE THAT 
 
 IRELAND is A NATION .... 9 
 II. THE HISTORICAL THREAD : How IRELAND 
 
 HELPED TO CIVILISE EUROPE . . . 21 
 
 III. THE HISTORICAL THREAD : A NATION 
 
 UNDER ONE KING 28 
 
 IV. THE HISTORICAL THREAD : THE NEW 
 
 IRISH NATION 36 
 
 V. THE HISTORICAL THREAD : THE WORST 
 
 CENTURY OF ALL 46 
 
 VI. SINN FEIN 53 
 
 VII. THE INSURRECTION OF 1916 . . . 62 
 VIII. ULSTER : THE FACTS OF THE CASE. . 76 
 
 IX. THE HESITATING SORT OF LIBERAL AND 
 
 IRISH SELF-DETERMINATION ... 82 
 
 X. ONE MAN'S VIEWS ON DOMINION HOME 
 
 RULE 101 
 
 XL THE IRISH SOLDIER 109 
 
 XII. IRELAND'S RECORD IN THE WAR . . 117 
 XIII. THE SOLDIERS' SACRIFICE . . . .124 
 7
 
 8 CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 XIV. THE ENGLISH IN IRELAND: A SCENE . 131 
 
 XV. ANOTHER SCENE : THE DRUMS OF ULSTER 138 
 
 XVI. THE WITNESS OF THE POETS . . .148 
 
 XVII. A NOTE ON IRISH LITERATURE . . . 157 
 
 XVIII. VOICES OF THE NEW IRELAND : 
 
 (1) P. H. PEARSE AND HIS WRITINGS . 182 
 
 XIX. VOICES OF THE NEW IRELAND : 
 
 (2) MRS J. R. GREEN . . . .190 
 
 XX. VOICES OF THE NEW IRELAND : 
 
 (3) A. E. . 197 
 
 XXI. VOICES OF THE NEW IRELAND : 
 
 (4) T. M. KETTLE 213 
 
 XXII. VOICES OF THE NEW IRELAND : 
 
 (5) DORA SIGERSON .... 222 
 
 XXIII. COMMON-SENSE ABOUT THE LITTLE NATIONS 228 
 
 XXIV. EPILOGUE 235
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 WHY IT IS IMPORTANT TO REALISE THAT 
 IRELAND IS A NATION 
 
 THE English attitude to Ireland is somewhat para- 
 doxical. Englishmen can hardly be said to dislike 
 the Irish personally. On the whole, I think, they 
 like them better than they like most foreigners. 
 They like them, however, as a holiday people rather 
 than as a serious people. Even the most fanatical 
 Irishman who, without the faintest gleam of humour 
 in his composition, gives his life for a passionate 
 ideal, is explained away as a person with a hilarious 
 love of fighting for its own sake. In the early days 
 of the war Punch had a drawing of an Irishman to 
 whom someone says: "This is a terrible war, Pat." 
 " Yes, sorr," replies the Irishman, " 'tis a terrible 
 war ; but, sure, 'tis better than no war at all," I do 
 not think it is unfair to suggest that this joke 
 vividly represents a common English view of the 
 Irish character. Set out with the idea that the 
 Irishman is an irresponsible creature, and you do 
 not need to take anything he says or does quite 
 seriously. If he says he wants a republic, one does 
 not need to consider his demand, for he obviously 
 does not mean it. If he gives his life in the armies 
 of the Allies, it is not because he is a soldier of 
 freedom, but because he is always spoiling for a 
 fight. If he gives his life on the Republican side, 
 well, boys will be boys. If the Irish had not the 
 Germans or the English to fight, we are told, they
 
 io IRELAND A NATION 
 
 would fight each other. Is not Ireland the nation 
 of the shillelagh that knotted bludgeon which is 
 never seen in Ireland except in the windows of 
 shops that cater for the tastes of tourists? How is 
 it possible to regard Paddy with the shillelagh as a 
 potential Abraham Lincoln a statesman with a 
 constructive mind, tolerant, prudent, and endowed 
 with the civic and commercial virtues ? All such a 
 happy-go-lucky creature needs is to be ruled with a 
 firm hand. He is like a high-spirited animal that 
 only becomes naughty if ridden with a loose rein. 
 What he requires is firm and expert horsemanship. 
 The whole theory of English government in Ireland, 
 so far as it has a theory, depends upon the belief 
 that the Irishman is a fine specimen of animal, but 
 not a fine specimen of man. 
 
 There could be no more fatal belief than this in 
 politics. If persisted in, it will bring ruin not only 
 on Ireland but on England, and on our European 
 civilisation generally. If Ireland is not taken 
 seriously and given her freedom equally with every 
 other nation in Europe, another great world-war is 
 as certain as the rising of to-morrow's sun. This 
 may at first sight seem a ridiculous statement ; and 
 it would, I agree, be ridiculous to pretend that the 
 Great Powers will ever deliberately make war for 
 the sake of freeing Ireland. If one recalls the im- 
 mediate origins of the war of 1914, however, one 
 will see how easily the seeds of war grow in little 
 oppressed countries. The last war had many 
 causes, but the immediate cause that precipitated 
 it was an accident to an archduke in the little Bos- 
 nian town of Serajevo a town about one-tenth the 
 size of Dublin. Another of the immediate causes of 
 the war was certain happenings in the Irish cities 
 of Belfast and of Dublin itself. Had Sir Edward 
 Carson, with the aid of the English Tory Party, not
 
 REALISE THAT IRELAND IS A NATION n 
 
 been conspiring to destroy the liberties of Ireland 
 by arms, Germany would not have been deceived 
 as to the part England would play in the war, and 
 it is possible the Kaiser might have held his hand 
 held it, perhaps, long enough to enable democracy 
 to defeat militarism in Germany, and so prevent the 
 bloody disaster of war altogether. The evidence for 
 the part played by the conspiracy against freedom in 
 Bosnia and Ireland is not the evidence of political 
 partisans. It is known to everybody. It is to be 
 found in the writings of Mr Gerard, the American 
 Ambassador, and many others who can speak with 
 authority. Sir Edward Carson has denied indig- 
 nantly that Baron von Kuhlmann was over in Ulster 
 as the guest of the Unionists on the eve of the war. 
 What everyone knows is that responsible Germans 
 were sent to spy out the land in Ulster at that time, 
 and that the services of a German were made use of 
 in drilling Sir Edward Carson's Volunteers. What 
 one also knows is that the Carsonite arms were got 
 from Germany, and it is reasonable to suppose, 
 remembering the German genius for espionage, that 
 they did not leave that country without the conniv- 
 ance of the German Government. One also knows 
 that, when Sir Edward was in Germany not long 
 before the outbreak of the war, the Kaiser had him 
 to lunch with him. When Sir Edward was accused 
 in the House of Commons of having dined with the 
 Kaiser, he said it was an infamous falsehood. True, 
 he did not dine; he only lunched. That makes an 
 immense difference. Now, I am not going to pretend 
 that Sir Edward Carson was ever a pro-German, 
 though Mr Redmond would have been denounced 
 as one on a hundredth part of the evidence. I am 
 recalling those things, not as proofs of Sir Edward 
 Carson's interest in Germany, but of Germany's 
 interest in Sir Edward Carson. Sir Edward's con-
 
 12 IRELAND A NATION 
 
 spiracy against the Irish nation gave Germany yet 
 another seemingly valid reason for declaring war. 
 If Ireland had been free, Germany's reasons for 
 declaring war would have been by so much the 
 weaker. I wonder if even Mr Bonar Law would 
 have raised a ringer to oppose Irish freedom if he 
 had known that by so doing he was helping to doom 
 millions of young men to death and torture beyond 
 telling, and scores of thousands of women and 
 children to pain and fear and starvation, and 
 massacre by land, sea and air. 
 
 And yet every statesman nay, more, every 
 citizen who assists or even acquiesces in the perpetu- 
 ation of one of those seed-beds of war, the oppres- 
 sions of small nations, is dooming his children's 
 children to horrors of war still more appalling than 
 those through which the world has just passed. The 
 next war, as Mr Masterman has said, will not be 
 a warning ; it will be the end. The late war was a 
 mere initial experiment in aerial warfare and in the 
 use of deadly poisons. The next great war will be 
 a universal murder of civilians, and attempts will 
 be made to blot out great cities in a night. There 
 will be no use in raising a cry of "Baby-killers." 
 "Baby-killing" has now become a feature of war 
 which no nation will forgo. Now, if there were 
 any great moral end to be gained by bringing on 
 such a war, with its attendant horrors, we might well 
 set our jaws and look forward to it with what 
 equanimity we could. But everyone knows that 
 there is no moral end to be gained at any rate, 
 that there would not be if every nation agreed to 
 the equal freedom of all other nations, and abandoned 
 its passion for predominance. Wars are caused by 
 imperial greed, not by the love of equality. In the 
 world before the war, Germany, England, France, 
 Italy and Austria were all consumed by a passion
 
 REALISE THAT IRELAND IS A NATION 13 
 
 for dominating other countries which they had no 
 right to dominate. Their political ideals were ideals 
 of power rather than of justice. Germany desired a 
 place in the sun, failing to realise that each country 
 is its own place in the sun. England already pos- 
 sessed many places in the sun, and even justified 
 her possession of them on altruistic grounds. All 
 the nations of Europe, indeed, that were able to do 
 it, pursued a course of Imperialist rivalry, not of 
 international justice. None was content to rule its 
 own household. Each of them went out into the 
 world, as unscrupulous as a robber baron. The 
 greatness of a nation was judged by its capacity for 
 stealing large portions of the earth's surface. The 
 monomania of plunder that came to a head in the 
 Europe of the nineteenth century will surely, when 
 the world becomes civilised, be looked back on as 
 the most disastrous form of madness that has ever 
 afflicted human society. The passions of the Euro- 
 pean nations can only be compared to the passions 
 of a primitive mining-camp, where the love of gold 
 leads inevitably to envy, hatred and murder. Europe 
 was a lawless society of law-abiding nations. Each 
 of the nations had to some extent subdued the 
 personal egoism of its citizens and kept it in check 
 by a system of law and order. But there was no 
 check of law and order on national egoism. There 
 was no check except fear, and every nation prepared 
 against the day when greed would become stronger 
 than fear, and fighting would break out again. It 
 was taken for granted that there would be fighting. 
 What is there to do but fight when every country 
 believes that it has a right to everything it can gain 
 by fighting ? We private citizens would fight and 
 kill for wealth and power in the same way if we had 
 not, for the sake of peace, devised a system of law 
 to protect ourselves from each other's egoism. I do
 
 i 4 IRELAND A NATION 
 
 not wish to imply that man would live entirely 
 without moral considerations were it not for the law, 
 or that nations live entirely without moral considera- 
 tions in their present lawless state. All I contend 
 is that, without a law expressing the spirit of justice, 
 we should be unjust, quarrelsome, pugnacious and 
 bloody to a degree to which we do not now dare to 
 be. In so far as we have accepted the law, we have 
 abandoned egoism to become social and civic beings. 
 There is no reason for doubting that the nations 
 also can become social and civic beings. If they 
 cannot, Europe is destined to commit suicide in the 
 next great war. 
 
 It is all the more appalling to find the statesmen of 
 Europe still thinking in terms of empires instead of 
 nations. The defeated empires have had to abandon 
 their egoism at least they have had to abandon 
 the effective part of their egoism. But the egoism 
 of the victorious empires, instead of diminishing, 
 has grown. They have formed what is nominally 
 a League of Nations, but what is really in great 
 measure a League of Empires, by which each seems 
 to be guaranteed in the possession of its most ill- 
 gotten gains. Each of them claims the right to 
 absolute rule within the territories it seized in previous 
 wars. Not one of them outside America has per- 
 formed a single act of self-renunciation, the example 
 of which alone could begin the reign of justice 
 among peoples. They have made Germany disgorge, 
 but which of themselves has disgorged ? And yet, 
 until every empire voluntarily sets free its subject 
 peoples, the first day of the new civilisation cannot 
 arrive. England, unfortunately, has taken the lead 
 in upholding the old system. Her statesmen 
 vehemently declare that neither the League of 
 Nations nor America shall be allowed to interfere in 
 order to liberate Ireland that Ireland is an internal
 
 REALISE THAT IRELAND IS A NATION 15 
 
 English question Ireland, which is less English than 
 Alsace-Lorraine is German! In private life, anyone 
 suffering from internal trouble is usually only too 
 glad of outside assistance to get rid of it. England, 
 however, is almost proud of her internal trouble. 
 She cries " Hands off!" angrily to those who would 
 heal her. And the worst of it is, this disease of hers 
 is infectious. It is the terrible disease of possessive- 
 ness. Every nation on the earth that desires to do 
 wrong to another takes fresh heart when it thinks of 
 the example of England in Ireland. Russians used 
 it as an excuse for denying liberty to Poland. The 
 Germans used it as an argument for their own 
 Imperial crimes. Even King Leopold of Belgium, 
 when he was accused of committing atrocities in the 
 Congo, retorted with an allusion to Ireland. During 
 the Peace Conference, the Italians used the presence 
 of England in Ireland as an argument for the annexa- 
 tion of Dalmatia by themselves. Few Englishmen 
 are aware, I fancy, of the force for evil that the 
 English conquest of Ireland has been in international 
 politics. England has given lessons of liberty to the 
 world as splendid as any other nation in history. 
 She has been one of the great democratic educators 
 of mankind. In Ireland, on the other hand, she has 
 given the world a lesson in the denial of liberty. 
 Whether she will ultimately help to teach the world 
 liberty or oppression it remains for the present 
 generation of Englishmen more than any other to 
 decide. The world will eagerly learn either lesson. 
 It would not be too much to say that the world 
 is likely to be more profoundly influenced for good 
 or evil by England's treatment of Ireland than by 
 any other empire's treatment of any other subject 
 nation. England has by her natural genius become a 
 leader among the nations. Will she lead the world 
 into good or into evil ?
 
 16 IRELAND A NATION 
 
 The Allies, according to most of their spokesmen, 
 went to war in order to establish certain principles 
 of freedom and justice in international affairs. We 
 were to have a new world in which the independence 
 of the little nations was to be guarded as jealously 
 as that of the greatest. The rescue of Belgium from 
 the grip of Germany was to be but the first act in 
 the great drama of the liberation of mankind. The 
 British people acquiesced when Mr Asquith promised 
 them such a war of liberation. The whole body of 
 the Allies acquiesced when President Wilson asserted 
 that the war had for one of its objects the securing 
 to every nation of the right to choose its own rulers. 
 The ordinary man began to wonder whether he was 
 still on the earth, or whether he had got lost in 
 heaven, as he read the noble sentiments of Allied 
 statesmen and pamphleteers. Cynics reminded him 
 that it was not the first time a war-wearied world 
 had dreamed of establishing perpetual peace on a 
 basis of international justice. He did not listen to 
 the cynics, however. He told himself that dynasts 
 and diplomats had settled the peace after previous 
 wars. The democracies were going to take the 
 matter in hand this time. Democracies would clearly 
 be free from the old dynastic ambitions. They 
 would insist on setting up a democracy of nations, 
 in which every nation would have an equal right of 
 self-government with the rest. They might not be 
 able to establish a United States of the world, but 
 they would at least establish a harmony of nations 
 in which every nation would be equally sovereign 
 within its own borders. Nations would, it was 
 hoped, be willing to resign a certain portion of their 
 sovereignty into the hands of the League of Nations, 
 but the independence of one nation would not be 
 limited to a greater extent than the sovereignty of 
 another. Clearly, mankind could abolish war in a
 
 REALISE THAT IRELAND IS A NATION 17 
 
 year at least, as far as the civilised world is con- 
 cerned if it were accepted that all nations had an 
 equal right to liberty. Questions of the aspirations 
 of border minorities might still arise, but these could 
 be referred constitutionally at intervals to the League 
 of Nations, which could guarantee the right of an 
 oppressed minority to secede. The international 
 parliament might thus do as much for the freedom 
 and progress of mankind as a national parliament 
 has done for the freedom and progress of England. 
 It was evident, however, that if any of the great 
 empires began to claim special privileges for con- 
 tinuing the old greeds and oppressions, all the other 
 empires would claim the same privileges. The 
 League of Nations could only be built on the 
 universal will to renounce the right to oppress (or, if 
 you prefer the word, to suppress) other nations. 
 The League of Nations, as Mr H. G. Wells said, 
 must supersede empire or it would be meaningless. 
 The world could have peace, but only at a price. 
 The question to be answered was whether any 
 nation was willing to pay that price. Was Russia 
 willing to take her hands off the throat of Poland ? 
 Was Prussia willing to give up Alsace ? Was Italy 
 willing to renounce her ambitions on the east coast 
 of the Adriatic? Was England willing to set 
 Ireland free? Alas, it was discovered at the Peace 
 Conference that every one of the victorious nations, 
 except America, so far from being in a mood for 
 renunciation, was more determined than could have 
 been foreseen to keep its grip on every square inch 
 of territory into which it could fix its talons. Every 
 democracy was betrayed by its leaders as completely 
 as it had ever been betrayed by its dynasts. If a 
 roomful of criminals had gathered together deliber- 
 ately to concoct a plan for another world war within 
 the next century, they could hardly have acted
 
 i8 IRELAND A NATION 
 
 differently from the stupid and short-sighted statesmen 
 who had the destiny of the world in their keeping at 
 Versailles. This is not a rhetorical exaggeration. 
 It is a lamentably simple fact. The new world-order 
 was not begun, because no statesman had the courage 
 to call on his nation to live in the spirit of the new 
 world-order. England could not in decency ask 
 France and Italy to curb their greed, as she herself 
 was not willing to renounce a single acre of her vast 
 Empire. Fortunately, however,the League of Nations 
 has at least been born. If it grows to maturity, the 
 world may yet be saved. But it is a sickly, anaemic 
 child, and it can only be nursed into manhood if its 
 parents close their selfish, orgiestic brawls over its 
 cradle and take to behaving with common sense, 
 common decency and common kindness. We shall 
 surely be behaving like the most heartless black- 
 guards if we neglect anything that can save the life 
 of the great hope of mankind. Probably, however, 
 the miseries of the world are due at least as much 
 to want of imagination as to blackguardism. That is 
 why statesmen should be afraid above all of behaving 
 unimaginatively. Yet what could be more un- 
 imaginative than to fail to realise that the life of a 
 subject nation is a life of spiritual torture that the 
 passion for freedom is not a passion for evil but is 
 one of the noblest passions which have ever found 
 a home in the hearts of men ? To outrage this 
 passion is to introduce a poison into the life of the 
 world. It is the attempted murder of a soul. Crimes 
 of a certain kind were followed in the Greek tragedy 
 by the coming of the Furies. The crime of destroy- 
 ing a nation's freedom to live its own life will always 
 as surely be followed by the coming of the Furies of 
 war upon the great empires. The last war was not 
 merely the punishment of the guilt of Germany, but 
 was the punishment of the guilt of imperialism. While
 
 REALISE THAT IRELAND IS A NATION 19 
 
 you have imperialism, you will have wars. The 
 only way to end war is to end imperialism. 
 
 If this is so, it can hardly be disputed that the 
 greatest contribution England could make to the 
 establishment of a new world-order would be the im- 
 mediate surrender of Ireland into the hands of the 
 Irish people, to rule it either as a republic or a 
 dominion, according as the people themselves decide. 
 Some nation has to begin some time, and England 
 may well claim the privilege of being the world's 
 first liberator. There is no moral argument in favour 
 of granting Ireland Dominion Home Rule which 
 does not tell with equal strength in favour of an 
 Irish Republic, should the Irish people prefer that 
 form of government. England is in Ireland not as 
 a matter of right but as a matter of power. She has 
 no more "right" in Ireland than she has in France. 
 France is strategically more important to her, and is 
 nearer her shores ; France has also a Protestant 
 minority, which was treated more harshly on various 
 occasions than the Protestant minority was ever 
 treated in Ireland. England has exactly the same 
 right in Ireland that Turkey had in Serbia the 
 right of long centuries of conquest. She has even 
 less right than Germany had in Belgium ; for if the 
 philosophy of imperialism and strategic frontiers is 
 a true philosophy, Germany's criminal attack on 
 Belgium was not only intelligble but justified. From 
 a nationalist point of view, Germany's invasion of 
 Belgium was a crime. From an imperialist point of 
 view, there was no moral objection to it. 
 
 Briefly then, my argument is that England can 
 save herself and save the world only by saving 
 Ireland. She has to choose between teaching the 
 world freedom and teaching the world imperialism. 
 And now that the people of Asia are waking, woe 
 be to her if she teaches the world imperialism. Asia
 
 20 IRELAND A NATION 
 
 is learning many things from Europe. If we teach 
 her imperialism, the "yellow peril" will become more 
 than a sensation-monger's nightmare. Imperialism, 
 I know, is in some form or other a universal vice of 
 human nature. It remained for Europe, however, to 
 idealise it as a part of the higher morality. We cannot 
 continue to do so without debasing the moral currency 
 of the world. We may even be preparing the over- 
 throw of Europe and its civilisation by persisting in 
 governing some tiny minority of people against its 
 will. "A bacterium that may kill you or me," says 
 Mr Wells, " in some novel and disgusting way may 
 even now be developing in some Congo muck-heap." 
 The bacterium of world war may similarly be de- 
 veloping in some negligible little nation for which 
 nobody but its own children cares a button. It is 
 all-important that the body of Europe should be 
 cleansed of such bacteria. But we can only do this 
 by facing the facts, and by making the European 
 nations a brotherhood of free peoples. The destruc- 
 tion of the bacteria of war is as simple a matter as 
 the destruction of the bacteria of sleeping sickness. 
 Statesmanship would not need to be moral, it would 
 only need to be scientific, to accomplish this. The 
 scientific statesman would sweep away the causes of 
 the disease of war by strengthening the forces that 
 make for the health of nations. And the greatest of 
 these is freedom (which includes the love of freedom). 
 A wise Englishman would not only not hesitate to 
 grant freedom to Ireland ; he would thrust freedom 
 upon her with both hands for the sake of the future 
 of his own country and of mankind.
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 THE HISTORICAL THREAD : HOW IRELAND HELPED 
 TO CIVILISE EUROPE 
 
 IT is more than everworth while at the present moment 
 to try to understand the background of history against 
 which the Irish people see themselves as the members 
 of a distinct nation. One need not go back to the 
 prehistoric days before the coming of the Gaels, nor 
 need one consider whether the Gaels were really the 
 descendants of Gadelius, who married Scota, the 
 daughter of Pharaoh, and, as a result of taking the 
 side of the oppressed Hebrews, was compelled to fly 
 from Egypt. It is hardly necessary even to consider 
 whether the Gaels were Celts or, as many recent 
 students believe, members of the same Nordic or 
 Teutonic race from which the English come. Accord- 
 ing to the annalists, they arrived in Ireland as 
 conquerors in the year 1700 B.C. The date is of little 
 account. What is most important to emphasise is 
 that, during many centuries of Gaelic rule, Ireland 
 was a nation with one code of laws, one language, 
 and one High-King (who, however, at several periods 
 shared the throne with a joint ruler). 
 
 Even before her conversion to Christianity in the 
 fifth century Ireland seems to have had frequent 
 intercourse with Europe as well as with Great 
 Britain. King Niall of the Nine Hostages was slain 
 on the coast of the English Channel while invading 
 Britain in A.D. 405, and, twenty-three years later, 
 his nephew, King Dathi, was killed by lightning in 
 
 21
 
 22 IRELAND A NATION 
 
 Gaul, near the Alps, having (according to the theory 
 of Professor Bury) gone thither at the head of his 
 troops to aid the Romans against the Franks. And 
 there is evidence that in those days Ireland traded 
 freely with other countries as well as made war on 
 them. It was not, however, till St Patrick (who in 
 his boyhood had been brought as a slave to Ireland) 
 came back to the country in 432 as a missionary and 
 Christianised it that Ireland became one of the con- 
 spicuous nations of Europe. Irish intercourse with 
 Europe seems in early times to have been direct 
 rather than by way of England. During the sixth 
 and succeeding centuries there was scarcely a corner 
 of the known world to which Irishmen did not pene- 
 trate, taking with them religion and learning and the 
 arts. Ireland became a land of schools, lay and 
 monastic. Her schools and scholars were cele- 
 brated throughout Europe. She has been described 
 as " the most learned country in Europe " at this 
 period. Foreigners flocked to her as to a university. 
 We hear of Germans, Gauls, Romans, Britons and 
 even Egyptians coming to her for their "higher 
 education." English princes were educated at her 
 schools, and Dagobert II., King of the Franks, went 
 as a student to Ireland. At the same time, Irishmen 
 founded monasteries and schools in every part of 
 Europe and even in Carthage. One Irishman, 
 St Gall, a famous hermit and church-founder of the 
 seventh century, has had one of the cantons of 
 Switzerland called after him. Another Irishman, 
 Virgilius O'Farrell Latinised became Bishop of 
 Salzburg in the eighth century, and made a reputa- 
 tion by teaching that the world was round and that 
 people lived at the Antipodes. It was to an Irish 
 scholar, Dungal, as the greatest astronomer of the 
 time, that Charlemagne appealed to explain the 
 alleged occurrence of two solar eclipses in the year
 
 THE HISTORICAL THREAD 33 
 
 810. And the list of the Irish " makers of Europe" 
 in those centuries includes many other famous names, 
 perhaps the most famous of all being that of Johannes 
 Scotus Erigena, the most remarkable scholar and 
 philosopher of the ninth century, who taught at the 
 Court of Charles the Bald. The Irish schools seem 
 to have kept alive Greek learning when it had 
 perished throughout the west of Europe. It has been 
 said that at the time of Charles the Bald it was 
 scarcely possible to find anyone who spoke Greek on 
 the Continent except an Irishman or one who had 
 been taught by an Irishman. The memorable Irish 
 conquests were the conquests of religion and learning, 
 not of warfare. They are associated with the 
 names, not of battle sites but of the monastic 
 foundations of Luxeuil, St Gall and Bobbio, of lona, 
 Lindisfarne and Malmesbury. 
 
 Many historians write as though the significant 
 fact in early Irish history were not the great mission 
 to Britain and the Continent a mission which 
 incidentally helped to mould the civilisation of 
 England and France, to name no other countries 
 but the recurring unrest of the provincial kings and 
 the failure of the High-Kings to form a strong central 
 government. It is absurd, however, to be horror- 
 stricken upon finding in Ireland what is taken for 
 granted in the history of France, England and Italy. 
 Ireland, like other countries, suffered much from 
 disorder, but she was orderly enough to build up a 
 remarkable and distinctive civilisation, which per- 
 vaded the whole country from north to south, and 
 which has left its traces to the present day in a 
 fine imaginative literature, and in beautiful artistic 
 workmanship in illuminated manuscripts, in gold and 
 in enamel. That it must in some respects have been 
 a luxurious civilisation is suggested by the constant 
 references to gold ornaments in the old literature and
 
 24 IRELAND A NATION 
 
 indeed by the fact that, while the weight of the gold 
 ornaments in the British Museum collected from 
 Great Britain is about 50 ounces, the weight of a 
 similar Irish collection in the National Museum in 
 Dublin is about 570 ounces. It is now impossible 
 to say along what lines this most promising Irish 
 civilisation would have developed if it had not been 
 interfered with by invaders, first from Scandinavia 
 and then from England of the Normans. But the 
 Book of Kells, the Ardagh Chalice, the Cross of Cong, 
 the Tara Brooch, and the prose romances of Finn 
 and Cuchullain suggest the beginnings of a richly 
 imaginative national life a national life which, for 
 some reason or other, has not been able to express 
 itself fully and satisfactorily for the better part of a 
 thousand years. 
 
 For good or for ill, Ireland had not shared the fate 
 of Britain in being subjected, first, to the Roman 
 Empire, and afterwards to the invading Angles and 
 Saxons. Tacitus tells us that Agricola contemplated 
 the subjugation of Ireland because he thought it 
 would finally crush the spirit of the Britons to see 
 " every spark of liberty extinguished round their 
 coast." But Ireland remained free from foreign rule 
 for seven centuries longer. And Norsemen and 
 Danes, though they established themselves in many 
 parts of Ireland between the end of the eighth and the 
 beginning of the eleventh centuries, never conquered 
 the country as a whole to the point of putting a 
 Danish High-King on the throne. Their record 
 in Ireland, though they were apparently the first 
 town-builders, is one of destruction and cruelty. 
 They plundered and ravished Armagh a score of 
 times, and almost every famous religious centre in 
 Ireland Glendalough, Clonard and Clonmacnoise 
 was at one time or another sacked by them, the 
 people slaughtered or enslaved, the gold ornaments
 
 THE HISTORICAL THREAD 25 
 
 stolen, and the books (precious as a king's ransom) 
 burned or " drowned." It is an astonishing thing that, 
 in spite of two centuries of gluttonous plunder, so 
 much of the old art and literature and learning of the 
 country survived. Even during the greatest agonies 
 of the Danish invasions, Irish saints and scholars 
 continued to labour in the schools and to send forth 
 learned missionaries able to Christianise anybody in 
 Europe, except the enemies of Ireland. It was Brian 
 Boru who finally released Ireland from the Danish 
 horror by his great victory over the foreigners at 
 Clontarf on the 23rd of April 1014. As a youth, he 
 had found the submission of Irishmen to the Danes 
 intolerable, and when his elder brother, the King of 
 Munster, entered into a truce with them, Brian refused 
 to recognise it, "for," he said, "however small the 
 injury he might be able to do the foreigners, he pre- 
 ferred it to peace" a sentence prophetic of the 
 attitude of many Irishmen in later ages. An am- 
 bitious as well as a patriotic man, he aimed at and 
 achieved the supreme power in Ireland, and he gave 
 the country a long spell of peace, during which he 
 repaired a multitude of churches and monasteries and 
 made roads and bridges, and sent learned men over 
 the sea to purchase books to take the place of those 
 which had been destroyed by the Danes. This was 
 one of the golden periods of Irish history. It was a 
 national disaster that there was no one with the same 
 genius for government to succeed Brian when, at the 
 age of seventy-three, he was slain in the hour of 
 victory at the battle of Clontarf. 
 
 After the defeat of the Danes, who had swept 
 down upon Ireland from all quarters in a last 
 desperate challenge, came a century and a half of 
 national revival. It was during this time that many 
 of the famous churches of Ireland, such as those of 
 Cashel and Cong, were built. Historians wrote of
 
 26 IRELAND A NATION 
 
 the Danish wars. Men of letters wrote down the 
 heroic tales in the form in which we now possess 
 them. Scholars made translations from Latin into 
 Irish. The school of Armagh was exalted into 
 something like a national university, at which every 
 lector in an Irish church was compelled to graduate. 
 This was what is called a "time of transition." 
 Ireland was faced by serious problems of government. 
 She had to discover a more stable order than was 
 compatible with a system of ambitious provincial 
 kings and a more or less elective monarchy. She 
 suffered, like eighteenth-century Poland, from too 
 much individualism, though even in the eleventh 
 century she had strong High-Kings like Turlough 
 O'Brien, whom Lanfranc, Archbishop of Canterbury, 
 addressed as " magnificent King of Hibernia," adding 
 that the Almighty had shown great kindness to 
 Ireland "when He gave your Excellency supreme 
 power over that land." The weakness of the Irish 
 monarchical system, however, together with much 
 civil strife and certain troubles in the Church, gave 
 Henry II. an opportunity of effecting a conquest 
 such as the Romans had not essayed and the Danes 
 had not succeeded in. Accordingly, in 1154, he 
 obtained a Bull from Pope Adrian IV. who, incident- 
 ally, was an Englishman giving him permission to 
 go on a sort of crusade into Ireland and " subject the 
 people to laws." It is one of the ironies of history 
 that, though the Orangeman's motto is " To Hell with 
 the Pope," it is the Pope who, in the Middle Ages, as 
 in the more recent days of the land war, has again and 
 again been one of the chief bulwarks of British rule 
 in Ireland. As Father M. H. Maclnerney says in a 
 remarkable book, A History of the Irish Dominicans: 
 
 "From the time of Adrian IV. onward it became 
 the traditional policy of the Popes to foster the
 
 THE HISTORICAL THREAD 27 
 
 power of England for political reasons of their own. 
 They wanted the support of England in their contests 
 with the German emperors, in their difficulties with 
 French kings, in the affair of Sicily, and particularly 
 in the Crusades. The Popes apparently desired to 
 see the British Isles consolidated into a single 
 kingdom, under the strong rule of the English King. 
 Hence their traditional partiality for the English 
 monarch, and their unfriendliness to Irish and 
 Scottish independence." 
 
 The Normans were too busily occupied in various 
 wars, however, to take immediate advantage of 
 Adrian's Bull, and when they ultimately did begin 
 to cross to Ireland in the invasions of 1168, 1169 and 
 1171, it was not upon a crusade but in answer to an 
 appeal for help from Dermot MacMurrogh, a dis- 
 possessed King of Leinster. Had Henry II. permitted 
 Strongbow to conquer Ireland at this time, and to 
 become the first Norman King of Ireland, then 
 Ireland might have gained as much as England from 
 Norman law and order. But he was too jealous to 
 allow this, and the Irish, instead of becoming the 
 subjects of a residential Norman King (whom they 
 might ultimately have nationalised), were treated as 
 the enemies of an absentee Norman King (whom, in 
 the circumstances, it was impossible to nationalise). 
 There, in a sentence, you have the difference between 
 the Norman conquest of England and the Anglo- 
 Norman conquest of Ireland. Norman government 
 in England became a national institution. Anglo- 
 Norman government in Ireland never for a moment 
 ceased to be an anti-national institution. That is 
 one of the keys to the understanding of Irish history.
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 THE HISTORICAL THREAD: A NATION UNDER 
 ONE KING 
 
 " WHAT ! Was there ever any general King of all 
 Ireland ? I never heard it before," exclaims one of 
 the speakers in Edmund Spenser's famous dialogue 
 about the state of Ireland in the time of Elizabeth. 
 It was the work of Henry II. and his successors to 
 smash beyond repair so much of national unity as 
 was symbolised by the High-Kingship, and to 
 foment disunion among the Irish princes. English 
 policy in Ireland during this period was admirably 
 summed up by a Bishop of Waterford who, on being 
 asked by King Edward I. why certain contentions 
 between Irish chieftains were not suppressed, replied 
 that " in policy he thought it expedient to wink at 
 one knave cutting off another, and that would save 
 the King's coffers and purchase peace to the land ; 
 whereat the King smiled and bid him return to 
 Ireland." It would probably have done Ireland 
 little harm to be invaded and conquered. It did her 
 infinite harm to have a conqueror who, so far from 
 ultimately identifying himself with the inhabitants 
 of the country, maintained his position by setting 
 them at each other's throats. And it was not only 
 the original Irish who were a prey to these divisions. 
 The English invaders were equally turbulent after the 
 mediaeval fashion. They fought among each other 
 like cats or Greek cities. Nor were they allowed to 
 settle down on terms of friendship with the Irish. 
 
 28
 
 THE HISTORICAL THREAD 29 
 
 Immediately they showed signs of doing so, a law 
 was passed thundering penalties against conduct so 
 "degenerate." Thus English rule came to Ireland 
 not as an aid, but as a hindrance to the development 
 of a modern civilisation. Lecky put the case in a 
 few words : 
 
 " Like a spear-point embedded in a living body, 
 it inflamed all around it and deranged every vital 
 function. It prevented the gradual reduction of 
 the island by some native Clovis, which would 
 necessarily have taken place if the Anglo-Normans 
 had not arrived, and, instead of that peaceful and 
 almost silent amalgamation of races, customs, laws, 
 and languages which took place in England, and 
 which is the source of many of the best elements in 
 English life and character, the two nations remained 
 in Ireland for centuries in hostility." 
 
 This does not mean, however, that the Irish were 
 not able again and again to rally in an attempt to 
 recover their lands and liberties. They called in 
 Edward Bruce, the brother of Robert Bruce, and 
 crowned him King Edward I. of Ireland in 1316, 
 in spite of the Pope's threat to excommunicate all 
 who sided with him. Under Bruce, they defeated 
 the Anglo-Normans in more than one battle in the 
 following two years, at the end of which, owing to 
 his folly and impatience, he was overwhelmed, and 
 his head cut off and salted and sent to the English 
 King. 
 
 In the Middle Ages and up till the time of 
 Elizabeth, Cromwell and William III., Irishmen 
 made many attempts to reassert their liberties. 
 One pictures Ireland as a nation continually 
 struggling to her feet and continually bludgeoned 
 into impotence again. England issued edict after
 
 30 IRELAND A NATION 
 
 edict against her laws, her customs, her language, 
 her education and her trade, but in all these matters 
 Ireland almost held her own until the coming of the 
 Tudors. Richard II., when he was a candidate for 
 the Holy Roman Empire, was jeered at because he 
 could not even subdue Ireland at his doors. He 
 made two attempts to do so, and, while he was 
 absent in Ireland, he lost the English throne. 
 English law, soon after, was powerless thirty miles 
 outside Dublin. Irish traders were meanwhile send- 
 ing their wares to all the ports of Europe, and Irish 
 scholars seeking learning at all the universities. 
 English colonists were forbidden to trade with 
 Irishmen, but the prohibition was a dead letter. 
 Irishmen desiring education were forbidden by a law 
 of Henry IV.'s time to go to "the schools of Oxford, 
 Cambridge, or elsewhere," but this law, too, failed 
 in its object. The Irish instinct for in a modern 
 phrase complete national self-expression was too 
 powerful to be restrained by edicts. Perhaps the 
 most remarkable triumph of the national spirit 
 during the mediaeval period was the Irishising of the 
 English settlers. De Burgho began to call himself 
 MacWilliam, Bermingham to call himself MacFerris, 
 De Exeter Macjordan, Nangle MacCostelloe, and so 
 on, exchanging Norman for Irish names. It was a 
 symbolic act in the fourteenth century when the 
 leaders of the Burkes took off their Norman dress 
 and arms in sight of the King's army at Athlone 
 and dressed themselves instead in the saffron robes 
 of Irish chieftains. The English settlers, indeed, 
 were as ready as the Irish themselves on occasion to 
 assert their independence of England. They insisted 
 time and again that their Parliament was inde- 
 pendent of the English Parliament. In 1408, for 
 instance, they resolved "that the statutes made in 
 England should not be of force in this Kingdom,
 
 THE HISTORICAL THREAD 31 
 
 unless they were allowed and published in this 
 Kingdom by Parliament." Thus we see two races 
 growing up in Ireland with converging ideals. 
 Fusion between the races was, but for outside inter- 
 ference, inevitable. England alienated her own 
 colonists in Ireland by treating them with the same 
 suspicion and harshness with which she treated the 
 Irish. This was especially so after the English in 
 Ireland, siding with the White Rose against the Red, 
 accepted first Lambert Simnel and then Perkin 
 War beck as their king. Henry VII., in disgust, 
 sent over Sir Edward Poynings in 1494 to wreck the 
 independence of the Anglo-Irish Parliament. The 
 passing of " Poynings' Law," which forbade the Irish 
 Parliament to originate laws without the consent of 
 the English King and Privy Council, is a hated event 
 in Irish constitutional history. In spite of this blow 
 to Anglo- Ireland, however partly, perhaps, as a 
 distant result of it the next great Irish rebel was 
 a member of the English colony. The rebellion of 
 Silken Thomas in 1534 was a FitzGerald rebellion. 
 Seven years later, Henry VIII., feeling the need of 
 strengthening his authority, called the Irish Parlia- 
 ment together to sanction his adoption of the title 
 " King of Ireland " in place of the title " Lord of 
 Ireland," hitherto assumed by English monarchs. 
 The Bill authorising this was read to the Parliament 
 both in English and in Irish evidence of the extent 
 to which the Irish had reconquered Ireland since the 
 time of Henry II. It was the first time, indeed, the 
 native Irish had been invited to attend the Parlia- 
 ment. This use of the Irish language, unfortunately, 
 was almost the last courtesy the Tudors paid to the 
 conquered nation. 
 
 It was not, as some people seem to think, a passion 
 for Protestantism that dictated the Tudor policy in 
 Ireland. The Tudors were more eager to destroy
 
 32 IRELAND A NATION 
 
 the language and liberties than to save the souls of 
 the Irish. Queen Mary (from whose persecutions 
 English Protestants fled to Catholic Ireland for 
 safety) was as hostile to everything Irish as her 
 father had been. It was in her reign that a law was 
 passed which flooded Ireland with debased money 
 which was forbidden to be circulated in England 
 an obviously destructive blow to Irish trade. She 
 also carried on her father's policy of denying the 
 traditional right of the Irish people to share in the 
 ownership of their lands, or to elect their chiefs, 
 who were turned (with considerable flattery) into 
 hereditary English barons. Every Irish custom, 
 whether of dress or speech, was soon proscribed, and 
 in Elizabeth's reign it became an offence to good 
 men for an Irishman to be alive. I will not quote 
 Nationalist historians in regard to the orgy of 
 massacre and plunder and destruction which 
 Elizabeth and her Ministers let loose on Ireland. 
 English and pro-English historians are sufficiently 
 emphatic as to the agonies that then laid waste the 
 country in a manner that can scarcely be paralleled 
 outside Armenia. Lecky declares that "the sup- 
 pression of the native race . . . was carried on with 
 a ferocity which surpassed that of Alva in the 
 Netherlands, and has seldom been exceeded in the 
 page of history." " Sir Peter Carew," writes Froude, 
 " has been seen murdering women and children, and 
 babies that had scarcely left the breast." Sir 
 Humfrey Gilbert, another leading Englishman of 
 the time, was, Froude goes on to say, not a bad man, 
 but, in making war on the Irish, he "regarded 
 himself as dealing rather with savage beasts than 
 with human beings, and when he tracked them to 
 their dens he strangled their cubs and rooted out 
 the entire broods." And these instances are typical. 
 Every torture of burning, strangling, and starvation
 
 THE HISTORICAL THREAD 33 
 
 was resorted to. When Irish chiefs eluded capture, 
 assassins were hired to poison or otherwise " abridge " 
 them, as in the case of Shane O'Neill, Hugh O'Neill, 
 Red Hugh O'Donnell and Fiach MacHugh O'Byrne. 
 Shane O'Neill was murdered by arrangement at a 
 banquet in 1567, after having made war on the 
 English intermittently for sixteen years. Hugh 
 O'Neill, though taken to be educated in England, 
 was the next great Irish leader. He defeated the 
 English in 1598 at the battle of the Yellow Ford, 
 called in the Spaniards (with whom the Irish ports 
 of the west had traded for centuries) and marched 
 victoriously from north to south of the country, but 
 the national cause went down in disaster at the 
 battle of Kinsale in 1602. With the Flight of 
 the Earls in 1607 a nation also seemed to take to 
 flight, and the planting of Ulster, followed by the 
 planting of Leinster, with Lowland Scots and 
 Englishmen, looked like the last word in the aboli- 
 tion of an ancient race. Nothing could be more 
 characteristic of the vitality of the Irish genius than 
 the fact that amid the fire and slaughter of the 
 sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the poets and 
 historians went on with their labour of keeping alive 
 the tradition and spirit of the nation. O'Higgin, 
 O'Hussey, Ward and O'Gnive are among the poets 
 of the time, some of whose passionate work still 
 survives, and it was in these dark days that Keating 
 wrote his History of Ireland and the O'Clerys The 
 Annals of the Four Masters. It was some time 
 earlier, I fancy, that Marco Polo and Mandeville's 
 Travels had been translated, like many other foreign 
 works, into Irish. Seldom can there have been a 
 nation which clung more tenaciously to its civilisation 
 and culture. 
 
 Exiles in their own land, the dispossessed Irish 
 rose again in 1641 under Owen Roe O'Neill, a great
 
 34 IRELAND A NATION 
 
 and humane man who had earned fame in the Spanish 
 service. With fine national insight he attempted to 
 win over the Scots planters of Ulster as well as the 
 Anglo-Irish to his banner, but in this he failed. He 
 won a tremendous victory in the battle of Benburb 
 in 1646, sending his men into the charge with the 
 exhortation : " In the name of Father, Son and Holy 
 Ghost, charge for the old land." He was a model of 
 chivalry and statesmanship as well as a great military 
 leader. He died of illness, unfortunately for Ireland, 
 in 1649, before he had had time to meet Cromwell 
 in the field. " God help him," cried his nephew, who 
 watched over him during his illness ; " he talks of 
 freeing Ireland first, and afterwards expelling the 
 Turk from Europe." Cromwell, who landed in 
 Ireland in the year of O'Neill's death, fought more 
 honourably than the Elizabethan ravagers, but he 
 too dreamed of uprooting the Irish nation for ever 
 and ever, or at least of sweeping all that was left of 
 it " to Hell or Connaught." He waged war with a 
 German ruthlessness. His savage slaughterings at 
 Wexford and Drogheda have made his memory a 
 thing of horror in Irish history, and the Irish still 
 recall with passionate anger the way in which, under 
 his rule, thousands of Irish women, children and 
 boys were sold into slavery in the West Indies. It 
 was estimated by Sir William Petty that during the 
 O'Neill-Cromwellian War of 1641-1652 a third of 
 the population of Ireland perished by sword, plague 
 and famine. 
 
 The Irish nation, however, did not perish. It 
 owed little to Charles II., who in spite of Stuart 
 promises left two-thirds of the good land of Ireland 
 in the hands of Protestants and recent English 
 settlers; and it owed less to James II., who used 
 it merely as a weapon to win back the English 
 throne. It had sufficiently recovered its strength,
 
 THE HISTORICAL THREAD 35 
 
 however, to play a leading part in the Jacobite 
 war which began when the thirteen apprentices 
 closed the gates of Derry in 1688, and, continuing 
 after the defeat of the Boyne two years later, came 
 to an end in 1691. At this date Sarsfield sur- 
 rendered Limerick to the Williamites, not uncon- 
 ditionally, but on terms. The Treaty of Limerick 
 guaranteed religious freedom to the Irish, and it 
 is understood that this was in accordance with King 
 William's own wishes. The extreme Protestants 
 insisted, however, by an act of perfidy which in 
 Ireland is still contemporary history, that the Treaty 
 should be torn up and the Irish subjected to both 
 religious and commercial persecution. Even to-day 
 Limerick is known to every Irish school-child as the 
 City of the Broken Treaty. During the era of the 
 Penal Laws that followed Irish soldiers fought 
 against the English in most of the great armies 
 of Europe, rushing into action with the battle-cry : 
 " Remember Limerick ! " Sarsfield himself died 
 fighting for the French against the English at 
 Landen in 1693. He is said to have cried with his 
 last breath : " O that this had been for Ireland ! " 
 It must have seemed to him and to the other exiles 
 of those sunless days that Ireland had now gone 
 down into the grave for ever.
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 THE HISTORICAL THREAD : THE NEW IRISH 
 NATION 
 
 IN order to understand the state of Ireland in the 
 early part of the eighteenth century, one must try 
 to imagine what England would be like if all her 
 national institutions and interests were swamped in 
 a general ruin the throne, the landed aristocracy, 
 the soldiers, the laws and lawyers, the churchmen, 
 the middle-class manufacturers, the shipowners, the 
 skilled artisans and the schoolmasters. One may, 
 I admit, deny the exactness of the parallel, but one 
 cannot deny the truth of the picture. It is a picture 
 of the utter destruction of national life both of the 
 real and the potential national life so that, as far as 
 was possible, not one stone was left standing on 
 another. What Burke called " the outlawry of the 
 mass of the people" was the first principle of English 
 government in Ireland. Irishmen continued to exist, 
 it is true, as the Christian populations in the Balkans 
 continued to exist for centuries under the rule of the 
 Turkish ascendancy. But they were not encouraged 
 to do so. Everything was done that could be done 
 to impoverish and debase them and to stamp them 
 as an eternally inferior people. The Penal Laws, no 
 doubt, threw open to Irishmen the profession of the 
 turncoat, but, as Lord Chancellor Bowes and Chief 
 Justice Robinson laid down from the bench, the law 
 did not " suppose any such person to exist as an 
 Irish Roman Catholic." It has often been said in 
 
 36
 
 THE HISTORICAL THREAD 37 
 
 recent years that in practice the Penal Laws were 
 not so severe as people imagine. This kind of 
 apology reminds one of Miss Hobhouse's suggestion 
 that the German devastation of Belgium has been 
 greatly exaggerated. The spirit in which Ireland 
 was ruled at the beginning of the eighteenth century 
 by the occupying Ascendancy may be gathered from 
 the fact that the Irish Privy Council in 1719 actually 
 proposed that any unregistered priest or friar found 
 in Ireland should be castrated. 
 
 It is probable, however, that the national life of 
 Ireland did not suffer such lasting injurious effects 
 from the Penal Laws as from the destruction of Irish 
 manufactures by the English Parliament. In spite 
 of laws and "priest-hunters" secular priests were 
 allowed to remain on certain conditions, by the way 
 Irishmen continued to study for the priesthood at 
 Paris and Salamanca and Louvain, and to return to 
 serve Mass to their people in caves and woods. 
 The Bishop of Kilmore, who was a skilled player on 
 the bagpipes, went round his diocese in the disguise 
 of a Highland piper. Thus the religious tradition of 
 the country was never destroyed. The manufacturing 
 tradition, on the other hand, was destroyed to such a 
 degree that, when the industrial revolution arrived, 
 Ireland was as impotent to meet the new conditions 
 as a man whose hands have been tied behind his back 
 is to build a house. England had already taken 
 step's to suppress the Irish woollen trade at the time 
 of Strafford. Later on, she prohibited the export of 
 woollen manufactures from Ireland to the colonies, 
 and shut them out of her own markets by preventive 
 duties. In 1699 the Parliament at Westminster went 
 still further and passed a law forbidding the export 
 of manufactured wool from Ireland to any other 
 country whatever. The Irish trade with England 
 in live stock and provisions had been destroyed by
 
 38 IRELAND A NATION 
 
 the Cattle Acts of Charles II. Ireland thereupon 
 built up a thriving provision trade with the Continent 
 and the colonies. England, jealous of this direct 
 intercourse between Ireland and the plantations, 
 then forbade the Irish to import from the colonies 
 any goods that had not been first landed in England, 
 with the result that a heavy blow was struck at Irish 
 shipping as well as at the colonial trade. These 
 things are typical of the way in which the Irish trade 
 and manufactures were strangled almost at birth by 
 the English Parliament. An Irish glass industry 
 sprang up : the export of glass from Ireland to any 
 country whatever was forbidden. Irish silk manu- 
 factures and Irish gloves, again, were excluded from 
 the English market. By one means or another every 
 industry or prospective industry even to some 
 extent the linen of the north was either hampered 
 or destroyed. Brewing, cotton, fish-curing, sugar- 
 refining it was possible to build up none of these 
 industries on a secure basis on account of the jealousy 
 of the English manufacturing classes. The silent 
 harbours of the west of Ireland in the twentieth 
 century are surviving witnesses to the destruction 
 of the nascent industrial spirit of the country two 
 hundred years ago. 
 
 This widespread ruin of industry and commerce 
 had disastrous effects both on the Catholic and the 
 Protestant population. It gave the Irish Catholics 
 no outlet save the land of which they had been 
 largely dispossessed. When, thrust out of the 
 industries, they made an attempt to recover their 
 ancestral fields, they were punished as marauders 
 and agrarian criminals. Irish Protestants, disgusted 
 at once with the restrictions on their industries and 
 with the rack-renting methods of the landlords, began 
 to stream out of the country in thousands, and it is 
 a memorable commentary on anti-Irish statesmanship
 
 THE HISTORICAL THREAD 39 
 
 that Irish Protestants played as great a part in the 
 challenge to English power at Bunker's Hill as Irish 
 Catholics did in the similar challenge at Fontenoy. 
 
 General Robertson, giving evidence before a Com- 
 mittee of the House of Commons at the end of the 
 American War, quoted an American general to the 
 effect that "half the rebel Continental Army were 
 from Ireland." Lord Mountjoy, still a Commoner 
 at the time, declared in 1784 that " America was lost 
 by Irish emigrants," and added that he had authority 
 for the astonishing statement that " the Irish language 
 was as commonly spoken in the American ranks 
 as English." The eighteenth century, however, is 
 notable in Irish history less for what the Irish did 
 in the field abroad than for what they achieved in 
 national reconstruction at home. It is remarkable 
 enough that in all these years of ruin the line of 
 poets and musicians Carolan and Owen Roe 
 O'Sullivan are among the well-known names never 
 was allowed to perish. It is remarkable, too, that in 
 spite of persecutors and proselytisers Irish schools 
 " Popish schools," as they were called sprang up in 
 hundreds in the remotest parts of the country and 
 even in the heart of the Anglicised towns. It was to 
 Munster especially that "poor scholars" came from 
 all parts in search of Greek and Latin learning : 
 " Munster for learning," an Irish proverb says till the 
 present day. But the spirit of nationality a spirit 
 inevitably seeking to embody itself in institutions 
 did not merely haunt forbidden schools and keep 
 alive the geuius of the poet and harp-player. It took 
 possession of the Parliament of the settlers itself. 
 The old Irish nation having been swept out of the 
 field as an organised force, a new Irish nation marched 
 forward to take its place. 
 
 The author of Irish Protestant Nationalism was 
 William Molyneux, who denied that the Irish Parlia-
 
 40 IRELAND A NATION 
 
 ment was historically or rightly dependent on the 
 Parliament of England, and who wrote the primer 
 of Irish constitutional liberty (which was, naturally, 
 ordered to be burned by the hangman). Swift followed, 
 and his denunciations of alien government have the 
 ring of contemporary political utterances. " We are 
 in the condition," he declared, " of patients who have 
 physic sent to them by doctors at a distance, strangers 
 to their constitution, and the nature of their disease." 
 He put the facts as regards English government in 
 Ireland in an immortal and sardonic sentence. " In 
 reason," he said, " all government without the consent 
 of the governed is the very definition of slavery ; but, 
 in fact, eleven men, well armed, will certainly subdue 
 one single man in his shirt." Gradually, the Irish 
 Parliament, anti-Catholic though it was, stuffed with 
 placemen and pensioners, and without any Septennial 
 Act to keep it under the control of public opinion, 
 began to respond to the new spirit in the country, 
 and to protest against the impoverishment of Ireland, 
 which was due not only to commercial restrictions 
 but to absentee landlordism, and to the outrageous 
 pension system whereby any discarded royal mistress 
 or scamp in need of a salary was charged to the Irish 
 funds. Irish opinion, which armed the Protestant 
 Volunteers for the defence of Ireland against a 
 threatened French invasion during the American 
 War, quickly realised the use that might be made of 
 the new force for national purposes. At a grand 
 parade of the Volunteers in Dublin in 1779, the 
 object of which was to demand freedom of trade, 
 Napper Tandy's cannon rattled through the main 
 streets of the city bearing the quaint inscription : 
 " Open thou our mouths, O Lord, and our lips shall 
 show forth Thy praise." The Commercial Code was 
 repealed in the following year. Backed by the 
 Volunteers and by the great mass both of Protestant
 
 THE HISTORICAL THREAD 41 
 
 and Catholic opinion, Grattan at once pressed for 
 the recognition of the Irish demand for legislative 
 independence. In making this demand, Irish states- 
 men based their claim on the ancient constitution of 
 the country since the time of the Normans, treating 
 Poynings' Law (as usually understood) and the 
 Sixth of George I. merely as unconstitutional out- 
 rages on Irish liberty. They declared that the King, 
 Lords and Commons of Ireland were the only power 
 competent to enact laws to bind Ireland. They 
 were loyal to King George not as the King of 
 England but as the King of Ireland. The English 
 Ministry yielded to the Irish demand for independ- 
 ence in 1782 and, in the following year, to make 
 assurance doubly sure, they passed a Renunciation 
 Act through the Parliament at Westminster, declaring 
 that the 
 
 " Right claimed by the people of Ireland, to be 
 bound only by laws enacted by his Majesty and 
 the Parliament of that kingdom [Ireland] in all 
 cases whatever, ... is hereby declared to be estab- 
 lished, and ascertained for ever, and shall at no time 
 hereafter be questioned or questionable." 
 
 This pledge was cheerfully torn up in the same 
 generation in which it was so solemnly given. 
 
 Much has been written both in praise and dispraise 
 of Grattan's Parliament, as the Irish Parliament 
 between 1782 and 1800 is usually called. Its chief 
 vice was that it had not a Cabinet responsible to it. 
 The Irish Ministers, appointed by the King, were 
 really the agents of the English Cabinet. The Irish 
 Parliament might register vote after vote against 
 them : they remained in office none the less as the 
 servants of King George. The Irish House of Com- 
 mons consisted at this time of three hundred Members, 
 of whom, Grattan estimated, two-thirds were returned
 
 42 IRELAND A NATION 
 
 by fewer than two hundred persons. Here was a rich 
 field of corruption, and Ministers made the most of it. 
 Grattan's Parliament in Ireland was as corrupt, let 
 us say, as Walpole's Parliament in England. In spite 
 of this, however, it was shaped into a marvellously 
 workable instrument for the expression of the national 
 will in progressive measures. The Irish Parliament 
 had hitherto been forbidden to pass a law making 
 the judges independent of the executive. Grattan's 
 Parliament was no sooner in existence than it secured 
 the same independence for Irish judges as English 
 judges had possessed for sixty-eight years. In the 
 same year it restored the right of Catholics to acquire 
 every kind of freehold property. In 1792 and 1793 
 it granted the Parliamentary franchise to Catholics, 
 opened (to some extent) the learned professions and 
 army appointments to them, and enabled them to 
 serve as magistrates and on grand juries. Thus the 
 essentials of Catholic Emancipation (which did not 
 come in England till 1829) were carried through 
 Grattan's Parliament in 1793. "But for the Union," 
 O'Connell trulydeclared in 1833, " weshould have been 
 emancipated by our Protestant fellow-countrymen 
 long before." During the brief life of Grattan's 
 Parliament, Ireland did not suddenly blossom into 
 a paradise, but she made strides towards prosperity 
 in manufactures and agriculture to which even anti- 
 Irish statesmen bore abundant witness at the time. 
 Castlereagh's Under-Secretary at Dublin Castle even 
 declared that one of the causes of the " dangerous 
 state" of Ireland at the end of the century was "the 
 general prosperity of the country, which has produced 
 great activity and energy ! " 
 
 One thing, unfortunately, the Irish Parliament 
 steadily refused to do. The pensioners and the 
 representatives of rotten boroughs were unwilling 
 to sacrifice their bread and butter by reforming
 
 THE HISTORICAL THREAD 43 
 
 their House. It is only fair to remember that the 
 English Parliament itself would not at that time 
 have dreamed of passing so radical a measure of 
 reform as that proposed to Grattan's Parliament in 
 1783 by the leaders of the Volunteers. All the same, 
 in refusing to reform itself, Grattan's Parliament 
 committed a fatal blunder. Had the Volunteers' 
 Reform Bill been allowed to pass in 1783 it is likely 
 enough that the Union with England would never 
 have taken place. For one thing, the insurrection 
 of 1798 which, many reputable people have held, 
 was deliberately " facilitated " by the Government in 
 order to create an excuse for the Union would not 
 have happened. Reform having failed, revolution 
 took its place. 
 
 It is interesting to recall that it was Presbyterian 
 Ulster which turned with especial eagerness to the 
 idea of compelling the Irish Parliament to reform 
 itself by a revolution which would at once destroy 
 the tyranny of the unreformed Parliament and would 
 separate Ireland from the inevitably corrupting in- 
 fluence of English Ministers. The French Revolu- 
 tion filled Ulster with high hopes and ardent ideals. 
 Paine's Rights of Man became (in Wolfe Tone's 
 phrase) the Koran of Belfast, and the anniversary 
 of the fall of the Bastille was enthusiastically cele- 
 brated by the whole population of the town. No 
 attempt was made by the authorities to meet public 
 opinion, and events moved with tragic certainty to 
 the rising of the United Irishmen. The rising, 
 which was a failure, was stamped out with a ferocity 
 which, though it provoked ferocious reprisals, has 
 never been forgotten by the common people. " Every 
 crime, every cruelty, that could be committed by 
 Cossacks or Calmucks has been transacted here," 
 General Abercromby, the Commander-in-Chief, said 
 of the forces under him, which had been goading the
 
 44 IRELAND A NATION 
 
 people beyond endurance in the months preceding 
 the rebellion. During the suppression of the rebellion, 
 no quarter was given by the military, and, as Lecky 
 says, " the executions . . . were far less horrible than 
 the indiscriminate burning of houses and slaughter 
 of unarmed men, and even of women, by the troops." 
 It was an inauspicious prelude to the Union. 
 
 The history of Ireland in the eighteenth century, 
 as the Nationalist reads it, is a tragedy of jealousy 
 English jealousy of the commercial prosperity 
 and political liberty of a neighbouring nation. Pitt 
 looked at Ireland purely from the point of view of 
 supposed English interests. He now determined 
 to tear up the Renunciation Act and push through 
 an old project for destroying the Irish Parliament 
 altogether, in spite of the fact that it was the Irish 
 Parliament which had supplied the bulk of the 
 money and the troops for the suppression of the 
 rebellion. Even though the country was in a state 
 of confusion and horror and despair, however, the 
 Ministers did not dare to put the question of the 
 Union to the test of a General Election. Not 
 Ireland but a bribed Parliament was to be asked 
 to decide Ireland's fate. Corrupt as the Irish 
 House of Commons was, even it passed a Unionist 
 resolution in 1799 by a majority of only one. 
 Dublin was illuminated, thinking that this meant 
 a moral defeat for the proposal. Castlereagh and 
 Clare, however, set to work with more than a million 
 of money and bought the patrons of many pocket 
 boroughs with a promise of ^75CXD each for eighty- 
 four seats which were to be disfranchised after the 
 Union. What Lecky called "the unbribed intellect 
 of Ireland " fought against the Union to the last : it 
 is said that there were only seven members who in 
 1800 voted for the Union from disinterested motives 
 and without a bribe. Never surely was a national
 
 THE HISTORICAL THREAD 45 
 
 Parliament given so brief and so poor a chance to 
 justify its existence. No man had a right to pro- 
 nounce it a failure in the year 1800. Its promise 
 was of the noblest. No wonder that Grattan, in 
 his last great speech against the Union, refused 
 to believe that the nation he had done so much to 
 build up was dead beyond awakening, and that he 
 quoted over it the passionate words addressed 
 by Romeo to Juliet in the vault : 
 
 Thou art not conquer'd : Beauty's ensign yet 
 Is crimson in thy lips and in thy cheeks, 
 And death's pale flag is not advanced there. 
 
 Archbishop Troy and the rest of the Catholic 
 Bishops supported the Union in return for an 
 understanding that the Catholics would at once 
 be emancipated. Pitt, having achieved his object, 
 did not redeem his promise ; he was afraid that if 
 he did King George III. might go mad. That is 
 why ever since to the Irish Nationalist the Union 
 has seemed not merely an evil, but an evil begotten 
 by corruption upon faithlessness.
 
 CHAPTER V 
 
 THE HISTORICAL THREAD : THE WORST CENTURY 
 OF ALL 
 
 BYRON'S comment on the Union between England 
 and Ireland is famous. It was, he said, "the union 
 of the shark with its prey." Dr Johnson's prophecy 
 has been quoted almost as often. "Do not unite 
 with us," he said to an Irishman at a time when the 
 question of a union was being mooted ; " we would 
 unite with you only to rob you." Modern Englishmen 
 are sometimes bewildered when they discover that 
 the Irishman, whom they regard as, on the whole, a 
 poor relation getting more than his fair share of 
 doles, accepts Johnson and Byron as having foretold 
 and summed up with perfect accuracy the history of 
 Ireland during the nineteenth century. From an 
 Irish point of view, it astonishes many people to 
 learn, the reign of Queen Victoria was a tale of 
 disaster and horror to a scarcely less degree than 
 that of Elizabeth. In the course of it, population 
 fled, wealth emigrated, taxation increased, the fields 
 went out of cultivation, hundreds of thousands of 
 people perished by famine, hundreds of thousands 
 of others were evicted, the language sank into decay, 
 the national culture dwindled, almost everything 
 that makes a nation, save faith and purpose, seemed 
 to be inevitably melting away. Even Ulster, which 
 had been so eager and integral a part of Ireland at 
 the end of the eighteenth century, became more and 
 more indoctrinated with a seventeenth-century terror 
 
 46
 
 THE HISTORICAL THREAD 47 
 
 of the Pope and threw off the last remnants of her 
 once proud Nationalism. She was Nationalist Ulster 
 at the end of the eighteenth century ; she was 
 Unionist Ulster by the end of the nineteenth. That 
 is one of the tragedies of Irish history. 
 
 In order to understand the extent of the ruin of 
 Ireland during the nineteenth century, it is important 
 to remember that at the time of the Union the 
 population of Ireland was 5,395,456, or more than 
 half that of Great Britain (10,500,956). By the 
 end of the century, the population of Ireland was 
 4,458,775, or considerably less than one-eighth of 
 that of Great Britain (36,999,940). How many other 
 nations in Europe are there which declined in 
 population, not only comparatively but absolutely, 
 during the greatest century of expansion that the 
 world has seen? This alone, however, would not 
 give the measure of Ireland's falling out of the race 
 during the century. Pitt, Castlereagh and their 
 supporters, recognising that Ireland was a poorer 
 country than England, had foretold that the Union 
 would bring the two nations more nearly on an 
 economic level. Ireland, as the first result of it, 
 was to import English capital. Instead of this, as 
 Irishmen foresaw, Ireland began to export her own 
 capital, and continued to do so till the end of the 
 century. In the first place the landlords in increasing 
 numbers flocked to London instead of Dublin, and 
 it has been estimated that not less than 105,000,000 
 of Irish capital was exported to England in the form 
 of rents in the first thirty years after the Union. 
 After the amalgamation of the Irish and British 
 Exchequers which was deferred till 1817 the 
 Treasury, like the landlord, became an absentee ; 
 and, while Ireland contributed to the revenue in a 
 single year (1819-1820) the sum of 5,256,564, only 
 a fraction of this, or 1,564,880, was returned to be
 
 48 IRELAND A NATION 
 
 used for Irish purposes. Thus Ireland, instead of 
 being made an equal part of a kingdom, became 
 merely a tributary province, paying out of her 
 poverty something like 4,000,000 a year to support 
 an empire that had, from the Irish point of view, 
 done her as little service as the Turkish Empire has 
 done Armenia. It was, I think, Lord MacDonnell's 
 estimate in 1911 that, quite over and above the cost 
 of Irish administration, England had taken from 
 Ireland during the preceding ninety-three years 
 more than 325,000,000. It is important that anyone 
 who wishes to understand the Irish view of the 
 Union should realise that during the nineteenth 
 century Ireland was a country from which money 
 was being drained, not a country to which money 
 was being given. Not until the introduction of Old 
 Age Pensions was there an Irish deficit in the 
 Budget a deficit that has disappeared during the 
 war. It is easy to imagine the results to Ireland of 
 the loss of her capital during the early years of a 
 century of industrial development. In the year of 
 the passing of the Union there were 91 woollen 
 manufacturers in Dublin, employing 4938 hands. 
 In 1840 these numbers, instead of having risen, had 
 declined to 12 manufacturers, employing 682 hands. 
 These figures are typical. Scarcely an industry was 
 able to progress save the linen of the north, which, 
 though hampered to a certain extent, had received 
 "most-favoured-industry" treatment in the eighteenth 
 century. " Can we doubt," asked Professor Kettle, 
 reviewing some of these facts, " that in overtaxation 
 and the withdrawal of capital we have the prime 
 causa causans of the decay of Ireland under the 
 Union?" 
 
 The truth is, the history of Ireland in the nine- 
 teenth century has been the history, not of two 
 nations governing jointly, but of one nation governing
 
 THE HISTORICAL THREAD 49 
 
 another against its will. One may accept as 
 symbolical of the history of the century the fact 
 that between 1829 and 1858 twenty-three Irish land- 
 reform Bills were brought into the House of Commons 
 and every one of them was rejected, while during the 
 same period thirty-five Coercion Bills were intro- 
 duced and every one of them passed. The way in 
 which the Catholic Emancipation Act was passed 
 in 1 829 was also characteristic of the government of 
 Ireland under the Union. In the first place, the 
 Duke of Wellington pushed the measure through 
 Parliament on the ground, not that the Irish had 
 voted for it constitutionally, but that they would rise 
 in rebellion if it were refused. In the second place, 
 the Government, while emancipating Catholics with 
 their right hand, disfranchised a great mass of them 
 the forty-shilling freeholders with their left. 
 The immediate result was that the landlords, who 
 had hitherto cut up their estates into small farms for 
 forty-shilling freeholders who would vote for them 
 at elections, now cleared their estates of all these 
 small farmers as undesirables and threw them out of 
 the only industry the land which had been per- 
 mitted to survive. Once more the poor and dis- 
 possessed multiplied. When the Great Famine 
 came at the end of the forties, it went through an 
 impoverished nation like a scythe. The number of 
 those who died of hunger during the Famine has 
 been estimated by a Registrar-General at 729,033, 
 and another 200,000 persons are estimated to have 
 died in the " coffin-ships " in which they sought to 
 fly from a plague-stricken land. Thus, as Bright 
 said, more human beings perished in Ireland during 
 the Famine than had fallen by the sword in any war 
 England had ever waged. And the most appalling 
 fact in the situation was that the Famine was pre- 
 ventible even at the last moment, had it not been
 
 50 IRELAND A NATION 
 
 for the Westminster Parliament. There was an 
 abundance of corn and cattle in Ireland in 1846 and 
 1847; it was only the potato crop that had failed. 
 Had a native Parliament been in being, it would 
 obviously have done what other European Parlia- 
 ments had done in similar circumstances what, 
 indeed, the wisest Irishmen of the time advised : it 
 would have prohibited the export of any food-stuffs 
 whatever until the people of the country were fed. 
 The landlords, however, were waiting for their rents, 
 and the corn and cattle had to be exported to pay 
 them. Peel, instead of prohibiting the export of 
 corn from Ireland, facilitated the import of corn into 
 the country by removing the duties on it. This 
 meant that the price of corn fell sufficiently low to 
 ruin the Irish farmer who had corn to sell, but not 
 sufficiently low to be within the reach of the starving 
 Irish peasant, who had nothing left to him by this 
 time but his immortal soul. There have been few 
 more terrible episodes in history than this, as the 
 Irish regard it, Government-caused famine. 
 
 It was not till the coming of the Fenian movement 
 in the sixties that Irish opinion began to have the 
 slightest effect on legislation for Ireland. The 
 Fenians, like the United Irishmen, were republicans. 
 They had a powerful organisation in America, and 
 thousands of their members were in the ranks of the 
 Irish police and the British Army. Their rising in 
 1867 failed it was a mere flash-in-the-pan but 
 Mr Gladstone, Lord Dufferin, Lord Derby and 
 other public men confessed that it at least did some- 
 thing to awaken opinion in England about Ireland. 
 The Irish (Protestant) Church was immediately 
 disestablished, and the first of the great Land Acts 
 passed. Out of the failure of Fenianism rose the 
 modern Home Rule movement in 1870. O'Connell 
 had demanded Repeal of the Union in the forties ;
 
 THE HISTORICAL THREAD 51 
 
 he had declared wisely, as I think, from the 
 national point of view that for the government of 
 Ireland he would prefer an Irish Parliament without 
 Catholic emancipation to a British Parliament with 
 Catholic emancipation. He failed, however, to re- 
 store an Irish nation within the Empire, as Emmet 
 failed in 1803 and Young Ireland failed in 1848 to 
 restore an Irish nation outside the Empire. The 
 Home Rule movement first under Isaac Butt and 
 afterwards under Parnell was a movement to 
 establish an Irish nation within the British Empire 
 on a much more limited scale than O'Connell's. Butt 
 was a Federalist with Conservative instincts, and 
 Parnell, though he desired the restoration of Grattan's 
 Parliament, was satisfied with the "practical inde- 
 pendence" inside the British Empire guaranteed 
 in Mr Gladstone's first Home Rule Bill. Thus it 
 will be seen that Irish Nationalist opinion during 
 the nineteenth century hesitated only upon one 
 point whether the re-establishment of the historic 
 Irish nation should take place inside or outside the 
 British Empire. What the average Nationalist has 
 always desired above all things is a workable con- 
 stitution, a resident Parliament, and the liberty to 
 solve his national difficulties, develop his national 
 resources and express his national genius. 
 
 It is easy, I think, to trace a " stream of tendency " 
 in the life of Ireland down through the centuries. 
 Ireland has the persistent passions of a nation. We 
 find her attempting to restore her nationhood now 
 by constitutional and now by revolutionary means ; 
 beaten back at one door, she attempts to enter by 
 another. She has done something in recent years 
 to build up a national literary life, a national 
 " cultural " life, a national industrial life, a national 
 farming life. Her political life, however, has been 
 disastrously blocked. Of all the useful remedial
 
 52 IRELAND A NATION 
 
 legislation that has been passed for her since the 
 time of Gladstone, there is practically nothing that 
 an Irish Parliament would not have passed at least 
 a generation earlier. The Land Acts, for instance, 
 were merely belated concessions, not to the votes of 
 the Irish electors, but to their violence in the days 
 of the Land League and later associations of the 
 same kind. In other words, Ireland, instead of being 
 permitted to make her own laws, has been forced 
 to resort to lawlessness in order to obtain suitable 
 laws from what she regards as an absentee Parlia- 
 ment. English partisan historians, a witty Irishman 
 once said, found Ireland a nation and left her a 
 question. It seems to me that, until English states- 
 men read enough history to know that it is the Irish 
 nation, not the Irish question, which has to be dealt 
 with, there is not the slightest chance of settled 
 friendship between the two peoples. The Irishman 
 regards himself as the heir of Irish history : the 
 Englishman is inclined to behave as though there 
 were no such thing as Irish history. Irish history, 
 however, exists as a witness in the Irishman's favour. 
 It is a history of the decadence of a nation even 
 the agrarian revolution has not put an end to this 
 decadence owing to the absence of freedom. In 
 the twentieth century, will England adopt an attitude 
 of hostility to national ideals in Ireland while, as 
 Mr Sydney Brooks has said, ideals of the same sort 
 would attract her enthusiasm and support in any 
 other country in Europe Poland, Bohemia or 
 Serbia? This is not only a question of justice, but, 
 as I have said, a question affecting world-politics 
 and the future peace of the world.
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 
 SINN FEIN 
 
 SINN FEIN is a policy which it is easy to understand 
 and easier still to misunderstand. Those who prefer 
 to misunderstand it say that "Sinn Fein" means 
 "Ourselves Alone." Mr Lloyd George and Mr 
 Herbert Samuel have both attacked it on this ground. 
 " S'inn Fein," unfortunately for them, does not mean 
 " Ourselves Alone " any more than " God Save the 
 King" means "God Save the King Alone." It 
 means simply " Ourselves." The name was chosen 
 to indicate not a policy of national selfishness but 
 a policy of national self-reliance in contrast to a 
 policy of waiting for the good-will of the British 
 Parliament to make Ireland a nation. Even when 
 the phrase, " Ourselves Alone " (" Sinn Fein 
 Amhain "), is used, it is used in the same sense. It 
 has no other meaning than that it is upon the 
 courage, self-sacrifice, unity and exertions of Irish- 
 men themselves that the future of the Irish nation 
 depends. " The basis of the policy," Mr Arthur 
 Griffith, who founded it, has said, " is national self- 
 reliance. No law and no series of laws can make 
 a nation out of a people which distrusts itself." The 
 spectacle of the statesmen of a great Empire which 
 has just added to its dominions Egypt, Mesopotamia, 
 Palestine and immense tracts of Africa, taunting 
 Ireland with pursuing a policy of selfish ambition is 
 more ironical than inspiring. 
 
 Another popular misunderstanding in regard to 
 
 53
 
 54 IRELAND A NATION 
 
 Sinn Fein arises from the belief that it is a policy of 
 armed insurrection. It is nothing of the sort. The 
 insurrection of Easter week, 1916, was not a Sinn 
 Fein insurrection, but a Fenian insurrection. As a 
 leading Sinn Fein writer, Mr P. S. O'Hegarty, says, 
 "of the seven men who signed the republican 
 proclamation only one was in any sense a Sinn 
 Feiner Sean MacDiarmada and most of the others 
 would have objected very strongly to being identified 
 with Sinn Fein." Luckily for Sinn Fein, however, 
 the journalists and the politicians all spoke of the 
 " Sinn Fein rebellion," and the Government arrested 
 and deported Sinn Feiners and Fenians indiscrimin- 
 ately. When the insane harshness with which the 
 leaders of the rebellion were treated produced a 
 reaction in Ireland, it was to Sinn Fein that the 
 people turned in their anger and resentment. 
 Fenianism was, after all, a secret movement, a 
 conspiracy, and it is not easy to organise a whole 
 nation into a secret society. Secret societies are 
 disliked both by the clergy and by the middle classes. 
 Sinn Fein, while sharing most of the ideas of the 
 Fenians, had the advantage of being an open move- 
 ment, which a priest or burgess could join without 
 committing himself to violent courses. Sinn Fein, it 
 should always be remembered, had originally come 
 into being as an alternative not only to constitutional 
 Nationalism but to Fenianism. True, Sinn Fein 
 differed from Fenianism only in regard to methods, 
 while it differed from the Parliamentarian National- 
 ists on a point of principle. Sinn Fein did not say 
 that the Fenian methods were wrong: it merely 
 doubted if they were practical. It did definitely say 
 that the Parliamentarian methods were wrong. Sinn 
 Fein did not say that it was immoral to take arms 
 against England : it did say that it was immoral for 
 Irishmen to attend an English Parliament and to
 
 SINN FEIN 55 
 
 take an oath of allegiance to the King of England. 
 Thus, though Sinn Fein may be called a passive- 
 resistance movement as opposed to an active- 
 resistance movement, it is easy to understand how it 
 has come to be confused in the minds both of states- 
 men and the public with physical-force Nationalism. 
 The confusion has been greatly increased by the fact 
 that, since the insurrection, the ablest of the physical- 
 force Nationalists have been content to work in the 
 passive-resistance ranks of Sinn Fein. Sinn Fein, 
 too, accepts the tradition of physical force in the 
 past, though it does not advocate it in the present. 
 It will be seen that, if Sinn Fein turns aside from 
 physical force, it is not for Tolstoyan reasons. If 
 Sinn Fein objects to physical force, it is because it 
 objects to failure. 
 
 One remembers with astonishment the fact that 
 the Sinn Fein policy, which has now conquered 
 three-fourths of Ireland, seemed already to be dead 
 and done for two or three years before the war. 
 The Irish people, like Sinn Fein itself, are lovers of 
 success, and at that time Mr Redmond's Home Rule 
 policy seemed likely to succeed. Irishmen, like the 
 members of other small nationalities, have wavered a 
 good deal between a policy of absolute separation 
 and a policy of Home Rule. They have been 
 passionately bent on winning their liberty, but they 
 have not been fanatical in their definition of liberty. 
 At one time they have been largely republican ; at 
 another time, they have been enthusiastic for a 
 Home Rule Parliament. Parnell converted them 
 into Home Rulers because he persuaded them he 
 could succeed in getting Home Rule. Unionist 
 agitators always make great play with the argument 
 that Irish Nationalists are all separatists at heart 
 and only consent to accept Home Rule, when they 
 do consent, with their tongues in their cheeks.
 
 56 IRELAND A NATION 
 
 Mr O'Hegarty apparently agrees with the Unionists 
 on this point. It is a misreading of the facts. The 
 Irish Parliamentary leaders, and their chief followers, 
 believe in Home Rule within the British Empire, not 
 because they cannot get separation, but because 
 they believe that the position of a free nation inside 
 the British Empire would be best for Ireland. 
 Parnell worked with the Fenians, especially after he 
 had been driven out of the leadership, but he was 
 clearly an anti-separatist. The same may be said of 
 Mr Dillon and Mr Redmond. These distinguished 
 Irishmen were not hypocrites. They said moderate 
 things because they believed moderate things. 
 Similarly, the Ireland that followed them was a 
 genuinely moderate Home Rule Ireland. Home 
 Rule at that time seemed a straight, smooth road to 
 liberty. When it was found to be merely a road of 
 insult and futility, barred by armed men under the 
 direction of ignominious persons such as " Galloper " 
 Smith (now Lord Chancellor of England), the 
 majority of Irishmen began to wonder whether the 
 steep and thorny way to an Irish Republic might 
 not after all afford more hopeful travelling. The 
 treatment of the insurgent leaders after Easter week 
 convinced them that the policy of England in 
 Ireland was one not of co-operation but of conquest. 
 They saw as in a sudden vision their country being 
 ruled by foreigners by the sword. The nation that 
 has been haunted by this terrific vision and that can 
 yet go on following moderate counsellors has not yet 
 appeared on the earth. 
 
 At the same time, I am inclined to think that the 
 part played by Easter week in the conversion of 
 Ireland to Sinn Fein has been exaggerated. The 
 European War did as much, I believe, to turn Irishmen 
 into Sinn Feiners as the Irish Rebellion did. The 
 leading statesmen in the Allied countries all became
 
 SINN FEIN 57 
 
 propagandists of the gospel of nationalism as opposed 
 to the gospel of aggressive imperialism. They de- 
 clared that the war was a war on behalf of the 
 small nations, and prominent men began preaching 
 separatism to small nations that had hitherto been 
 largely content with Home Rule ideals. As a result 
 of this propaganda, Bohemia is now an independent 
 republic under the presidency of the ex-Home Ruler, 
 Dr Masaryk. Poland is also politically free to a 
 degree that no responsible Pole would have deemed 
 possible a few years ago. Similarly, Finland, which 
 recently only desired its liberty inside the Russian 
 Empire, has as a result of the war been proclaimed 
 a separate republic. It will be seen that the move- 
 ment away from Home Rulism towards separatism 
 and republicanism is not a peculiarly Irish pheno- 
 menon. It has swept along with it every subject 
 nation in Europe. One cannot preach a crusade 
 for liberty without scattering abroad ideas of liberty. 
 One cannot fight for liberty without popularising it. 
 Whether it was a result of the war or the propaganda, 
 there is no question that during the last few years a 
 far more advanced philosophy of liberty has taken 
 root in the imagination of peoples. The right of 
 self-determination, of every people to choose their 
 own rulers, is now accepted in an absolute sense by 
 hundreds of thousands of thoughtful men and women 
 who not long ago would have dismissed it as too far 
 beyond the bounds of practicability to be worth 
 troubling about. In Ireland, as in Bohemia, Poland 
 and Finland, the war was bound to produce just 
 such an extension of the ideal of national liberty. 
 If the Sinn Fein policy had not already existed, 
 Ireland would have had to invent it in the course of 
 the war, even though there had been no Volunteers 
 in the country and no insurrection. As a matter of 
 fact, the war has added in one important respect
 
 58 IRELAND A NATION 
 
 to the ideals of Sinn Fein. It has made Sinn Fein 
 definitely republican. Before the war, official Sinn 
 Fein did not demand for Ireland a position of greater 
 independence in relation to England than Hungary 
 had in relation to Austria. The rank-and-file of 
 the movement were always republicans. The leaders 
 are now republicans as well. 
 
 Sinn Fein, however, as Mr O'Hegarty points out 
 in his able and useful little book, is not merely, or 
 perhaps even mainly, a political movement. It is 
 an attempt to rebuild a nation, and its policy is even 
 more constructive in purpose than separatist. Mr 
 O'Hegarty thinks of it as the child not of Fenianism 
 so much as of the Gaelic League. To the Sinn 
 Feiner the history of the past seven hundred years 
 is the record of the war waged by English kultur 
 on Irish civilisation. The death of Irish civilisation 
 seems to him an even more appalling tragedy than 
 the death of Irish liberty. Hence he regards the 
 foundation of the Gaelic League in 1893 as a far 
 more important event in history than anything 
 connected with the name of O'Connell or Parnell, 
 or even of Wolfe Tone or John Mitchel. The Gaelic 
 League began with the ideal of saving the Irish 
 speech and culture in the already Irish-speaking 
 districts. Its vision has grown till it now dreams 
 of an Ireland that has won back its past from the 
 disasters of seven centuries, and that will renew 
 its connections with those sources of the national 
 genius which have already given the world Irish 
 legend, Irish music and Irish imaginative speech. 
 Sinn Fein in the noblest of its aspects is but 
 a Nationalist adaptation of the saying : " The 
 kingdom of heaven is within you." It is founded 
 on a belief that each nation has a sort of "inner, 
 light," fidelity to which alone will save it. The 
 Sinn Feiner is not, as some of his critics allege,
 
 SINN FEIN 59 
 
 opposed to the brotherhood of nations. He is 
 opposed merely to the subjection of nations. He 
 believes that the genius, culture and speech of every 
 nation is worth preserving, and that to consent to 
 servitude to a foreign kultur is a sin against the 
 light. Thus his objection to the Anglicisation of 
 Ireland is not an objection to Shakespeare or even 
 to Mr Wells. It is an objection to the destruction 
 of Irish civilisation. Most Englishmen refuse to 
 believe that such a thing ever existed. One would 
 have thought it would be impossible even to 
 listen to a traditional Irish song without knowing 
 better. 
 
 It is easy to see how the belief in the equal rights 
 of civilisations was bound to express itself politically 
 as separatism. The Sinn Feiner believes in the right 
 of Ireland to be a sovereign nation in a society of 
 sovereign nations. He would, no doubt, acquiesce 
 in limitations of national sovereignty if the citizens 
 of all the other nations did the same. But no one 
 can understand Sinn Fein who does not see that it 
 is based on the view that Ireland is a historic 
 nation with the same rights to independence and 
 self-expression that England or France or Serbia or 
 Bohemia has. It is because he believes this that the 
 Sinn Feiner regards abstention from the House of 
 Commons as so important a part of his programme. 
 The thought of going to the House of Commons and 
 swearing allegiance to King George fills him with 
 the same horror as an Englishman would have felt 
 during the war at the thought of going to the 
 Reichstag and taking an oath of allegiance to 
 the Kaiser. He thinks that to do such a thing 
 would be to drag his country under the yoke 
 before the eyes of mankind. That is the essence 
 of the Sinn Fein point of view. Many writers 
 and speakers are content to dismiss Sinn Fein as
 
 60 IRELAND A NATION 
 
 " lunacy." It would be better to inquire what it 
 really is. To dismiss as lunacy a movement that 
 has captured the greater part of a nation and not 
 merely the fanatics, but the average intelligent, 
 cautious and peace-loving citizens is to beg the 
 question. 
 
 As to what would happen to Sinn Fein if a 
 "Dominion Home Rule" constitution were granted 
 to Ireland the prophets differ. The mass of opinion 
 favours the belief that the Irish people would accept 
 and work such a constitution. Would Sinn Fein 
 survive? That, of course, is an entirely different 
 question from " Ought it to survive ? " Prophets 
 differ as regards the ultimate destiny of Ireland as 
 they differ regarding the ultimate destiny of South 
 Africa. There would certainly ensue great battles 
 for making the schools and universities Irish, for 
 the protection of Irish industries, for the creation of 
 direct communication with the other countries of 
 the world. Orthodox Sinn Fein is at present 
 Protectionist and may continue so even in a self- 
 governed Ireland, but Labour (which is also in a 
 sense Sinn Fein) may easily find itself in the 
 opposite camp on this point. These, however, are 
 problems for the future. Sinn Fein at present 
 contains both reactionary and progressive elements, 
 and as a party it might conceivably develop in 
 either direction. At present it is neither Con- 
 servative nor democratic, neither clerical nor anti- 
 clerical, neither capitalist nor labourist. It is an 
 attempt to unite men of conflicting schools of 
 thought on the common policy of rebuilding the 
 Irish nation with Irish brains and hands, and of 
 organising the people to work out their own salva- 
 tion on the soil of Ireland. In another aspect, it 
 is a denial of the right of England to rule Ireland 
 and a policy of refusing to acquiesce in English rule
 
 SINN FEIN 61 
 
 by attending Parliament, entering the Army, or 
 recognising the right of English-appointed judges 
 to sit in trial over Irishmen. It seems to me to be 
 the most remarkable and also the most promising 
 political experiment in Irish history.
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 
 THE INSURRECTION OF 1916 
 
 IF Matthew Arnold had been alive, he would no 
 doubt have seen in the last Irish insurrection but 
 another confirmation of his theory that the Celt 
 is a person always ready to react against the des- 
 potism of fact. He would have regarded it as a 
 typically Celtic adventure for a few hundred Irish- 
 men to declare war upon the British Empire at a 
 moment when the British Empire was at least ten 
 times more powerful in men, guns and munitions 
 than she had ever been in history. He would hardly 
 have been surprised that a body of Celts should have 
 overlooked the fact that rifles are as useless against 
 modern artillery as pikes are against rifles. And 
 with sadly ironical lips he would have quoted his 
 favourite sentence from Ossian : " They went forth 
 to the war, but they always fell." Since Matthew 
 Arnold's day, we have come to doubt the racial 
 explanation of everything that bewilders us in Irish 
 character and politics. For one thing many of the 
 authorities on race have denied that the Irishman 
 is, apart from the inhabitants of certain western 
 seaboards, a Celt at all. Professor A. C. Haddon has 
 even gone as far as to assert that there is more 
 Celtic blood in England than in Ireland. This may 
 seem a mere game of professors, but it is all to the 
 good in so far as it prevents Englishmen from fail- 
 ing to see their own responsibility for the unrest of 
 
 62
 
 THE INSURRECTION OF 1916 63 
 
 Ireland. The ruling fact which England or any 
 other country which wishes to understand Ireland 
 has got to recognise is that Ireland is the home, not 
 of a mob of Celts, but of a nation of Irishmen. 
 
 That is the leading fact about Ireland to-day, as 
 it has been for centuries. Yet it is a fact which the 
 authorities in Ireland have been reluctant to admit, 
 even since the passing of the Home Rule Bill. The 
 passing of the Home Rule Bill in the early months 
 of the war left Ireland with Home Rule on paper 
 and with Dublin Castle in reality. At the same 
 time the great majority of the Nationalists, as well 
 as the Unionists, ranged themselves, as I have already 
 said, with England, France and Belgium, in the war 
 against Germany. In the first place they regarded 
 the case of Belgium as somewhat analogous to the 
 case of Ireland. In the second place they believed 
 that upon their attitude at this crisis depended the 
 freedom of Ireland still more than the freedom of 
 Belgium. There was, to be sure, a dissentient 
 minority even at the beginning of the war. But if 
 Ireland had been granted Home Rule in the week 
 in which the war broke out, that minority would 
 never have risen above a handful. I do not mean 
 that Home Rule would have been accepted as a 
 final national settlement by the Sinn Fein National- 
 ists, but that the Sinn Feiners would have joined 
 enthusiastically with the Home Rule majority in 
 making self-government a success. Unhappily, Sir 
 Edward Carson barred the way with a hundred 
 thousand armed Ulstermen. He demanded not only 
 that Ireland should not have immediate Home Rule, 
 but that the Home Rule Bill should not be passed 
 into law while the war lasted. The result was a 
 compromise by which Home Rule was passed into 
 law, but the law was not to come into operation till 
 the war was over. Home Rule, as Sir Edward
 
 64 IRELAND A NATION 
 
 boasted to his followers, had become an Act, but 
 not a fact. That was one of the fatal successes of 
 Sir Edward Carson which led almost inevitably to 
 the insurrection of Easter Monday. 
 
 Sir Edward Carson and his armed men had the 
 good fortune never to fire a shot, because nobody 
 ever opposed them. At the time of their gun-running 
 exploit at Larne, they took policemen and custom- 
 house officers prisoners ; they took possession of 
 railway stations ; they earthed the telegraph system ; 
 they held the roads with armed sentries. Had they 
 been interfered with by soldiers and policemen, 
 either they would have shot them or they would 
 have given in. However, it was the authorities that 
 gave in, and Carsonism, with its boatload of arms 
 from Germany, enjoyed a bloodless triumph. But 
 it was not only Carsonism that triumphed on this 
 occasion ; it was the idea of physical force. Every- 
 body of ordinary intelligence knew that the physical 
 force of Ulster could do nothing against the physical 
 force of a united England. But England did not 
 happen to be united. Not only did a great part of 
 the English Press and English society offer un- 
 limited support to Ulster, but even the army was 
 tampered with, and officers were told that it was un- 
 thinkable that they should be asked to shoot down 
 their fellow-subjects (an Irishman of the north being, 
 apparently, a fellow-subject, but an Irishman of the 
 south not). Clearly, the Ulster Volunteer Force 
 was merely the spear-head on a shaft consisting of 
 much of the English aristocracy and plutocracy, 
 and it was aimed straight at the heart of Irish 
 nationality. The Liberal Government despite 
 protests from their followers looked on, less like 
 masters of the situation than like spectators with 
 their mouths open. Many Nationalists suddenly 
 became alarmed lest the argument of arms was
 
 THE INSURRECTION OF 1916 65 
 
 the only argument that was going to be listened to, 
 and it was the only argument in favour of self- 
 government with which they had neglected to provide 
 themselves. 
 
 The first news the general public heard of the 
 introduction of arms into politics in the south of 
 Ireland related, not to orthodox Nationalists, but 
 to unskilled labourers in Dublin. Only a few 
 months before the war, a terrible six months' strike 
 had been brought to a close in Dublin, to the huge 
 delight of the employers and some leading Sinn 
 Feiners who believed they had crushed labour 
 agitation in Ireland for a life-time. Before the strike 
 was over, however, the Irish Citizen Army had been 
 formed, and the part played by this body under the 
 leadership of James Connolly in the recent insurrec- 
 tion suggests the madness of crushing the poor with 
 too unreflecting a ruthlessness. To the Irish Citizen 
 Army insurrection must have presented itself as 
 the only means of resurrection. Social revolution, 
 at least as much as national revolution, was their 
 aim. They were Socialists and Republicans as well 
 as Nationalists. 
 
 But there was another armed body of Nationalists 
 which came into existence at the same time as the 
 Irish Citizen Army, or a little earlier. This was 
 the National Volunteers which, though Mr Redmond 
 is said to have been opposed to its formation, 
 attracted into its ranks moderate as well as extreme 
 Nationalists those who were " loyal " and those 
 who were " disloyal " all of them with the single 
 purpose of defending the unity and freedom of 
 Ireland with their lives. At first Mr Redmond 
 stood apart from it ; then, as it grew, he saw he 
 must either enter it or see a rival power taking 
 control of the Nationalist movement. He conse- 
 quently assumed control of the Volunteers, who were
 
 66 IRELAND A NATION 
 
 drawn, indeed, for the most part, from the ranks of 
 his own followers. 
 
 Then came the war and no Home Rule. Mr 
 Redmond promised the Government the unqualified 
 support of Ireland in the war, and offered the 
 National Volunteers as a home-defence force in 
 union with the Ulster Volunteers. His offer was 
 not accepted by the Government ; at the same time 
 a number of the National Volunteer leaders declared 
 that Mr Redmond had no right to make it, and even 
 regarded it as an attempt to bring them uncon- 
 ditionally under the power of the British Government. 
 They therefore seceded and organised themselves 
 into a new body, the Irish Volunteers, under the 
 presidency of Professor Eoin MacNeill, who was 
 understood to be not a Sinn Feiner but a Home 
 Ruler in politics. They took the view that in the 
 war Ireland an Ireland lacking the ABC of self- 
 government should remain neutral, just as certain 
 Canadian Nationalists held that Canada should 
 remain neutral. But as to their being then in any 
 large degree pro-German, or contemplating an in- 
 surrection during the war, that is a fable. Un- 
 doubtedly, there were among them some who hated 
 England sufficiently to be pro-anybody-you- please, 
 and were filled with the belief that to die for Ireland 
 even in a hopeless battle would in some mystical 
 way help their country to become free. But these 
 were a minority : they were extremists among ex- 
 tremists. The purpose that held the Irish Volunteers 
 together was a defensive, not an offensive, purpose. 
 The fact that the wisest and ablest of their leaders 
 were opposed to the insurrection suggests that it 
 was not the result of a plan preconcerted and long 
 agreed upon by the Volunteers. 
 
 How then was the insurrection brought about ? 
 Some declare that it was all a German plot. Others
 
 THE INSURRECTION OF 1916 67 
 
 say that it was provoked by the authorities (or by 
 certain subordinates). Others again hold that the 
 less prudent leaders rushed the Volunteers into a 
 hopeless venture in a spirit (as it has been described) 
 of Christian Bushido. Others say that the rank and 
 file of the Volunteers could never have been persuaded 
 into so desperate an enterprise if they had not been 
 convinced that the Government was about to attempt 
 to disarm them. Certainly rumours of disarmament 
 had been frequent, and the week before the insurrec- 
 tion a document was published containing a detailed 
 plan for the suppression of the Volunteers. This has 
 since been officially declared to be a forgery, but one 
 may be certain that the great mass of the Volunteers 
 believed it to be genuine. Who was the author of 
 the document ? Without the document, some people 
 hold, there might have been no rising. Even some 
 of the leaders who took part in the rising and 
 were afterwards shot are said to have hesitated to 
 give their voice for it till the last moment. 
 
 Mr Birrell is much blamed for not having prevented 
 the insurrection. Dublin Castle is supposed under 
 his influence to have governed Ireland with rose-water 
 instead of the mailed fist. This is contrary to the 
 fact. Armed bodies of Irishmen unquestionably 
 enjoyed unparalleled freedom of marching and 
 manoeuvring where they pleased. But Dublin 
 Castle, which never accepted the Birrell policy, 
 harried most of them individually, ordered the 
 deportation of some, and suppressed most of their 
 papers. Neither Dublin Castle nor the War Office 
 was willing to recognise the fact that, now that 
 the Home Rule Bill had passed, Ireland was a 
 nation by Act of Parliament, to leave any diviner 
 authority out of consideration. Irishmen wrote to 
 the English Press again and again, urging that it was 
 madness to treat Ireland not as a nation but as a sort
 
 68 IRELAND A NATION 
 
 of naughty English shire. They foretold that blood- 
 shed was almost inevitable if the anti-national spirit 
 went too far. But few of them foresaw a definite 
 insurrection. When it came, it was a tragic collision 
 of the anti-English with the anti-Irish spirit of the 
 unyielding with the unyielding. It might not have 
 taken place if the English Government as a pledge 
 of good faith had even begun to reconstruct the 
 Irish Parliament House in preparation for the 
 first Home Rule Parliament. But the Volunteers 
 began by believing that Home Rule was never 
 coming and ended by believing, so to speak, that it 
 would not be worth taking when it came. I refer, 
 of course, to the rank and file. The believers in a 
 more intransigent nationalism would have remained 
 in a small minority, even in the Volunteers, if the 
 suspicion that Ireland was going to be tricked out of 
 Home Rule had not become widespread. 
 
 I have attempted to explain the insurrection rather 
 than to estimate it in terms of good and evil. But 
 there is no doubt that the majority of Nationalists, 
 on first hearing of it, regarded it as an unqualified 
 evil. They looked on it as a rebellion, not against 
 England, but against Ireland. They honoured the 
 courage and idealism of young men who were eager 
 to die for their country, but they felt that not for the 
 first time in history men with good intentions had 
 blundered. "It is the first time in history," one of 
 them said to me, "that Irish rebels have been 'bad 
 Europeans.'" The general opinion in Ireland on 
 the insurrection may not have been based on 
 European considerations, but it was none the less 
 hostile. But the executions of the leaders of the 
 revolt, doled out (as it were) day after day, trans- 
 formed condemnation of the insurrection into horror 
 at the Bloody Assize which followed it. The courts 
 martial converted the revolt of a minority into
 
 THE INSURRECTION OF 1916 69 
 
 an episode in national history. They made people 
 who had looked on the insurrection with detestation 
 see the leaders in the blazing light of martyrdom. 
 One is aware of a transformation of this sort in one's 
 own mind. If clemency like Botha's had been 
 exercised, thousands of Nationalists would have re- 
 garded the insurgents as brave men unwittingly doing 
 a great injury to Ireland. As it is, one can see them 
 now only as Irishmen lined up against a wall and 
 dying for Ireland, dying for a dream at the hands of 
 men who did not understand, or wish to understand, 
 the dream. Never was England madder than to add 
 in this way to the bitter memories that already 
 existed in Ireland. Probably, however, not a single 
 one of the soldiers who sat on those fatal courts 
 martial had ever read a line of Irish history. If 
 they had, they would hardly have dared to order a 
 shot to be fired. 
 
 II 
 
 Lord Dunsany, himself an Irish soldier, in the 
 course of an introduction to a book of verse by an- 
 other Irish soldier, Francis Ledwidge, is careful to 
 warn the English reader in regard to one or two 
 poems which may seem to have an air of sedition 
 about them. These poems, which are contained in a 
 volume called Songs of Peace, are laments for Thomas 
 MacDonagh, Joseph Plunkett and the other men of 
 letters who were executed after the Dublin rising. 
 One of them, " The Blackbirds," begins : 
 
 I heard the Poor Old Woman say : 
 
 " At break of day the fowler came, 
 And took my blackbirds from their songs, 
 
 Who loved me well through shame and blame." 
 
 And it goes on to picture the skylark and other birds 
 doing honour to the dead singers. Lord Dunsany,
 
 70 IRELAND A NATION 
 
 fearing that such poems may be misunderstood, begs 
 the reader " rather than attribute curious sympathies 
 to this brave young Irish soldier, . . . to consider the 
 irresistible attraction that a lost cause has for almost 
 any Irishman." For my part, I think it is better that 
 everyone should realise that the Irish soldier, like 
 the Irish civilian, has in fact " curious sympathies," 
 and that to ignore these sympathies, as they were 
 ignored again and again in the course of the war, and 
 especially in the harsh measures that were taken after 
 the Easter rising, is political lunacy. Even the most 
 ordinary worldly wisdom, I should have thought, 
 would suggest that to give surrendered foes an 
 opportunity to reveal their genius for dying nobly 
 is to burn up all the mistakes of their lives in the 
 blazing glory of their deaths. The Irish insurrection 
 was not a success until fifteen men had been shot and 
 one hanged for it. How far it has become a success 
 since then may be judged by the fact that a corporal 
 in the British army wrote poems " in barracks " in 
 praise of the dead leaders. It is not that he was a 
 pro-German or a hater of England. Irishmen who felt 
 not only a patriotism of Ireland but a patriotism of 
 Europe in the war, and who would have regarded a 
 German victory as one of the greatest catastrophes of 
 history, were in most cases, I think, far more horrified 
 by the methods by which the insurrection was sup- 
 pressed than by the insurrection. It is certainly the 
 tragic close of the insurrection which has made it 
 already so exciting a theme for historians. 
 
 The leading historians of the insurrection, Messrs 
 W. B. Wells and N. Marlowe, contend that "the 
 Rebellion of 1916 was . . . the best conceived and, 
 up to a certain point, the best executed in the whole 
 history of Irish risings," and that the plans of the 
 leaders, " concerted with Germany's agents, displayed 
 a strategic instinct of a high order." They suggest
 
 THE INSURRECTION OF 1916 71 
 
 that, " but for a series of accidents, it might easily 
 have confronted not Ireland alone, but the whole 
 Kingdom, with the gravest menace that it has so far 
 encountered in the great war." Their opening 
 chapter on Ireland's strategic importance in relation 
 especially to British sea-power strikes the keynote 
 of their book. They apparently regard the plans of 
 the insurgent leaders as having seriously threatened 
 both British sea-power and British land-power. But 
 it seems to me that, while the British navy was 
 supreme on the seas and the majority of the Irish 
 people sympathetic to the cause of the Allies, the 
 menace to British sea-power could only be infinitesimal. 
 If Ireland were hostile, whether under the Union or 
 whether in enjoyment of the widest independence, 
 she could no doubt give assistance to German sub- 
 marines in her many bays. But no Irish State would 
 ever tolerate that. And as for the threat to British 
 land-power, the war has shown, as Mr. H. G. Wells 
 pointed out the other day, that successful war has 
 now become impossible for any non-industrialised 
 population, and it is a hundred times more impossible 
 for any population which does not even possess 
 artillery and the means of constantly renewing its 
 stores of munitions. No doubt, had a German sub- 
 marine fleet at work in the Irish Sea been able to 
 prevent English transports from crossing to Dublin, 
 and had an effective attack by the German Fleet 
 on the east coast of England deprived the British 
 Government at the same time of the power to send a 
 sufficient number of soldiers over to Ireland the in- 
 surrection would have taken longer to suppress, but 
 with only one side armed with modern artillery the 
 work of suppression could not have lasted many days. 
 This point seems to me to need to be emphasised, as 
 the historians blame the British Government for 
 making light to the world of the seriousness of the
 
 72 IRELAND A NATION 
 
 insurrection. " Its policy of minimising the gravity 
 of the Rebellion," they write, " inevitably threw into 
 disproportionately high relief the punishment inflicted 
 on the leaders of the rising, and the measures taken 
 for the pacification of Ireland." They express no 
 opinion on the wisdom or justice of the severe 
 measures of the authorities. But they suggest that 
 a large section of Irish opinion thought the punish- 
 ments excessive only because they were led to regard 
 the rebellion as just a little one. I doubt that. 
 
 Whether one agrees with it or not, however, one 
 follows with intense interest the reconstruction of 
 the Irish rebellion as an incident of European signi- 
 ficance, like the Irish War for James II. and the plan 
 of the United Irishmen for calling in Napoleon. The 
 authors suggest that there was not "adequate 
 material for a serious Irish rebellion " in the situation, 
 had it not been for "external stimulus and support." 
 On the other hand, the suppression of the Larkinites, 
 the methods of Sir Edward Carson, the Curragh 
 " mutiny," and the formation of the Coalition Govern- 
 ment had all contributed to an atmosphere of unrest 
 and angry despair in many parts of Ireland which 
 had not until then shown any revolutionary leanings. 
 Then there was the infection of the war spirit in a 
 time of almost universal war. The historian has to 
 take account of a hundred causes which combined 
 to bring matters to a head. I notice that Messrs 
 Wells and Marlowe are of opinion that even the 
 over-taxation of Ireland had something to do with 
 leading up to the outbreak. 
 
 "With the increase of taxation since the outbreak 
 of the war, Ireland was now paying for Irish ex- 
 penditure to the full, and in addition ,5,000,000 
 annually as an Imperial contribution, although it 
 had been argued during the debates on the Home
 
 THE INSURRECTION OF 1916 73 
 
 Rule Bill, both by the Unionists and Liberals, that 
 Ireland was then taxed to the utmost, and the only 
 possible road to solvency in a self-governed Ireland 
 would be by way of economies in administration. . . . 
 Nor did the money go, as it went in England, to the 
 stimulation of war industries." 
 
 "The Irish Party at this time," they hold, "would 
 probably have taken some of the wind out of the 
 revolutionists' sails if they had attacked the Budget 
 and withdrawn their support from the Government." 
 Certainly the financial grievance was a contributory 
 cause of Irish discontent, but hardly to the point of 
 revolution. 
 
 As to how far the Volunteers ever intended 
 revolution, instead of mere armed defence against 
 the policy of Unionism, there is as yet no means of 
 judging. Some of the leaders did not attempt to 
 conceal their belief that revolution, if it could not 
 free Ireland, would at least help Ireland on its way 
 towards freedom. But Messrs Wells and Marlowe 
 hold, with the majority of those who have written on 
 the subject, that the rank and file of the Volunteers 
 did not know on Easter Monday that an insurrection 
 was about to take place. " Most of the men who 
 assembled under the instructions of their Com- 
 mandants at the various centres at 10 o'clock on 
 the morning of Easter Monday," they declare, 
 "entertained no other idea than that they were to 
 take part, as announced, in a parade or route march ; 
 and it says much for the discipline of the Volunteers 
 that they obeyed loyally and with alacrity the 
 summons of the leaders which called them at high 
 noon to engage them in armed rebellion against the 
 King." As is well known, even the leaders were 
 at variance as to the wisdom of the insurrection. 
 " Finally the argument of the labour element pre-
 
 74 IRELAND A NATION 
 
 vailed, and by a small majority the council of the 
 rebel leaders decided upon immediate action." 
 Messrs Wells and Marlowe contend, however, that, 
 though certain labour leaders advocated insurrection, 
 the labouring classes were not with them. " The 
 women of the slums, many of them the wives of 
 soldiers, were enraged by the Republican proclamation 
 and attacked the rebel leaders before the Post Office 
 with bottles and a most violent language." There 
 is no doubt, as Sir Morgan O'Connell, a Unionist 
 landlord, stated before the Rebellion Commission, 
 that "when the war started, the vast majority of 
 Irishmen were in sympathy with England," even 
 though in the Curragh period, as is suggested else- 
 where, the opinion forced itself on many people that 
 " English military power was in the last resort the 
 enemy of Irish nationality." Even after years of 
 what Irishmen regarded as unjust treatment, Messrs 
 Wells and Marlowe assure us, " the mass of popular 
 opinion manifested itself unmistakably as not with 
 the rebels." 
 
 Their book will, I think, take its place as the 
 standard history of Easter week for many years to 
 come. It is not a piece of ephemeral journalism, but 
 an able essay in history. The authors seldom accept 
 any statement for which they cannot produce evi- 
 dence, though occasionally they do publish such a 
 paragraph as : " The most conspicuous defect in the 
 military organisation of the Volunteers was the lack 
 of efficient staff work, but in this department the 
 resources of Germany were called in aid, and 
 voluminous memoranda on the higher direction of 
 affairs reached the headquarters through various 
 channels from Washington and Berlin." On the 
 other hand, they will not accept the theory a theory 
 for which there is abundant evidence that Sir Roger 
 Casement went to Ireland to prevent the rising, not
 
 THE INSURRECTION OF 1916 75 
 
 to advocate or lead it. The fact that he did not 
 plead this at his trial a fact urged by Messrs Wells 
 and Marlowe against the theory is said to have 
 been due to his generous feeling that he could not 
 publicly dissociate himself from men who had died 
 for the same ideals as his own.
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 
 ULSTER: THE FACTS OF THE CASE 
 
 ULSTER'S fear of Home Rule or any other form of 
 national governnent is a much simpler and more 
 intelligible thing than is sometimes admitted. What 
 the Ulsterman fears most of all is that under Home 
 Rule he will not enjoy self-government. He is 
 sometimes painted as a person who is determined 
 at all costs not to surrender a position of ascendancy 
 for one of equality. But that is hardly fair to the 
 average Ulsterman. He has usually allowed himself 
 to be led by men who believed in the gospel of the 
 top-dog and did their best to live up to it ; but there 
 have also always been tens of thousands of Ulster- 
 men who were instinctively democrats, and who would 
 never have opposed Home Rule but for the dread 
 that it would mean not the reign of equality but the 
 reign of a new sort of ascendancy. What men of 
 this kind fear is that in an Irish Parliament they 
 will be given laws they do not want, like a subject 
 people. 
 
 Oddly enough, they argue that the Irishman enjoys 
 equality in the "United Kingdom" because he has 
 a vote and is allowed to send representatives to the 
 Parliament in London. They fail to see that accord- 
 ing to this argument the Ulsterman must enjoy 
 equality in a self-governed Ireland because he will 
 have a vote and be able to send representatives to 
 the Parliament in Dublin. As a Nationalist, I 
 naturally hold that freedom consists in something 
 
 76
 
 ULSTER : THE FACTS OF THE CASE 77 
 
 more than the right to send representatives to 
 somebody else's Parliament. But the point that 
 has just been made is worth making as a reminder 
 to the Ulsterman that, even were the worst to come 
 to the worst, an Ulster Party in a Dublin Parliament 
 would be proportionately far larger and more power- 
 ful than an Irish Party in the present British House 
 of Commons. An Ulster Party could easily wreck 
 any Irish Parliament that attempted injustice to 
 Ulster. 
 
 It may be worth inquiring, however, whether there 
 are any grounds for the fear of the moderate Ulster- 
 man I use the word " Ulsterman," of course, in the 
 customary political sense that he will not enjoy 
 self-government in a self-governed Ireland. He 
 has been legislated for to some extent by Irish 
 Nationalists in the past. Which of the laws 
 demanded and won by Irish Nationalists in the 
 last fifty years has been contrary to the wishes 
 of the ordinary Ulsterman ? Land Act after Land 
 Act has been gained. Who can deny that the 
 Land Acts represent the wishes of the Presbyterian 
 farmers of County Antrim as well as of the Catholics 
 of County Galway ? Orange tenants, again, are as 
 quick to take advantage of the Town Tenants Act 
 as if they lived in Tipperary and went to Mass. It 
 would be impossible, I think, to name a single law 
 agitated for and won by Nationalist Irishmen in 
 the last fifty years which the ordinary Ulster 
 Protestant really would like to see repealed. The 
 Ulsterman's quarrel with the Nationalists is not 
 with the laws they have made or compelled to be 
 made. It is with the laws he imagines they would 
 like to make if they dared. His terror of Nationalism 
 is not based on the legislative record of Nationalism 
 (which consists of Land Acts, the Town Tenants Act, 
 Acts about trade-marks, harbours, local government
 
 78 IRELAND A NATION 
 
 and education), but on some such fantastic theory 
 as that if he marries a Catholic (whom he does 
 not, except in a very rare instance, want to marry) 
 an Irish Parliament will declare the marriage in- 
 valid. He thinks of Nationalists chiefly as people 
 who desire to penalise him. He thinks, too, that 
 even if they would not penalise him through vindic- 
 tiveness, they would ruin him through incompetence. 
 
 The worst of illusions of this kind is that they 
 are so difficult to destroy. They have the strength 
 of principles, not of arguments. Reason is almost 
 powerless against them. All the same, one is bound 
 to go on reasoning. It is necessary to keep on 
 asking the Unionist Ulsterman to mention any one 
 point in regard to which the legislative ideals of 
 North and South have clashed in the past. If 
 Ulster had enjoyed complete self-government in 
 the past, would she have passed the laws for which 
 Nationalists have been responsible, or would she 
 have been content with the laws which satisfied 
 the Ulster Tory leaders? It is one of the paradoxes 
 of the Irish situation that in most matters the 
 Ulsterman has been far more in sympathy with 
 the legislative policy of the Nationalists than with 
 that of his own leaders. Lord Londonderry and 
 Col. Saunderson had his vote, but Parnell and Davitt 
 represented his ideals, so far at least as the land 
 was concerned. The division between Ulster and 
 the South has for the most part not been a division 
 of interests, but a division of political leaders. 
 
 As regards the future also, our interests are at 
 one. Ireland as a whole is an undeveloped country. 
 Ulster and Munster are developed in a sense in 
 which Connaught is not. But it is broadly true of 
 the whole country, North and South, that its re- 
 sources, intellectual and material, have been left 
 in a state of neglect, and that even the richest parts
 
 ULSTER : THE FACTS OF THE CASE 79 
 
 of Ulster are not rich according, say, to English and 
 Scottish standards. The modern world is setting 
 new standards of efficiency and education, and 
 no people that does not take its own problems in 
 hand and devote its united energies to solving them 
 can expect to take its place among civilised and 
 successful peoples. Even if Ulster did not come 
 into an Irish Parliament she would have to learn to 
 manage her own affairs. England has even now no 
 time to manage Ulster land and Ulster education. 
 All she can do is to place matters of this kind 
 in the hands of a board. With the war over she 
 has less time than ever to devote to the solution 
 of the special problems of Ulster or of any other 
 part of Ireland. If the Ulsterman wants to find 
 eager allies in the work of draining the Bann, he 
 will find them among the Irish Nationalists, not 
 among even the best-intentioned English members. 
 To the Englishman, the Bann drainage is a question 
 of as little interest as the drainage of a district in 
 China or Australia. To every Irishman it is a home 
 problem, a thing about which one can get excited. 
 It is a fact of human nature that problems can only 
 be solved by those who are sufficiently interested in 
 them to get excited about them. 
 
 The chief function of an Irish Parliament will be 
 to focus the national mind on the various national 
 problems. The Ulsterman may protest that Ulster 
 problems are not the same as Irish problems. But 
 the fact that Ulstermen have consentingly lived for 
 so many years past under Irish laws, not English 
 laws, as regards land, education, temperance, etc., 
 suggests that what Ulster wants in all these matters 
 is more like what Ireland wants than like what 
 England wants. Had Ulster felt herself to be a 
 part of Great Britain rather than of Ireland, she 
 would long ago have insisted on being excluded
 
 8o IRELAND A NATION 
 
 from all this specially Irish legislation. By remain- 
 ing without protest under Irish laws she has, it 
 seems to me, confessed her unity of interests with 
 the rest of Ireland. 
 
 The only matter in regard to which I can imagine 
 any serious difference of ideal between Ulster and 
 the rest of Ireland is education. And in regard to 
 education it seems to me obvious that Ulster can 
 obtain complete provincial autonomy if she wishes 
 it. The encouragement of industrial life, however, 
 the discovery of new methods of increasing the food 
 supply, the raising of the level of health and wealth 
 and happiness for all the people these are objects 
 upon which the best brains of all the four provinces 
 can concentrate, without any clash of principle. In 
 regard to these objects, indeed, I hold that Ulster 
 can only realise herself fully if she is willing to 
 play her part in the general resurrection of Ireland. 
 Outside Ireland she would merely be a backward 
 and outlying province of Great Britain, with all her 
 best sons emigrating to some happier soil. As part 
 of the Irish nation, she will be the pioneer province 
 of a country with immense untapped resources of 
 every kind a country which will attract the young 
 and the enterprising instead of frightening them 
 away. She will enjoy self-government because she 
 will not she does not even now feel that her 
 interests demand different laws from the interests 
 of the rest of Ireland, and she will have a full share 
 in making those laws. Judging by the way in which 
 Ulster has lived under Irish law up till the present, 
 she can never possibly feel a stranger, a nuisance, 
 a bore, a bottom dog, a mere hostile element with 
 different needs, in the Dublin Parliament, as Ireland 
 has so often felt in the British House of Commons. 
 Ulster is an integral part of Ireland to a degree to 
 which Ireland has never been an integral part of
 
 ULSTER : THE FACTS OF THE CASE 81 
 
 the " United Kingdom." She has never objected 
 to Irish laws, but only to an Irish Parliament. She 
 will have no objection to an Irish Parliament either, 
 as soon as she realises that it will be, not an instru- 
 ment for her subjection, but an instrument for the 
 expression of her desires, her energies and her ideals. 
 Most people outside Ulster take it for granted that 
 Ulster is much more likely to dominate an Irish 
 Parliament than to be dominated by it. One thing 
 is certain. She will be able to impress her will on 
 Dublin far more powerfully and effectively than 
 Lancashire impresses her will on London. Can self- 
 government go further than that ? 

 
 CHAPTER IX 
 
 THE HESITATING SORT OF LIBERAL AND IRISH 
 SELF-DETERMINATION 
 
 No man is greatly to be blamed for being in a 
 muddle in years in which the whole frame of things 
 has been tottering. I am convinced, however, that 
 a great deal of the muddled thinking of the time 
 is due, not to the general confusion of events, but 
 merely to a confusion of words. I do not see how 
 it is possible for political thought to become clear 
 until we have ceased to give, as all of us sometimes 
 give, the same word two opposite meanings. The 
 word " Nationalism " is in this respect the most 
 deceptive piece in the political vocabulary. Some- 
 times it is used to mean genuine Nationalism ; 
 sometimes it means Imperialism, which is the 
 contrary of Nationalism. I realise that Nationalism 
 may easily develop into Imperialism, just as self- 
 confidence may easily develop through self-conceit 
 into the spirit of self-aggrandisement There is no 
 virtue so secure that it cannot be altered into a denial 
 of itself. Has not the very love of God been 
 identified with the passion of persecution, cruelty, 
 hate and murder? It should be the first duty of 
 thinkers to prevent this fraud of words. Exchange 
 of thought is almost impossible with a man who, 
 when he says " white," means " black," and, when he 
 says Lord Birkenhead, means Mr George Lansbury. 
 It becomes quite impossible if, when he says Lord 
 
 82
 
 IRISH SELF-DETERMINATION 83 
 
 Birkenhead he means sometimes Mr George 
 Lansbury and sometimes Lord Birkenhead. 
 
 Yet that is the position as regards the use of the 
 word Nationalism by practically everybody at one 
 time or another. It is an undoubted fact that the 
 party of expansion in various countries calls itself 
 Nationalist when it should say Imperialist. But 
 political philosophers should not allow themselves to 
 be misled by camouflage of this sort. European 
 thought would become infinitely more lucid if we 
 reserved the word Nationalism for a nation's demand 
 for an equal right of self-expression with other 
 nations, and used the word Imperialism to signify 
 the demand for the right of self-aggrandisement, even 
 at the expense of other nations. Nationalism, it has 
 been said, involves the theory of a democracy of 
 nations ; Imperialism involves the theory of a 
 hierarchy of stronger nations with the right to 
 subject weaker nations to their will. Nationalism 
 is concerned with the building up of the life of a 
 nation within its own borders, and implies that, in 
 so far as its activities extend beyond its borders, they 
 shall do so not by self-seeking violence but with the 
 consent of the other nations implicated. Imperialism, 
 on the other hand, is concerned with the extension 
 of a nation's power beyond its own borders : it is 
 a policy of egoism, arrogance and the right of the 
 stronger. Here, surely, is a distinction of terms 
 which, if observed, would assist us greatly towards 
 getting a clear idea of some of the problems of 
 government with which the world is now in travail. 
 
 Unfortunately, many British writers do not like 
 to use the word Imperialism in its proper sense 
 because they are afraid that by doing so they will 
 be condemning the British Empire in its finer and 
 more democratic aspects. They naturally shrink 
 from condemning that democratic system of free
 
 84 IRELAND A NATION 
 
 nations which includes Canada, Australia and South 
 Africa. A distinguishing name should be given to 
 that part of the British Empire which is really self- 
 governing. The British Empire is partly an empire 
 and partly not an empire ; and at present the virtues 
 of the part which is not an empire are used by many 
 good men to blind themselves to the vices of the 
 part which is an empire. Bishops swallow the whole 
 of the Empire at a gulp, as though it were as 
 impossible for an empire as for an egg to be good 
 only in parts. They see that Australia is free, and 
 the freedom of Australia, instead of persuading them 
 that Ireland ought also to be free, persuades them 
 that Ireland actually is free. General Smuts has 
 proposed to rename the British Empire the British 
 Commonwealth. One might suggest as an amend- 
 ment to this that the free parts of the British 
 Empire Great Britain, Canada, South Africa, 
 Australia, etc. should be differentiated from the 
 rest under the name of the British Commonwealth. 
 It would then become clear to the average simple 
 man that Ireland, India and Egypt are not portions 
 of the British Commonwealth but only of the 
 British Empire. This would, I fancy, hasten the 
 day when men would demand the conversion of 
 the British Empire into the British Commonwealth 
 a vastly more important thing than its mere 
 rebaptism. One may leave out of consideration for 
 the moment the question of the government of 
 barbarous races. In the meantime, what sane man 
 can question that at least the borders of the Common- 
 wealth should have been, before the Peace Conference, 
 enlarged so as to include Ireland, with the implication 
 that Ireland should be at liberty either to remain in 
 it or to leave it, according as she preferred ? 
 
 Mr A. E. Zimmern is a writer whose book, The 
 Greek Commonwealth, it seems to me difficult to
 
 IRISH SELF-DETERMINATION 85 
 
 over-praise. His book on current politics, Nationality 
 and Government, on the other hand, is the outcome 
 not merely of an ambiguous use of the word 
 Nationalism but of a failure to understand the 
 difference between Nationalism and Imperialism and 
 between the one kind of British Empire and the 
 other. Hence it is itself a failure, and can only be 
 praised with great reservations. Mr Zimmern's 
 prejudices are all in favour of the composite State 
 as opposed to the nation-State ; and, as a result, he 
 is opposed to the principle of self-determination, on 
 the one hand, and hesitant (to say the least of it) in 
 regard to the League of Nations, on the other. He 
 says many fine things incidentally, and is full of 
 enthusiasm for Nationalism as a spiritual force. It 
 is only as a political force that it unbalances him. 
 Now, no one but a materialist will deny that the 
 spirit of Nationalism is a greater thing than the 
 politics of Nationalism. It is equally true that 
 the spirit of Liberalism is greater than the politics of 
 Liberalism. But, just as the spirit of Liberalism 
 must attempt to express itself in politics, so must 
 the spirit of Nationalism attempt to express itself 
 in politics. It is a creative spirit, not a fad. 
 
 Spiritual Nationalism is desirable, according to 
 Mr Zimmern, because it gives the Jew in England 
 and the Croatian and Pole in America a necessary 
 link with the past in a home-country of his own 
 people. Here Mr Zimmern seems to me to be 
 confusing Nationalism with racialism. Nationalism 
 is not a matter of racial pride. The national line of 
 cleavage is, in most modern nations, distinct from 
 the racial line. A good Englishman of to-day may 
 be of Saxon, Norman, Celtic or Iberian race. Sir 
 Alfred Mond, I suppose, would describe himself as a 
 member of the Jewish race and of the English nation. 
 Mr Zimmern would probably argue from this that,
 
 86 IRELAND A NATION 
 
 if a number of races can come to terms within the 
 bounds of a single nation, it ought to be possible 
 for a number of nations to come to terms within 
 the bounds of a single State. And it manifestly 
 is possible. No reasonable man can object to 
 Mr Zimmern's ideal of a composite State except 
 in so far as he denies the right of self-determination 
 to the separate nations of which it is made up. 
 The British Commonwealth portion of the British 
 Empire is admired by Liberals in all countries 
 chiefly because the nations which compose it enjoy 
 the right of self-determination almost completely. 
 If I remember aright, even so vehement an 
 Imperialist as Mr Chamberlain agreed that if 
 Australia or Canada wished to separate itself 
 entirely from the Empire it could do so. The 
 British Commonwealth part of the Empire is a 
 voluntary union of free, self-determining nations, 
 and is no argument in favour of a composite State 
 based on the denial of the right of self-determination. 
 In order to make out a case against self- 
 determination, indeed, Mr Zimmern has to ignore 
 all the great national struggles for freedom against 
 external rule and to take refuge in the ambiguous 
 and irrelevant instance of the American Civil War. 
 Lincoln did not, as Mr Zimmern thinks he did, 
 wage war to resist the principle of national self- 
 determination. He regarded the United States as 
 the unit of American nationality. The Southern 
 States were not a nation : they were only the 
 minority within a nation. They proclaimed them- 
 selves a nation at the time, but that was merely a 
 move in a political game. That they were not a 
 nation was proved by the simple fact that they did 
 not carry on the struggle for national independence 
 after their defeat, as the Poles, the Irish and the 
 Czechs have done. Nations are not capable of
 
 IRISH SELF-DETERMINATION 87 
 
 sudden subsidence after this fashion. Hence, it 
 seems to me absurd for Mr Zimmern to pretend that 
 there is any precedent to be found with respect to 
 the right of nations to self- determination in the 
 instance of the United States. 
 
 I quite agree with Mr Zimmern that self- 
 determination is "a poor and unhelpful substitute 
 for the Christian doctrine of human brotherhood 
 and for Lincoln's great formula of dedication." But 
 who suggests treating it as a substitute for these 
 things? Liberty is not a substitute for love, any 
 more than a bottle of claret is a substitute for a 
 pair of boots. Personally, I cannot see how the 
 Christian doctrine of human brotherhood can be 
 honestly held by anyone who is not willing to concede 
 liberty and equality as well as fraternity to all other 
 nations as well as his own. 
 
 I have, perhaps, over-emphasised the points in 
 regard to which I think Mr Zimmern has gone 
 astray. I feel, however, that Mr Zimmern is a 
 Liberal who has made the mistake of sitting down 
 at " The Round Table " and has learned there to 
 think, not fundamentally, but Liberal-Imperially. 
 He is an internationalist, but apparently he believes 
 less in a League of Nations than in a number of 
 quasi-Empire-States with good intentions and, no 
 doubt, plenty of Home Rule. He thinks it was a 
 calamity for Belgium to have become an independent 
 nation, as though a Germany which did not shrink 
 from challenging Russia, France and England would 
 have shrunk from challenging a Confederation of 
 the Netherlands ! 
 
 "The two chief weaknesses of British Liberalism," 
 says Mr Zimmern, "are ignorance and amiability." 
 The weakness of Mr Zimmern's Liberalism, I should 
 say, is his woolly and wavering use of words. Even 
 where he writes of Liberalism, he uses the word in a
 
 88 IRELAND A NATION 
 
 sense that makes practically every English-speaking 
 man a Liberal. The war of American Independ- 
 ence, he says, " arose, not out of a conflict between 
 Liberalism and its opposite, but out of the clash 
 of two rival conceptions of freedom and corporate 
 responsibility." Might not a Prussian professor 
 explain the German invasion of Belgium in similar 
 terms ? To Mr Zimmern the late Lord Salisbury 
 "seen, as it were, from above" is simply a Liberal 
 of the Right. The English party system, he explains, 
 " could not function at all unless both sides were 
 prepared to accept, not simply the constitutional 
 framework inside which their activities are carried 
 on, but the moral ideas which created it and sustain 
 it." But the party of Lord Salisbury, as was shown 
 during the fight over the House of Lords and Home 
 Rule, accept none of these things. They attempted 
 to revive the Royal veto and to withdraw the right 
 of financial supply from the representatives of the 
 people, and they helped Sir Edward Carson to raise 
 a private army to defeat the will of Parliament. If 
 the party of Lord Salisbury did not behave like 
 Prussian Junkers, it is not because they lacked the 
 will but because they lacked the power. English 
 Liberals would be ignorant and amiable indeed if 
 they did not perceive that Prussianism is a disease of 
 the human soul, which can no more than influenza 
 be confined within the borders of a single nation. 
 Liberalism has to fight Prussianism in England as 
 in Germany. To form a coalition between the shade 
 of George III. and the shade of George Washington 
 and to call it Liberalism might be entertaining as 
 a paradox ; but seriously to do this seems to be a 
 playing with words and a mockery of the ideals 
 Washington fought to establish. I trust that when 
 Mr Zimmern makes his next contribution to political 
 literature he will, for his own sake, preface it with a
 
 IRISH SELF-DETERMINATION 89 
 
 dictionary of political terms and take as his guide 
 through the tangle of the world's problems some- 
 thing better than a half-and-half a priori Imperialism. 
 Such a philosophy as his, I feel, is a stumbling-block 
 in the way not only of the freedom of individual 
 peoples but of the League of Nations. 
 
 II 
 
 Professor J. H. Morgan is another distinguished 
 Liberal who approaches Home Rule in the spirit less 
 of a determined Liberal than of a constitutional 
 lawyer. As editor of an authoritative Liberal 
 volume on Home Rule, The New Irish Constitution, 
 he shows none of that eager faith in the democratic 
 principle and in the Irish people which inspired 
 Mr Erskine Childers's masterly political essay, The 
 Framework of Home Rule. He sees, to be sure, as 
 clearly as Mr Childers does, the folly of trying to 
 make Home Rule fit into a Procrustean bed of 
 doctrinaire Federalism. But with him this is a 
 question of convenience rather than of freedom. He 
 has no objection in principle to maiming the freedom 
 of the Irish Parliament to suit the imagined con- 
 venience of the United Kingdom. He is inclined 
 to regret, for instance, that under the Home Rule 
 Bill the number of matters in regard to which the 
 Irish Parliament would be forbidden to legislate 
 "has not been enlarged." "It is highly desirable," 
 he holds, "to avoid conflict of laws in the United 
 Kingdom as far as possible." Therefore he is not 
 content with seeing the Land Acts, Old Age Pensions 
 Acts, National Insurance Acts and Labour Exchange 
 Acts reserved for the control of the Imperial Parlia- 
 ment. He is anxious to keep an Imperial grip on 
 the Companies Acts, the Bills of Exchange Acts 
 and the Factory Acts as well. In regard to the last
 
 go IRELAND A NATION 
 
 of these, he complains that " Ireland may discriminate 
 against England only less effectively by lowering 
 the standard of the Factory Acts than by a tariff." 
 In other words, Ireland is to be denied the liberty 
 to manage her own industrial life, because she may 
 conceivably abuse it. But cannot this argument be 
 extended so as to tell against the grant of any 
 measure of Home Rule whatever? If the English 
 people are to give way to jealousy, not of what 
 Ireland has done, is doing, or is most likely to do, 
 but of what she might be imagined as doing, they 
 will insensibly slide into one of those moods of 
 national suspiciousness which have so often led 
 strong empires to destroy both the liberties and 
 the industries of weaker nations. Self-government, 
 if it is worth granting at all, must, like every other 
 great reform, come as an expression of confidence in 
 human nature. If Ireland is to be kept in leading- 
 strings for fear she may stumble, or, worse still, prefer 
 the gutter to the high road, those who so keep her 
 are much more likely to limit and hamper her power 
 for good than her power for evil. The ideal of true 
 Liberalism is to give Irish opinion and Irish character 
 the freest possible scope in directing the course of 
 Irish national life to liberate the moral and material 
 energies of the Irish people for the great work of 
 national reconstruction. 
 
 "The doctrine of Mazzini," Professor Hobhouse 
 observes, in the important volume Professor Morgan 
 has edited, " that every nation had its own peculiar 
 function to fulfil in the life of humanity, was not 
 pure fancy." There is more light shed on the prob- 
 lem of Irish self-government in that single sentence 
 than in the whole of Professor Morgan's able and 
 on constitutional points instructive chapter. Pro- 
 fessor Hobhouse has also done a service to Liberals 
 in emphasising the old, but sometimes forgotten,
 
 IRISH SELF-DETERMINATION 91 
 
 truth that " the primary object of political Liberalism 
 is to found government on freedom," and in reminding 
 them that freedom means a good deal more than 
 the establishment of "a well-oiled representative 
 machine," Freedom does not mean merely repre- 
 sentation in a democratic assembly. If it meant 
 nothing beyond that, then England could have no 
 logical objection to being incorporated in the United 
 States or in France, provided she were given her fair 
 share of representatives in Congress or the Chamber 
 of Deputies. But, obviously, freedom involves re- 
 presentation in an assembly that is not only de- 
 mocratic but national. The case might be briefly 
 stated in this way : One's own representative institu- 
 tions are representative ; other people's representative 
 institutions are not. But, if this is so, Unionists 
 may fairly ask whether the principle we have laid 
 down does not hold good in regard to Unionist 
 Ulster in Ireland, as well as in regard to the position 
 of Ireland as a whole in the United Kingdom. It 
 certainly would do so if Ulster had ever claimed to 
 be treated as a nation. But Ulster never has made 
 this claim. So far, Ulster has had no separate 
 history as Ireland has had a separate history. She 
 has never felt the need of a native Parliament, as 
 Ireland has done, in order to "fulfil her function" 
 among the nations of the world. At her noblest, 
 she has been on the side of the Irish nation in its 
 struggle for liberty, and she has invariably shared 
 in the fruits of Irish national victories, such as the 
 successive Land Acts. At her worst, she has allowed 
 herself to be made the tool of an ascendancy faction 
 a sort of Irish Opposition which claims to rule 
 Ireland permanently through Westminster. Thus 
 the demand of Unionist Ulster is not a demand 
 for freedom ; it is a demand for the right to keep 
 Ireland in subjection or at least for the continuance
 
 92 IRELAND A NATION 
 
 of a state of affairs which involves the subjection of 
 Ireland. It is a demand begotten of sectarian fears, 
 of ignorance of Irish history and ignorance of the 
 world's history. Unionist Ulster has never affirmed 
 a single positive ideal. She has simply repeated 
 " No ! " a thousand times in a hundred thousand 
 voices. 
 
 So much for the Liberal attitude to Irish Nation- 
 alism and Ulster Unionism. But self-government 
 is equally the logical outcome of the Liberal attitude 
 to British representative institutions. No one but a 
 political partisan could read Mr H. de R. Walker's 
 article, The Tendency towards Legislative Disin- 
 tegration, without realising the extent to which 
 British representative institutions are imperilled by 
 the postponement of Home Rule perhaps, of Home 
 Rule all round. In the first place, there is the eternal 
 congestion of business, resulting in the constant 
 application of the guillotine, and in the voting of 
 huge sums of public money without discussion or 
 criticism. " The Mother of Parliaments," as Mr 
 Cecil Harmsworth says, writing on The State of 
 Parliamentary Business, " is trying to do the work 
 of four or five Parliaments, and is signally failing 
 in the attempt." The facts brought forward by Mr 
 Walker clearly show that the British Parliament is 
 overburdened, because it attempts, not only to be a 
 Parliament of the United Kingdom, but an English 
 Parliament, a Scottish Parliament, an Irish Parlia- 
 ment, and a Welsh Parliament as well. Of the 
 1089 Public Acts which it passed in the twenty years 
 1891-1910, only 547 were applicable to the United 
 Kingdom as a whole ; the other 542 applied to 
 certain " States " of the United Kingdom alone. 
 These figures, it should be added, do not include 
 the Local and Private Acts, the enumeration of 
 which would make the case for devolution still
 
 IRISH SELF-DETERMINATION 93 
 
 stronger. But, bad as the congestion of business 
 is, it is not the worst feature of this imitation of 
 a legislative union. Far worse is the fact that it 
 introduces into the House of Commons more than a 
 hundred members who, when they consent to attend, 
 do not profess to represent the views of their con- 
 stituents on any of the great political questions of 
 the day, except the question of self-government. 
 " Ireland," as Mr Walker says, " whether in its 
 Nationalist or its Unionist constituencies, never 
 expresses any other opinion than for or against 
 Home Rule. ... It is impossible to say, for in- 
 stance, whether Ireland is in favour of Tariff Reform 
 or not." Thus, on the fiscal question, and on many 
 other questions, the Irish representatives are not 
 representative ; in other words, they are not respon- 
 sible to, and do not express the opinion and wants 
 of, their constituents. To this extent Parliamentary 
 Government is injured. And British votes on Irish 
 questions are as irresponsible and unrepresentative 
 as are Irish votes on British questions. In the 
 result, the tendency to "log-rolling" is strengthened, 
 and the evils of "log-rolling" accentuated. The 
 Unionists, who have themselves so often angled for 
 the Irish vote, denounce it as a "corrupt bargain" 
 when the Irish vote is cast for the Liberals. But, 
 if there is any corruption in the business, it lies, not 
 in the "bargain," but in the legislative union, of 
 which the " bargain " is an inevitable consequence, 
 and which Unionists, nevertheless, desire to per- 
 petuate. It should be the task of Liberalism to free 
 Great Britain and Parliamentary Government from 
 all such political corrupting influences. The machine 
 of government will otherwise suffer because the 
 morals of government are neglected. Unfortunately, 
 many Liberals are in danger of approaching Home 
 Rule as a question of machinery and convenience,
 
 94 IRELAND A NATION 
 
 instead of as a question involving large moral 
 principles. 
 
 Ill 
 
 Sir Edward Carson declared in the course of his 
 famous Ulster campaign : " I despise the will of the 
 people ; I care nothing for the opinion of the world, 
 or for the Acts of the Legislature." Nothing, per- 
 haps, has done so much to range the British workers 
 on the side of Ireland as the spectacle of this elderly 
 lawyer setting up in recent years as the Kaiser of 
 Ulster and entering publicly, as The Times put it, 
 into a sort of offensive and defensive alliance with 
 the Deity. Sir Edward claimed the right to " break 
 every law"; the Kaiser has claimed the same right. 
 They both alike abandoned themselves to a political 
 philosophy which, if put into practice, would make 
 liberty, security and civilisation impossible. They 
 both in their separate spheres played the part of 
 world-wreckers, and it is difficult to see how they 
 could more successfully have brought death and 
 disaster on their fellow-men. If many Englishmen 
 have come to long for a settlement with Ireland, it 
 is not merely because they have grown weary of an 
 old wrong but because they realise that Carsonism 
 is but one phase of the monstrous lie against which 
 the peoples of the West have been righting. We 
 know that while Sir Edward Carson has his way 
 the world cannot, in the phrase of the hour, be made 
 safe for democracy, since these islands will not have 
 been made safe for democracy. Sir Edward, indeed, 
 in the sentence I have quoted, frankly repudiated his 
 loyalty either to the world or to the legislature of 
 England. One of his followers, the Rev. T. L. F. 
 Stack, was equally outspoken in the last year of 
 the war about the attitude of the Carsonites to the 
 British Empire. " So long as the Covenant stands,"
 
 IRISH SELF-DETERMINATION 95 
 
 he declared, "our duty is to reject Home Rule, even 
 if it proved the only salvation of the Empire." All 
 these things might be dismissed as mere verbiage, 
 the blind hysterics of the Anglo-Celt, were it not 
 for the fact that during the war Sir Edward Carson 
 and his politicians were as good as their word. Did 
 not Sir Edward refuse to stand on the same platform 
 with Mr Redmond at an all-Ireland recruiting 
 meeting in Ulster? Did not the Ulster represen- 
 tatives refuse the extravagantly generous terms of 
 settlement offered to them at the Convention, al- 
 though Mr Lloyd George, as Prime Minister re- 
 sponsible for carrying on the war, assured them that 
 " pressing war considerations " made a settlement 
 an urgent necessity ? "A settlement, in our judg- 
 ment," he declared, " will materially help the 
 successful conclusion of the war." Though the 
 urgency of an Irish settlement is a hundredfold 
 greater to-day than it was when the Prime Minister 
 spoke those words, Sir Edward Carson remains in- 
 different to all appeals. He will not budge for the 
 sake of the world. He will not budge for the sake 
 of the British Empire. He will not budge for the 
 sake of England. He will not budge for the sake 
 of Ireland. He is disloyal, it seems to me, north, 
 south, east and west. Not consciously disloyal, I 
 regret to say. If he were conscious of his egoism 
 and his errors, there would be some hope of his 
 amendment. As there is apparently no hope of 
 this, all that can be done is to refuse to allow him 
 to play the part of a wrecker any longer, and to go 
 forward with the work of settlement alike unaided 
 and undeterred by the rhetoric of one to whom the 
 will of the people and the opinion of the world are 
 equal objects of contempt. 
 
 The chief danger to an Irish settlement at the 
 present moment, however, seems to me to come not
 
 96 IRELAND A NATION 
 
 from Sir Edward Carson but from what may be 
 described as moderate Englishmen. Many of these 
 are clear-sighted enough to see that, as one of the 
 consequences of a war on behalf of the small nations, 
 something must be done for Ireland ; but they are 
 tempted by their old pre-war prejudices to make 
 that something as small as possible. They still 
 believe in their hearts that the liberties of Ireland 
 and the liberties of England are opposed. They 
 are willing, reluctantly willing, to concede to Ireland 
 the position of a province, like Quebec, or one 
 analogous to that of a State in the United States of 
 America. But they cannot bring themselves to 
 think of Ireland as a nation, as even Mr Gladstone 
 thought of it to some extent, and as Australians 
 think of Australia. They regard Irish liberty as a 
 sad necessity, not as a fine ideal. They are really 
 bored by it : it is only when they consider how to 
 safeguard England against its possible consequences 
 that they grow interested. This, I contend, is a 
 fatal spirit in which to approach the question of an 
 Irish settlement. Nations, no more than individuals, 
 can become friends on a basis of grudging distrust. 
 To make Ireland a sort of ticket-of-leave man among 
 the nations, watched with suspicion and put on its 
 good behaviour, is more likely to result in friction 
 than in friendship. And there is no reason why 
 such a blunder should be made except the old foolish 
 distrust of freedom which led statesmen in other 
 days to dispute the rights of Americans and 
 Canadians, of Parliaments and working-men, and, 
 more recently, of women. George-the-Thirdism is 
 one of the abiding characteristics of human nature. 
 It was smashed in America. It was smashed in 
 Canada. It was smashed only a year or two ago in 
 South Africa. But it is still the spirit that governs 
 Ireland. That, I fear, is the origin of a great deal
 
 IRISH SELF-DETERMINATION 97 
 
 of the talk that is going on about federalism just 
 now. The federalists are, for the most part, men 
 who a few years ago were opposed to giving Ireland 
 any Constitution at all. Now they are opposed to 
 giving her any but a bad Constitution. Federalism, 
 I am aware, is a word that may mean anything. 
 The group of politicians which wishes to federate 
 the British Empire, for instance, has no desire to 
 deprive Canada, Australia and South Africa of the 
 main liberties of self-respecting nations. Similarly, 
 the German Empire is a federation of variously 
 governed States. Those who demand a federalist 
 solution of the Irish question, however and I regret 
 to see Mr George Barnes and Mr J. M. Robertson 
 among the number seem for the most part to be 
 attempting to standardise a form of extended local 
 government within the United Kingdom rather than 
 aiming at satisfying the national aspirations of the 
 Irish people, which differ from those of the Welsh 
 and the Scottish peoples as cheese differs from chalk. 
 Federalism, I fear, is regarded by the majority of its 
 supporters though not, perhaps, by Mr Barnes or 
 Mr Robertson not as a key to open the door to 
 Irish liberty, but as a key to lock the door on Irish 
 liberty. It is Unionism's second line of defence. 
 
 General Smuts, in one of the most important of his 
 war speeches, uttered a warning against the attempt 
 to impose a mechanical sameness of government on 
 the nations composing the British Empire. Speaking 
 at the banquet given in his honour by members of 
 both Houses of Parliament, he said : 
 
 " What I feel in regard to all the empires of the 
 past, and even in regard to the United States, is 
 that the effort has always been towards forming one 
 nation. All the empires we have known in the past 
 and that exist to-day are founded on the idea of
 
 98 IRELAND A NATION 
 
 assimilation, of trying to force human material into 
 one mould. Your whole idea and basis is entirely 
 different. You do not want to standardise the 
 nations of the British Empire ; you want to develop 
 them towards greater, fuller nationality. These 
 communities, the offspring of the Mother Country, 
 or territories like my own, which have been annexed 
 after the vicissitudes of war, must not be moulded 
 on any one pattern. You want them to develop 
 freely on the principles of self-government, and 
 therefore your whole idea is different from anything 
 that has ever existed before. That is the funda- 
 mental fact we have to bear in mind that this 
 British Commonwealth of nations does not stand 
 for standardisation or denationalisation, but for the 
 fuller, richer, and more various life of all the nations 
 comprised in it." 
 
 That, I believe, expresses perfectly what South 
 Africans, Canadians and Australians feel about the 
 British Empire. It also explains, incidentally, why 
 the British Empire, as regards all the white races of 
 which it is composed except the Irish, has been a 
 marvellous success. How then can any sane Im- 
 perialist desire to violate in Ireland those great 
 principles which have saved Imperialism though 
 that is hardly the right name to call it by in 
 South Africa? The Irishman equally with the 
 South African protests against standardisation and 
 denationalisation. His whole history is a warning 
 that he will never be a contented member of the 
 British Empire, unless his country is an equal partner 
 in (to repeat the words of General Smuts) " the fuller, 
 richer, and more various life of all the nations com- 
 prised in it." It is possible even that he will never 
 be a contented member of the British Empire at all. 
 
 From all the hints that have been published in the
 
 IRISH SELF-DETERMINATION 99 
 
 Press, it may be inferred that the next Home Rule 
 Bill will not be framed in the generous Commonwealth 
 spirit of General Smuts. If it is not, it is doomed 
 to failure both as an Imperial and as an Irish measure. 
 If ever there was need for the generous as opposed 
 to the niggardly view in politics, it is in Anglo-Irish 
 politics to-day. Mr Erskine Childers, who in The 
 Framework of Home Rule wrote by far the most 
 remarkable book that has ever been written on the 
 Home Rule question, has laid it down that the only 
 secure principle on which an Irish Constitution can 
 be framed is that "what is best for Ireland is best 
 for the Empire." Certainly every rational Imperialist 
 believes that what is best for Australia, or Canada, 
 or South Africa is " best for the Empire." The unity 
 of the British Empire, so far as regards all the white 
 peoples who dwell within it except the Irish, is a 
 unity of common interests and equal liberties. The 
 Empire would not survive a fortnight if English 
 statesmen behaved towards the Dominions in the 
 same narrow, grudging, suspicious spirit in which they 
 have almost consistently behaved towards Ireland. 
 The Irish people were offered complete self- 
 determination within the Empire when Mr Lloyd 
 George set up the Convention. Having promised 
 this, the Prime Minister unscrupulously withdrew his 
 promise while the Convention was sitting and de- 
 manded that the members should not go beyond a 
 federal scheme of Home Rule. This act of less than 
 good faith, which passed without notice in Great 
 Britain, had a disastrous effect in Ireland, turning 
 into doubters many of those who were expecting 
 great things from the Convention. And later the 
 threat of Conscription and of a milk-and-water Home 
 Rule Bill have created such a gulf between England 
 and Ireland as has not existed before in modern 
 times at an hour when it is of more vital importance
 
 ioo IRELAND A NATION 
 
 than ever before that the two countries should be 
 friends, helping and not harrying one another, allies 
 in the work of establishing human liberty. Alas ! 
 that statesmen should not have realised long ago 
 that such a friendship and alliance was possible only 
 on one condition. The Irish must be given the 
 complete right of self-determination. They must be 
 regarded as free not only by Englishmen but by them- 
 selves. The first step to this happy consummation 
 would be to open an Irish Parliament, in accordance 
 with the Home Rule Act already on the Statute- 
 book, and to invite the Irish (including the Ulster- 
 men) to set to work to model a Constitution for 
 themselves. A subject Ireland can only be a source 
 of political insanity and bitterness, a destructive 
 and wasting influence on English as well as Irish 
 politics, a peril (as Baron von Kiihlmann's visit to 
 Ulster and its consequences have made clear) in 
 international affairs. The British statesman who, 
 realising this, helps Ireland not only to he free but 
 to feel free, will, by at once removing a menace and 
 a nuisance, help to make liberty secure in these 
 Western waters and will also, I believe, considerably 
 hasten the victory of orderly progress and Liberal 
 ideals throughout the world.
 
 CHAPTER X 
 
 ONE MAN'S VIEWS ON DOMINION HOME RULE 
 
 " LIKE every other problem," a friend of mine, a lover 
 of compromise, said to me, "the Irish problem is 
 insoluble until a serious attempt is made to solve it. 
 If it is the asses' bridge of British politics, this is 
 because of the stubbornness of the asses, not because 
 of the steepness of the bridge. I am not going to 
 deny the existence of difficulties ; I merely deny that 
 they are insurmountable. 
 
 " There are a number of facts that must be clearly 
 realised and that do not seem to be generally 
 realised in England before a good peace can be 
 made with Ireland. One rather startling fact is that 
 it is the Imperialists who in the past have killed 
 every attempt at an Imperial settlement of the Irish 
 question. O'Connell, Butt, Parnell, Redmond all 
 in the name of the Irish people asked for freedom 
 within the British Empire ; and the Imperialists 
 again and again replied : ' Certainly not. To belong 
 to the British Empire is freedom enough for a small 
 nation. However, though you are a member of the 
 family, you are the black sheep of the family ; so we 
 are going to punish your insubordination with a 
 Coercion Act.' 
 
 "The Imperialists always told themselves fondly 
 that in Anglo-Irish politics it was a question of 
 choosing between Home Rule and the Union. As 
 a matter of fact, in Ireland as in America and 
 South Africa the real alternative has always been 
 
 101
 
 102 IRELAND A NATION 
 
 between a policy of Home Rule and a policy of 
 separation. Unionism led straight to separation in 
 the American colonies. In Ireland it has led, if 
 not to separation, at least to the birth of the most 
 powerful separatist movement that has been known 
 in that country since the days of Cromwell. Liberty 
 men must have, and liberty without the liberty to 
 choose one's own form of government is merely 
 a Cabinet Minister's joke. If you refuse a nation 
 liberty inside an empire, it will demand liberty 
 outside the empire. The most cursory dip into 
 American history ought to make this clear even to 
 Mr Austen Chamberlain. 
 
 " If this fact is grasped clearly by British statesmen 
 of all parties, the greatest of the obstacles to an Irish 
 settlement will have been removed. For the greatest 
 obstacle in the past has always been, not that Ulster 
 stood in the way of a settlement, but that British 
 statesmen encouraged Ulster to stand in the way. 
 This was due to various causes. It was due partly 
 to a mistaken idea of patriotism which regarded the 
 United Kingdom as being all one country. The 
 Irish were admitted to be different when it became 
 necessary to speak ill of them ; but even then they 
 did not enjoy the status of a different nation, but 
 only of a different class children, let us say, or 
 criminals, or imbeciles, or beggars. Apart from the 
 quasi-patriotic motive, the enemies of social reform 
 were interested in preventing a settlement of the 
 Irish problem, as they were anxious that the 
 electorate should occupy its thoughts with Ireland 
 rather than with questions of land, wages and hours 
 of labour. 
 
 " Let us suppose, however, that the war has 
 changed all this. Let us take for granted that it has 
 taught even the most reactionary Englishman certain 
 elementary truths about nationality and has opened
 
 DOMINION HOME RULE 103 
 
 his eyes to the necessity, even if not the desirability, 
 of social reconstruction. He has, on this assumption, 
 no reason to wish ill to an Irish settlement, and 
 every reason to wish well to it. What, then, should 
 he urge a British Government to do? In view of 
 the result of the last Convention, the suggestion 
 may at first sight be regarded as a futile one ; but 
 it is my firm conviction that by far the best course 
 for Mr Lloyd George would be to summon a new 
 Convention. The method of conference, it may be 
 said, has been tried, and failed. As a matter of 
 fact the method of conference has not failed, since 
 it has not been seriously tried. For one thing, the 
 members of the last Convention were not directly 
 chosen by the people. It was not an Irish 
 Convention, but a Government Convention. No 
 Convention consisting of delegates from sections 
 of the community, County Council Chairmen and 
 Government nominees will ever be in sufficiently 
 vital contact with Irish passions and Irish realities to 
 arrive at a satisfactory settlement. The late Irish 
 Convention was, rightly or wrongly, regarded with 
 suspicion by a majority of the Irish people. It was 
 regarded as a piece of camouflage or window-dressing 
 intended to deceive America into the belief that 
 England had left the Irish question to be settled by 
 Irishmen themselves, and to enable England to say 
 to America, after the Convention had failed : ' Well, 
 you see they have nobody but themselves to blame. 
 They simply cannot come to an agreement.' This is 
 a view that is possibly unfair to the mass of English- 
 men, who are anxious to get the Irish difficulty out 
 of the way. But the attitude of certain sections of 
 the Unionist Press, and of Mr Bonar Law since the 
 failure of the Convention, has 1 done much to convince 
 the most suspicious Sinn Feiners that their suspicions 
 were justified. Anyhow, it is clear that, to have any
 
 104 IRELAND A NATION 
 
 chance of success, an Irish Convention must, like 
 Caesar's wife, be above suspicion. Let it even begin 
 to be suspected of being a ' Government dodge,' 
 and it is doomed. The only Convention having 
 the remotest chance of settling the Irish question 
 would be a Convention consisting of the Members 
 of Parliament returned at the last election. Let 
 Mr Lloyd George summon such a conference of all 
 the Irish representatives (Sinn Fein, Home Rule 
 and Unionist), and leave it to them to thresh out 
 their differences among themselves, on the under- 
 standing that the British Government accepts the 
 principle of the right of every people to choose its 
 own form of government. 
 
 " What, then, would be the lines discussion would 
 be likely to follow at such a conference? First, of 
 course, the Sinn Feiners would state their claim to 
 an independent Irish republic. The Ulster Unionists 
 would then state their claim to contract out of such 
 a republic, and they would claim not merely the four 
 Unionist counties of Ulster, but the Nationalist 
 counties of Tyrone and Fermanagh as well. Both 
 sides having the reputation of being irreconcilable, 
 the business of the Conference would then seem to 
 have reached an impasse. But not a bit of it. 
 There are moderate men even among irreconcilables ; 
 and one of them would doubtless rise in order to put 
 some pointed questions at this stage. He would 
 say : ' Let us take for granted the right of every 
 people to self-determination. Let us take for granted 
 both the right of the Irish people and the right of 
 the Ulster people to self-determination. How are 
 we to reconcile these two rights ? Can we do it in 
 this way? Shall we grant complete independence of 
 choice to the four Unionist counties of Ulster to cut 
 themselves out of Ireland, and complete independence 
 of choice to all the rest of Ireland, except the four
 
 DOMINION HOME RULE 105 
 
 counties, to declare itself an independent republic ? 
 That seems to be the solution most in conformity with 
 abstract reason. Will you accept it ? And at once 
 Ulstermen, Home Rulers and Sinn Feiners would 
 roar out a unanimous 'No.' 
 
 " The Ulstermen would say : ' We want six, and 
 we wont mix.' The Sinn Feiners and Home Rulers 
 would cry out in horror at the proposal to divide 
 their country, as the mother cried out when Solomon 
 proposed to divide the living baby. At this the 
 moderate man, instead of being disheartened, would 
 feel his spirits rising. ' They told us,' he would say, 
 'that Irishmen can never agree among themselves, 
 and yet here we have Ireland absolutely unanimous. 
 The Sinn Feiner and the Orangeman, who were never 
 united before, are united now in rejecting a policy of 
 complete self-determination for their respective parts 
 of Ireland.' And he would be so pleased with having 
 united his fellow-countrymen that he would feel as 
 though he had at least reached a hill-top on the way 
 to the mountain-top. 
 
 " ' Well, then,' he would continue, ' the Ulstermen 
 negative an independent republic for all Ireland. 
 The Sinn Feiners negative a republic for all Ireland 
 minus the four counties. The Nationalists, as a 
 whole, negative the exclusion of six Ulster counties. 
 Let us see whether complete self-determination 
 having failed to produce a satisfactory settlement 
 some modified form of self-determination will serve 
 us any better.' And, turning to the Sinn Feiners, he 
 would ask : ' Would you rather have an independent 
 republic for all Ireland minus the four counties or a 
 dominion Constitution for the whole of Ireland inside 
 the British Empire? The Sinn Fein reply would 
 undoubtedly be : ' We want a republican Constitution 
 for the whole of Ireland.' ' Quite so,' our moderate 
 man would agree ; ' but don't you see that, until you
 
 106 IRELAND A NATION 
 
 convert Ulster to your point of view, that is impos- 
 sible? Convert Ulster, and you can agree with her 
 to have any form of government you please. Mean- 
 while, kindly answer my question. Which of the two 
 alternatives I have mentioned would you prefer? 
 Which, at any rate, would you hate the less ? ' And it 
 is beyond the shadow of a doubt that nineteen Sinn 
 Feiners out of twenty would confess their preference 
 for a dominion Constitution for all Ireland to even 
 the most republican and separatist Constitution that 
 involved partition. 
 
 " Having thus persuaded the Sinn Feiners to state, 
 not only their ideal solution, but their second- 
 best solution, our Socratically-minded man would 
 approach the Ulstermen with similar questions. He 
 would find it a difficult matter to get an answer out 
 of them. But I think he would find in the end that, 
 rather than lose Tyrone and Fermanagh, the Ulster- 
 men would even agree to accept an autonomous 
 Ulster State of six counties within an Irish dominion 
 an autonomous Ulster State that, if it pleased, 
 could have its own education laws, and drink laws, 
 and marriage laws. Ulstermen would find that, 
 provided they conceded the principle of the unity of 
 Ireland, no one wished to stand in the way of their 
 enjoyment of full liberty and self-government. 
 
 " If they merely continued to say ' No ' to every offer, 
 on the other hand, and refused to discuss any second- 
 best solution, their aforetime English supporters 
 would then warn them to make terms while it was 
 still possible, as there can never be any more support 
 in England for an intransigent Ulster. Conservative 
 statesmen, indeed, would tell them frankly that, if 
 Ireland was going to accept the British Empire for 
 the sake of Ulster, Ulster was expected to accept 
 Ireland for the sake of the British Empire. They 
 would add a hint as to the possibility of an English
 
 DOMINION HOME RULE 107 
 
 Government coming into power some day which 
 would settle the Irish question over the heads of the 
 Ulstermen. Such a settlement would not involve, of 
 course, the armed coercion of Ulster, but it might 
 conceivably involve the closing of English ports to 
 Ulster goods and the withdrawal to the British Post 
 Office from Ulster as a means of persuading it to 
 ' transact." When once Ulster saw that it would pay 
 her to come to terms with the rest of Ireland, and 
 that she could get far more generous terms from 
 Ireland than she could hope to get from an exasper- 
 ated British democracy, the chances are that she 
 would at least be willing to try the experiment of 
 coming into an Irish Constitution as an autonomous 
 State for a term of years, reserving the right at the 
 end of such a term to lay her case before the League 
 of Nations, should the experiment prove unsatis- 
 factory. 
 
 " Such a consummation is possible, however, only 
 if the Convention I suggest is left absolutely free. 
 The terms of reference of the last Convention were 
 such that no Sinn Feiner could sit on it ; and Mr 
 Lloyd George suddenly modified them and made 
 them still more unacceptable while the Convention 
 was sitting. The new Convention should simply be 
 a conference to discuss the future of Ireland. It 
 would be impossible to make the terms of reference 
 much more definite without alienating either the 
 Ulstermen or the Sinn Feiners. It ought, I think, 
 however, to have power to co-opt a score or more of 
 members from the outside. It might reasonably 
 wish to have the assistance and advice of Sir Horace 
 Plunkett, or Mr G. W. Russell, or Mr Dillon, or 
 some representative farmer or business man from 
 Ulster. It would be no harm, either, I think, if 
 it held its sittings in Belfast. The South would 
 willingly go to the North in order to win it to the
 
 io8 IRELAND A NATION 
 
 principle of a united Ireland. The alternative to 
 such a conference as I propose is a forcible settle- 
 ment of the Irish question by English statesmen 
 which will produce chaos both in Irish and British 
 politics. The plan I have outlined will, I believe, 
 produce peace in Ireland, prosperity in Ulster, and 
 credit for British statesmanship. It depends, how- 
 ever, on the whole-heartedness with which the former 
 British supporters of Ulster recognise that it takes 
 two to make a compromise, and that no satisfactory 
 solution is possible which does not give the essentials 
 of self-determination to Ireland as a whole equally 
 with Ulster. I have always been firmly convinced 
 of the persuadability of Ulster, if only her English 
 friends had the will to persuade her." 
 
 " But you will agree," said I to my friend, as he was 
 about to rise, "that whether Ireland is to become a 
 republic or a dominion like Canada should be left 
 entirely to the Irish people themselves to decide." 
 
 " Certainly," he agreed. " England has no more 
 right to interfere in the internal affairs of Ireland 
 than in those of France. I am merely suggesting 
 a form of evacuation that will save the faces of all 
 creeds and classes!"
 
 CHAPTER XI 
 
 THE IRISH SOLDIER 
 
 ENGLISHMEN have grown so accustomed to the 
 part played by the Irish regiments in the modern 
 history of the British army that they have not quite 
 realised the amazing fact that the war with Germany 
 was the first war in history in which the Irish 
 soldier fought qua Irishman on the same side as 
 England. If one were writing the military history 
 of the Irish people, one would have to describe a 
 great many more battles in which the Irish fought 
 against the English than those in which they have 
 fought side by side with them. First, they fought 
 for the independence of their country in Ireland 
 itself: when this was no longer possible, after the 
 triumph of King William III., they continued to 
 fight against England in any country which would 
 accept their services. The Wild Geese, as they were 
 called, who sailed away with Sarsfield from the ruins 
 of Limerick were perhaps the most noted and the 
 most romantic soldiers of fortune who fought over 
 the European battle-fields of the eighteenth century. 
 They distinguished themselves in France, in Spain, 
 in Italy and in Austria, and their fame is the best, 
 if the most barren, part of their country's history 
 during that time. If the Irish in Ireland thrilled 
 in those days at the names of Blenheim, Ramillies, 
 Cremona, Landen and Fontenoy, it was because of 
 the deeds accomplished there by Irishmen in the 
 armies of European monarchs. Not that all Irish- 
 log
 
 no IRELAND A NATION 
 
 men fought on the same side. After the Williamites 
 had taken Limerick at the close of a resistance of 
 splendid memories Limerick, which James's French 
 allies had assured him could not withstand a bom- 
 bardment with roasted apples the Irish regiments 
 were marched up to a banner with the instruction 
 that those who were willing to enter the English 
 army should at that point wheel to the right, while 
 those who preferred to sail away into exile should 
 wheel in the opposite direction. The great majority 
 of the soldiers preferred exile to submission, but a 
 number of them went under the English colours, 
 with the result that practically every war in which 
 England was engaged through the eighteenth 
 century was a civil war so far as the Irish were 
 concerned. But the soldiers who fought for France 
 and the other European countries felt that they were 
 fighting for Ireland as the soldiers in the service of 
 England did not. The latter were the real soldiers 
 of fortune. The others were conscious, at least, of 
 a sort of second-best patriotism. Sarsfield, when he 
 was lying fatally wounded on the field of Landen, 
 cried, as previously related : " O that this were for 
 Ireland ! " a cry which has remained in the Irish 
 imagination as the dying words, real or supposed, 
 of Nelson and Pitt have remained in the English 
 imagination. But none the less, it was not without 
 bitterness that the Irish soldiers in the service of 
 France found themselves fighting again and again 
 against their countrymen in the English ranks. 
 At Fontenoy, where the Irish soldiers turned the 
 day against the English in such a way as to 
 draw from George II. (unless the story is only a 
 myth) the exclamation : " Cursed be the laws which 
 deprive me of such subjects!" some of the soldiers 
 in the Irish Brigade were found in tears after the 
 battle. When they were asked why, having fought
 
 THE IRISH SOLDIER in 
 
 so nobly, they were now melancholy, they replied 
 that what they had done they would do again, but 
 " it was hard they should have to fight against their 
 own countrymen, some of them even relatives." 
 " To divert attention, therefore, from this sad 
 episode," said the Irishman who described it, "the 
 band was ordered to play up Patrick's Day, when 
 the men instantly started, shouted a ' Hurrah for old 
 Ireland ! ' and were as alert and ready for a row 
 as ever." 
 
 Nor does the broader-minded type of Englishman 
 in those days seem to have resented the Irish practice 
 of enlisting in the European armies. The Irish of 
 the days of William and James were, as Macaulay 
 says, detested as foreigners, but they were regarded 
 apparently by many Englishmen as having, at least, 
 the rights of foreigners. The great Anglo-Irishman, 
 Swift, wrote to the Chevalier Wogan, famous for 
 his squiring of the Princess Maria Clementina : " I 
 cannot but highly esteem those gentlemen of Ireland 
 who, with all the disadvantages of being exiles and 
 strangers, have been able to distinguish themselves, 
 by their valour and conduct, in so many parts of 
 Europe, I think, above all other nations." So true- 
 blue an English Tory as Dr Johnson enjoyed dining 
 with the Irish Colonel Dromgold in Paris "a very 
 high man, sir, head of L&cole Militaire, a most 
 complete character, for he had first been Professor 
 of Rhetoric, and then became a soldier." This 
 vindicator of the Irish at Fontenoy was also a friend 
 of Burke, and he was praised by Lord Lyttelton in 
 lines including the couplet : 
 
 Tho' now thy valour, to thy country lost, 
 Shines in the foremost ranks of Gallia's host. 
 
 These Irish exiles, indeed, fought with courtesy as 
 well as with courage like Colonel O'Mahony, as he
 
 H2 IRELAND A NATION 
 
 tried at Cremona to save the life of the Baron de 
 Freiberg, who had sworn to " perish or crush the 
 Irish." Freiberg, in the impetuosity of the charge, 
 arrived in the ranks of the Irish, when O'Mahony, 
 anxious to save the life of a brave enemy, rushed 
 forward and caught his bridle, crying : " Good quarter 
 for M. de Freiberg ! " But we are told that the 
 Austrian cried out in answer : " This is no day for 
 clemency, only do your duty and I'll do mine ! " and 
 fought his way forward till he was shot. Thus the 
 recent war was by no means the first in which 
 Irish soldiers faced the Germans, and an Irish 
 air survives to commemorate the event, called The 
 Day We Beat the Germans at Cremona. And so the 
 record goes on till the days of the French Revolution 
 and Napoleon, under whose banner Wolfe Tone and 
 Miles Byrne, and many another famous Irishman, 
 enlisted themselves. It was the Duke of Wellington 
 who said of Wolfe Tone that he had come near being 
 as fatal an enemy to England as Hannibal had been 
 to Rome. 
 
 It is important that this background of Irish 
 history should be remembered by all who want to 
 understand the spirit of the Irish soldier in the 
 recent war. I do not wish unduly to romanticise 
 him. One may admit that he entered the British 
 army in some cases through hunger, in many as the 
 cheapest form of emigration and adventure, and for 
 a host of other muddled reasons. But, so far as the 
 war is concerned, Irish soldiers fought consciously as 
 Irish patriots in a way in which they never fought 
 before. They did not echo Sarsfield's cry, " O that 
 this were for Ireland ! " They took the view that, in 
 defeating the Germans as at Cremona, they actually 
 were fighting for Ireland. The chaplain of an Irish 
 regiment, writing after the first battle of Ypres, 
 described a dying soldier whom he attended. " His
 
 THE IRISH SOLDIER 113 
 
 side was torn with shrapnel, and he lay in a pool of 
 blood. After being attended to spiritually, he raised 
 his hand and exclaimed : ' My life for old Ireland ! ' ' 
 Nor is this an isolated example of conscious Irish 
 patriotism patriotism which is always so much 
 more self-conscious in tragic than in successful 
 countries. It was not many weeks before the out- 
 break of the war that the Irish Guards were repri- 
 manded for singing God Save Ireland 1 ^ Mr Redmond 
 passed the barracks in Birdcage Walk. But they 
 sang the same song a song celebrating the three 
 Fenians who were hanged at Manchester in 1867 
 as they charged the Germans at Mons. No doubt, 
 they varied their music with "Early doors, this 
 way" and the other comic audacities of the battle- 
 field. But the evidence of the national spirit of the 
 Irish troops in crisis after crisis of the war, in 
 addition to their gaiety, fidelity and daring, is over- 
 whelming. One oddly rhetorical letter from the 
 front from a corporal in the Irish Guards shows how 
 a flamboyant national spirit can exist in the breast 
 of an Irish soldier even alongside a flamboyant 
 Imperialism : 
 
 " We are British soldiers, and proud of the name 
 and proud to belong to the great British Empire, but 
 in doing our duty for the glory and honour of the 
 Empire we have always also in our minds to add, if 
 we can, more lustre to the fair name of Erin. Our 
 flag of green with the harp and shamrock and the 
 words ' Erin Go Bragh ' is now faded and torn, but 
 still loved and cherished. Talking about that dear 
 
 old flag, I shall endeavour to describe how at , 
 
 when the fate of the day seemed to waver in the 
 balance, when the ruthless enemy by sheer weight 
 of numbers was pressing onward at every point of 
 vantage, that faded flag turned a threatened defeat
 
 H4 IRELAND A NATION 
 
 into decisive victory. On our left were the Ministers, 
 on our right the Leinsters and Connaught Rangers. 
 All were hard pressed, and were about to retire, 
 when suddenly from the firing line one of our comrades 
 rushed out flourishing the old green flag and shouting: 
 ' Erin Go Bragh.' With the blood coursing fast 
 through my veins, I watched with pride and admira- 
 tion the marvellous effect produced by these simple 
 words. With a mighty cheer that seemed to rend 
 the heavens, and that rose and swelled even above 
 the din of battle, those hard-pressed sons of Erin 
 charged down on the advancing enemy with fixed 
 bayonets. The Germans were completely staggered 
 by this unexpected turn of events when victory 
 seemed just within their grasp, but they were given 
 little time for hesitation, for, to slightly alter the 
 words of a well-known Irish ballad : 
 
 Like lions leaping at a fold, 
 
 When mad with hunger's pang, 
 Right up against the German lines 
 
 Those Irish heroes sprang. 
 
 The Germans turned and fled in all directions, com- 
 pletely routed and wholly disorganised. Such was 
 the effect on the Irish Guards of the sight of their 
 old green flag and the cry of ' Erin Go Bragh.' " 
 
 This letter, which I quote from Mr James Milne's 
 admirable compilation, The War Stories of Private 
 Thomas Atkins, is on a level with a letter published 
 from an Irish sergeant, a prisoner in Germany, 
 describing the failure of the German attempt to 
 persuade the Irish prisoners to enlist in a special 
 Irish brigade. He said that his men in reply sang 
 first God Save the King, and then A Nation Once 
 Again another national song recalling the Sars- 
 fields and the heroes of the Irish.
 
 THE IRISH SOLDIER 115 
 
 Of the courage of the Irish troops both in Gallipoli 
 and in Flanders, though Mr Redmond justly com- 
 plained that it was insufficiently recognised at head- 
 quarters, it is almost superfluous to speak. Not that 
 it was more remarkable than English or French or 
 Scottish or German courage. But the courage of the 
 various nations is probably different in kind. Mr 
 Valentine Williams, in his book, With Our Army in 
 Flanders, writes : " The British soldier's indifference 
 to danger, while it is one of his finest qualities, is 
 often the despair of his officers. The Irish regiments 
 are the worst. Their recklessness is proverbial." 
 And the daring of the Irish (loth) Division at 
 Gallipoli was as notable. Captain Thornhill, of the 
 New Zealand forces, bore witness to it in a letter to 
 an Irishman : 
 
 " Your Irish fellows are the talk of the whole Army. 
 To me the last few weeks have been one long night- 
 mare. . . . But I must make you wise in regard to 
 the doings of the Irish. Most of them, I believe, are 
 ' freshies.' The Empire can do with a heap more 
 'freshies' of the Irish brand. Their landing at 
 Suvla Bay was the greatest thing that you will ever 
 read of in books by high-brows. Those who witnessed 
 the advance will never forget it. Bullets and shrapnel 
 rained on 'em, yet they never wavered. Officers 
 got it here, there, everywhere, but the men never 
 wavered. . . . God ! the men were splendid. The 
 way they took the hill (now called Dublin Hill) was 
 the kind of thing that would make you pinch yourself 
 to prove it wasn't a cheap wine aftermath. How 
 they got there heaven only knows. As the land lay, 
 climbing into hell on an aeroplane seemed an easier 
 proposition than taking that hill." 
 
 One might go on for one page after another
 
 n6 IRELAND A NATION 
 
 quoting the evidence of soldiers' letters as to the 
 spirit, at once patriotic, romantic and fearless, in 
 which Irishmen played their part in the war. I pass 
 from this, however, to the discussion of the part they 
 actually did play.
 
 CHAPTER XII 
 
 IRELAND'S RECORD IN THE WAR 
 
 IRELAND'S record in the war was, from the point of 
 view of the Allies, magnificent. The magnificence 
 of the Irish contribution to the cause of freedom was 
 only less amazing than the flood of calumny and 
 belittlement that has been consistently poured on 
 it ever since August, 1914. Ireland made a greater 
 voluntary contribution of men to the Allied forces 
 than any other unfree nation in the world. That is 
 the leading fact of the situation. Sir Charles Russell, 
 speaking at a Red Cross meeting at Dublin, declared 
 that Ireland had given 250,000 men to the British 
 army and navy ; and this leaves altogether- out of 
 account the equally large number of Irishmen who 
 took part in the war in the Australian, Canadian and 
 American armies. If these are added in, we need 
 not hesitate to accept Mr John Redmond's estimate 
 that 500,000 Irishmen fought in the ranks of the 
 Allies for the liberty of the world. At the same 
 time Ireland was second only to America itself in 
 the supplies of food she sent to England during the 
 perilous years of the war. Had it not been for the 
 assistance rendered by Ireland, both in men and 
 food-stuffs, it is doubtful whether the Allies would 
 have been able to force Germany to submission so 
 soon. This is not to claim that Ireland did more in 
 proportion than any other country. It is to claim 
 merely that she was a necessary link in the great 
 chain of the Allied success. He would be a knave 
 
 117
 
 n8 IRELAND A NATION 
 
 and a fool who would attempt to disparage the 
 sacrifices of France and England, of tortured Belgium 
 and tortured Serbia. He would be equally a knave 
 and fool, however, who, having accepted the services 
 of half-a-million Irish soldiers and sailors, would 
 pretend that Ireland did not make an immense 
 and unforeseeable contribution to the victory of the 
 Allies, and who would reward the Irish dead with a 
 weak sneer about the abundance of butter in Ireland 
 in war time. 
 
 It may be asked why, these things being so, has 
 the average Englishman been allowed to get the 
 idea that Ireland stood aside and sulked during 
 the war. Some people think that the insurrection 
 of 1916 is chiefly to blame. Well, there were not 
 enough Irishmen in the Dublin insurrection of 1916 
 to make up even one battalion of the Irish Guards. 
 One was told at the time that the Dublin insurgents 
 numbered about a thousand. One has learned since 
 then that they were hardly more than six hundred. 
 Clearly, if Ireland's freedom is to depend upon 
 whether her services to the Allies have outweighed 
 her disservices, she has earned her freedom about 
 a thousand times over. For every Irishman who 
 shouldered a rifle on the insurgent side, nearly a 
 thousand Irishmen bore weapons on the side of the 
 Allies. I doubt if one Englishman in a hundred 
 thousand realises this. If they did, they would 
 insist on seeing that their Irish allies had a free 
 Parliament restored to them. Never was the need 
 for a national government proved more completely. 
 Had Ireland possessed a national government during 
 the war, she would have had an organ for making 
 known her services to the civilised world. Canada, 
 Australia and South Africa have but to speak of 
 what they have done, and all the world listens. The 
 Times, and the Press in general, pay deference to
 
 IRELAND'S RECORD IN THE WAR 119 
 
 them as free nations that command respect. South 
 Africa has not contributed nearly so many men to 
 the Allied armies as Ireland has done, but, luckily 
 for herself, South Africa is free, and even her most 
 malignant enemy of the old days dares not criticise 
 her gift. She too, like Ireland, had a small insurrec- 
 tion ; but, even after this, she escaped calumny. 
 She too has been divided in opinion as to the war 
 far more so, indeed, than Ireland was before the 
 malevolence of the anti- Irish authorities had had 
 time to destroy the people's enthusiasm for Belgium. 
 " It is an unfortunate fact," said Mr Merriman in the 
 early part of 1918, "that we in South Africa are for 
 our sins riven into two factions of almost equal 
 strength. Almost one-half of the European popula- 
 tion is coldly neutral towards the issue which we 
 look upon as vital, if, indeed, they are not positively 
 hostile to the cause of the Allies." And yet South 
 Africa is free. If there is any coldness towards the 
 Allies, it is on account of past wrongs. In Ireland, 
 on the other hand, if there is any coldness towards 
 the Allies, it is chiefly on account of present wrongs. 
 Some months ago, when a dinner was given in 
 honour of Mr Burton, the Minister of Mines in South 
 Africa, Mr Asquith in a speech mentioned the 
 numbers of the South African forces who had served 
 in the war. The Times, for some reason or other, 
 omitted the figures in its report. One wondered at the 
 time whether this was because they made Ireland's 
 contribution seem so immense by comparison. The 
 Times was content to give the report of the dinner 
 some general appreciative heading such as " Loyal 
 South Africa." It is more exigent in regard to 
 Ireland. English statesmen, it is clear, have also 
 one standard for South Africa and another for 
 Ireland. Mr Burton, we are told, related to the 
 assembled guests the story of a wounded Boer
 
 120 IRELAND A NATION 
 
 soldier who said that he wished to get to France in 
 order to repay the gift of free institutions to his 
 country. He went on to say that the soldier's eye 
 brightened as he added : " I would not have raised 
 one single hand for the Empire if the Empire had 
 refused to establish in my country that freedom 
 which South Africa now enjoys." It is said that 
 Mr Austen Chamberlain and other representative 
 statesmen who were present cheered this remarkable 
 saying of the Boer soldier. By what fatality is it 
 that they are unable to see that Irishmen are human 
 beings, with the same passions as Boers? General 
 Botha wrote to Mr Redmond to say that he agreed 
 with him that South Africa's services to the Allies 
 were simply the fruit of the concession of national 
 freedom. Yet, even without national freedom, and 
 as a pure act of faith, Ireland poured her sons into 
 the trenches in the most critical days of the war 
 and helped to hold the line at its weakest for what 
 then seemed to be the world's freedom. 
 
 Let me say again that I do not make these com- 
 parisons in order to belittle the services of any other 
 nation, but only to show up Ireland's services in the 
 war in a true light Most of the free nations have 
 published a list of their dead and wounded soldiers. 
 Let us have a full list of the dead and wounded Irish 
 soldiers, so that we may judge how great have been 
 the sacrifices made by Ireland. Has Japan con- 
 tributed as many dead as Ireland? She has not. 
 Yet Japan is praised. Has New Zealand contri- 
 buted as many? She has not. Yet New Zealand 
 is praised. Has South Africa ? Has Canada ? 
 Canada has a greater population than Ireland. Yet, 
 if figures were to be had, I am confident it could be 
 shown that far fewer Canadian-born men than Irish- 
 born men have fallen in the war. Captain Esmonde, 
 M.P., said in the House of Commons : " I have seen
 
 IRELAND'S RECORD IN THE WAR 121 
 
 myself, buried in one grave, 400 Nationalist soldiers 
 killed in one fight" two-thirds as many as the total 
 number of the Dublin insurgents of Easter week. 
 And that mournful spectacle was being repeated not 
 after one fight, but after fifty during the war. In 
 the most desperate days of the war at Mons and 
 at the Marne Irishmen were present at the thickest 
 of the fighting, and battalion after battalion gave 
 itself up to the slaughter, singing The Bold Fenian 
 Men, A Nation Once Again, and other songs of 
 the kind that the police nowadays suppress with 
 baton charges in Ireland. At the beginning of the 
 war a battalion of the Irish Guards mutinied. It 
 was because it had been rumoured that they were 
 not being sent to the Front. The Irish Guards, it 
 will be remembered, had been reprimanded at the 
 time of the Buckingham Palace Conference for 
 cheering Mr Redmond on his way down Birdcage 
 Walk. I knew a soldier in the Irish Guards now 
 dead who declared that his battalion called them- 
 selves " Redmond's Own." Well, they are dead, and 
 so are the Redmonds, and Sir Edward Carson and 
 Mr Bonar Law have made the glorious sacrifice of 
 surviving to perpetuate the subjection of Ireland. 
 One is not surprised to hear of the Nationalist 
 soldier back from the Front who said to Mr Dillon : 
 " Mr Dillon, the worst of it is I know now that we 
 are not fighting for liberty, for England is going to 
 betray us." England, with the help of Labour, one 
 hopes, is going to do nothing of the sort ; but Mr 
 Bonar Law, Mr Shortt and Mr Macpherson, so far 
 as they are able, have already made the great 
 betrayal. Anti-Irish influences have for the moment 
 triumphed, and Ireland is held up to contempt as a 
 sullen shirker to all the free nations of Europe. 
 
 Mr Lloyd George admitted, in the days following 
 the insurrection, the malignity of the anti-Irish
 
 122 IRELAND A NATION 
 
 influences that had been at work among the English 
 official classes in the early days of the war. This 
 malignity has been shown by nothing more clearly 
 than by the nature of the anti- Irish propaganda 
 carried on by propagandists in the United States. 
 The misrepresentation of Ireland to the United 
 States could not have been more vehement if Ireland 
 had been righting for the Germans instead of for the 
 Allies. If an American soldier, going ashore in 
 Ireland, got into a drunken row that ended in a 
 fight, the incident was telegraphed to America as if 
 it were an unprovoked assault on the American flag 
 by Irish Nationalists. And what can be said of the 
 egregious statements about Ireland made in Mr 
 " Ian Hay's " propaganda book published in America 
 and exposed by Mr Devlin in the House of Com- 
 mons ? Irishmen ask themselves whether an English 
 Government that meant to deal honestly by Ireland 
 would actually pay for the spread of anti- Irish 
 feeling in America. It seemed to me at the be- 
 ginning of the war that England was now about to 
 take the attitude before the world : " Well, we have 
 done wrong in the past ; but we are now going to 
 liberate the small nations of the world Ireland 
 among them." Instead of that, English propaganda, 
 so far as it has related to Ireland, has largely been 
 occupied with an attempt to show, not that England 
 has at last admitted the justice of the cause of 
 Ireland, but that, comparatively speaking, England's 
 attitude to Ireland is satisfactory and just. Every 
 other Allied country except Ireland has been glorified 
 in pamphlet after pamphlet. Ireland alone has been 
 maligned. One pamphlet was published to show 
 that the English do not behave as badly in Ireland 
 as the Germans in Poland. On grounds of this kind 
 nearly any country might be denied its freedom. 
 One can usually find some other country which,
 
 IRELAND'S RECORD IN THE WAR 123 
 
 in some respect or other, has suffered still worse 
 things. 
 
 Here, then, is the plain truth about Ireland. Some 
 powerful influences, which have always hated the 
 thought of Irish freedom, have devoted themselves 
 resolutely to the denigration of Ireland since the 
 beginning of the war. Why, the story of the heroic 
 deeds of the Irish regiments at Gallipoli was sup- 
 pressed until Mr Redmond raised a storm about 
 them, after the troops of every other nation had 
 been given full credit. And to-day people who are 
 praising the Czecho-Slovaks and the Poles both of 
 whom fought (under compulsion) against the Allies 
 by the fifty thousand are to be found denouncing 
 the Irish, who contributed an immense and vitally 
 necessary army to the cause of the Allies. One 
 rejoices in the freedom that is coming to the Poles 
 and the Bohemians. But Ireland, too, has some 
 little claim on the attention of statesmen in these 
 years of liberation. As she thinks of her dead, lying 
 in a world of graves in Flanders, Gallipoli and 
 Mesopotamia, she may well (adapting the lines of 
 Mr Kipling) cry out, in the agony of her soul : 
 
 If blood be the price of nationality, 
 Good God, we ha' paid in full. 
 
 In this hour of the institution of the League of 
 Nations, let not the great deeds of this little nation 
 be forgotten.
 
 CHAPTER XIII 
 
 THE SOLDIERS' SACRIFICE 
 
 ONE of the tragic possibilities of the war always 
 was that the soldiers might sacrifice their lives for an 
 ideal and that the politician might afterwards make 
 use of their sacrifices to violate this ideal. It is im- 
 possible, I admit, to estimate the number of idealists 
 who turned themselves into soldiers in the war 
 against Germany, or even to be sure of the exact 
 formula of their idealism. On one point, however, 
 one feels confident ; never in any previous war did 
 so many of the soldiers consciously fight for ideal 
 ends. These ends may, for the most part, be resolved 
 into a single purpose the substitution of generosity 
 for greed, bullying and cruelty in the intercourse of 
 nations. One might almost describe the chief object 
 of the war, from the point of view of idealistic 
 soldiers, to be the Christianisation of foreign policy. 
 That, certainly, was the object for which Professor 
 Kettle gave his life, though by " foreign policy " he 
 would have understood something more than the 
 term conveys to the average Englishman. He would 
 have meant by it not only the policy of one inde- 
 pendent nation towards another but the policy of a 
 dominant nation towards the nations subject to it. 
 His demand was not merely that Germany should 
 behave finely to Belgium, but that England should 
 behave finely to Ireland ; it was even that Ireland 
 should behave finely to England. Though the last 
 man in the world one could mistake for a Utopian, 
 
 124
 
 THE SOLDIERS' SACRIFICE 125 
 
 he deliberately went out to the trenches in order 
 to help to lay the foundations of a new world. " I 
 want to live . . .," he wrote home from France, " to 
 use all my powers of thinking, writing and working 
 to drive out of civilisation this foul thing called War, 
 and to put in its place understanding and comrade- 
 ship." On another occasion he wrote : " If God 
 spares me, I shall accept it as a special mission to 
 preach love and peace for the rest of my life." And 
 in almost his last letter he put his passionate faith 
 in two deadly sentences : " Unless you hate war, as 
 such, you cannot really hate Prussia. If you admit 
 war as an essential part of civilisation, then what 
 you are hating is merely Prussian efficiency." 
 
 Some people may think that these sentiments 
 would be more in place in the mouth of a Consci- 
 entious Objector than of a soldier a soldier, more- 
 over, who was not a pressed man, but a volunteer. 
 Kettle knew that his position was paradoxical. 
 " We are gripped," he wrote, in The Ways of War, 
 " in the ancient bloodiness of that paradox which 
 bids us kill life in order to save life." He did not 
 believe, like a militarist, in war ; but he believed, 
 like many a pacifist, in the last war. The militarist 
 is a man who believes in war if it may be ; the 
 pacifist is a man who believes in war if it must be. 
 Not that Kettle, or any other pacifist, could ever 
 accept the theory that war is, at any time, an inevit- 
 able occurrence. 
 
 " There is " (he wrote) " a sort of pietism, hardly 
 distinguishable from atheism, to which war appears 
 as a sort of natural calamity. . . . War is not a 
 calamity of nature, and there are no ' inevitable 
 wars.' Or, rather, the only war inevitable is a war 
 against aggression, and aggression itself is never 
 inevitable."
 
 126 IRELAND A NATION 
 
 Certainly, nothing but the necessity of protesting 
 against aggression at all costs could ever have turned 
 Kettle into a soldier in the British army. England 
 has for seven centuries governed Ireland by the 
 sword. Hence Irish Nationalists have always re- 
 garded the army as an instrument of English 
 domination over their country, and therefore as no 
 place for a patriotic Irishman. Kettle, as a student 
 in Dublin, had distributed anti-recruiting leaflets in 
 the streets. On entering politics, he tried to persuade 
 Mr Redmond to include anti-enlistment in the pro- 
 gramme of the Irish Party. He was considered at 
 that time to be more in sympathy with Sinn Fein 
 than any other of Mr Redmond's followers. And, 
 if he died in the uniform of a British soldier, it was 
 not that he had cast off his inherited Nationalism. 
 Just as it was his Nationalism which had made him 
 all his life protest against English aggression in 
 Ireland, so it was his Nationalism which made 
 him protest against German aggression in Belgium. 
 He was quite free from the sort of Nationalism 
 which is simply self-absorption applied to one's 
 country. His Nationalism was international. He 
 could not content himself with catch-words, such as 
 " England is the enemy," " Germany is the enemy," 
 or " Basutoland is the enemy." He saw that, though 
 any of these statements may be true for a time, none 
 of them is true for all time. They are not philo- 
 sophic or universal truths. They may sound im- 
 pressive enough at the street-corner or in a leading 
 article. But men do not die for such things. At 
 least, philosophers do not. It was the philosophic 
 basis of Kettle's Nationalism which enabled him to 
 see at the beginning of the present war that the 
 principles in which he believed were most terribly 
 threatened, not by England but by Germany. In 
 July, 1914, he was in Belgium buying rifles for his
 
 THE SOLDIERS' SACRIFICE 127 
 
 fellow-Nationalists. In August he took the view 
 that the battle-field of Nationalism was transferred 
 from the Liffey to Belgium, and the change of scene 
 did not mean for him a change of ideal. As Mrs 
 Kettle says : " It was as an Irish soldier in the army of 
 Europe and civilisation that he entered the war." 
 
 Major Redmond's was a less subtle and philosophic 
 nature than Kettle's. He was the incarnation, not 
 of philosophic " good Europeanism " but of impulsive 
 chivalry. His widow relates that he took the war 
 so deeply to heart that for a long time he refused 
 even to look at a newspaper. " If I'm too old to 
 fight," he said, " at least I will not sit comfortably 
 in an arm-chair and read what other men are doing 
 and suffering." After the first Zeppelin raid, he 
 decided he could remain a non-combatant no longer. 
 Although in his fifties and by no means robust in 
 health, he applied for a commission in the army. 
 " I am far too old to be a soldier," he said, " but I 
 mean to do my best for whatever life remains in me 
 to show that Ireland at least is true to her treaties, 
 and not in any way ungrateful to her friends through- 
 out the world." As a friend has written of him : " To 
 one of his political principles the donning of the 
 British uniform was a moral effort." To fight for 
 one's country is noble ; to fight for the oppressor of 
 one's country is surely nobleness in its most difficult 
 form. Both Redmond and Kettle, of course, believed 
 that in fighting for England in the war they were 
 fighting for Ireland. But, with Dublin Castle still 
 in power and still as brutally cynical as ever, this 
 was by no means self-evident. It required not only 
 a fine moral sense, but a generous imagination to 
 realise it. Even after they had thrown themselves 
 heart and soul into the war, there was much that 
 happened which must have tried their faith. Who 
 but a politician can ever forget that last speech of
 
 128 IRELAND A NATION 
 
 Major Redmond's in the House of Commons, which 
 was like a hero's dying cry of despair? Speaking 
 on a motion to put the Home Rule Act into im- 
 mediate operation, he exclaimed, almost in an agony 
 of emotion : " In God's name, why cannot you do 
 it ? " It was an appeal, one would have thought, 
 that would move even a Cabinet Minister. Major 
 Redmond had not been in his grave three months, 
 however, when Sir Edward Carson was sending tele- 
 grams to the Australian Orangemen, encouraging 
 them to continue the fight against Irish freedom, and 
 was publicly accepting as a gift a model of the 
 yacht which had landed the fatal arms of the gun- 
 runners at Larne, and so helped to precipitate Europe 
 into war. Sir Edward Carson, it has often seemed 
 to me, has a nature closely resembling the Kaiser's. 
 Egoistic, theatrical in a tawdry way, with the sort 
 of personal magnetism that is always sure of cheers 
 and that makes men ready to follow him to the 
 death in an unjust cause, hysterical, self-deceiving, 
 a hero of clergymen had the Kaiser been an Anglo- 
 Irishman and Sir Edward Carson a German, I do 
 not believe that the course of European history 
 during the last three or four years would have been 
 appreciably different. Sir Edward, like the Kaiser, 
 owes some reparation to this tortured world. 
 
 Kettle dreaded the triumph of the Carsons, as we 
 see in his writings, not only as regards Ireland but 
 as regards the wholesale degradation of the objects 
 of the war. In his essay, Trade or Honour ? he made 
 a protest of splendid eloquence against everything 
 for which the Paris Resolutions stand. " An attempt 
 is being made," he warns us, "to transform what 
 began as a war for honour into a war for trade " : 
 
 " Powerful intriguers of unbounded assurance are 
 sedulous behind the backs of the fighting men,
 
 THE SOLDIERS' SACRIFICE 129 
 
 scheming to run up new flags in the place of the old. 
 The inscription 'Justice' is to be hauled down, and 
 4 Markets ' is to be hoisted in its stead. In pursuance 
 of that new object the powerful innovators are ready 
 to extend far beyond their natural term the torture 
 and agony which are now the sole realities of Europe. 
 They are willing, for the accomplishment of it, to 
 ordain that the blood of better men shall drip in- 
 definitely into the cistern of Gehenna. And since it 
 is the followers and gamblers at home, and not the 
 silent trench-fellows of death at the Front, that 
 exercise most influence on national policy, it is to 
 be feared that the former may prevail. Assuredly 
 protest is a matter of obligation." 
 
 Later on in the same chapter, he puts the matter 
 in a sentence : 
 
 " The New Army attested to die, if need be, for 
 the public law of Europe : there was no mention of 
 tariffs in the bond." 
 
 Kettle, it will be seen, was Liberal as well as 
 Nationalist in his enthusiasms. But it was as an 
 exponent of Nationalism that he earned his greatest 
 fame. He was a natural orator in his writings as in 
 his speech. No one but an orator could have written 
 that rich passage in The Open Secret of Ireland which 
 portrays Ireland as not a conquered nation, but a 
 nation marching towards victory. How far it soars 
 above the level of contemporary eloquence ! 
 
 "Tears, as we read in Wordsworth, to human 
 suffering are due. If there be anyone with tears at 
 command, he may shed them, with great fitness and 
 no profit at all, over the martyrdom of Ireland. But 
 let him, at least if he values facts, think twice before
 
 130 IRELAND A NATION 
 
 he goes on to apply to her that other line which 
 speaks of human hopes defeated and overthrown. 
 No other people in the world has held so staunchly 
 to its inner vision ; none other has, with such fiery 
 patience, repelled the hostility of circumstances, and 
 in the end reshaped them after the desire of her 
 heart. Hats off to success, gentlemen ! Your modern 
 god may well be troubled at the sight of this enigmatic 
 Ireland which at once despises him and tumbles 
 his faithfullest worshippers in the sand of their 
 own amphitheatre. Yet, so it is. The Confederate 
 general, seeing victory suddenly snatched from his 
 hands, and not for the first time, by Meagher's 
 Brigade, exclaimed in immortal profanity : ' There 
 comes that damned green flag again ! ' I have often 
 commended that phrase to Englishmen as admirably 
 expressive of the historical role and record of Ireland 
 in British politics. The damned green flag flutters 
 again in their eyes, and if they will but listen to the 
 music that marches with it, they will find that the 
 lamenting fifes are dominated wholly by the drums 
 of victory." 
 
 There is the music of national faith in these sen- 
 tences. It is for this faith that tens of thousands 
 of Irish soldiers sacrificed their lives in the war 
 against Germany.
 
 CHAPTER XIV 
 
 THE ENGLISH IN IRELAND : A SCENE 
 
 IRELAND marched for many generations under the 
 green flag. This became (despite Kettle) an emblem 
 of defeat, however even of humiliation, for the 
 withholding of Home Rule affected the most 
 moderate of Irishmen like the rebuff of a proffered 
 handshake. Parnell always hated green as an 
 unlucky colour. Whether it is or not, Ireland has 
 apparently had enough of it. Her young men and 
 women have in the past two years taken a new flag 
 and a new national anthem. Their flag is now the 
 orange-white-and-green tricolour, and their song is 
 The Soldier? Song. 
 
 Dublin Castle does not quite know what to do 
 about it. There is a minority of exceptionally well- 
 fed persons whose flag is the Union Jack and whose 
 anthem is God Save the King, and these people 
 heatedly call on Dublin Castle to preserve order. 
 By preserving order they mean cracking the skull 
 of anyone who sings The Soldiers' Song and pre- 
 cipitating bodies of policemen and soldiers, armed 
 with bludgeons and bayonets, upon every little 
 crowd that happens to raise the orange-white-and- 
 green flag. It is difficult to distinguish this view of 
 order from the theory of terrorism. The preservation 
 of order means nothing to the partisan save a free 
 hand for violence on one's own side. 
 
 Dublin Castle on the whole prefers to rule by 
 threat rather than by deed. Liberty Hall, for
 
 132 IRELAND A NATION 
 
 instance, the headquarters of the Irish Transport 
 Workers' Union, is opposite a railway bridge which 
 is guarded by armed sentries. Recently an iron 
 structure has been raised above the parapet of the 
 bridge with a machine gun emplacement and an 
 arrangement of loopholes through which rifles could 
 fire straight into the windows of the most important 
 trade union in Ireland. So long as the rifles do not 
 go off, however, it is possible for a casual visitor to 
 Dublin on a sunny day to feel that this is the best of 
 all possible worlds, with nothing to complain about 
 but the noise of the trams. People do not walk 
 along the streets in actual chains, nor are babes-in- 
 arms transfixed on the points of bayonets by passing 
 soldiers. In these respects, at least, life in con- 
 temporary Ireland bears a resemblance to life in the 
 Golden Age. 
 
 When the Irish-American delegates arrived in 
 Dublin last May, Dublin Castle stood aside at first. 
 The delegates drove up to the Mansion House 
 in taxis from which the orange-white-and-green 
 tricolour was flying on the right hand and the stars- 
 and-stripes on the left. Every evening, as they 
 returned from their travels, they were met at the 
 railway station by the same beflagged taxis, which 
 would then proceed slowly through the streets, 
 surrounded by a bodyguard, followed by a brass 
 band playing The Soldiers' Song : 
 
 Soldiers are we ; 
 
 Our lives are pledged to Ireland 
 
 an army of Volunteers in civilian clothes, and a 
 dense mass of sight-seers. This was all done in 
 defiance of the law, which forbids processions, and 
 an occasional Volunteer even risked court martial by 
 appearing in uniform. It was important, however, 
 to give the American delegates the impression that
 
 THE ENGLISH IN IRELAND 133 
 
 they were on a visit to a free country ; and so the 
 law slept, and good order reigned. On the second 
 evening a long file of policemen, the white metal 
 of their helmets making them look like a musical- 
 comedy chorus of Prussians in the darkness, marched 
 quickly behind the crowd ; but the next night there 
 was not a policeman to be seen on the route of 
 the procession, and half Dublin trooped after the 
 Republican flags and the Republican tunes to the 
 fashionable Unionist square where the delegates 
 stayed. They cheered Republican speeches made 
 from a balcony under a huge tricolour, and then 
 went home as quietly as if they had been coming out 
 of a Sunday school. On the Friday, again, the Dail 
 Eireann, as the Republican Parliament is called, met 
 in the Round Room of the Mansion House, and once 
 more the police stood aside, while Volunteers with 
 white armlets discharged the duties assigned to 
 policemen in ordinary free States. Everything 
 seemed quiet to the point of dullness. I met one 
 man who had just left the Mansion House, and he 
 complained bitterly of the dullness of some of the 
 speeches. I was all the more astonished on turning 
 into Dawson Street between five and six o'clock to 
 find cordons of huge policemen throwing themselves 
 across the street and soldiers in trench helmets and 
 full kit marching in columns towards the Mansion 
 House, with a fleet of motor lorries (more crowded 
 than the wooden horse of Troy) following, out of 
 which other soldiers poured, carrying monstrous- 
 looking machine guns. The police said that I could 
 not pass ; but on my protesting that I lived in 
 Dawson Street, one of them said genially : " Well, 
 go ahead, but if you're blurring, you're done for ; for 
 you can't get out at the other end." As another 
 company of soldiers swept up to the pavement, a 
 lady at my side ran up to them and said : " Why
 
 134 IRELAND A NATION 
 
 don't you fight for liberty in this country? Why 
 don't you fight for liberty in this country ? " She 
 went up to a young officer in a trench helmet and 
 passionately put the same question to him. He 
 looked slightly taken aback, but replied with a smile : 
 " My dear lady, I'm only a soldier obeying orders." 
 By this time the throb of the motor lorries, the tramp 
 of marching feet, and the click of bayonets being 
 fixed filled the street with the preliminary din of 
 war. No one knew what was happening. People 
 said that the Republican Parliament was being sup- 
 pressed on account of some inflammatory speeches. 
 Others said that the public reception arranged by 
 the Lord Mayor at the Mansion House for that 
 evening had been prohibited. An officer came up to 
 a group of people near me and said it was "only 
 a demonstration." Whatever may have been the 
 purpose of it all, the street was now held at each end 
 by a cordon of policemen. A few yards behind this 
 came a row of soldiers with fixed bayonets. A few 
 yards behind this, again, came more soldiers with 
 fixed bayonets. An armoured car with the nose of 
 a gun projecting threateningly started every few 
 minutes with a grunt and sailed up and down the 
 street. Beyond the police and soldiers a crowd was 
 now gathering and singing The Soldiers' Song and 
 other seditious airs. As each song came to an end 
 they cheered defiantly. At the end of one chorus 
 the soldiers rattled their rifle butts derisively on the 
 stones, but an officer called out angrily : " Stop 
 that." Singing and cheering went on in this fashion, 
 while the crowd increased; and every time the 
 armoured car went off on its minatory prowl there 
 was a voluminous boo. An old woman ran out of 
 a house crying : " This is going to be worse than 
 the rebellion." " Prussianism ! " declared a little 
 man with a rough moustache. " Here's Prussianism
 
 THE ENGLISH IN IRELAND 135 
 
 for you ! " Meanwhile tramcars were still allowed to 
 pass along the street, each with a crowd of people 
 standing on the roof, angry and amazed. A travelling 
 musician who happened to be on one tram had his 
 trumpet with him ; and, as he passed through the 
 soldiers, he raised it to his lips and blew a defiant 
 Come to the Cookhouse Door which set both soldiers 
 and Republicans laughing. 
 
 An officer assured some people in a doorway that 
 nothing was going to happen. He protested good- 
 naturedly against a comparison an onlooker made 
 between the British army in Ireland and the Germans 
 in Belgium. " You surely don't think we're like the 
 Huns?" he said. He declared that no English 
 soldier had any but friendly feelings towards the 
 Irish. "You know," he said, "you people often 
 complain about Oliver Cromwell. But we dislike 
 Oliver Cromwell as much as you do. After all, we 
 got rid of him as soon as we could, didn't we?" 
 During the evening another officer came up and 
 expressed his bewilderment as to the cause of the 
 trouble between the English and the Irish. I said 
 to him that it all arose from England's incapacity 
 to see that the Irish were a nation like the Poles and 
 the Bohemians. " I hope not like the Poles," he said, 
 with a distressed air. While he was speaking a tiny 
 mouse, terrified by the continous singing, cheering 
 and clamour, appeared in the street and rushed off 
 down the gutter with its tail up. A soldier in heavy 
 boots ran after it and attempted to trip it. He thrust 
 at it with his bayonet, and it turned and fled across the 
 street. Half-a-dozen other soldiers made at it with 
 their bayonets, scuffling for it like men playing hockey, 
 and laughing uproariously. As soon as the officer saw 
 what they were doing, he curtly told them to stop ; but 
 the mouse lay dead on the stones. Strange that a 
 man should find pleasure in bayoneting a mouse !
 
 136 IRELAND A NATION 
 
 Suddenly the crowd ceased singing and began to 
 cheer and wave arms rapturously, and a taxi flying 
 the Sinn Fein colours was received into its bosom. 
 Other cars and motors had already arrived, with 
 people in evening dress waiting to be admitted to 
 the Mansion House. A police inspector put up his 
 hand and brought the Sinn Fein taxi to a halt. At 
 first it seemed as if the crowd was eager to rush the 
 taxi through the police and soldiers, but the American 
 delegates got out and approached the police on foot. 
 As the crowd behind them became more excited 
 and urgent, some of the soldiers in the front rank 
 raised their rifles into the air, and a shot rang out. 
 Some people declare that only a "slap-bang" was 
 discharged, but the rifles were certainly pointed 
 skywards at the time, and the effect was that of a 
 rifle shot. Some of the onlookers on the outskirts 
 of the crowd ran backwards, but the crowd as a 
 whole pressed forward, cheering angrily and singing 
 The Soldiers' Song and shouting for the Republic. 
 Officers, police and American delegates stood in 
 the middle of the road arguing and thousands of 
 guests waited, wondering whether they were going 
 to a war or a tea-party. 
 
 At last the Americans were passed through the 
 police cordon amid yells of triumph ; but as Mr 
 de Valera and their other hosts were forbidden to 
 accompany them, they returned to the side of the 
 taxi. Then followed more arguments with military 
 and police officers, the armoured car commanding 
 the mouth of the street. After some time it was 
 clear that the guests were to be allowed through. 
 Out of the crowd a number of volunteer stewards 
 appeared and passed like a rope round the edge of 
 their followers. The soldiers drew up and unfixed 
 their bayonets. The men with the machine guns 
 tumbled out of the alley where they had been waiting
 
 THE ENGLISH IN IRELAND 137 
 
 and scrambled into the motor lorries. They began 
 to move off amid the boos of the crowd. To the 
 crowd it had all the appearance of a flight. Soldiers 
 and police withdrew, and the Sinn Fein colours drove 
 through, a host of cheering men and women pouring 
 1 after them, carrying the volunteer stewards before 
 them like driftwood on a wave. What all the trouble 
 had been about no one in the crowd knew ; but 
 there was not a child present who did not believe 
 that Sinn Fein had routed the British army. 
 Mr Macpherson explains that this imposing display 
 of bayonet, machine gun and armoured car had for 
 its object the arrest of a single Sinn Fein Member 
 of Parliament. Whatever the object may have been, 
 the result was merely to give the American visitors 
 an unusually vivid spectacle of methods of terrorism 
 in Ireland and to bring ridicule on the British army. 
 The whole display might be described as an immense 
 success for Sinn Fein. So generally was this felt 
 that an officer expressed his belief to me the next 
 day that the Sinn Feiners had deliberately planned 
 it for the sake of the American visitors, and had 
 played a hoax for this purpose on the Dublin police. 
 It would be amusing to think so, but the comedy of 
 Irish life is not, I am afraid, a comedy of" practical 
 joking" Sinn Feiners, but a comedy of the stupidity 
 of General Shaw and Mr Macpherson. Never was 
 The Soldiers' Song played with greater gusto than 
 by the band at the Lord Mayor's reception that 
 evening. True, a mouse lay dead outside in Dawson 
 Street. Otherwise there was no shadow cast on the 
 festivities of the occasion.
 
 CHAPTER XV 
 
 ANOTHER SCENE: THE DRUMS OF ULSTER 
 
 IT must have been twelve or thirteem years since I 
 had marched out with the Orangemen to celebrate 
 the battle of the Boyne, or whatever it is, at a 
 Twelfth of July demonstration. Then it was along 
 the dusty road from Belfast to Lambeg that I went 
 a pilgrim. On the eve of the war I saw the great 
 procession among the hedges and hills of the south 
 of County Down not far from Kilkeel, the capital 
 village, as you might call it, of the old kingdom of 
 Mourne. A traveller in the country-side on the eve 
 of the Twelfth might have wondered at the manner 
 in which every white house-front seemed to be shining 
 like the lamp of a wise virgin. He would have 
 learned that the whitening and cleansing of the 
 houses at the approach of the Twelfth is an inherited 
 ritual in these parts. He would have noticed, too, 
 with interest, the orange Hly rising like a spirit of 
 flame among the marigolds and pansies and poppies 
 and roses by hundreds of Protestant doors. And at 
 night, when the jackdaws had fallen down the 
 chimneys into their nests and the very stillness had 
 gone asleep, he would have heard the air suddenly 
 invaded by a rout of thwackings a leaping heels- 
 over-head procession of clang and clatter, as though 
 a race of traction engines dragging loads of loose 
 and empty milk cans were taking place down stony 
 roads. That was the voice of the drum. No shrill- 
 ness of fife, no sweetness of flute, shared the night 
 
 138
 
 THE DRUMS OF ULSTER 139 
 
 with its arguments. It reigned as supreme as 
 thunder while it lasted. In its rhythm, however, 
 it was less like thunder than a cosmic clog-dance 
 with the orchestra silent. There are some people, 
 I believe, who can find no rhythm at all in drum 
 music. In Belfast we used to interpret its measured 
 utterance as : " There are no public-houses on the 
 Lambeg R6ad." Personally I have always been 
 a lover of the drum. It seems to me to be, not 
 an instrument of threatening and outrage, as so 
 many hold, but an instrument of summoning to good 
 company. Certainly in Kilkeel it has never had any 
 left-handed significance. Here, and in the surround- 
 ing district, the population is almost equally divided 
 between Protestants and Catholics, yet the drum has 
 never been known to set them fighting together. 
 They say that party fighting is as rare as poverty 
 in the neighbourhood, and that poverty simply does 
 not exist. Even if one demurs to this until one has 
 had a satisfactory definition of poverty, one cannot 
 question that here is a corner of Ulster which is as 
 unlike the Ulster that the week-end correspondents 
 of the London Unionist papers discover as paradise 
 is unlike Dante's Inferno on the cinematograph. 
 
 Into this fishing village under the mountains the 
 morning of the Twelfth came like the peace of God. 
 Over the wide central street a single arch hung in 
 greeting to the day. It was a rope of orange lilies 
 mixed with red and blue flowers : a gold Bible with 
 a crown planted on it swung from the middle, and 
 on each side of this was a row of tiny blue, white 
 and red pennons, point downwards, with a silver star 
 hanging from nearly every point, while a little 
 ladder, a cardboard King William on a white horse, 
 a cross, a pair of compasses, and various other 
 symbols, dangled as from a Christmas tree. It was 
 as charming as a bridge of toys. There were no
 
 140 IRELAND A NATION 
 
 other public decorations. The shops were all open 
 as usual, but there was more than the usual sprinkling 
 of sight-seers hanging about the doors. There was 
 an unusual number of country girls out, too, dressed 
 in the flower of the fashion, and of children in their 
 Sabbath clothes. Here and there an orange-and- 
 blue rosette hid a button-hole ; here and there a 
 full-blown Orangeman moved along the pavement, 
 with his sash putting a hoop of colour round his blue 
 Sunday coat. Orange lilies were worn, but not 
 universally. Probably the Catholics of the town, 
 as well as the Protestants, were in the streets to see 
 the festival of banner and drum go by on its annual 
 way. When I arrived at the chief cross-roads of the 
 village the local Orange lodges had apparently 
 already set out into the country to meet a number 
 of outlying lodges and give them the company of 
 their flags and music along part of the road. It is 
 a charming office of hospitality the lodges pay to 
 each other. Before long they came back, a dozen 
 or so of them, towards the sea, a tumult of painted 
 banners marching down the street, while the 
 drummers lashed the big drums with a morning 
 vigour. Every banner was a shouting picture, sup- 
 ported on each side by a man holding a pole, and 
 with many proud little boys keeping it steady with 
 long orange ribbons. One banner would represent 
 King William waving a sword as he crossed the 
 Boyne on a white horse ; another would depict him 
 as he received his wound on the same horse at the 
 same battle; another showed a youthful Queen 
 Victoria presenting a Holy Bible to a monkey-brown 
 heathen king, and bore the motto : " The Secret of 
 England's Greatness " ; another had a picture of the 
 boy David getting his pebbles ready in the stream ; 
 and there were plenty more of them, all with a 
 coloured picture on each side. Each lodge had its
 
 THE DRUMS OF ULSTER 141 
 
 special banner, before which two men usually walked 
 holding the charter of the lodge, framed like a 
 picture for the world's eyes. Behind the banner 
 came the band, often two lordly drums and a little 
 fife, the latter scarcely more audible amid the noise 
 than the cheep of a newly hatched canary. Here, 
 I confess with sadness, I noticed none of the 
 backward-dancing flute-players who so often precede 
 the big drums in the Belfast demonstrations, and 
 who, I am sure, with their shapes and their tunes 
 come down in direct line from an old procession to 
 the temple of some rustic pagan god. In Kilkeel, 
 however, there was a no less picturesque youth who 
 went before some of the bands and swung a heavy 
 pole, with a Bible and gold crown on the end of it, 
 in time with the music, and who every now and then 
 would twist round sharp as a drum-tap, and march 
 backwards, with neat little steps, holding the pole 
 horizontally across the front line of the band, as 
 though to command an ideal straight line of front. 
 Then, having marshalled his whistling men into 
 right lines, he would sweep round again, twirling his 
 pole with the airs and graces, and would lead them 
 pacing down the road, looking the picture of happi- 
 ness in office under the scarlet plumes of his khaki- 
 coloured hat. Other young men walked at the sides 
 and ends of the lodges with gleaming pikes, called 
 deacon-poles, and an occasional officer carried a 
 polished wooden hammer in his hand. Four abreast 
 or so, the rank and file of the procession ambled 
 along, with their coloured sashes over their 
 shoulders sashes of orange, blue, purple and black, 
 with borders here and there of green, and many of 
 them embroidered with ladders and crowing cocks 
 and coffins and keys and death's-heads and lambs, 
 and all the rest of it, in gold thread. They walked 
 past slowly and self-consciously, with little attempt
 
 142 IRELAND A NATION 
 
 to keep step, some puffing cheerfully at pipes, old 
 men and young, dark and red, with bronzed skins, 
 many of them with the shy, serious, Irish face, most 
 of them with the talent of good will in their eyes. 
 One could not have beheld anything less like the 
 army of rage and roaring, of bloody words and 
 purposes, which we are sometimes asked to regard 
 as inhabiting the Orange counties of Ulster. Here 
 was more friendship than frenzy. No sooner had 
 the procession filed into the town than it broke off 
 once more along a country road to meet a second 
 large contingent coming from Annalong. Pouring 
 down the hilly road and out among the fields, with 
 the fifes lilting out The Orange Lily, and another 
 band following at a few yards' distance battering 
 out that most Irish, if most Protestant, of songs, 
 The Boyne Water, and an artillery of drums behind 
 merging into that, the little army seemed to go 
 forth on its mission with a mediaeval gaiety and 
 gorgeousness. Crude the art of the painters no 
 doubt was, but the imagination was carried away as 
 the green and the blue and the orange silks of the 
 banners disappeared to music over the edge of 
 a hill. 
 
 Probably it was about an hour before the procession 
 got back from its second march of hospitality. When 
 it returned it was headed by a brake, upon which 
 sat the Worshipful Master of the Orangemen of the 
 district, in a chimney-pot hat and a plush coat of 
 many colours. Lean of face, lean and grizzled of 
 beard, smiling, spectacled, he raised his hat on all 
 sides like a monarch as he was borne through the 
 town. The two grey horses which drew him had 
 bunches of orange lilies at their ears, as had many of 
 the horses in the cars which brought loads of country 
 visitors in from every part. The procession was now 
 twice as long as it had previously been ; and the
 
 THE DRUMS OF ULSTER 143 
 
 drums swept it down the street at a livelier pace 
 as it made towards the field of meeting with a host 
 of cars and girls in white dresses following it. On 
 the way to the field, an old stooping farmer with 
 a boy's face and eyes gleaming with sociability under 
 his grey brows, came over and talked to me. When 
 I spoke about the district, he said : " Ay, this is one 
 of the civilised parts of the country. The country 
 isn't all like this, you know." He talked about the 
 prosperity of the farmers, and the excellence of 
 seaweed as manure for the potatoes, and told me 
 that you could grow twenty tons of potatoes on an 
 acre of land and sell them at more than .3 a ton. 
 When I asked him who were to be the speakers at 
 the day's demonstration, he said : " I don't know. 
 Aw, I suppose it'll be some of the clergy. Some of 
 the clergy's very good at the talking." It was an 
 admirable example of the easy-going way in which 
 the people of the country-side accepted the Twelfth 
 and enjoyed it when it came. 
 
 Even when the procession had arrived in the field, 
 no one seemed to be in a hurry to begin the oratory. 
 First of all, the lodges laid down their drums and 
 folded up their banners, and sat down in various 
 corners of the field, while carts followed them with 
 crates of lemonade-bottles and provisions. Each 
 lodge provided its own lunch, and the wives and 
 children of many of the Orangemen shared in the 
 picnic, while a couple of ice-cream carts, fallen from 
 heaven knows where, stood on the road and supplied 
 the needs of the outside public. The fields around 
 were empty of labourers ; the only sound of work 
 to be heard was that of an unseen man clipping a 
 hedge. There was a sort of Sunday look about it 
 all a Sunday school excursion look as you gazed 
 round the demonstrators sprawling in the grass 
 in their Sunday clothes, eating sandwiches and
 
 144 IRELAND A NATION 
 
 smoking and talking without excitement. As the 
 elders ate and talked, small boys would steal up to 
 the drums, fascinated, and beat a tattoo on them, 
 taking turns at the work. A beggar-woman, with 
 red-rimmed eyes, slipped among the people, gently 
 begging for her baby, until a sturdy, bearded man 
 told her to go away home. "Go home yourself 
 to your drunken wife," she shouted, turning on him 
 venomously ; " bejasus, go home and pay your debts." 
 It was the only exciting incident of the day. 
 Conspicuous among the moving crowd in the field 
 was the figure of the Worshipfnl Master in his 
 chimney-pot hat and his plush cloak, smoking a 
 pipe, with no memory of his ceremonial garb. Boys 
 in twos and threes wandered about bandying wit 
 with girls in twos and threes. And so an hour, 
 and an hour and a half, passed, and no orator had 
 yet broken the peace of the shining cloudy day. 
 
 At long last, there was a general movement 
 towards the wagonette, where a purple-and-orange 
 bannerette and a Union Jack were flying. Several 
 clergymen clambered into it beside the Worshipful 
 Master, and, as I got near one of them was reading 
 a prayer. This was followed by a chapter from the 
 Bible, after which the Worshipful Master uprose 
 in his red, gold and blue plush, and smilingly 
 rejoiced in the fact that so many of us had gathered 
 there to do honour to 
 
 King William Three 
 Of glorious memoree. 
 
 He said that that great meeting, the greatest he 
 had ever seen in Mourne, showed that Orangeism was 
 still strong in the ancient kingdom, " and perhaps 
 some of you know," he added, with a beautiful 
 irrelevance, " that the Mourne Mountains were made 
 before the Alps, and Kilkeel dates from the fifth
 
 THE DRUMS OF ULSTER 145 
 
 century. It was called Kellkeel then, but the name 
 has changed since." He then referred to various 
 members who had died or emigrated during the 
 year. " And now," was his comment on one of the 
 former, as he pointed upwards, " our friend has joined 
 the Grand Lodge above I mean heaven." He 
 read a letter from a member who had gone to New 
 Zealand, promising, when the Ulster rebellion arrived, 
 to come back. " You hear that," said the Worshipful 
 Master, with a happy smile "he says he'll come 
 back when he's wanted." And he said it with so 
 comic a simplicity that some of the listeners could 
 not help bursting into laughter. It was a good- 
 humoured, free-and-easy speech, an odd mixture of 
 country-side colloquialisms and astonishing plunges 
 into poetry and eloquence. He would suddenly 
 break aside from the main thread of his speech and, 
 with outstretched arms, appeal to us : " Put upon 
 my tombstone when you lay me in the green earth 
 neither ' He did well ' nor ' He did ill,' but only ' He 
 did his best.'" And with equal unexpectedness he 
 afterwards declaimed a parody on From Green- 
 land's Icy Mountains, which began something like : 
 
 From Ulster's glorious mountains 
 To Munster's golden sands, 
 Where Connemara's fountains, 
 
 etc., and ended by saying that all the parts of Ireland 
 mentioned were united together in declaring : 
 
 We will not have Home Rule. 
 
 The next speaker was a young Presbyterian 
 minister, who contented himself with covering the 
 local history of the Orange Order during the year. 
 After him came yet another young minister, who 
 traced the history of Orangeism back to the end of 
 the seventeenth century, and who incidentally spoke
 
 146 IRELAND A NATION 
 
 the only speech of ill will that I heard during the 
 day. He recalled the battle of the Diamond in 
 Armagh, where the Orangemen had defeated a 
 superior host of Catholics in 1795, "leaving forty- 
 eight dead," he added, with apparent satisfaction. 
 " And," he went on boastfully, " we're ready to meet 
 our enemies again, three to one, when they like. 
 Don't think we're afraid of their numbers," he 
 declared. " I have seen them during the riots up 
 there in Derry, and you would only have to shake an 
 empty pair of breeches at them to see the whole lot 
 of them taking to their heels." He declared that 
 Sir Edward Carson was one of the brightest intellects 
 in the House of Commons, and expressed the deepest 
 resentment because some people sneered at him who 
 weren't nt to black his shoes. " Bottle-washers," sug- 
 gested one of the audience. "They sneer at our 
 dummy rifles," cried the young clergyman ; " we have 
 the real rifles and can produce them when necessary." 
 He kept repeating the word " loyalty," and con- 
 temptuously proclaimed that "a loyal Hibernian 
 was as rare as holy water in Aughanoory Orange 
 Lodge." He called for " the long arm and the short 
 sword " to seek out and punish treason. He uttered 
 no word of good will to the country in which he was 
 born. Perhaps that is why his speech sounded so 
 oddly in the tolerant atmosphere of Mourne " kindly 
 Mourne," as the old stooping farmer had assured me 
 it is called. And I do not believe that the mind of 
 the place was expressed in it. Beside it I could not 
 help putting for contrast a sermon I heard in the Pres- 
 byterian Church the next morning, when a minister 
 with white hairs preached a sermon that closed with 
 another reference to Home Rule. He said that he, 
 and many people with him, believed that Rome 
 under Home Rule could re-establish her system as it 
 was in the days of the Stuarts, and he urged his
 
 THE DRUMS OF ULSTER 147 
 
 hearers to pray to God to avert so great a calamity. 
 "And if," he concluded I quote the words freely from 
 memory " God sees good to answer our prayer, He 
 will drive these clouds away, and if in His providence 
 He should allow the changes we dread to come to 
 pass, then we may be sure that it is His purpose to 
 make them the means of some great blessing to His 
 people of which we do not now know." That, I 
 think, is the statement of a deeper Ulster mood than 
 the clerical message that had been delivered on the 
 field. 
 
 I left the meeting after the young minister had 
 spoken. But in the evening the bands came 
 thundering into the village again, and, as I watched 
 them, I remembered how I too was once filled with 
 the vision of the Pope as a dragon who might at any 
 time come stealing over the hills during the night to 
 devour us in our beds. Well, perhaps I am some- 
 thing of an Orangeman in my view of the Pope still. 
 But I sometimes wonder whether the Orangeman 
 dreads Home Rule because of the power it will give 
 the Pope half as much as many a Pope has dreaded 
 Irish freedom because of the power it will give the 
 Orangeman.
 
 CHAPTER XVI 
 
 THE WITNESS OF THE POETS 
 
 IF one wants to know the truth about a country is it 
 better to turn to the poets or the police ? One always 
 accepts the witness of the poets about one's own 
 country. In regard to foreign countries (or, at least, 
 foreign States) one wobbles, but with a distinct bias 
 in favour of the police. In regard to subject countries 
 one does not wobble at all : one takes the police view 
 automatically. There have been individual English- 
 men, even individual statesmen, who have seen 
 Ireland more or less through the eyes of the poets. 
 But they have never been able to establish the 
 Ireland of the poets on the map of the world. 
 Ireland is still, for all practical purposes at least, 
 for all political purposes a nation in the dock. 
 Her history is the long history of a people who 
 entered into a criminal conspiracy to set their 
 country free. They have been guilty of patriotism, 
 self-sacrifice, fidelity, idealism, hatred of oppression, 
 and all the other vices in the Newgate Calendar of 
 the little nations. The poets, it may be, who are 
 lenient to sinners, have praised Ireland for these 
 things. The police, however, are not to be deluded 
 into sentimentality. For them the supreme virtue 
 of a subject people is obedience. The first and last 
 commandment with them is : " Thou shalt obey the 
 will of the stronger" as it is set forth in Act of 
 Parliament or in the decree of Tsar, or Sultan, or 
 dictator. 
 
 148
 
 THE WITNESS OF THE POETS 149 
 
 Had the police view prevailed the people of 
 England would never have been free, George 
 Washington would have been hanged as a criminal, 
 and Italy would not now be a nation. That, whether 
 we like it or not, is a fact that we must face. I am 
 not among those who affect to despise law and order, 
 and who believe that the world would get on very 
 well without policemen standing at the street-corners. 
 Law and order, however, are admirable only as a 
 means to liberty and justice. As substitutes for 
 liberty and justice they are not tolerable to any 
 community of self-respecting men. From the police- 
 man's point of view perhaps inevitably so the test 
 of a nation's or a man's virtue is compliance with the 
 existing law. The poets, on the other hand, who 
 have as a rule been on the side of Christ against 
 Caiaphas, are more exacting. They are the confessors 
 of the soul. They ask about a man, not whether he 
 broke a law, but whether he served God about a 
 nation, not whether it was orderly, but whether it 
 kept the faith. And they not only ask but answer 
 these questions. Theirs is the ultimate human verdict 
 on men and on nations. 
 
 If would be an excellent thing if Lord French and 
 the other soldiers and statesmen, in whose hands 
 is to some extent the immediate destiny of Ireland, 
 would study the reports of the poets as well as the 
 reports of the police concerning the Irish people. 
 They would learn a number of things from the poets. 
 They would learn, for one thing, that Ireland is a 
 nation, with a tradition, genius and self-consciousness 
 distinct from those of any other nation in Europe. 
 They need not go to the rebel poets to discover this. 
 They will find the same flaming news in the poems 
 of Irishmen who died fighting in the uniform of the 
 British army. If we want the poetry of modern 
 Irish Nationalism we get it as indubitably in the
 
 150 IRELAND A NATION 
 
 work of Francis Ledwidge and Tom Kettle as in 
 that of Thomas MacDonagh and Joseph Plunkett. 
 It may be questioned, indeed, if the former is not 
 on the whole the more poetic and, therefore, the 
 more persuasive of the two. The fact that Kettle 
 and Ledwidge threw themselves into the fight for 
 the world's liberty did not mean that they had 
 grown indifferent to Ireland's liberty. They gave 
 their lives for Ireland none the less deliberately 
 because they gave them for Europe. Living and 
 dying in this great passion, they seem to have felt 
 at times a curious kinship with those other Irish 
 poets who perished as a result of the Easter week 
 rising in 1916. They differed from them in regard 
 to the war; one of them even took arms against 
 them ; but death is a great canoniser, and it was not 
 long after the rebel poets were in their graves that 
 Corporal Ledwidge was singing of them as com- 
 panions in the great adventure for the liberation of 
 Ireland. The death of the poets in the rebellion 
 seems to have cast a tragic cloud over his imagina- 
 tion. In one of his poems in Last Songs he relates 
 how : 
 
 All the dead kings came to me 
 
 At Rosnaree, where I was dreaming, 
 
 and told him the famous three sorrows of story- 
 telling. He in his turn had a story to tell : 
 
 And I, too, told the kings a story 
 Of later glory, her fourth sorrow. 
 
 This was the sorrow of the martyrdoms of Easter 
 Week. The end of the poem, " The Dead Kings," 
 coming as it does from the pen of a soldier, since 
 dead, is testimony that must be honoured as to the 
 intensity of the passion that is stirring in Ireland 
 to-day :
 
 THE WITNESS OF THE POETS 151 
 
 And one said : " Since the poets perished, 
 
 And all they cherished in the way, 
 Their thoughts unsung, like petal showers, 
 
 Inflame the hours of blue and grey." 
 
 And one said : " A loud tramp of men 
 
 We'll hear again at Rosnaree." 
 A bomb burst near me where I lay, 
 
 I woke, 'twas day in Picardy. 
 
 I do not quote this as an example of Ledwidge's 
 poetry at its finest. I quote it simply as evidence 
 of the nature of the thoughts of a pro-English (as 
 distinguished from what is called a pro-German) 
 Irishman regarding his country and his countrymen. 
 Many influences have been at work in recent years 
 to impress upon the world at large the false opinion 
 that the love of Ireland is a pro-German thing that 
 Irishmen desire freedom merely out of hatred of 
 England. The truth is, the Irish are very like any 
 other nation. They idealise their own country and 
 are enraged with those who trample on them and 
 play Pharaoh over their miseries. Francis Ledwidge 
 seems to have been so happily constituted as to be 
 spared the rage of patriotism, but he had his full share 
 of its ardour. One of his poems, " At Currabwee," 
 is a charming, fanciful and passionate expression of 
 his love both for Ireland and for the lovers of Ireland, 
 even when the latter died fighting in the opposite 
 ranks to those in which he himself fought. He 
 begins by recalling the stories that he used to hear 
 of the leprechauns, the " little men with leather hats," 
 who 
 
 Mend the boots of Faery 
 
 From the tough wings of the bats 
 
 stories that he had heard from his mother as a 
 child. As he lets his memory wander, the old
 
 152 IRELAND A NATION 
 
 country-tale is linked up with thoughts not only of 
 his mother but of the dead poets of Easter Week : 
 
 Louder than a cricket's wing, 
 All night long their hammer's glee 
 
 Times the merry songs they sing 
 Of Ireland glorious and free. 
 
 So I heard Joseph Plunkett say 
 
 You know he heard them but last May. 
 
 And when the night is very cold 
 They warm their hands against the light 
 
 Of stars that make the waters gold 
 Where they are labouring all the night. 
 
 So Pearse said, and he knew the truth 
 
 Among the stars he spent his youth. 
 
 Ledwidge, however, does not idealise the poets of the 
 insurrection at the expense of those other gallant 
 Irishmen like himself, who, putting their trust in the 
 honour of England and their lives into the struggle 
 for the liberty of mankind, fought for Ireland on the 
 battle-fields of Europe. The last verse of the poem 
 is full of the proud consciousness that he too was 
 giving his days to his country. 
 
 And I, myself, have often heard 
 Their singing as the stars went by, 
 
 For am I not of those who reared 
 The banner of old Ireland high, 
 
 From Dublin town to Turkey's shores, 
 
 And where the Vardar loudly roars ? 
 
 Mr James Stephens is a writer of greater originality 
 than Ledwidge. I do not propose to discuss the 
 original side of his genius in this place. I turn to 
 him here only as one of the many poet witnesses on 
 behalf of Irish Nationalism. Reincarnations, his book 
 of adaptations from the older Gaelic poets, is of 
 especial interest in this connection. As evidence of 
 the centuries-old passion with which the Irish have
 
 THE WITNESS OF THE POETS 153 
 
 regarded their country as a nation oppressed and 
 denationalised by a foreign people, it contains much 
 that is deeply impressive. The version of O'Rahilly's 
 poem " Inis Fal," for instance, expresses what every 
 Irish Nationalist still believes that the Irish arts 
 and the Irish social life, as well as Irish wealth and 
 Irish lands, were stolen away or destroyed by the 
 invaders : 
 
 Now may we turn aside and dry our tears, 
 And comfort us, and lay aside our fears, 
 For all is gone all comely quality, 
 All gentleness and hospitality, 
 All courtesy and merriment is gone ; 
 Our virtues all are withered every one, 
 Our music vanished and our skill to sing : 
 
 Now may we quiet us and quit our moan, 
 Nothing is whole that could be broke, no thing 
 Remains to us of all that was our own. 
 
 No one who does not understand the feeling ex- 
 pressed in these lines, that Ireland is a foreign country 
 as regards England, and a country that has suffered 
 loss as bitter and complete as Poland, is in a position to 
 spell even the first simple words of the Irish question. 
 The anti-Irish will, I do not doubt, continue to regard 
 Irish national sentiment as an unpleasant mixture of 
 whining and race hatred. It is always an easy thing 
 to belittle the agony and tears of a subject people. 
 But every honest Englishman of imagination knows 
 that had the parts of England and Ireland been re- 
 versed, England's attitude to a dominant Ireland 
 would have been the same that Ireland's attitude to 
 a dominant England has always been. 
 
 I do not share the mood of Pearse when he writes 
 that Irish hate of the English is "a scarcely less holy 
 passion " than " Irish love of Nature and of Nature's 
 God." Hatred is one of the ancient passions of 
 human nature, but it is a deforming passion and
 
 154 IRELAND A NATION 
 
 outside the circle of holy things. At the same time, 
 it is an inevitable passion in certain circumstances for 
 all but the saints, and the Irish would have been less 
 than human if the attempts of Queen Elizabeth to 
 exterminate them or of Cromwell to destroy them 
 had not filled them with wild and ruinous thoughts. 
 It was an anonymous Irishman of those old days 
 who comforted himself with the thought : 
 
 The world hath conquered, the wind hath scattered like dust 
 
 Alexander, Caesar, and all that shared their sway, 
 
 Tara is grass, and behold how Troy lieth low, 
 
 And even the English, perchance their hour will come ! 
 
 That quatrain, translated by Pearse, is but a mild 
 example of some of the rebel poetry which he him- 
 self gathered and put into English in Songs of the 
 Irish Rebels. A still fiercer passion breaks through in 
 his translation of Ferriter's poem on the Cromwellian 
 clearances, which contains the verses : 
 
 Pirates rule in the place of princes, 
 
 In comfort, in ease, in luxury, in spacious palaces, 
 
 Full of strength, full of goods, full of words, well-feasting, 
 
 Uncouth, gabbling, greedy, cynical. 
 
 The aim and desire of the crew is, 
 However they may make peace with our people, 
 To play with those that accept terms from them, 
 The tricks of the redoubtable cat with the mouse ! 
 
 On the whole, the words seem gentle and innocent 
 compared with a speech of Sir Edward Carson or 
 a leading article in The Spectator against the Irish 
 Nationalists. The Spectator's attitude to Ireland, 
 however, is as irrefragable a proof that Ireland is a 
 separate nation as is Ireland's attitude to The Spectator 
 and all for which it stands. 
 
 Sir Samuel Ferguson, a selection of whose poems 
 can be got in " Every Irishman's Library," was a
 
 THE WITNESS OF THE POETS 155 
 
 Belfast man belonging to the Protestant and Union- 
 ist class. But in his work, as surely as in the work 
 of the Southern Catholic, Pearse, we find unanswer- 
 able evidence that Ireland is a distinct and foreign 
 nation. Mr Yeats in his youth declared that 
 Ferguson was " the greatest poet Ireland produced, 
 because the most central and the most Celtic." Most 
 of us read him, however, less for his original work 
 than for his translations from the Irish. Among the 
 latter is " The Downfall of Gael," the original of which 
 was written about 1580 by O'Gnive, Bard of the 
 O'Neill. It is a fine example of national poetry 
 both in its lamentation and its summons to action. 
 It is too long to quote in full, but the last verses 
 will give an idea of its anger, sorrow and power : 
 
 We starve by the board, 
 
 And we thirst amid wassail 
 For the guest is the lord, 
 And the host is the vassal ! 
 
 Through the woods let us roam, 
 Through the wastes wild and barren ; 
 
 We are strangers at home ! 
 We are exiles in Erin ! 
 
 And Erin's a bark 
 
 O'er the wild waters driven ! 
 And the tempest howls dark 
 And her side planks are riven ! 
 
 And in billows of might 
 
 Swell the Saxon before her 
 Unite, oh, unite ! 
 
 Or the billows burst o'er her ! 
 
 Had Serbian poets written verse like this, how the 
 Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of London 
 and Mr Lloyd George and The Times would have 
 united to do honour to so noble a national bequest of 
 passion and patriotism ! A long national memory
 
 156 IRELAND A NATION 
 
 seems in an ally the ultimate grace, but in a subject 
 and suspect country the ultimate disgrace. That is 
 why Ireland is misunderstood. She will be under- 
 stood easily enough on the day on which statesmen 
 make an honest effort to understand her. They can 
 do this by studying Irish literature and Irish history, 
 wherein the whole truth about Ireland is as clear as 
 day. Lord French will learn far more about the 
 essentials of what is called the Irish question from 
 the verse of Ledwidge, Pearse and Lieutenant 
 Kettle, and from Mrs Green's little book on Irish 
 Nationality, than from Major Price, the Dublin Metro- 
 politan Police and the Royal Irish Constabulary 
 combined.
 
 CHAPTER XVII 
 
 A NOTE ON IRISH LITERATURE 
 I 
 
 THE wealth of literature which Ireland has produced 
 in Gaelic is as amazing almost as the poverty of 
 the literature she had produced in English until 
 last century. Her old books are, as scholars know, 
 chiefly in prose. She possesses an Iliad of stories 
 the stories of Cuchullain, of Finn, of the children of 
 Lir, of Diarmaid and Grainne, of Deirdre and the 
 sons of Uisneach which have known no diminution 
 of beauty in a thousand years. Even in Irish prose, 
 however, we are usually aware of an underflow of 
 lyricism. If every now and then the prose breaks 
 into poetry like a mediaeval cantefable, it is not an 
 abrupt change from pedestrian to winged literature. 
 Irish prose flashes into poetry hardly less naturally 
 than the lark springs from the ground. A passion- 
 ate delight in beauty, youth, nature, love and battle 
 runs through Irish imaginative literature like a song ; 
 and though this delight is, in a sense, the stuff of 
 which all literature is made, I believe that the in- 
 tensity of the worship of nature, at least, which is 
 shown in some of the medieval Irish poems is with- 
 out a parallel in the literature of the Middle Ages, 
 or, indeed, of any age between the writing of the 
 Song of Solomon and the coming of Burns and 
 Wordsworth. 
 
 Perhaps we are inclined to exaggerate the degree 
 
 157
 
 158 IRELAND A NATION 
 
 to which Wordsworth and the nineteenth century 
 discovered nature. Obviously, man's emotional 
 concern with nature is as old as hunger or love or 
 any other primary instinct. At the same time, it 
 is only among some peoples and at some periods 
 that the long procession of nature with its flying 
 banners becomes the subject of enthusiasm without 
 ulterior motive, of childlike rapture for rapture's 
 sake. The nineteenth century was such a period. 
 The Irish have for hundreds of years been such a 
 people. The centuries-old joyousness of the Irish 
 imagination in its attitude to nature appears in such 
 a poem as In Praise of May, which Mr. T. W. 
 Rolleston has translated into English rhyme. The 
 poem is too long to quote in full ; but, at the risk 
 of spoiling it, I give some scattered verses : 
 
 May-day ! delightful day ! 
 Bright colours play the vale along. 
 Now wakes at morning's slender ray 
 Wild and gay the blackbird's song. 
 
 Now comes the bird of dusty hue, 
 The loud cuckoo, the summer-lover. 
 Branchy trees are thick with leaves. 
 The bitter evil time is over. 
 
 Loaded bees with puny power 
 Goodly flower-harvest win ; 
 Cattle roam with muddy flanks, 
 Busy ants go out and in. 
 
 A bright shaft has smit the streams, 
 With gold gleams the water-flag ; 
 Leaps the fish, and on the hills 
 Ardour thrills the leaping stag. 
 
 Loudly carols the lark on high, 
 Small and shy, his tireless lay, 
 Singing in wildest, merriest mood, 
 Delicate-hued, delightful May.
 
 A NOTE ON IRISH LITERATURE 159 
 
 Those who think that Mr Rolleston has unduly 
 amplified and modernised the original would do 
 well to turn for purposes of comparison to the prose 
 translation of the last verse of the poem from Dr 
 Kuno Meyer's Ancient Irish Poetry : 
 
 A timorous, tiny, persistent fellow 
 Sings at the top of his voice, 
 The lark sings clear tidings ; 
 Surpassing summer-time of delicate hues ! 
 
 It is clear that the enthusiasm for this Noah's Ark 
 which is the world is not the importation of a modern 
 rhyming translator but is the very soul of the ninth- 
 century Irish original. 
 
 This we may regard as an example of Irish secular, 
 and even of pagan, poetry : it is traditionally ascribed 
 to Finn MacCool. One of the remarkable facts in 
 Irish literature is, however, as Miss Hull points out 
 in her anthology, The Poem Book of the Gael, that 
 there is no real break between the pagan and 
 Christian poets of nature. Saint and hermit observed 
 the phantasmagoria of bird and fish and flower with 
 the same blitheness as the most godless bard. Irish 
 mediaeval Christianity seems, indeed, for the most 
 part to have missed that bleak hatred of the world 
 which hung so long like a pestilence over the greater 
 part of Christian Europe. St Columba, in the poem, 
 does not praise God by ignoring the sensible world 
 around him : his thoughts turn easily from heaven 
 to the delights of sitting on a rock by the sea : 
 
 That I might hear the thunder of the clamorous waves 
 
 Upon the rocks ; 
 
 That I might hear the roar by the side of the church 
 
 Of the surrounding sea ; 
 
 That I might watch its noble bird-flocks 
 
 Flying over the watery surf; 
 
 That I might see the ocean-monsters, 
 
 Greatest of all wonders.
 
 160 IRELAND A NATION 
 
 Manchan, the hermit, describing that " hidden hut 
 in the wilderness," which he desires, finds time to 
 pray for 
 
 A southern aspect to catch the sun, a brook across the floor, 
 A choice land, rich with gracious gifts, down-stretching from 
 my door. 
 
 Prince Marvan, who has retired from a palace to 
 a hermitage in the woods, in praising his new life to 
 his brother, King Guaire, speaks not as a mystic, 
 but of the love of the beautiful and simple things 
 which the eye can see. He has lover's eyes for the 
 movements of the animals, the falling of the fruits, 
 the colour and song of the birds about his dwelling. 
 
 Like a great hostel, welcoming to all, 
 
 My laden apple-tree ; 
 Low in the hedge, the modest hazel-bush 
 
 Drops ripest nuts for me. 
 
 The host of forest-dwellers of the soil 
 
 Trysting at night ; 
 To meet them foxes come, a peaceful troop, 
 
 For my delight. 
 
 Like exiled princes, flocking to their home, 
 
 They gather round ; 
 Beneath the river-bank great salmon leap, 
 
 And trout abound. 
 
 The little music-makers of the world, 
 
 Chafers and bees, 
 Drone answer to the tumbling torrent's roar, 
 
 Beneath the trees. 
 
 It is, perhaps, less of a paradox than it at first 
 sight appears that a people which has praised life 
 with such sanity and such acceptance as in poems 
 like these should have devoted so much of its 
 imaginative energy to the quest and scripture of
 
 A NOTE ON IRISH LITERATURE 161 
 
 fairyland. The Irish have long since come to be 
 popularly regarded, not as lovers of the day's life 
 but as the idealists of Tir-na-nOg, the country of 
 the young. The two things are not really contra- 
 dictory. It is the very love of the day's life which 
 has fired the poets with the longing to immortalise 
 life at its most exultant the life of golden lads and 
 girls. Even to-day an almost pagan idolatry of 
 youth peeps out now and then in the Irish tempera- 
 ment. Lovers of every feature and shadow of 
 loveliness, the Irish have, more keenly than most 
 peoples, resented the harsh prose of a world in which 
 the brave and the beautiful are herded down to one 
 dusty end with chimney-sweepers. The mockery of 
 age and its ugliness is one of the persistent notes 
 in Irish literature. Synge did not invent the hag 
 as the cockshy of invective. The Old Woman of 
 Beare in the eleventh-century poem, who has become 
 a nun in her old age, is a more horrid and disastrous 
 figure than any of Synge's, as she bitterly contrasts 
 her present holy estate with the pagan joys of her 
 youth : 
 
 Amen ! and woe is me ! 
 
 I lie here rotting like a broken tree ; 
 
 Each acorn has its day, and needs must fall : 
 
 Time makes an end of all ! 
 
 I had my day with kings ! 
 
 We drank the brimming mead, the ruddy wine, 
 Where now I drink whey-water ; for* company more fine 
 Than shrivelled hags, hag though I am, I pine. 
 
 The bitter rebelliousness of the poem a dramatic 
 masterpiece the genius of which can be only faintly 
 suggested in a quotation is still more effectively 
 concentrated in Dr Meyer's prose translation of the 
 first of these verses :
 
 162 IRELAND A NATION 
 
 Amen ! woe is me ! 
 
 Every acorn has to drop. 
 
 After feasting by shining candles 
 
 To be in the gloom of a prayer-house. 
 
 But Miss Hull's versions, skilful and melodious 
 and interpretative, will usually be found . happy 
 supplements to Dr Meyer's in cases where both have 
 translated the same poem. In reading translations 
 of poetry, at the best, we are imprisoned in a kind 
 of Plato's cave, seeing only the shadows thrown on 
 the wall by the passing world behind our backs. 
 Prose translations, perhaps, cast the clearer silhou- 
 ettes. But the translator into verse occasionally 
 enables us to catch the tone of a voice, the 
 light on a face, which we might otherwise have 
 missed. 
 
 At the same time, more than once one finds one- 
 self wishing that Miss Hull had been content with 
 giving the exact prose of some of the modern or, 
 at least, comparatively modern lyrics. One feels 
 this especially in regard to Donall Oge, where, 
 indeed, she has compromised by leaving two of the 
 most significant lines without rhyme or metre. Do 
 not the rhymes trammel the imaginative march of 
 this exquisite lament of a country girl tragically 
 deserted ? 
 
 You have taken the East from me and you have taken the 
 
 West, 
 You have taken the path that is before me and the path that is 
 
 behind ; 
 The moon is gone from me by night, and the sun is gone by 
 
 day, 
 Alas ! I greatly dread you have stolen my God away ! 
 
 I heard the dog speak of you and the sun gone down, 
 I heard the snipe calling aloud from the marshlands brown ; 
 It is you are the lonely bird flitting from tree to tree 
 May you never find your mate if you find not me !
 
 A NOTE ON IRISH LITERATURE 163 
 
 On the other hand, nothing could be happier than 
 Miss Hull's verse-translation of that other love-song, 
 which begins : 
 
 The stars stand up in the air, 
 The sun and the moon are set, 
 The sea that ebbed dry of its tide 
 Leaves no single pebble wet ; 
 The cuckoo keeps saying each hour 
 That she, my Storeen, is fled 
 O Girl of the brave, free tresses, 
 Far better had you struck me dead ! 
 
 One could go on quoting extract after extract 
 from Miss Hull and Dr Sigerson and the other 
 translators and anthologists of Irish poetry, not 
 merely as examples of beautiful literature but as 
 expressions of this or that phase of the Irish genius 
 and temper. No study of the psychology of race 
 could enlighten the careful reader in regard to 
 Ireland half so well as the songs of love, of war, of 
 religion, of death, of revenge. Irish history survives 
 alike in the flashing war-songs, and in triumphant 
 pieces of melancholy, such as Mangan's Woman 
 of the Piercing Wail. Not less important as a key 
 to the secrets of the old Irish civilisation are the 
 religious poems, like that noble prayer of St Patrick's 
 which contains the lines : 
 
 Christ on my right, Christ on my left, 
 
 Christ when I lie down, Christ when I sit down, Christ when I 
 
 arise, 
 
 Christ in the heart of every man who thinks of me, 
 Christ in the mouth of everyone who speaks of me, 
 Christ in every eye that sees me, 
 Christ in every ear that hears me. 
 
 Those who care indeed may discover in the trans- 
 lated literature the abundant soul of Ireland, and 
 they will discover in it, I believe, a revelation, not 
 merely of a national genius, but of the beauty of
 
 164 IRELAND A NATION 
 
 old, heroic and simple things, which may be related 
 to nationality but which transcends it. 
 
 II 
 
 It was the contention of the late Thomas 
 MacDonagh, in his book, Literature in Ireland, that 
 a distinctive Irish literature has recently grown up in 
 the English language, and that this is due to the fact 
 that English has at long last become the daily 
 language of the great majority of the Irish people. 
 The Irish mind, according to this argument, had 
 hitherto either expressed itself in the Irish language 
 or had been too exhausted and broken to express 
 itself at all. English-speaking Irishmen had written 
 poetry and prose of genius, but they wrote for an 
 English audience : their imaginations and sympathies 
 were English, not Irish. Goldsmith, Burke and 
 Sheridan are but three names in a long line of Irish 
 genius (including, in our own time, the names of 
 Oscar Wilde and Mr Bernard Shaw) which has 
 emigrated to England in search of an audience. 
 The truth is that until recently there was very little 
 hope of an Irish audience for Irish authors unless 
 they talked the language of politics. Even to-day it 
 may be doubted whether Ireland supports a single 
 native author. The Abbey Theatre company goes 
 wandering to London and New York in search of 
 funds. A. E. is a painter and journalist as well as 
 a poet. I doubt whether Mr Yeats's Irish sales 
 alone would justify the publication of a single one of 
 his books from a commercial point of view. Even in 
 England the public for literature, though not the 
 public for books, is astonishingly small. In Ireland, 
 until the other day, it might almost have been 
 packed into a reasonably sized excursion train. The 
 world -success of Synge, the reputation of Mr Yeats,
 
 A NOTE ON IRISH LITERATURE 165 
 
 the Maunsel publishing-house, the growing prosperity 
 of the country, and the spread of secondary and 
 University education have, however, done much to 
 give the Irish author some hope of being able to live 
 on literature if only he could be sure of surviving 
 another century or so. Assuredly, the Irish audience, 
 if it has not supported many authors, has inspired 
 many. The fact that Irish writers have turned their 
 faces to it has given their work, as might have been 
 expected, a new light and originality of intimacy. 
 Irish literature has ceased to be an echo, and has 
 become a beautiful voice. This is one of the most 
 important literary facts of our time. 
 
 MacDonagh himself, who was one of the fifteen 
 Irishmen executed for proclaiming an Irish Republic 
 on Easter Monday, 1916, liked to think of the Irish 
 literary movement as a sort of rebellion. He 
 contends in his book that the "note" of the new 
 literature in Ireland at least of the new literature in 
 Irish is "a note of pride, of self-reliance, almost of 
 arrogance." " The Gaelic revival," he goes on, " has 
 given to some of us a new arrogance. I am a Gael 
 and I know no cause but of pride in it. ... My race 
 has survived the wiles of the foreigner here. It has 
 refused to yield even to defeat, and emerges strong 
 to-day, full of hope and of love, with new strength 
 in its arms to work its new destiny, with a new song 
 on its lips and the words of a new language ; which 
 is the ancient language, still calling from age to 
 age. . . . This arrogance is a sign of energy, of 
 vitality, and so here is good." 
 
 In its most important aspect, however, his book is 
 not a chant of defiance but an attempt to discover 
 and explain the nature of that curiously interesting 
 literature which has grown up in Ireland chiefly in 
 the English language during the past century. 
 MacDonagh leaves out of account Irish writers such
 
 166 IRELAND A NATION 
 
 as Swift and Goldsmith. Those were contributors 
 to English, not to Anglo-Irish, literature. By 
 Anglo- Irish literature MacDonagh means literature 
 which, though written in the English language, is 
 influenced by Irish modes of thought and addressed 
 principally to an Irish audience. Thus he includes 
 among Anglo-Irish writers Lionel Johnson, who, 
 though an Englishman in upbringing, was adopted 
 into the Irish tradition. He wishes to substitute for 
 the "Celtic note" emphasised by Matthew Arnold 
 something which he calls the " Irish mode." This 
 Irish mode he does not exactly define ; but by a 
 poem written in the Irish mode he means a poem 
 which shows "the influence of Irish versification, 
 the influence of the Irish way of speech, the influence 
 of Irish music." It is not that he excludes from 
 Anglo-Irish literature all poetry not written in this 
 mode. He does not find the marks of the Irish 
 mode in the verse of Mr James Stephens, Miss 
 Susan Mitchell or Miss Alice Milligan, but he would 
 scarcely on this account shut out their work from an 
 anthology of Anglo-Irish poetry. By making this 
 concession, he may seem rather to weaken his argu- 
 ment for the existence of a separate Anglo- Irish 
 literature a literature which is not merely a branch 
 from the stem of English literature. At the same 
 time, he does make out a most interesting case for 
 his contention that Anglo-Irish literature has its 
 roots, not in English literature but in the traditional 
 music and poetry of Ireland and in the almost 
 separate language of the English-speaking peasantry 
 in Ireland to-day. English as it is spoken in Ireland 
 is English that has been turned and twisted to suit 
 the old Gaelic order of speech. Perhaps, however, 
 MacDonagh exaggerates the differences between the 
 Irish and the English or French use of words. Thus 
 he takes a passage from De Quincey on the swarming
 
 A NOTE ON IRISH LITERATURE 167 
 
 life of Southern Asia, ending with the sentence : 
 " Man is a weed in those regions." He then gives 
 us a French version by Baudelaire, who translated 
 this sentence as : " L'homme, dans ces contre"es, 
 pousse comme 1'herbe." This is followed by a terse 
 Latin translation, and then by a translation into 
 classic Irish prose, which is literally turned into 
 English in this shape : " Where are we then, but 
 than not more grows the growth of wild plants in 
 a soft, sodded grassy place than the fresh growth 
 of the Adam-clan on the arable soil of India?" 
 
 One cannot help feeling that the Irish mind must 
 have simpler methods of expressing a simple image 
 than this. These grace notes of speech seem to me 
 to be a vice of style of which every language is 
 capable if perverted from its right use. Mr Padraic 
 O'Conaire, I imagine, could translate the sentence 
 into Irish as pithy as the English of De Quincey or 
 the French of Baudelaire ; and his version would be 
 as well suited to the Irish mode of thinking as the 
 Keatingese version quoted by Mr MacDonagh. It is 
 its imaginative fullness, not its adjectival emptiness, 
 which is the distinction of good Irish writing. 
 
 MacDonagh is much nearer one of the secrets of 
 Irish literature when he notes the difference between 
 English and Irish rhythm. " English rhythm," he 
 writes, "is governed by stress. In England the 
 tendency is to hammer the stressed syllables and 
 to slur the unstressed syllables. In Ireland we keep 
 by comparison a uniform stress. A child in Cork, 
 reading the word unintelligibility , pronounces all the 
 eight syllables distinctly, without special stress on 
 any, though his voice rises and falls in a kind of 
 tune or croon, going high upon the final syllable." 
 It is because they look for the stresses of Pope and 
 Keats in the verse of Mr Yeats that many readers 
 are at first at a loss before its music. But, none the
 
 168 IRELAND A NATION 
 
 less, it has a most exquisite music a music in many 
 ways akin to that of Irish speech. And so with 
 a great deal of modern Irish verse. " I should say," 
 writes MacDonagh, "that the effects of our more 
 deliberate Irish speech on our verse are these two : 
 first, a prose intonation, not monotonous, being saved 
 by the natural rise and fall of the voice, a remnant of 
 the ancient pitch a quality, as it were, of chanted 
 speech ; and, secondly, a tendency to give, in certain 
 poems, generally of short, rhyming lines, almost 
 equal stress value to all the syllables, a tendency to 
 make the line the metrical unit." There are many 
 other points in regard to which MacDonagh's studies 
 throw light on the differentia of verse written in the 
 Irish mode. At the same time, with some of his 
 points it is impossible to agree. Thus, he confuses 
 two kinds of obscurity in his defence of Irish poets 
 against the charge of being obscure. He regards 
 obscurity as a word applied to what is unknown or 
 strange Irish tradition, for example, or a personal 
 vision incomprehensible to an English reader and 
 he quotes, as an example of Irish obscurity, a verse 
 from Mr Colum's Drover : 
 
 Then the wet, winding roads, 
 Brown bogs and black water, 
 And my thoughts on white ships 
 And the King of Spain's daughter i 
 
 " To us," he comments on this, " there is a world of 
 memory in these lines. . . . Others might well ask, 
 Which King of Spain? Why white ships? and find 
 nothing but suggestions of unpleasantness in the 
 thought of wet roads, brown bogs, and black water. 
 I suppose one has to be baptized Irish to feel the 
 right thing." As a matter of fact, no one would ask 
 these questions who was capable of appreciating 
 poetry above the level of The Boy Stood on the
 
 A NOTE ON IRISH LITERATURE 169 
 
 Burning Deck. It is the vague vision in the work 
 of some of the lesser Irish poets, not the novelty of 
 their imagination, of which many critics reasonably 
 complain. MacDonagh contends that, while the 
 Irish use words which are coins the English merely 
 use words which are counters. The truth is, in both 
 countries the great mass of writers make use of the 
 counters of convention. Only the most honest and 
 determined imagination can escape from this peril. 
 
 Similarly, it is not always easy to agree with what 
 MacDonagh has to say on the subject of Irish litera- 
 ture of literature, that is, which is written in the 
 Irish language. When he says, for instance : "Irish 
 prose I believe to be a finer vehicle than English prose. 
 The poise and the concision of the idiomatic Irish 
 sentence make our long series of words in English 
 seem weak by comparison," one feels that it would be 
 much better to say that each language has its special 
 genius, and to leave it at that. Certainly, to quote 
 Keatingese Irish on one page and to speak of the 
 conciseness of Irish on another will only serve to 
 bewilder most readers. 
 
 At its present stage, however, the Irish literary 
 movement that is of most interest to the world at 
 large is the movement that expresses itself, not in the 
 Irish, but in the English language. No movement 
 has ever been more industriously "written up." 
 There is a whole library of books about it at the dis- 
 posal of the historian good books, bad books, and 
 indifferent books. Mr George Moore has written the 
 comic history of it in Hail and Farewell ! Mr Yeats 
 has published his reminiscences. Mrs Hinkson's 
 now run to three volumes. And the result is that 
 one knows the names of the Irish minor poets by this 
 time as well as those of the Elizabethan dramatists. 
 No book covers the field so well as Mr Ernest Boyd's 
 Ireland's Literary Renaissance. It is a book which is
 
 170 IRELAND A NATION 
 
 at once useful in its information and dignified in its 
 criticism. As a survey of the Irish literary move- 
 ment it is the best thing that has so far been written. 
 Not that one invariably agrees with Mr. Boyd in his 
 ideas as to which Irish authors are really Irish and 
 which are really English. It seems to me wrong to 
 omit all reference to the poems of Mr James Joyce 
 or the essays of T. M. Kettle, and it is equally wrong 
 to leave the work of the authors of Some Experiences 
 of an Irish R.M. out of account. The Irish R.M. is 
 no doubt merely the last and best of the books in the 
 Lover-Lever tradition, but it is also a masterpiece 
 which has caught the Irish accent with a genius as 
 sure as Synge's or Lady Gregory's. The truth is, it 
 is only possible to write a satisfactory history of 
 modern Irish literature in one way, and that is to in- 
 clude the work of every Irish author of note, whether 
 he derives from Mangan and Ferguson or not. 
 
 Mr Boyd wisely begins his history with the 
 appearance of those two poets, whose finest work 
 was their translations from the Irish. At the same 
 time I wish he had tried to do a little justice to 
 Thomas Moore. Moore's work had many admirable 
 Irish qualities, and it did much to popularise Irish 
 melody and Irish themes in Ireland as well as in 
 England. And Mr Boyd is unjust to The Nation group 
 as well as to Moore. "Patriotic as was The Nation 
 group," he writes, " it cannot in the proper sense of 
 the word be described as national." It would be far 
 nearer the truth to say that, though it was national, 
 it failed in not being sufficiently literary. It was for 
 the most part a national journalistic movement, not a 
 national literary movement. But good journalism is 
 as necessary to a nation as good literature. As for 
 the men of letters in it, Mangan was the one writer 
 of soaring genius among them. He brought, as it 
 were, a new spirit into Ireland out of the clouds and
 
 A NOTE ON IRISH LITERATURE 171 
 
 out of the dead centuries. He was the most Gaelic 
 of all poets who have written in English. 
 
 Mr Standish O'Grady is regarded by many critics 
 as the immediate inspirer of the Irish literary revival. 
 As Mr Boyd points out, however, Dr Douglas 
 Hyde's translations from the Irish have also immense 
 importance in a history of the development of an 
 Anglo-Irish literature. It is in the prose translation 
 of The Love-Songs of Connacht that the student " will 
 find the source of what has come to be regarded as 
 the chief discovery, and most notable characteristic, 
 of the drama of the Irish literary Revival, the effec- 
 tive employment of the Anglo-Irish idiom." For 
 myself I think still earlier anticipations of this may 
 be found in Patrick Kennedy's versions of Irish 
 legends and fairy-tales. But it was certainly Dr 
 Hyde who taught Synge how to write his gorgeous 
 sentences. " The Love-Songs of Connacht" writes 
 Mr Boyd, " were the constant study of the author of 
 The Playboy, whose plays testify, more than those of 
 any other writer, to the influence of Hyde's prose." 
 Had it not been for Dr Hyde, he adds, Synge's " most 
 striking achievement might never have been known." 
 And he quotes an example of Dr Hyde's Anglo-Irish, 
 which is clearly a foreshadowing of the Synge word- 
 decorations that all the world knows : 
 
 If you were to see the sky-woman, and she prepared and dressed, 
 
 Of a fine sunny day in the street, and she walking, 
 
 And a light kindled out of her shining bosom, 
 
 That would give sight to the man without an eye : 
 
 There is the love of hundreds in the forehead of her face. 
 
 Her appearance is, as it were, the Star of Monday, 
 
 And if she had been in being in the time of the gods, 
 
 It is not to Venus the apple would have been delivered up. 
 
 The Irish literary movement may be said to have 
 given the world a new style. It did this largely, it 
 has been shown, as a result of literary nationalism.
 
 i;2 IRELAND A NATION 
 
 Irish literature had to become national in order to 
 become international. 
 
 Ill 
 
 No aspect of the Irish revival has made a deeper 
 impression on the world at large than the dramatic. 
 Lady Gregory traces back the origin of the Irish 
 theatre to a conversation between Mr Yeats and 
 herself at Coole in 1898. The first performance was 
 given on 8th May 1899, when an absurd attempt 
 was made to obtain a hostile reception for Mr Yeats's 
 Countess Cathleen, on the ground that it was contrary 
 to Catholic orthodoxy that a lady who sold her 
 soul, even to help the poor, should ultimately be 
 admitted into heaven. Luckily, the average Catholic 
 theatre-goer in Dublin refused to take the charge 
 seriously, and so eminent a Catholic as Dr William 
 Barry wrote to Mr Yeats to assure him that the 
 moral of his story was on all fours with St Paul's " I 
 wish to be anathema for my brethren." 
 
 The hero of the dramatic movement, as he is 
 the greatest literary figure in modern Ireland, is 
 Mr W. B. Yeats. Even if we recognise that Synge 
 had the genius of drama in a higher degree than 
 Mr Yeats, and that Mr Moore has the genius of 
 fiction beyond almost anyone now writing in 
 English, as he shows especially in his reminiscences, 
 it is time that the intellectual world realised that 
 Mr Yeats's poetic genius is one of the most splen- 
 did of recent times. That he put this genius into 
 harness for the sake of the Irish dramatic move- 
 ment may not have been fortunate for himself, but 
 what a send-off it gave to the movement ! His 
 Kathleen Ni Houlihan brought the youth of 
 Nationalist Ireland behind the new theatre ; and 
 his King's Threshold, in which Mr Frank Fay spoke
 
 A NOTE ON IRISH LITERATURE 173 
 
 verse as one has seldom heard it spoken since on 
 the stage, gave the theatre dignity outside Ireland 
 as a centre of new artistic excitements. Nor should 
 we forget the part that the Fays have played in the 
 building up of an Irish theatre. The Irish Literary 
 Theatre was at first merely a society for importing 
 English actors into Dublin to produce plays by 
 Irish writers, and might have continued to be so 
 for a considerable time, if Mr Frank Fay had not 
 happened, in August, 1900, to read an article in The 
 Morning Leader in which " Mr William Archer, 
 reviewing a volume of Norwegian dramatic criticism, 
 explained how Ole Bull, the great Norwegian 
 violinist, had formed the Norwegian National Theatre 
 for seven or eight amateurs who had answered his 
 advertisement for people wishing to make a pro- 
 fession of singing, dancing, and acting." This last 
 was the theatre that had "hatched Ibsen." By 
 April, 1902, the efforts of the Fay brothers were so 
 successful that they had founded the Irish National 
 Dramatic Company, and were producing " A. E.'s " 
 Deirdre and Mr Yeats's Kathleen Ni Houlihan. The 
 Irish National Theatre Society soon followed, and 
 in 1904 Miss Horniman stepped forward and built 
 or rebuilt the Abbey Theatre as we know it to-day. 
 To the outsider, the history of the Abbey Theatre 
 may seem a continuous advance from one height of 
 prosperity to another. That is because the move- 
 ment always succeeded in getting talked about. 
 As a matter of fact, however, it did not always 
 succeed in getting audiences ; and Lady Gregory 
 gives us a pathetic reminiscence of those empty and 
 discouraging days : " Often I have gone out by the 
 stage door when the curtain was up, and come round 
 into the auditorium by the front hall, hoping that 
 in the dimness I might pass for a new arrival, and 
 so encourage the few scattered people in the stalls."
 
 174 IRELAND A NATION 
 
 It was The Playboy^ of course, that made the 
 theatre world-famous. Before The Playboy it was 
 regarded, more or less, as a charming trifle. After 
 The Playboy it was seen to be an institution serious 
 enough to set men fighting about it. To me The 
 Playboy has always seemed one of the least of 
 Synge's plays, and not an inhabitant of the same 
 artistic world as Riders to the Sea and The Well of 
 the Saints. At the same time, whatever may be 
 one's critical opinion of it, it is historically the most 
 exciting play the Abbey Theatre has produced. 
 People have often expressed their amazement that 
 so exuberant an extravaganza should ever have 
 been objected to by people with a sense of humour. 
 But much as one detests the rowdyism that tried 
 to drive it from the theatre, the provocativeness of 
 the play is obvious to anyone who has eyes to see. 
 Both Lady Gregory and Mr Yeats realised that the 
 play as it was written, and is now printed, was too 
 bold for unexpurgated production. " I did not 
 think," Lady Gregory tells us, " it was fit to be put 
 on the stage without cutting"; and Mr Yeats, who 
 was away from Dublin during the rehearsals of the 
 play, wrote to Lady Gregory : " I would like to 
 know how you thought The Playboy acted. . . . 
 Have they cleared many of the objectionable sen- 
 tences out of it ? " The cuts were not made for the 
 first night ; they have been made in every perform- 
 ance since. Those who wish to understand why 
 Dublin or a small portion of it rioted on those 
 first nights, should read The Playboy, and read it, 
 not in the easy-going spirit in which it is now acted 
 but in the light of the far fiercer humour of the early 
 performances. There is no excuse for the abomin- 
 able behaviour of the rowdies ; but one would be 
 stupid not to see how their simple emotions came 
 to be outraged.
 
 175 
 
 M. Bourgeois, in his valuable book on Synge and 
 the Irish theatre, enables us to understand how it 
 was that a man of Synge's temperament came into 
 such violent collision with popular Irish opinion, 
 Synge, partly as a result of physical frailty, " revelled 
 in all that was pungent, truculent and savage," and 
 " although his mind was fundamentally sane, his 
 impaired bodily health had distorted his vision from 
 the beginning." Those who have detected a re- 
 current eroticism, especially in his later plays, have 
 often been reproved by Mr Yeats ; but M. Bourgeois 
 gives evidence on their side when he tells us how 
 in Paris Synge lived for a time " in rooms overlooking 
 the beautiful garden of a convent of nuns. The 
 view of the convent prompted in Synge the idea of 
 a play of monastic life, which Mr Yeats read in 
 MS., and which was marked by a strong eroticism." 
 Not that Synge led the wild, erotic existence which, 
 according to M. Bourgeois, has at times been im- 
 puted to him. " Personally," M. Bourgeois writes, 
 " he had, I believe, a profound contempt, at least a 
 fundamental distaste for the promiscuous sensuality 
 of the roue. A significant anecdote is told of how a 
 friend, visiting the salon, . . . criticised the naked 
 figure of a woman in one of Henner's pastoral 
 paintings. Synge said he knew nothing of such 
 matters. . . . Synge always remained as chaste and 
 pure as ever man was." On the other hand, wild 
 language shocks the conventional more than wild 
 life ; and in wild language Synge delighted. " His 
 language was often coarse, at times, I have heard, 
 almost incredibly gross, and he indulged in magni- 
 ficent swear-words, which had something of the 
 Elizabethan or Rabelaisian licentiousness." His 
 crime at the Abbey Theatre was that in his plays 
 he held the mirror up too boldly to certain aspects 
 of his own nature. His comic eroticism, his freakish
 
 176 IRELAND A NATION 
 
 delights in characters and words that beautifully 
 ignored the Ten Commandments, his mockery of 
 the holy standards of commonplace existence, these 
 were too much for the respectability of a Dublin 
 audience. 
 
 Synge himself, however, it is worth remembering, 
 was never hated in Dublin as his plays were. He 
 was, as M. Bourgeois reveals him to us, a gentle and 
 attractive figure, and his gallant fight with death 
 gave him a tragic interest for all who knew him. 
 He died in March, 1909, in a private hospital in 
 Dublin. " In the early morning Synge said to the 
 nurse : ' It's no use fighting death any longer,' and 
 turned over and died." So Mr Yeats has written. 
 Since Synge's death the theatre cannot be said to 
 have grown less bold in the fight for imaginative 
 independence. The atmosphere has changed, how- 
 ever. The dramatic movement has in recent years 
 turned away from romantic comedy towards natural- 
 ism, as may be seen in the plays of the younger 
 writers, Mr Lennox Robinson, Mr St John Ervine 
 and Mr T. C. Murray. 
 
 IV 
 
 Mr Yeats sometimes appears in the literary legend 
 of the moment as a typicial minor poet with a minor 
 poet's affectations a dreamy, effeminate person 
 in sad velvet. The real Mr Yeats is the very 
 opposite of this. He is a man of aquiline energy, 
 tall, thin, high-shouldered, keen-faced, a restless and 
 fearless fighter for ideas. He is in his figure nearer 
 Hamlet than Falstaff; but he is a Hamlet of the 
 sword. He may in one aspect be the Hamlet who 
 has seen ghosts and in another the Hamlet who 
 takes pleasure in riotous and jewelled words. His 
 poetry has come out of some spirit of isolation and
 
 A NOTE ON IRISH LITERATURE 177 
 
 luxurious reverie. He is more than a poet, however 
 more than the Hamlet of the passive reveries and 
 speculations. He has shown himself a pugnacious 
 man of action, ever since, at the close of the last 
 century, he set himself to give Ireland its theatre 
 and to make Dublin a capital of the arts again. 
 
 He expressed his views on the prospects and 
 functions of an Irish theatre in the course of a 
 conversation some years ago. 
 
 " We have now," he said, " a steady popular 
 audience at the Abbey" the society's theatre in 
 Dublin " I mean an audience from the people, such 
 as clerks and shop-boys. Our difficulty is to attract 
 the stalls audience the middle classes." 
 
 "You think, however," I asked him, "that the 
 upper classes in Ireland are beginning to take an 
 interest in Irish things the drama, for instance?" 
 
 " Undoubtedly," he said, with conviction. " I think 
 we are at the beginning of a movement in Ireland 
 which will affect people of all classes. I believe we 
 are on the verge, just on the verge, of a great 
 awakening of thought and intellect a period of 
 ideas and of liberation." 
 
 " And the Abbey Theatre is taking a part in this 
 movement? Do you not find that the Abbey plays 
 are too ' cultured,' too ' high art,' to affect the 
 imagination and thought of the people?" 
 
 " No," replied Mr Yeats ; " we have taken our plays 
 to Belfast, to Cork, to Galway, to Sligo, and every- 
 where the people have come to see them and liked 
 them. Perhaps the transition stage we are passing 
 through explains this. Ireland is waking up to new 
 interests. In some ways Ireland at present is more 
 like Elizabethan England than modern England. 
 In the times of Elizabeth, English men and women 
 were passing from the stage where they were 
 absorbed in the beauty of external things and in 
 
 M
 
 178 IRELAND A NATION 
 
 external events. They were becoming interested in 
 the drama of the soul, in the struggle within a man's 
 self, and as a result the Elizabethan drama is 
 a drama of great souls. Synge in The Playboy is an 
 Elizabethan writing about Elizabethans. Compare 
 the people Synge writes about with the people in a 
 modern English play, such as a play of Galsworthy's. 
 Galsworthy's people are people without souls ; their 
 only standards, the things they worship and fear, are 
 external to themselves social conventions, social 
 systems, the British Constitution all of them as 
 external as the Pyramids of Egypt. What kind of 
 language can you put in the mouths of these poor, 
 pale, shivering creatures obsessed by external things ? 
 Synge, on the other hand, gives you the drama of the 
 soul of his own soul, if you like. And the soul, 
 when it speaks, demands splendour and beauty of 
 language to express itself. Synge did exactly as the 
 Elizabethan dramatists did, in pouring out his soul 
 through his plays in extravagant and joyous words." 
 
 " But do you think," I interrupted him, " that the 
 Irish peasant about whom Synge wrote is such an 
 extravagant, joyous person as he is sometimes 
 painted ? " 
 
 "I think he is," said Mr Yeats, "when circum- 
 stances permit it. The Irishman, I am sure, has a 
 great deal of the gay, extravagrant nature of the 
 Elizabethan Englishman. You remember some 
 traveller described the Englishman of Elizabeth's 
 time as ' witty, boastful and corrupt.' The English- 
 man was more Continental then." 
 
 "You believe, then, that the Irishman, like the 
 Elizabethan Englishman, has a special genius for the 
 drama?" 
 
 " I do. Perhaps one reason why we are dramatic 
 in instinct is that we have always had something to 
 fight for. Irish life has been full of stress and
 
 A NOTE ON IRISH LITERATURE 179 
 
 danger an atmosphere which makes for dramatic 
 genius." 
 
 " But the Englishman," I suggested, " has been 
 prosperous, and has not had the same struggle, the 
 same insecurity, and yet he has produced more great 
 literature than we have." 
 
 " Literature, perhaps," admitted Mr Yeats, " but 
 not drama, in the last two hundred years. At least 
 the greatest English dramatists for two hundred 
 years have nearly all been Irishmen, or have had 
 Irish blood in their veins. I think, too, Havelock 
 Ellis has made calculations showing what an immense 
 proportion of the actresses on the English stage have 
 had Irish blood. Then our people have, perhaps 
 more than any other people, the gift of fantasy. Go 
 and talk to the Galway peasant and you will find it 
 in him as you will find it in Synge or Lady Gregory, 
 or Oscar Wilde, or Bernard Shaw, or any of the 
 Irish dramatists. It is in all classes of our people. 
 The duellists at the end of the eighteenth century 
 had it. There was fantasy in the man who made the 
 bet that 'within a year he would play ball against 
 the walls of Jerusalem.' The modern Englishman 
 would say baldly that within such-and-such a time 
 he would go to Jerusalem and back again. Lever 
 had this gift in some measure, but he was imperfectly 
 educated. Still, we must not underestimate Lever." 
 
 " That reminds me. Sometimes the Abbey drama- 
 tists are accused, as Lever was, of not giving us real 
 Irish peasants at all, but a new sort of stage Irish- 
 man." 
 
 Mr Yeats waved his hand in a certain restlessness 
 of scorn. " Perhaps," he agreed, after a moment, 
 "our dramatists have selected some types rather 
 than others, as a group of artists always select the 
 types which they find most interesting. You must 
 not think, however, that writers like Lady Gregory
 
 i8o IRELAND A NATION 
 
 and Synge do not know the Irish peasant. Before 
 Synge wrote about Irish peasants he had gone and 
 lived among them, and Lady Gregory knows the 
 peasant as it could never be said that Kickham, 
 whose peasants were merely amiable fictions, knew 
 them. Still, I think Lady Gregory herself has said 
 that her plays are not merely about Irish life. 
 Someone called Spreading the News a satire on an 
 Irish village. It is quite as much a satire on London 
 society. Lady Gregory gives us in her plays her 
 own spiritual vision, using the men and women 
 whom she knows best and finds most interesting as 
 to some extent symbolic figures." 
 
 " Still," I put in, wishing to hear his opinion of the 
 work of the younger men, " the new Irish dramas 
 Colum's Thomas Muskerry and Robinson's The Cross 
 Roads, for instance tend to be realistic rather than 
 symbolic, don't they ? " 
 
 "Yes, the younger men are undoubtedly becoming 
 realistic." 
 
 "Once when you had seen Ghosts" I continued, 
 "you said that perhaps this sort of realistic drama 
 was needed as the ' medicine of great cities.' Do 
 you think that Ireland requires the medicine of a 
 realistic drama? " 
 
 Mr Yeats drummed his fingers on the arm of the 
 chair, looking as though this were a problem which 
 had troubled him but which he had not yet entirely 
 solved. 
 
 " Perhaps," he said, with apparent regret. " I some- 
 times think that the realistic drama will produce the 
 greatest effect in Ireland." 
 
 I rose to leave, but before going away, being a 
 pedestrian person, troubled by politics, I said to 
 him : " Your dislike of political obsessions in the 
 theatre does not mean, I suppose, that you have 
 ceased to be an Irish Nationalist?"
 
 A NOTE ON IRISH LITERATURE 181 
 
 "In our theatre," he said, "we have nothing to 
 do with politics. They could only make our art 
 insincere. But, speaking for myself, I cannot see 
 how the Ireland I wish for can come about without 
 a national government."
 
 CHAPTER XVIII 
 
 VOICES OF THE NEW IRELAND: (l) P. H. PEARSE 
 AND HIS WRITINGS 
 
 IMMEDIATELY a man dies for what he believes, 
 everything he has said or written assumes a new 
 value. One feels that, however his beliefs may have 
 quarrelled with one's own, he has at any rate put 
 an honest signature to his work. His words are no 
 longer the mere casual utterances of a passing 
 contemporary. One reads them in the light of his 
 death, and they seem mysteriously laden with 
 meaning, confessions out of the depths, a part of the 
 poetry of fate. It is as though the soul of the dead 
 man, having left his body, had gone to dwell in his 
 books. We can no longer read them single-mindedly 
 as literature. They are a ghostly bequest in regard 
 to which we do not feel quite free to play the 
 critic. That, at least, is the world's attitude. It is 
 fascinated and unquestioning as in the presence of 
 a spirit. 
 
 It was in this way that Rupert Brooke became 
 a figure rather than an author on the morrow of 
 his death. One cannot expect The Collected Works 
 of P. H. Pearse to assist to another canonisation of 
 the same sort among English readers ; but in Ireland 
 the process has already begun, and Father Browne, 
 in the course of his eloquent introduction, expresses 
 the conviction that generations of Irishmen yet to 
 be born " will come to the reading of this book as 
 to a kind of Itinerarium Mentis ad Deum, a journey 
 
 182
 
 VOICES OF THE NEW IRELAND 183 
 
 to the realisation of Ireland." Pearse "will appeal 
 to the imagination of times to come," he declares, 
 11 more than any of the rebels of the last hundred 
 and thirty years. . . . His name and deeds will be 
 taught by mothers to their children long before 
 the time when they will be learned in school 
 histories." Here then is a book which a considerable 
 number of human beings already regard as a holy 
 book because a man died for what is written in it. 
 One cannot help, therefore, approaching it with 
 curiosity. One is no longer troubled as to whether 
 one agrees with the author. It is enough for most 
 of us that the author agreed, as it were, with 
 himself that he harmonised his life with his 
 principles to the last logic of dying for them. 
 Pearse, it will be remembered, was the first signatory 
 to the manifesto proclaiming the birth of an Irish 
 Republic on Easter Monday, 1916. As President of 
 the Provisional Government, he was also the first 
 of the insurgent leaders to be shot. On the day of 
 his death he was scarcely a name to the majority 
 of his fellow-countrymen. Thanks to the statesman- 
 ship of Sir John Maxwell, he has now become a 
 historic and almost worshipped figure. 
 
 I met Pearse, I think, only on two occasions. The 
 second was when, eight years ago, he and Thomas 
 MacDonagh showed me over the boys' school he had 
 opened in Rathmines. A dark man with a queer 
 fixity of eye and a habit of close and earnest scrutiny, 
 he struck one as being first of all a propagandist, in 
 contrast to MacDonagh who was obviously first of 
 all a scholar and artist. One felt that conversation 
 with Pearse would be mainly a discussion of causes, 
 while conversation with MacDonagh might be a 
 discussion of anything under the sun. It may have 
 been merely a superficial impression; but one did 
 not think of Pearse at that time either as a poet or
 
 184 IRELAND A NATION 
 
 a prose-writer with a place in Irish literature. It is 
 curious to remember that one did not even think of 
 him as a politician. One thought of him first and 
 last as a man who was anxious to extend the use 
 of the Irish language and to build on it a distinctively 
 Irish culture. Once or twice, while he was editing 
 the Gaelic League paper, called (in English) The 
 Sword of Light) he had shown leanings towards Sinn 
 Fein ; but politics seemed with him to be a secondary 
 interest. He was, in the opinion of most people, 
 simply an educationist. Even the stories he used 
 to write in Irish struck one as being the work not 
 of an artist who had to write or perish, but of a 
 propagandist who was desirous to help the movement 
 to produce a contemporary literature in the Irish 
 language. At the same time, one never dreamed of 
 regarding his enthusiasm as that of a grammarian. 
 He was bent upon the making of an Irish civilisation, 
 which would be as unlike English civilisation as is 
 the civilisation of France or Bohemia. One of the 
 class-rooms in his school was decorated with the 
 names of the great Irishmen of the past, all (or nearly 
 all) of them figures of rebellion. The inside of his 
 school was painted, one fancied, so as to be a sort of 
 temple of Irish heroism. I can recall only one 
 trivial sentence of the conversation of MacDonagh 
 and Pearse on that occasion. It is MacDonagh's 
 invitation to go along to a room where a class in 
 Irish phonetics taught by a well-known priest was 
 being held. " Do come," he said, with a school- 
 boy's bright look of mischief, " and see Father 
 
 making faces." 
 
 The Pearse we find in the Collected Works is 
 something more than an earnest schoolmaster. His 
 earnestness has now been intensified into passion. 
 His faith has become exalted into mysticism. His 
 plays and poems are prophetic of suffering. He has
 
 VOICES OF THE NEW IRELAND 185 
 
 now begun to believe in the necessity of bloodshed no 
 less than in the necessity of the Irish language. He 
 accepts the traditional ideal of an Irish Republic, 
 conceived by Wolfe Tone in sympathy with the 
 French Revolution and endorsed by the Fenians 
 within living memory, and life presents itself to his 
 vision as an altar of sacrifice to this ideal. He 
 becomes a sort of evangelist crying in the wilderness 
 that, for Ireland, without shedding of blood there 
 is no remission of sins. He makes himself the 
 preacher of a holy war on behalf of freedom. He 
 summons the young men of his time to live, as 
 a hostile critic I have already quoted said after 
 his death, in the spirit of Christian Bushido. He 
 becomes a visionary and foretells battle-fields. He 
 can scarcely see the present world for the flashing of 
 swords on the day of destiny. He seldom descends 
 in his plays and poems to the level of normal 
 life. The two most interesting of his plays, The 
 Singer and The King, are visions of self-sacrifice 
 in battle. In the former, the curtain falls on the 
 hero as he goes out against the Gall (the foreigners) 
 with the cry : " One man can free a people as one 
 Man redeemed the world. I will take no pike. I 
 will go into the battle with bare hands. I will stand 
 up before the Gall as Christ hung naked before men 
 on the tree ! " 
 
 His poems are utterances of the same passion of 
 renunciation for an ideal. One of them, entitled 
 Renunciation, begins : 
 
 Naked I saw thee, 
 O beauty of beauty, 
 And I blinded mine eyes 
 For fear I should fail. 
 
 He writes as one who has deliberately thrown over 
 the happy life of artists and lovers for the destiny of 
 the martyr :
 
 186 IRELAND A NATION 
 
 I blinded my eyes, 
 And I closed my ears, 
 I hardened my heart 
 And I smothered my desire. 
 
 I turned my back 
 On the vision I had shaped, 
 And to this road before me 
 I turned my face. 
 
 I have turned my face 
 To this road before me, 
 To the deed that I see 
 And the death I shall die. 
 
 One or two of the poems certainly reveal the fact 
 that Pearse had in him the genius of the artist to 
 a degree that one used not to imagine possible. 
 There is, for instance, the Lullaby of a Woman of the 
 Mountain, which begins : 
 
 Little gold head, my house's candle, 
 
 You will guide all wayfarers that walk this mountain. 
 
 Little soft mouth that my breast has known, 
 Mary will kiss you as she passes. 
 
 Little round cheek, O smoother than satin, 
 Jesus will lay His hand on you. 
 
 The last verses of this poem are especially charming, 
 expressing in a beautiful way the little noisy world 
 of night that must be sung to silence : 
 
 Mary's kiss on my baby's mouth, 
 
 Christ's little hand on my darling's cheek ! 
 
 House, be still, and ye little grey mice, 
 Lie close to-night in your hidden lairs. 
 
 Moths on the window fold your wings, 
 Little black chafers, silence your humming.
 
 VOICES OF THE NEW IRELAND 187 
 
 Plover and curlew, fly not over my house, 
 
 Do not speak, wild barnacle, passing over the mountain. 
 
 Things of the mountain that wake in the night-time, 
 Do not stir to-night till the daylight whitens ! 
 
 One finds the same charm, the same cataloguish 
 charm, in The Wayfarer. It is not a great poem, 
 but it is a very moving poem, and, in revealing 
 the list of the things that Pearse loved, it shows 
 that he had the imagination of a poet the imagina- 
 tion that aches as it beholds the visible beauty of 
 the world. In The Wayfarer he meditates sadly on 
 all he was so passionately to renounce : 
 
 The beauty of the world hath made me sad, 
 
 This beauty that will pass ; 
 
 Sometimes my heart hath shaken with great joy 
 
 To see a leaping squirrel in a tree, 
 
 Or a red lady-bird upon a stalk, 
 
 Or little rabbits in a field at evening, 
 
 Lit by a slanting sun. . . . 
 
 It is not of his own renunciation he is thinking, how- 
 ever, but of the impermanence of all lovely things 
 the theme of so much of the world's poetry. He 
 thinks last of all he was always specially moved by 
 the ways of children of: 
 
 Children with bare feet upon the sands 
 
 Of some ebbed sea, or playing in the streets 
 
 Of little towns in Connacht, 
 
 Things young and happy. 
 
 And then my heart hath told me : 
 
 These will pass, 
 
 Will pass and change, will die and be no more, 
 
 Things bright and green, things young and happy ; 
 
 And I have gone upon my way 
 
 Sorrowful. 
 
 It is as illustrations of the moods of an Irish 
 Republican rather than as poems of independent
 
 i88 IRELAND A NATION 
 
 beauty that these poems will be read by most people 
 for many years to come. That he met his death as 
 he did makes his rann, or song, in praise of death as 
 significant to us as an actual experience. 
 
 One finds a certain mawkishness in one of his 
 poems, Little Lad of the Tricks, as in some of his 
 earlier stories ; and one dislikes finding a child 
 addressed in such a verse as : 
 
 There is a fragrance in your kiss 
 That I have not found yet 
 In the kisses of women 
 Or in the honey of their bodies. 
 
 On the other hand, the poems about freedom 
 cannot be accused of being sentimental. They are 
 exultant, high-voiced, passionate, like the improvisa- 
 tions of a bard. One can almost see the hand 
 sweeping the strings as one reads the opening lines 
 of The Rebel: 
 
 I am come of the seed of the people, the people that sorrow, 
 That have no treasure but hope, 
 No riches laid up but a memory 
 Of an Ancient glory. . . . 
 
 One can see the hushed audience, tense with 
 emotion, as the evangel proceeds to its rapturous 
 confession of faith : 
 
 I say to my people that they are holy, that they are august, 
 
 despite their chains, 
 That they are greater than those that hold them, and stronger 
 
 and purer, 
 That they have but need of courage, and to call on the name 
 
 of their God, 
 
 God the unforgetting, the dear God that loves the peoples 
 For whom He died naked, suffering shame. 
 
 The religious element in Pearse's patriotic poetry 
 will puzzle those readers who judge him not according
 
 VOICES OF THE NEW IRELAND 189 
 
 to his ideal but according to their own. They must 
 remember that to his mind Ireland was as distinct 
 a nation from England as Poland is from Russia or 
 Germany, and Home Rule seemed to him merely 
 a subtle form of Unionism. He believed that the 
 full measure of Irish freedom could only be won if 
 he and his contemporaries were ready to die for it. 
 He admitted it could only be won by a miracle, but 
 he called for the miracle : 
 
 And so I speak. 
 
 Yea, ere my hot youth pass, I speak to my people and say : 
 
 Ye shall be foolish as I ; ye shall scatter, not save ; 
 
 Ye shall venture your all, lest ye lose what is more than all ; 
 
 Ye shall call for a miracle, taking Christ at His word. 
 
 And for this I will answer, O people, answer here and hereafter, 
 
 people that I have loved, shall we not answer together ? . . . 
 
 The bard of old was half rhapsodist and half poet, 
 and that, I should say, is the nearest one can get to 
 an exact description of Pearse as an author. His 
 stories scarcely count ; they are too much lacking in 
 the detail of life. Other writers of fiction in Irish, 
 such as Mr Padraic O'Conaire, surpass him as creative 
 artists. But the poems and plays have the voice of 
 a man tortured with circumstance a man across 
 whose face breaks the light of an apocalyptic faith. 
 
 1 confess I see more error than truth in the faith 
 in redemption by bloodshed. But these plays and 
 poems are beautiful with a far finer faith than that 
 faith in the destiny of the poor and the oppressed, 
 and in the power of self-sacrifice to redeem the 
 travailing world.
 
 CHAPTER XIX 
 
 VOICES OF THE NEW IRELAND : (2) MRS J. R. GREEN 
 
 WHEN Mrs Green's Irish Nationality was published, 
 a writer in a Dublin paper began his review of it 
 with the words : " By God, this is a book ! " That 
 sentence suggests, a little violently, the Irish opinion 
 of Mrs Green's place as a historian. No lover of 
 the cold (or, if you like the word better, the inanimate) 
 facts of history ever broke out into an exclamation 
 like that in book-review. It was obviously written 
 by one who regarded Mrs Green, not as a bloodless 
 chronicler of events but as the champion and 
 vindicator of a nation. 
 
 If anyone doubts that Ireland needed a champion 
 in the historical even more than in the political 
 sphere, he will do well to read Mrs Green's own short 
 essay, " The Way of History in Ireland." It is an 
 exposure, at once impassioned and wittily contemp- 
 tuous, of the way in which the historians, instead of 
 setting themselves to open up new fields of know- 
 ledge in Irish history, have successively contented 
 themselves with muddying the pedigree of the Irish 
 people. " History does not repeat itself," said either 
 Wilde or Mr Max Beerbohm ; " historians repeat 
 each other." And the witticism is seriously true of 
 most of the Irish history that has been written. One 
 after another, the historians have leaped through the 
 gap of tradition, like a rout of sheep, and pastured on 
 the old fables that represent the seven-hundred-years' 
 duel between England and Ireland as a duel between 
 
 190
 
 VOICES OF THE NEW IRELAND 191 
 
 civilisation, on the one hand, and barbarism on the 
 other. This was scarcely questioned in collegiate 
 circles. One accepted it as one accepted the superi- 
 ority of Abraham Lincoln to Sitting Bull, of Queen 
 Victoria to the Queen of the Baganda. To contend 
 
 *-/ o 
 
 that the quarrel between England and Ireland, so 
 far from being a quarrel between civilisation and 
 barbarism, was a quarrel beween one civilisation 
 and another, would have been regarded as a paradox 
 of which only an irresponsible Irishman would be 
 capable. More than that, it would have been to 
 challenge the whole world of political and social 
 ideas in which the historians of Ireland had hitherto 
 lived and moved and had their being. It would 
 even have been to question the ethics of Imperialism. 
 For Irish history has been written for the most part, 
 not in the service of truth but in the service of 
 Empire. 
 
 In Ireland, as Mrs Green says, "history has a 
 peculiar doom. It is enslaved in the chains of the 
 Moral Tale the good man (English) who prospered, 
 and the bad man (Irish) who came to a shocking 
 end." If an Irishman ventured to cast doubt on the 
 political tract that resulted whether on its ideas 
 or its instances he was dismissed in a scholarly 
 and judicial manner as a politician, a biassed and 
 querulous person, and any references to massacres 
 and murders perpetrated by Elizabethan civilisers 
 were discountenanced as peculiarly unpleasant ex- 
 amples of " the Irish whine." In this way the Irish 
 people were slowly being drained of that self-respect 
 which comes of being conscious heirs to a fine tradition. 
 More and more of them were coming to say, in tones 
 of self-pity and resignation : " Ah, where would we be 
 without England?" Irish history before the arrival 
 of Strongbow "came to be looked on as merely a 
 murky prelude to the civilising work of England
 
 192 IRELAND A NATION 
 
 a preface, savage, transitory, and of no permanent 
 interest, to be rapidly passed over till we come to 
 the English pages of the book." Clearly a nation 
 which accepted such an account of its ancestry as 
 this without question would be on the road to spiritual 
 slavery. 
 
 It would be absurd to suggest that Mrs Green was 
 the first writer who sought to bring Ireland out of 
 the Egypt in which the historians had bound her. 
 From Lynch, the author of Cambrensis Eversus, 
 down to Dr Joyce, many fine-hearted scholars have 
 given us Irish history from the Irish, instead of the 
 Imperial, point of view. Patriots, such as John 
 Mitchel, too, have written history out of imaginations 
 of blood and fire, and the common people have kept 
 alive rumours of an ancestry of kings rumours which 
 only helped to convince a good many people that 
 the melancholy Celt was also a melancholy humbug. 
 But none of these praisers of Ireland caught the ear 
 of the universities or of the world which the uni- 
 versities feed with the latest fashion in learning. The 
 only thing recognised as having any excellence in 
 the long procession of Irish history since the time 
 of the saints was a colonial, not a national, institution 
 Grattan's Parliament. That this was admitted to 
 have any virtue was due chiefly to the fresh-eyed 
 and honest scholarship of Lecky. Mrs Green bids 
 fair to do for Ireland as a whole, the Ireland of 
 Art MacMurrough and Margaret O'Connor and the 
 O'Neills, what Lecky did for the restricted Ireland 
 of Swift and Grattan. She is the first writer taking 
 what we might call a Continental view of history to 
 offer us anything better than the dreary traditional 
 statement of the record of Ireland. An authority 
 on the social life of mediaeval Europe, a historian 
 who had already won the praise of scholars by her 
 work in English history, a brilliant, eloquent and
 
 VOICES OF THE NEW IRELAND 193 
 
 imaginative writer, possessed of an indomitable 
 patience in research and an indomitable faith, she 
 has given Ireland for the first time what it so badly 
 needed in regard to its history a skilled advocate 
 before the world. 
 
 Mrs Green does not profess to have rewritten 
 Irish history. As may be seen in her reply to the 
 strictures of Mr Robert Dunlop on her most important 
 work, The Making of Ireland and its Undoing, she 
 claims merely to have brought forward certain new 
 evidence showing that "need has arisen for an entire 
 review of the whole materials for Irish history and of 
 the old conclusions." Her Making of Ireland and its 
 Undoing is a brilliant setting forth of the case for 
 inquiry. Further than this, it instances a thousand 
 good reasons for believing that the mediaeval Irish, 
 so far from being a mob of barbarians addicted to 
 the slaughter of their near relatives, as they were 
 generally painted, were comparatively ordinary white 
 Europeans who " made money, traded, built houses, 
 talked Latin, studied medicine and law, [and] other- 
 wise behaved like other people of the Middle Ages." 
 Other historians were content to repeat, like a 
 litany, the Newgate Calendar of mediaeval Ireland. 
 Mrs Green, in the first place, reminded them that 
 warfare between small communities was not confined 
 to Ireland in those days, and went on to show that, 
 besides a good deal of blood-letting, mediaeval Ireland 
 was also a scene of "cheerful progress of trade and 
 culture," and that this progress was deliberately 
 destroyed by the civilising agenies of Dublin Castle. 
 
 Orthodox historians, relying on the reports of 
 casual and official travellers, who usually did not 
 know a word of the language of the country, refuse, 
 of course, to credit the evidence for the existence of 
 an Irish national civilisation. Mrs Green, in one of 
 the most attractive chapters of The Old Irish World,
 
 194 IRELAND A NATION 
 
 which she calls " A Great Irish Lady," gives us a 
 sketch of a very noble impersonation of Irish culture 
 in the fifteenth century. This was Margaret O'Connor, 
 who called the learned of all Ireland about her at 
 a great festival at Killeigh, in 1434, when, " clad in 
 cloth of gold, her dearest friends about her, her 
 clergy and judges too," she began the festivities by 
 laying two chalices of gold on the altar as an offering 
 to God Almighty, and dispensed hospitality to 
 2700 poets and musicians and learned men. Such a 
 living figure of Irish culture is set in vain before the 
 makers of orthodox history. They prefer to judge 
 the social condition of the "native Irish" by what 
 Fynes Moryson says he heard from a Bohemian 
 baron, whose name he does not give. Or, rather, as 
 Mrs Green shows, they base their judgments, not 
 on what Fynes Moryson said the Bohemian baron 
 said, but on what they themselves say Fynes Moryson 
 said the Bohemian baron said a very different thing. 
 In Fynes Moryson we read how the baron, coming 
 to the house of the O'Cahan, " was met at the door 
 with sixteen women, all naked, excepting their loose 
 mantles" and so forth. That is much too simple 
 and vague a story for Froude, who accordingly trans- 
 forms the mantle-clad women who might have been 
 servants, dependants or refugees into "daughters 
 of distinguished Ulster chiefs," squatting in their 
 fathers' castles "in the presence of strangers, and 
 bare of clothing, as if Adam had never sinned." 
 Professor Mahaffy, in an essay in an excellent publica- 
 tion of the Georgian Society, added his share of 
 corroborative detail to the story, and spoke of "the 
 O'Cahan in his wigwam, surrounded by his stark- 
 naked wives and daughters." Thus is Irish history 
 written by the impartial and judicial scholars of 
 Empire. In this way, what Mrs Green calls "the 
 barbarian legend " has been heroically kept alive.
 
 VOICES OF THE NEW IRELAND 195 
 
 Like many pioneers, Mrs Green has to devote a 
 great part of her energies to cutting a way through 
 a monstrous forest of falsehood ; but, in essays such 
 as those on Margaret O'Connor and on " The Trade 
 Routes of Ireland," she ever and again pauses to 
 announce her vision of the pleasant places of truth 
 that lie beyond. Those who have been accustomed 
 to think of Ireland as "an island beyond an island," 
 with its very means of communication with the 
 Continent lying through England, will be surprised 
 to discover that the original Irish path to Europe 
 was apparently not through England at all, but 
 directly oversea to Spain and Southern France and 
 Scandinavia. What traffic did Ireland carry on with 
 these countries? Her great gift to the Continent 
 in the early days was, of course, not commerce, but 
 learning and religion ; but even then there was mani- 
 festly considerable exchange of commodities, and an 
 old poet could speak of Leinster with "its wine- 
 barque upon the purple flood ; its shower of silver 
 of great splendour ; its torques of gold from the land 
 of the Gaul." As for Ireland as a centre of distri- 
 bution of culture to Europe, Mrs Green writes : 
 
 " Ireland became the source of culture to all 
 Germanic nations ; indeed, wherever in the seventh 
 and following centuries education and knowledge is 
 found, it may be traced directly to Irish influence. 
 It has been justly said that at the time of Charles 
 the Bald everyone who spoke Greek on the Continent 
 was almost certainly an Irishman, or taught by an 
 Irishman. By degrees, Irish monasteries, built and 
 supported by Irish money, spread over Europe from 
 Holland to Tarentum, from Gaul to Bulgaria." 
 
 Nor did this direct Continental intercourse cease for 
 many hundreds of years. Through the long centuries,
 
 196 IRELAND A NATION 
 
 Mrs Green tells us, the Irish "never lost the habit of 
 the sea and of Europe." 
 
 " In the Middle Ages Spanish coin was almost the 
 chief currency in Ireland, so great was the Irish 
 trade with Spain ; and in the eighteenth century the 
 country was still full of Spanish, Portuguese, and 
 French money in daily use the moydore, the doub- 
 loon, the pistole, the louis d'or, the new Portuguese 
 gold coin. So much so that in the Peninsular War 
 Ireland was ransacked for foreign coins to send to 
 the army in Spain and Portugal." 
 
 The passages I have quoted will give some idea of 
 Mrs Green's aim and achievement as an Irish historian. 
 She has rehabilitated Ireland as a civilised European 
 country with an almost continuous record of com- 
 merce in trade and learning with other European 
 countries not a barbarous island beyond an island, 
 a province in a backwater, as the Imperialists pictured 
 it in the nineteenth century, but an enterprising and 
 culture-loving nation. She makes us realise the 
 Ireland of history as a living and growing common- 
 wealth instead of as the conventional shambles. Is 
 the account an impartial one? Mrs Green, in a 
 happy phrase, disclaims "impartiality of the heart." 
 " Love," says an Eastern proverb, " is the net of truth." 
 That is the secret of Mrs Green's genius as a 
 historian. To great gifts of the mind she has added 
 great gifts of the heart. That is why she has 
 succeeded in arriving at a human and beautiful inter- 
 pretation of Irish history where a thousand colder- 
 blooded scholars have lost themselves as in a maze 
 without a plan.
 
 CHAPTER XX 
 
 VOICES OF THE NEW IRELAND: (3) A. E. 
 
 IT would surprise a good many people to be told 
 that Mr George Russell is the greatest man Ireland 
 has produced since Parnell. Yet this is the con- 
 sidered opinion of many intelligent Irishmen. Not 
 that there are many points of comparison between 
 the genius of Mr Russell and the genius of Parnell. 
 Parnell was a destroying angel ; Mr Russell is a 
 creative idealist. Parnell devoted his life to the 
 siege and assault of that lonely castle of injustice 
 known as foreign government. Mr Russell has set 
 himself to lay the foundations of a sociable world 
 which the sons and daughters of God may inhabit 
 without shame. Painter, poet, journalist, mystic 
 and politician not a party politician, but a builder 
 of civilisation he has thrown himself into the work 
 of maintaining the co-operative cause in Ireland 
 with a gay and superabundant energy of soul and 
 intellect that bears the mark of the heroic. As 
 editor of The Irish Homestead, the weekly organ of 
 the Irish co-operative moment, he gives us what is 
 probably the only agricultural journal in the world 
 which non-agricultural citizens can read not merely 
 without boredom but with delight. 
 
 The secret of Mr Russell's appeal is fairly obvious. 
 His whole work, whether as poet, philosopher or 
 co-operative propagandist, is an expression of a 
 197
 
 198 IRELAND A NATION 
 
 divine vision the vision of the republic of God, 
 here built in the heart of an individual man and 
 exhibiting itself as a heroic life, and there built in 
 the heart of a whole people and exhibiting itself as 
 a heroic civilisation. For A. E. is not a mystic in 
 order that the soul may indulge herself in bizarre 
 experiences, and he is not a co-operator in order 
 that the farmer may get a penny a pound extra for 
 his butter. His mysticism is allied to the genius 
 of the earth and the common day, and he aims at 
 illumining agricultural co-operation with something 
 of the light of heaven. 
 
 He is thus a realist among mystics and an idealist 
 among practical men. His message to the mystic 
 and to the farmer is, as I have said, very much the 
 same. " Every word which really inspires," he writes, 
 in The Renewal of Youth, " is spoken as if the Golden 
 Age had never passed. The great teachers ignore 
 the personal identity and speak to the eternal 
 pilgrim." "The soul of Ireland," he declares in 
 Co-operation and Nationality, " has to be kindled, 
 and it can only be kindled by the thought of great 
 deeds, and not by the hope of petty parsimonies or 
 petty gains." Consequently, this voice from the 
 Golden Age disguised as a journalist of the world of 
 pigs and dairies and bees is not satisfied to tell the 
 Irish farmer how by combination he can capture this 
 or that market. "The true significance of the move- 
 ment promoted by Sir Horace Plunkett," he con- 
 tends, "is that it is an attempt to build up a new 
 social order in Ireland." 
 
 Irish rural civilisation has, he sees, been ruined 
 by a number of causes. And Ireland has not been 
 given, as other countries have, an alternative civilisa- 
 tion of the towns. The Irish country-side has become 
 a desert of grass and songlessness. As for the Irish 
 towns :
 
 VOICES OF THE NEW IRELAND 199 
 
 " We should rage and prophesy over them as the 
 prophets of ancient Israel did over Tyre and Sidon." 
 
 Here is ruin indeed ruin a little exaggerated, 
 perhaps, by the prophet's wrath but ruin enough 
 to call for the labours of giants. Most people are 
 vaguely satisfied that the ruin can be patched up, 
 if not turned into an earthly paradise, by help from 
 a beneficent monster called Government. A. E. sees 
 that the appeal for the salvation of Ireland must be 
 not to Government, but to the national will and soul. 
 He realises that Congested Districts Boards and 
 similar inventions of the politicians, whatever real 
 and apparent good they may do, are a danger to the 
 will and the self-respect of the people they profess 
 to help. As a result of these persistent State 
 tamperings with the daily lives of Irish men and 
 women, we are now witnessing, he holds, "the 
 tragedy of the decline and fall of the human will 
 in the people. . . . The will is growing powerless 
 to act without partnership with its fetish or idol the 
 State." And again, in a later chapter, he tells us : 
 " The effect of the policy of our present public men is 
 to turn the Irish into a race of economic babies, with 
 their lips for ever nuzzling at the nipples of the State." 
 
 To my mind many of the evils of government 
 attacked by A. E. are due to the fact that in Ireland 
 government does not mean government by the 
 people themselves but government from abroad. 
 The attractiveness of his dream of a new civilisation, 
 however, is independent of his subsidiary arguments. 
 Socialists and anti-Socialists may unite in working 
 for this new co-operative commonwealth which A. E. 
 desires to build first in the hearts and then in the 
 country-sides of Ireland. " Wherever there is mutual 
 aid," he tells us, "... wherever there is constant 
 give-and-take, wherever the prosperity of the indi-
 
 200 IRELAND A NATION 
 
 vidual depends on the prosperity of the community 
 about him, there the social order tends to produce 
 fine types of character, with a devotion to public 
 ideas ; and this is the real object of all government." 
 That is surely not opposed to William Morris, who 
 would also have agreed that " the phrase, ' Every 
 man for himself,' is one of the maxims in the gospel 
 according to Beelzebub. The devil's game with 
 men is to divide and conquer them." 
 
 And A. E.'s vision of some of the possibilities 
 opened up by co-operative habits and sentiments 
 would hardly have left that artist-designer of a 
 socialist civilisation cold : 
 
 "The men in any rural district, united together, 
 could make the land they live in as lovely to look 
 on as the fabled gardens in the valley of Damascus. 
 They could have fruit trees along the hedgerows, 
 and make the country roads beautiful with colour 
 in spring. This has been done in many a rural 
 commune on the Continent, and there is no reason 
 why it should not be done here. Only let us get 
 our men together, get them organised and one 
 improvement will rapidly follow another. For all 
 great deeds by races, all civilisations, were built up 
 by the voluntary efforts of men united together. 
 Sometimes one feels as if there were some higher 
 mind in humanity which could not act through 
 individuals, but only through brotherhoods and 
 groups of men. Anyhow, the civilisation which is 
 based on individualism is mean, and the civilisation 
 based upon great guilds, fraternities, communes and 
 associations is of a higher order. If we are to have 
 any rural civilisation in Ireland it must spring out 
 of co-operation." 
 
 It is the distinction of A. E. that he does not
 
 VOICES OF THE NEW IRELAND 201 
 
 paint Utopias, but holds up charming and realisable 
 visions to those who would set about building a 
 rural civilisation in Ireland or, indeed, in England, 
 either. He wants to see a newer Athens given to 
 the world, not in terms of the city, but in terms of 
 the country, and he comes as a messenger to the 
 Irish people, bidding them no longer be mere dole- 
 gatherers with shadowy wills, but take upon them- 
 selves the burden of being efficient in their daily 
 business, humane and distinguished in their culture, 
 social in their pleasures, and heroic in their aims. 
 Never before has so irresistible a call been uttered 
 for the establishment of a fine free civilisation in 
 Ireland. 
 
 Not that A. E. is given to speaking soothing and 
 gracious things. He can denounce his fellows like 
 a Jonah when he has a mind to it. His prose especi- 
 ally is, like so much good prophet's prose, only less apt 
 to fly into a passion of denunciation than into a passion 
 of ideals. He broods calm as a seer in his verse and 
 on his canvases. His prose is often the prose of a 
 controversialist with a lash. Everyone remembers 
 his punishment of Mr Kipling in an "open letter" 
 which he contributed to The Daily News during the 
 Ulster crisis, after Mr Kipling had written a shrill, 
 old-maidish poem about " hells declared for those 
 that serve not Rome." If Mr Kipling is sensitive, 
 its blazing nobleness must have disturbed him 
 beyond any other criticism that was ever directed 
 against his work. But A. E. is as bold in prophesy- 
 ing against the country he loves as against the poet 
 who maligned it. In an essay called Religion and 
 Love he charges Ireland with sin with an anger 
 possible only to a lover or an enemy. " The home 
 life in Ireland," he declares," is probably more squalid 
 than with any other people equally prosperous in 
 Europe. The children, begotten without love, fill
 
 202 IRELAND A NATION 
 
 more and more the teeming asylums." I quote this 
 not because I entirely agree with it I doubt whether 
 lovelessness is responsible for nearly as many admis- 
 sions into Irish asylums as malnutrition and tea but 
 as an example of A. E.'s preference of the home truth 
 to the sentimental lie in dealing with Irish or any 
 other questions. His scorn of the " made marriage " 
 and the haggling over dowries leads him even to be- 
 little the reputation of Irishwomen for virtue. " A 
 girl, without repining," he says, " will follow her four- 
 legged dowry to the house of a man she may never 
 have spoken twenty words to before her marriage. 
 We praise our women for their virtue, but the general 
 acceptance of the marriage as arranged shows so un- 
 emotional, so undesirable a temperament, that it is 
 not to be wondered at. One wonders was there 
 temptation." And he doubts not only whether Irish 
 women are virtuous in any fine sense, but whether the 
 Irish people as a whole deserve their reputation for 
 being a religious and spiritual race. 
 
 " It is " (he writes) " the essentially irreligious spirit 
 of Ireland which has come to regard love as an un- 
 necessary emotion and the mingling of the sexes as 
 dangerous. For it is a curious thing that, while we 
 commonly regard ourselves as the most religious 
 people in Europe, the reverse is probably true. The 
 country which has never produced spiritual thinkers 
 or religious teachers of whom men have heard, if we 
 except Berkeley and perhaps the remote Johannes 
 Scotus Erigena, cannot pride itself on its spiritual 
 achievement." 
 
 And in the end we are left with the damnation 
 of contemporary Ireland in the sentence : 
 
 " Dante had a place in his Inferno for the joyless
 
 VOICES OF THE NEW IRELAND 203 
 
 souls, and if his conception be true, the population of 
 that circle will be largely modern Irish." 
 
 Like many tempestuous prophets, however, A. E. 
 will not permit other people to damn where he him- 
 self damns. I have mentioned his castigation of Mr 
 Kipling. He is equally at odds with the realists of 
 the Abbey Theatre who dwell with too loving an in- 
 sistence on the vices of Ireland. In an essay, entitled 
 Ideals of the New Rural Society, he writes : 
 
 " Ireland is a horribly melancholy and cynical 
 country. Our literary men and poets, who ought to 
 give us courage, have taken to writing about the Irish 
 as a people who ' went forth to battle, but always fell,' 
 sentimentalising over incompetence instead of invigor- 
 ating us and liberating us and directing our energies. 
 We have developed a new and clever school of Irish 
 dramatists who say they are holding the mirror up to 
 Irish peasant nature ; but they reflect nothing but 
 decadence. They delight in the broken lights of 
 sincerity, the ruffian who beats his wife, the weakling 
 who is unfortunate in love and who goes and drinks 
 himself to death, while the little, decaying country 
 towns are seized with avidity and exhibited on the 
 stage in every kind of decay and human futility and 
 meanness." 
 
 Considering A. E.'s own indictments of Irish life, 
 this seems a little unfair. One is also inclined to ask 
 him how he, who is so suspicious of ethical intrusions 
 into the art of painting,can justify himself for demand- 
 ing these intrusions into the art of literature. Surely 
 the tragic figuration of suffering in Mr Lennox 
 Robinson's play, The Cross Roads the play concern- 
 ing the wife-beater which A. E. attacks is a legiti- 
 mate and even noble aim in imaginative literature.
 
 204 IRELAND A NATION 
 
 One feels that Mr. Robinson's sunless realism is the 
 result, not of intellectual malice but of imaginative 
 comprehension and pity. A. E.'s theory of literature, 
 however, will not allow any trafficking with ignoble 
 types. His theory of painting is as unethical 
 as Whistler's : his literary creed is nearer Tolstoy's. 
 In his essay, Nationality and Cosmopolitanism^ he 
 seems to hope for the coming of an Irish literature 
 which will hold up heroic types for the imitation of 
 the people. " The literature of a people," he believes, 
 " is for ever creating a new soul among its people," 
 and he sees no chance of any good thing coming 
 to Ireland from the pursuit of decadent European 
 models, which only disclose "the old wolfish lust, 
 hiding itself beneath the golden fleece of the spirit." 
 That sentence, however, is a protest not against 
 Mr Robinson but against Mr Yeats, who wrote The 
 Autumn of the Body to recommend French examples 
 to the Irish. A. E. will go to school neither to French 
 nor to English literature at least, so far as he desires 
 a literature of heroic types. As for English literature, 
 he writes : 
 
 " English literature has always been more sym- 
 pathetic with actual beings than with ideal types, and 
 cannot help us much. A man who loves Dickens, 
 for example, may prove to have a great tolerance for 
 the grotesque characters which are the outcome of the 
 social order in England, but he will not be assisted 
 in the conception of a higher humanity ; and this is 
 true of very many English writers who lack a funda- 
 mental philosophy, and are content to take man as he 
 seems to be for the moment rather than as the pilgrim 
 of eternity as one who is flesh to-day but who may 
 hereafter prove divine, and who may shine at last like 
 the stars of morning, triumphant among the sons of 
 God."
 
 VOICES OF THE NEW IRELAND 205 
 
 That passage in a measure implies a criticism of 
 A. E. as well as of Dickens. His own art is in- 
 habited by divine thoughts instead of human beings. 
 Whether in his lyrics or his landscapes, it is the 
 divine rather than the human interests that predom- 
 inate. He is too much of a visionary to be content 
 with the humours and observations of the realist. 
 
 At the same time, it is less the literary critic that 
 speaks in these sentences than the builder and maker 
 of the Golden Age in Ireland. A. E. is a patriot 
 who, amid all his indignation, dreams dreams of Ire- 
 land such as Blake dreamed of England. Few voices 
 so eloquent in the field of social prophecy have been 
 heard since Mazzini's and Ruskin's. He summons 
 Irishmen not to middle-class success but to the 
 politics of inspiration. 
 
 " The countryside in Ireland " (he declares) " could 
 blossom into as much beauty as the hillsides in 
 mediaeval Italy if we could but get rid of our self- 
 mistrust. We have all that any race ever had to inspire 
 them, the heavens overhead, the earth underneath, 
 and the breath of life in our nostrils. I would like 
 to exile the man who would set limits to what we can 
 do, who would take the crown and sceptre from the 
 human will, and say, marking out some petty enter- 
 prise as the limit : ' Thus far can we go and no 
 farther, and here shall our life be stayed.' " 
 
 Is not the country to be envied in which a hot- 
 gospeller of eggs and turnips (if one may use the 
 phrase without offence) can summon his fellows to 
 the Promised Land in accents like these : 
 
 " We in Ireland should not live only from day to 
 day, for the day only, like the beasts in the field, but 
 should think of where all this long cavalcade of the
 
 206 IRELAND A NATION 
 
 Gael is tending, and how and in what manner their 
 tents will be pitched in the evening of their genera- 
 tion. A national purpose is the most unconquerable 
 and victorious of all things on earth. It can raise up 
 Babylon from the sands of the desert, and make 
 imperial civilisations spring from a score of huts, and 
 after it has wrought its will it can leave monuments 
 that seem as everlasting a portion of nature as the 
 rocks. The Pyramids and the Sphinx on the sands 
 of Egypt have seemed to humanity for centuries as 
 much a portion of nature as Errigal, or Benbulben, or 
 Slieve Gullion, has seemed a portion of nature to our 
 eyes in Ireland." 
 
 A. E.'s prose does not bear the stamp of his genius 
 so indubitably as does his poetry. None the less, it 
 is the prose of a great man, whether he writes on 
 Mr Yeats or G. F. Watts, on the soul of man or the 
 reconstruction of rural society. 
 
 II 
 
 A. E. is a writer in a curious position. About 
 nine-tenths of those who admire him most passion- 
 ately are a little uncertain whether at times he is 
 humbugging them or not whether, indeed, he is 
 not humbugging himself. They are carried away 
 by the large images of his poetry ; they are moved 
 by the twilight beauty of his landscapes ; they re- 
 spond to his eloquence as a seer of the co-operative 
 commonwealth. But when it comes to the demi- 
 gods, fairies, spirits or whatever you care to call 
 those plumed and fiery creatures of his vision, all 
 but a few out-and-out disciples smile questioningly 
 at one another. In their hearts they regard these 
 things as the eccentricities of a great man rather 
 than as inhabitants of earth, air or eternity. They
 
 VOICES OF THE NEW IRELAND 207 
 
 think of them as rather comic, like Blake's vision 
 of the ghost of a flea which he once leaped out of 
 bed to set down on paper. The truth is, in hearing 
 of visions of this kind, most of us are like children 
 hearing a stranger speak a language we do not know. 
 We are amused, as at gibberish, never pausing to 
 reflect that the sense may be in the stranger's speech 
 and the lack of understanding in ourselves. And 
 the more ignorant we are, the more disinclined are 
 we to be seriously inquisitive beyond the tiny circle 
 of our own world. In the proverbs, it is the ignorant 
 man who believes in wonders. In reality, it is more 
 often the ignorant man who laughs at wonders. We 
 are by nature unbelievers in a great part of our 
 being. We even regard our unbelief as a proof that 
 we possess a sense of humour. 
 
 In a world in which death and distress are all 
 about us, however, we need a faith as well as a sense 
 of humour ; and we cannot afford to dismiss in a 
 flurry of prejudice the faith of any man who writes 
 in good faith. We should be especially foolish to 
 be impatient of the faith of a true poet who comes 
 making us such bounteous offers as A. E. "Sitting 
 in your chair," he assures us, " you can travel farther 
 than ever Columbus travelled, and to lordlier worlds 
 than his eyes have rested on. Are you tired of 
 surfaces ? Come with me, and we will bathe in the 
 Fountains of Youth. I can point you the way to 
 El Dorado." This is a cheerful promise, a golden 
 summons. What warrant have we that A. E. is 
 not asking us to chase a will-o'-the-wisp? What 
 warrant have we that he has not been chasing a 
 will-o'-the-wisp himself with the genius of an im- 
 aginative man? We can but listen attentively to 
 his story and ponder it, ringing it on our sense of 
 truth like a coin on a counter. 
 
 A. E. tells us that his visionary life does not go
 
 208 IRELAND A NATION 
 
 back to his infancy. " I never," he declares, " felt a 
 light in childhood which faded in manhood into the 
 common light of day, nor do I believe that childhood 
 is any nearer than age to the vision. ... I was not 
 conscious in my boyhood of any heaven lying about 
 me." At the same time, we find, in a chapter in 
 The Candle of Vision^ that while he was still in his 
 teens he was in many respects the visionary that we 
 know to-day. We see him walking along the 
 country roads of Armagh at night with a dream- 
 world in his head : " If I walked across my lawns 
 in darkness, the grasses stirred by my feet would 
 waken to vivid colour and glimmer behind me with 
 a trail of green fire." While he was still only seven- 
 teen or eighteen he was already trying to express 
 this mystic dream-world in paint, and " began with 
 much enthusiasm a series of pictures which were to 
 illustrate the history of man from his birth in the 
 Divine Mind, where he glimmered first in the dark- 
 ness of chaos in vague and monstrous forms, growing 
 ever nigher to the human, to men-beasts and men- 
 birds, until at last the most perfect form, the Divine 
 idea of man, was born in space." In connection 
 with these boyish paintings, A. E. relates an extra- 
 ordinary experience. As he brooded over one of 
 the pictures, wondering what legend to write beneath 
 it, he began to feel " like one who is in a dark room 
 and hears the breathing of another creature," and 
 something whispered to him, " Call it ' The Birth of 
 ^Eon.' " About a fortnight later, " A. E." was in 
 the National Library in Dublin waiting for the 
 attendant to give him a book, when his eye fell on 
 a volume that was lying open on a table. It was a 
 dictionary of religion, and the first word that caught 
 his eye was " yEon," and " it was explained as a 
 word used by the Gnostics to designate the first 
 created beings." Most people, as they read this,
 
 VOICES OF THE NEW IRELAND 209 
 
 will murmur something about " coincidence " a 
 blesseder word than " Mesopotamia " itself. A. E., 
 however, trembled at his discovery, and so great was 
 the impression it made upon him that he has ever 
 since called himself by the first two letters of the 
 mysterious word, " JEon" He intended, we are told, 
 to take "yon" as a pseudonym, but a printer, 
 finding his handwriting not easy to decipher, printed 
 only the first two letters, with a question-mark for 
 the rest. A. E., in his proof, deleted the question- 
 mark, and left "A. E." or rather," ^"standing. 
 Thus we see that even his mysterious initials are a 
 sort of record of strange experiences belonging to 
 the same world from which came the voices to Joan 
 of Arc. 
 
 Nor did this experience stand alone. A. E. gives 
 us an account of a considerable number of visions, 
 some of them prophetic, some of them explicable 
 by thought-transference, which came to him in those 
 early years. He began then to cultivate what may 
 be called the habit of vision. For this, one is in- 
 terested to learn, he believes that no special genius 
 is needed. " Genius ! " he exclaims. " There is no 
 stinting of this by the keeper of the Treasure House. 
 It is not bestowed, but it is won. Yon man of heavy 
 soul might if he willed play upon the lyre of Apollo, 
 that drunkard be god-intoxicated." He does not 
 pretend, however, that the power of evocation, the 
 mastery of one's vision, comes without labour. He 
 tells us how he himself set to work to attain mastery 
 over the will. " I would choose some mental object, 
 an abstraction of form, and strive to hold my mind 
 fixed on it in unwearying concentration, so that not 
 for a moment, not for an instant, would the concen- 
 tration slacken. It is an exercise this, a training 
 for higher adventures of the soul : it is no light 
 labour. The ploughman's cleaving the furrows is
 
 210 IRELAND A NATION 
 
 easier by far. Five minutes of this effort will at 
 first leave us trembling as at the close of a laborious 
 day." A. E.'s theory is that the body fights its 
 hardest to suppress the spirit's attempt to become 
 free. " Empires do not send legions so quickly to 
 frustrate revolt as all that is mortal in us hurries 
 along nerve, artery, and every highway of the body 
 to beset the soul." At first, he tells us, his vision 
 sometimes made him vain ; he was like a person 
 who at the rising of the sun would say : " This glory 
 is mine." But he always paid the penalty for such 
 vain self-deceptions. " By the sudden uprising of 
 such vanities in the midst of vision I was often out- 
 cast." He maintains, indeed, that those who make 
 use of the higher powers of vision for selfish ends 
 are in grave peril. "Woe to him who awakens it 
 before he has purified his being of selfishness, for 
 it will turn downwards and vitalise his darker 
 passions and awaken strange frenzies and inex- 
 tinguishable desires. The turning earthward of that 
 heaven-born power is the sin against the Holy 
 Breath, for that fire which leaps upon us with the 
 ecstasy of contemplation of Deity is the Holy 
 Breath, the power which can carry us from earth to 
 heaven." 
 
 A. E.'s theology is not always easy to make out. 
 At times he seems to be a polytheist, but he would 
 probably deny that he was more of a polytheist than 
 a believer in the Trinity. Like Mr Wells, indeed, 
 he appears to believe in the Trinity with a difference, 
 and to associate the God man may know especially 
 with this earth man does know. The object of his 
 last philosophic book, he says, is to " bring back 
 thought to that Being whom the ancient seers wor- 
 shipped as Deity. I believe," he adds, " that most 
 of what was said of God was in reality said of that 
 spirit whose body is earth." At the same time, it is
 
 VOICES OF THE NEW IRELAND 211 
 
 not in the visible earth that A. E. finds the vision 
 of reality. He believes with Plato that "the earth 
 is not all what the geographers suppose it to be." 
 We live in a world of shadows or reflections. 
 Another world permeates and surrounds our own, 
 populous with immortal presences. A. E. believes 
 that in ecstasy, vision and dreams we actually see 
 these presences. He believes that imagination is 
 but a means of recovering our lost citizenship and 
 consciousness of that starry world. " I am convinced 
 that all poetry is, as Emerson said, first written in 
 the heavens." Did not Blake also claim that the 
 authors of his poems were in eternity and that his 
 books were the delight of archangels ? 
 
 What, however, is the nature of this unseen world, 
 which is as objectively real as the present world ? 
 A. E. apparently believes in the objective reality 
 even of those mocking faces that sometimes appear 
 to the fancy when one has closed one's eyes for 
 sleep. He believes that in dreams and in imagina- 
 tion and in intuition the soul visits a many-coloured 
 world to which the normal senses are blind, and the 
 explanations of Freud seem to him as absurd as 
 would be the report of a dull dissector on the beauty 
 of Cleopatra. Not that A. E. has a single explana- 
 tion for all psychic phenomena. Many of them he 
 would attribute, for instance, to the soul's getting 
 into touch with the memory of the earth. Like 
 William James, he raises the question whether there 
 may not be a great stored-up earth-memory ; and 
 he thinks that he himself has wrung some of its 
 secrets from it through intuition. One of the most 
 startling chapters he has written is that called " The 
 Language of the Gods," in which he relates how 
 by intense meditation he sought to discover the 
 roots of speech as man first received them in the 
 original names of things from the gods. He describes
 
 212 IRELAND A NATION 
 
 how he used to meditate over each letter of the 
 alphabet in order to discover its secret. " No doubt 
 the sanity of the boy who walked about the roads 
 at night more than thirty years ago, murmuring 
 letters to himself with the reverence of a mystic 
 murmuring the ineffable name, might have been 
 questioned by anyone who knew that he was trying 
 to put himself in the place of his Aryan ancestors." 
 It may be doubted whether the prosaic will be re- 
 assured by the chapter in which they are told that 
 H is " the sound correspondence of Heat," and that 
 it has affinity with the colour orange, or that " Z 
 represents the multiplication, division or begetting 
 of organism from organism." Even those whom 
 the account of the language of the gods and the 
 interpretation of the Celtic myths merely bewilder, 
 however, will find such a wealth of poetic image and 
 of noble fantasy in A. E.'s writings that rapture will 
 alternate with puzzlement as they read. After all, 
 did not a fine English poet behold the traffic of 
 Jacob's ladder pitched between heaven and Charing 
 Cross? A. E. is an Irishman who has seen the same 
 overwhelming vision in the streets of Dublin.
 
 CHAPTER XXI 
 
 VOICES OF THE NEW IRELAND : (4) T. M. KETTLE 
 
 " AT least we are stylists," declared Kettle in a 
 mood of youthful arrogance in The Nationist a 
 little weekly paper which he edited in Dublin at 
 the outset of his career. This was not a mere boast 
 it was a confession of faith. He loved style as he 
 loved philosophy. They were the two stars which for 
 him lightened the gloom of a disastrous world. He 
 cultivated style in his conversation ; he achieved it, 
 as everybody who has read The Day's Burden knows, 
 in his prose. He was one of those rare men whose 
 conversation does not begin to pall at three o'clock 
 in the morning. His true place was among the wits 
 at an eighteenth-century table or, better still, in a 
 Paris cafe among extravagant, proud and religious 
 Bohemians, such as Villiers de 1'Isle Adam. In so 
 far as he belonged to the modern world, it was to 
 the world created by Mr Chesterton and Mr Belloc 
 the world of laughing, quaffing knights of the Holy 
 Ghost. He could, on the same evening, live for the 
 hour like an epicurean and meditate on eternity 
 like a monk. He was not, however, entirely of the 
 world of Mr Chesterton and Mr Belloc. His laughter 
 had not the note of boisterous triumph which one 
 associates with theirs. It was the laughter of a man 
 who seemed to have wrapped himself in sorrows. 
 He gave one the impression of a man of strong 
 nature but of sorrowful will. He never doubted that 
 life was a tragedy. He demanded of it, however, 
 213
 
 214 IRELAND A NATION 
 
 that it should be a well-written tragedy, with wit 
 flashing out of the darkest thunder-clouds, and with 
 a constant recurrence of good lines for such doomed 
 figures as were to perish in the fifth act. " Good 
 lines and a timely exit" we find the phrase and 
 the philosophy in one of his essays in The Day's 
 Burden. 
 
 In his posthumous book, The Ways of War, we 
 see that Kettle's sense of tragedy was tempered not 
 merely by his artist's love of style but by his political 
 idealist's love of justice and by his Christian faith. 
 His melancholy was not the melancholy of a 
 paralysed spectator. He had the large hand of a 
 fighter. He did not resign himself to the world's 
 failure. He despaired of Europe infinitely less than 
 he despaired of himself. The Ways of War is the 
 cry of indignation of a good European against a 
 monstrous outrage. It is a protest that is in itself 
 a fine action. It is a protest, as everybody knows, 
 that also shaped itself in action, in the commoner 
 sense of the word. For Kettle gave his life as well 
 as his rhetoric to the defence of Europe against 
 " the barbarians " and he fell at Ginchy, a man of 
 words splendidly transformed into a man of deeds. 
 It is not that he ever enjoyed the soldier's life for its 
 own sake. Who in these days does ? For him the 
 war had degraded Europe into "a sort of malign 
 middle term between a lunatic asylum and a butcher's 
 stall." He believed, however, that Germany had 
 gone crusading on behalf of the Gospel of the Devil, 
 and that it was the part (as he would have put it) of 
 plain Christian men to unite and overwhelm this 
 Mad Mullah of murder. He was one of those Irish 
 Nationalists who held from the first that, even if 
 England had played the part of Prussia in Ireland 
 for seven centuries, Prussia was at this new turn 
 of events the sinister apostle and swordsman of
 
 VOICES OF THE NEW IRELAND 215 
 
 Imperialism, and that to fight against Prussia was 
 to fight for the rights and the liberties of nations. 
 By far the greater part of Ireland may be said to 
 have taken that view at the beginning of the war. 
 It required only the imaginative gesture, the just 
 word, the handsome deed on the part of Mr Asquith 
 and English statesmen in general, to perpetuate and 
 strengthen this attitude and to inaugurate the first 
 year of friendship in the relations between England 
 and Ireland. But English statesmen, though they 
 loudly applauded Mr Redmond for stretching out 
 the hand of friendship, did not stretch out a hand in 
 response they thought their cheers were enough, 
 and nervelessly surrendered to the grip of Sir Edward 
 Carson. They shilly-shallied even over the formality 
 of putting the Home Rule Bill on the Statute Book. 
 As for putting it into operation, they seem never to 
 have been struck by the common-sense reflection 
 that an England setting out to fight for the liberty 
 of small nations ought first of all to strike off the 
 manacles from a small nation she herself had per- 
 sistently wronged. To refuse to do so was, as it 
 turned out, not only to poison the moral atmosphere 
 of England ; it was to change enthusiasm into anger 
 and cynicism in Ireland and to belittle the cause 
 of the Allies in America and afterwards with the 
 Russian democracy. 
 
 Kettle, who at the outbreak of the war was in 
 Belgium buying arms for the Nationalists, and who 
 remained there as war correspondent for The Daily 
 News, wrote from Brussels an appeal to the English 
 people to do the generous thing in Ireland at a crisis 
 at which generosity had become the first duty of 
 man. He wrote : 
 
 " Here at the opening of this vast and bloody epic, 
 Great Britain is right with the conscience of Europe.
 
 216 IRELAND A NATION 
 
 It is assumed that she has reconciled Ireland. A 
 reconciled Ireland is ready to march side by side 
 with her to any desperate trial. And suddenly the 
 lawyer, with the Dublin accent, who had been the 
 chief architect of destruction in the whole Empire, 
 and who was thought to have come to reason, pro- 
 poses for Ireland what I can only call a Prussian 
 programme. England goes to fight for liberty in 
 Europe and for Junkerdom in Ireland. It is in- 
 credible. Were it to come true it would become 
 utterly impossible to act on Mr Redmond's speech. 
 Another dream would have gone down into the 
 abyss. Ireland wounded anew would turn sullenly 
 from you. Is that what a sound Tory ought to 
 desire ? Will Tory England, enlightened at last as 
 to the real attitude of Ireland, allow such a fatal 
 crime to be committed ? " 
 
 Unhappily, Sir Edward Carson had his way long 
 enough at least, in Kettle's phrase, to " bedevil the 
 whole situation." And what Sir Edward left undone 
 by way of bedevilment the War Office and Dublin 
 Castle did with a will. In the result, Ireland, or a 
 great part of it, as Kettle foretold, turned sullenly 
 away. Any other people with ordinary human 
 susceptibilities would have done the same thing in 
 the same circumstances. Some people are always 
 trying to explain Ireland as though she were a 
 puzzle among the nations. There is nothing the 
 matter with Ireland except human nature. If you 
 prick her she will bleed. 
 
 If Tom Kettle himself did not " turn away " it was 
 largely because he was more imaginative, more 
 travelled, more European in interests than the 
 majority of his countrymen. He never lost sight of 
 the fact that the civil war in Europe was a fight 
 between right and wrong, even though it was not a
 
 VOICES OF THE NEW IRELAND 217 
 
 fight between one side wholly white and another 
 side wholly black. Being a sinner himself, he re- 
 cognised that, at the best of times, one has to fight 
 by the side of sinners against sin. England, Ireland, 
 France, Belgium they were all, like Germany, 
 models of imperfection. But of Germany alone 
 could it be said that " she stood for the gospel of 
 force and the sacrament of cruelty." Prussia, unlike 
 her fellow-nations, had, as Kettle said, " adopted her 
 vice as her highest virtue. Her philosophy did not 
 correct her appetites, it canonised them." " What is 
 the Devil's Gospel ? " he asks again, and answers : 
 
 " I take it that the three main articles are violence, 
 intellect, and a certain malign splendour of domina- 
 tion. If that is the formula of the Courts of Hell, 
 it is certainly the formula of Prussianism." 
 
 Nietzsche's writings he sums up as " a long-drawn- 
 out Metaphysics of Bullying." On another page he 
 speaks of him as "that sinister Quixote who made 
 cruelty his sacrament, and who was yet so humanly 
 dear in some of his moods." He does full justice 
 to the splendour as well as the darker aspects of 
 Nietzsche. It is of him that he writes : 
 
 " Not since Lucifer was so much light used to 
 dark ends. Not since Diana was great in Ephesus 
 were such beautiful images cast or carven in the 
 service of a false worship. He made German dance 
 as before him only Heine had done. 
 
 " ' I have an idea,' he wrote, ' that with Zarathustra 
 I have brought the German language to its point of 
 perfection.' 
 
 " The boast is probably true. The devil was always 
 a good stylist, and it is not inappropriate that when
 
 218 IRELAND A NATION 
 
 his gospel is at its worst, his prose should be at its 
 best." 
 
 Kettle could not endure Nietzscheanism in the 
 ugliness of action in spite of the beauty of its prose. 
 What he saw in Belgium led him on his way home 
 through England to offer his services to the War 
 Office in any capacity in which it could use him. 
 He believed in punishment almost flamboyantly. 
 My own blood is too pale to respond to everything 
 he wrote in those days. But one sympathised with 
 his indignant scorn of that form of well-meaning 
 dishonesty which had rather believe the tortured 
 Belgians liars than the torturing Germans murderers. 
 To those who would not accept the evidence of 
 German atrocities in Belgium he ironically replied : 
 
 " If you come, during time of war, upon a civilian, 
 hanging by the neck, with his hands tied behind his 
 back, and a fire burning under him, the theory of 
 suicide or accident does not seem to embrace the 
 full scope of the fact." 
 
 The Ways of War is not a gentle book. It is 
 passionate and denunciatory in its oratory. Kettle 
 was a pacifist in that he hated war. But he was 
 aggressive against aggression. "There are no 
 ' inevitable wars,' " he retorted to militarists and 
 determinists alike. " Or, rather, the only war in- 
 evitable is a war against aggression, and aggression 
 itself is never inevitable." Hence he rained heavy 
 blows both upon the peace-at-any-price party and 
 upon those who loved war as anything except the 
 most awful means of justice. His last essay, " Trade 
 or Honour ? ", is noble thunder against those who 
 degraded a war for righteousness into a war for 
 markets. Mrs Kettle quotes some of his letters
 
 VOICES OF THE NEW IRELAND 219 
 
 from the trenches in which his passionate hatred of 
 war is expressed with the intensity of a religious 
 faith. You cannot hate Prussianism, he said, unless 
 you hate war. He did not lose his wit and gaiety, 
 however, even in the midst of blood and wounds and 
 rats and mud and the obscene things of the trenches, 
 as we see in the sketch called " Rhapsody on Rats." 
 This is a fantasy on the trenches Ratavia, as he 
 called them, in respect of their rat inhabitants. 
 " Ratavia," he wrote 
 
 " Ratavia, as one may designate it, resembles China 
 in that there has never been a census of its popula- 
 tion : but that it approximates to the mathematically 
 infinite." 
 
 And from the rats in the trenches he proceeds to 
 a fine satiric fable on the rat-Kaiser : 
 
 " Kaiser Wilhelm, whose resemblance to a rat has 
 been too little noticed you have but to take the 
 wax off his moustache and allow it to droop was 
 seated in his ugly palace at Potsdam, considering 
 his ultimatum to Serbia, when there suddenly 
 appeared before him, down the chimney or out of 
 some diplomatic orifice in the panelling, a Rat, the 
 master and pattern of all rats. ' Majesty ! ' said he, 
 ' I am come to offer you my aid in this war which 
 you are planning. As you are the Emperor of all 
 the Germans, so am I the Emperor of all the Rats. 
 Our interests coincide.' 
 
 " They conferred together very shrewdly and struck 
 an alliance. ' Good ! ' said his Majesty, slapping his 
 thigh. ' It is decided. We are with-one-another- 
 firmly-united. The war will begin forthwith.' 
 
 " So the great quintessential Super-Rat, the Rattish 
 Ding an sich> left to mobilise his forces, and the
 
 220 IRELAND A NATION 
 
 Kaiser drew over a sheet of paper and wrote the 
 magical black word that unlocks Hell. And the 
 great Rat called in his Austria, which is the louse, 
 and his Turkey, which is the sand-flea, and his 
 Bulgaria, which is that porter of poison the fly. So 
 the battle was joined between the clean and the 
 obscene. 
 
 " It must be said for the Kaiser that with this one 
 ally he kept faith. Ratavia has increased enormously 
 in population and prosperity. It has suffered from 
 no menace of famine, for Wilhelm, the faith-keeper, 
 has even sacrificed his own subjects generously in 
 order to avert that calamity. 
 
 " But the end is not yet. The Emperor of the Rats 
 will come once again to Potsdam. 
 
 " ' Majesty ! ' he will say. ' I am a student of 
 Treitschke, who teaches that an alliance is to be 
 kept by the stronger of two associates only as long 
 as his profit lies that way.' And as Majesty, shrivelled, 
 decaying with the pallor of death on him, trembles 
 in his chair, the great Rat will add : ' I propose to 
 annex you.'" 
 
 Well, the Kaiser is gone now, and other Kaisers 
 of other races have taken his place. The war for 
 the freedom of the world turned out not to be a war 
 for the freedom of Ireland after all. Kettle and 
 many another Irish patriot are quiet in their graves, 
 and Mr Lloyd George remains alive and vocal to 
 commit the supreme infamy of denying that Ireland 
 is a nation. 
 
 Kettle was one of those men of whom it may be 
 said that they are more wonderful than anything 
 they write. But everything he wrote bears clearly 
 enough the signature of a fine personality, a valiant 
 soldier, a writer with just that swagger of phrase 
 that makes old truths young again and worn topics
 
 VOICES OF THE NEW IRELAND 221 
 
 bright as a new penny. His gospel lives after him. 
 One may disagree with it in certain details and in 
 certain of the ways in which Kettle himself applied 
 it. But his ideal of an Ireland inhabited not only 
 by good Irishmen but by good Europeans gives us, 
 I believe, a platform upon which the Sinn Feiner 
 and the Orangeman can unite, and Ireland take her 
 place among the free peoples of the world with 
 universal acclamation.
 
 CHAPTER XXII 
 
 VOICES OF THE NEW IRELAND : (5) DORA SIGERSON 
 
 DORA SlGERSON was fortunate in the praise of poets. 
 Meredith spoke of "the eternal poet in that wise 
 creature " ; Swinburne wrote of her with admiration ; 
 Francis Thompson applauded her freshness and 
 power. And I have heard the greatest of living 
 poets speaking with enthusiasm of the beauty of her 
 verse. Like many of the women who have written 
 good poetry, she found in poetry not so much a 
 profession as a delight. She achieved art through 
 artlessness. She was a poet born, not made. " She 
 was so full of artistic impulse and achievement of 
 many kinds," Katharine Tynan writes in the memoir 
 which prefaces The Sad Years " . . . and she 
 arrived at so much art without any apprenticeship, 
 that the word ' genius ' seems not inapplicable to her. 
 . . . The gifts came to her out of the air, so to 
 speak ; real gifts and nothing acquired." She was 
 in one sense an artist during all her waking hours. 
 She was restlessly occupied in the task of making 
 beautiful things, whether in her studio, in her garden 
 or at her desk. But there is a quality of freshness in 
 her poems that, as one reads them, makes one feel 
 that she wrote them as naturally as she talked, with- 
 out pause, blot or afterthought. Nature, indeed, 
 had marked her out for a poet. Her face, Katharine 
 Tynan writes, describing her first meeting with her, 
 " had some curious suggestion of the Greek Hermes. 
 . . . She was singularly beautiful, with some strange 
 
 222
 
 VOICES OF THE NEW IRELAND 223 
 
 hint of storm in her young beauty. . . . She was full 
 of joie de vivre, despite the hint of tragedy in her 
 beauty. She did madcap things." There, in four 
 sentences, you have the portrait of an indubitable 
 poet, impulsive, romantic, sensitive, dark and sunny. 
 The Sad Years, however, the book of verse which 
 contains this portrait and which may be regarded 
 as the author's poetical bequest to her country, is 
 something more than a revelation of a poet's 
 temperament. It is a revelation of a poet's heart in 
 the presence of suffering and death. Mrs Shorter, 
 we are told by Katharine Tynan, was from her girl- 
 hood a friend of lost dogs. When the two young 
 poets used to wander in the streets of Dublin 
 together, they were constantly picking up " waifs and 
 strays of forlorn doghood," so that the street-boys 
 used to shout jeeringly after them : " Go on ! wid 
 yer grand hats, and ye to be starvin' yer dog ! " 
 When the European War broke out a heart that had 
 been touched with pity for lost dogs was now all but 
 overwhelmed with pity for a lost humanity ; and in 
 " Progress," " The Road of the Refugees" and " An 
 Old Proverb " we find a bitter anguish of pity pouring 
 itself out a bitter anger of pity, one might almost 
 say, at sight of the implacable earth and her victims : 
 
 " Lo ! I am athirst," sighed the brown earth, 
 
 " Grant me red wine to spend." 
 "As it was in the beginning," said the great hills, 
 
 " And shall be to the end." 
 
 A new mood came to Mrs Shorter after the 
 Dublin rebellion of Easter week, 1916. The shooting 
 and hanging of the Sinn Fein leaders tortured her as 
 the agony of Belgium had tortured other sensitive 
 spirits earlier in the war. It would hardly be an 
 exaggeration to say that she received her death- 
 sentence when Pearse and Connolly were given
 
 224 IRELAND A NATION 
 
 theirs. Many people will question the reasonable- 
 ness of her sufferings as we find them passionately 
 articulate in The Sad Years. The Irish are only 
 human beings, however : they object to seeing their 
 fellow-countrymen put to death by strangers. Mrs 
 Shorter, in her passion of anger and sorrow, was 
 not a solitary and abnormal figure. She became 
 the prophet, as it were, of the passion of a people. 
 Those who know anything about human nature in 
 politics foresaw the results that would follow from 
 the execution of the insurgent leaders. They 
 warned the statesmen and the soldiers that to shoot 
 the leaders would, instead of emphasising and 
 attesting their failure, exalt them into national 
 figures. Ireland has often been accused of weeping 
 too persistently over her dead. How infatuated were 
 those statesmen who gave her new dead to weep 
 over ! Mrs Shorter more than anyone else has 
 sung the national lament over the dead insurgents. 
 No poem has been written which expresses the 
 passion of sorrow and wild hope over the graves of 
 the dead with the same power and beauty as " The 
 Dead Soldier." Passion such as this is beyond 
 argument. In politics, we may either allow ourselves 
 to be swept along by it or we may contend violently 
 against it. In literature, we have simply to accept 
 it as a part of nature. Even those who have 
 no sympathy with the author's political point of 
 view will find it difficult to remain unaffected while 
 reading this poem : 
 
 Look ! they come, the triumphant army I 
 Over yon hill see their weapons peeping. 
 
 Still I spoke not, but my wheel sent turning ; 
 I closed my eyes, for my heart was weeping, 
 
 My heart was weeping for a dead soldier. 
 
 " Who is he who looks towards me ? " 
 "'Tis no man, but a gay flag flying."
 
 VOICES OF THE NEW IRELAND 225 
 
 Red was his mouth and his white brow thoughtful, 
 
 Blue his eyes how my soul is crying, 
 My soul is crying for a dead soldier. 
 
 " Kneel ye down, lest your eyes should dare them. 
 
 Kneel ye down and your beads be saying." 
 " Lord, on their heads Thy wrath deliver." 
 
 This is the prayer that my lips are praying, 
 My heart is praying for a dead soldier. 
 
 Best cheer the path of the men victorious, 
 For he is dead and his blade lies broken. 
 
 His march is far where no aid can follow, 
 And for his people he left no token ; 
 
 He left no token, the dead soldier. 
 
 The way of the sword a man can follow, 
 
 See the young child with his gold hair gleaming. 
 
 When falls the oak must the acorn perish ? 
 He lifts the blade and his eyes are dreaming ; 
 
 He dreams the dream of the dead soldier. 
 
 Every broken and defeated people in Europe has 
 poetry expressing just such passions. 
 
 It would be misleading to suggest, however, that 
 The Sad Years is, in the conventional sense of the 
 word, a volume of patriotic poetry. Patriotic poetry, 
 as a rule, is rhetorical propaganda rather than poetry. 
 It expresses the passions of the mob or a public 
 meeting rather than of the individual soul. Mrs 
 Shorter's poems are the confessions of her own soul. 
 The sadness is a personal sadness. Their joyousness 
 is a personal joyousness. For there is a real joyous- 
 ness behind all the sorrow in the poems. No one 
 could have loved more ardently, more happily this 
 world of birds and flowers : 
 
 The young bird's broken tune, 
 The larkspur gold and blue. 
 
 At the same time, Mrs Shorter sees all these things 
 with the intensity of one who is bidding them farewell.
 
 226 IRELAND A NATION 
 
 She sees in the patchwork quilt of the flowers a 
 coverlet for her own narrow bed, and in the tree 
 uprooted the image of her release. The birds, too, 
 taking flight to the south in winter, she loves and 
 envies as fellow-exiles who have the liberty to return 
 home when they will. She looks at all nature wist- 
 fully, mournfully, half as a lover, half as a stranger. 
 In the midst of lovely things there is still cause for 
 repining : 
 
 I shall rest no more on the fragrant mosses 
 Under great trees where the green bough tosses 
 Scents of the lime ; and the wild rose, flinging 
 Sweets to the breeze with their censer swinging. 
 I shall count no more, as I linger lazy 
 Deep in the mead, from the pink-tipped daisy, 
 " Who loves me well, and who leaves me lonely ? 
 Who loves me not, and who loves me only ? " 
 
 For all their melancholy, however, these lines are 
 an expression of delight in the visible world. And 
 one finds evidence of this delight on every page of The 
 Sad Years. No one but a lover of wild things could 
 have written about the swallows that build on the 
 gable-ends of the cottage as Dora Sigerson has 
 done : 
 
 On its wall the swallows' house, who can find its secret door ? 
 
 Such a cunning nursery, made with Eastern art. 
 I can hear the baby ones, in their first, swift, troubled flight, 
 
 Giving little frightened cries as they swoop and dart. 
 
 And I hear the swallow-folk telling tales of foreign climes, 
 
 In a low sweet lullaby long before the day. 
 Little brothers of the wind, children of the summer time, 
 
 Lovers of the summer sky, swift you fly away I 
 
 In one of her most beautiful poems, indeed, it is 
 to nature that she turns as the great consoler. " The 
 Comforters" is, in my opinion, one of those poems 
 which will pass from anthology to anthology in
 
 VOICES OF THE NEW IRELAND 227 
 
 future years. Such a poem as " The Comforters " 
 will, better than any critical comment, announce the 
 noble quality of Mrs Shorter's gifts : 
 
 When I crept over the hill, broken with tears, 
 
 When I crouched down on the grass, dumb in despair, 
 
 I heard the soft croon of the wind bend to my ears, 
 I felt the light kiss of the wind touching my hair. 
 
 When I stood lone on the height my sorrow did speak, 
 As I went down the hill, I cried and I cried, 
 
 The soft little hands of the rain stroking my cheek, 
 The kind little feet of the rain ran by my side. 
 
 When I went to thy grave, broken with tears, 
 When I crouched down in the grass, dumb in despair, 
 
 I heard the sweet croon of the wind soft in my ears, 
 I felt the kind lips of the wind touching my hair. 
 
 When I stood lone by thy cross, sorrow did speak. 
 
 When I went down the long hill, I cried and I cried. 
 The soft little hands of the rain stroked my pale cheek, 
 
 The kind little feet of the rain ran by my side. 
 
 Katharine Tynan, in writing of Mrs Shorter's poetry, 
 has made use of the phrase, "beautiful poetry, 
 essential poetry, always with a passionate emotion 
 to give it wings." That is admirably said. There is 
 nothing of objective Parnassianism in Mrs Shorter's 
 work. She belongs to the singers rather than the 
 phrase-makers among the poets. Her lyrics are cries 
 of the heart, tender, passionate, romantic. In the 
 result, hers is poetry of a sort to which neither 
 artists nor simple people can remain indifferent. 
 Much of the finest of her work is in The Sad 
 Years. Nothing that she wrote, I fancy, is more 
 certain to survive than " The Comforters," " The 
 Dead Soldier" or " The Black Horseman."
 
 CHAPTER XXIII 
 
 COMMON-SENSE ABOUT THE LITTLE NATIONS 
 
 AT the beginning of the war all the books were full 
 of talk about the small nations. And by a small 
 nation most people meant not a nation of diminished 
 area so much as a nation of diminished liberties. 
 Their list of the little nations included not only 
 Belgium, which is hardly bigger than Ulster, but 
 Poland, which is one of the largest countries in 
 Europe. They idealised subject peoples in the 
 mass. They felt that they were engaged in a 
 crusade, and they had for every oppressed nation 
 something of the same feeling that the old Crusaders 
 had for the Holy Sepulchre. The small nations 
 shone in the reflected glory of the ideal of the hour. 
 People did not exactly ignore the greater nations 
 such as England and France. But they did not 
 glow about them in the same way as they glowed 
 about Belgium and Serbia. One did not feel that 
 the great nations stood in the same degree in need 
 of one's championship. They were strong enough 
 to look after themselves strong enough even to 
 stand criticism. After Mr Bottomley's first strangled 
 scream of " To Hell with Serbia ! " no Englishman 
 would have dreamed of uttering a harsh word in 
 public about Serbia, any more than a knight would 
 have dreamed of belittling a lady whom he was 
 rescuing from the clutches of an ogre. To a knight 
 every lady who had to be rescued was a fair lady. 
 Later on, if he married her and settled down, he 
 
 228
 
 COMMON-SENSE ABOUT LITTLE NATIONS 229 
 
 might discover that she was a shrew, and, following 
 the fashion of the time, might even claim the right 
 to beat her. But in the jubilee of his chivalry there 
 was no room for the harsh prose of realism. The 
 English and French peoples hurried to the rescue 
 of Belgium in just such a temper of romantic chivalry. 
 Never in history had the small nations been set on 
 such a pedestal. They were beautiful and spotless 
 as the virtuous figures in an allegory. They were 
 almost too good to be true except on Sunday. 
 Germany through Bernhardi had said that weak 
 nations have no right to exist, and that to become 
 the prey of the stronger is their natural destiny. To 
 many English and French people this seemed to be 
 the accursed lie that caused the war. They im- 
 mediately proclaimed the protection of the rights of 
 small nations to be the chief constructive ideal for 
 which they were righting. Even the destruction of 
 Prussian militarism was but a means to this great 
 end. Sir Edward Carson himself became a furious 
 Nationalist for Serbia. Mr Herbert Fisher, not 
 foreseeing that he would one day vote for the con- 
 scription of the manhood of a small nation without 
 its consent, wrote an admirable pamphlet showing 
 how glorious a contribution the small countries had 
 made to the arts and civilisation of Europe. The 
 Times created a genuine sense of horror in the 
 breasts of many people when it protested that 
 England had excellent motives of self-interest for 
 going into the war, and would have had to go in 
 even if Belgium had not been invaded. The average 
 Englishman felt that, so far as he individually was 
 concerned, this was doubtful. He was roused to a 
 passion of indignation against Germany, not by the 
 potential wrongs of England but by the actual 
 wrongs of Belgium. Then, as so often happens, 
 the rescuer fell in love with the rescued. The chief
 
 230 IRELAND A NATION 
 
 event of the first year of the war, indeed, may be 
 said to have been that Europe fell head over ears in 
 love with the little nations, for which a few months 
 before she had hardly cared a penny. 
 
 This mood of romance was bound to lead to dis- 
 illusion. Mr Shaw had shocked the romantic by 
 expressing his dislike of small nations as nuisances 
 on the ground that they are a standing temptation 
 to the great Empires to come and steal them. Other 
 people soon began to suspect the small nations of 
 being nuisances, though for quite different reasons. 
 First they discovered that Belgium was a nation not 
 of angels but of human beings. That discovery 
 came as a great blow. Sentimental people had not 
 been prepared for the fact that the population of 
 Belgium, like that of every other country in Europe, 
 contained thieves, prostitutes, thimbleriggers and 
 dyspeptics, as well as pious, poetic and good-natured 
 men and women. Then there came queer tidings 
 from Montenegro. Then Greece seemed to behave 
 rather queerly. Then there was the Sinn Fein in- 
 surrection in Dublin. Then the Georgians were 
 known to be not only fighting nobly for the Allies 
 in the army of Russia but to possess a pro-German 
 party, like the Irish, and even to have a few of their 
 extremists pleading their cause in Berlin. Then 
 the Ukraine, having received a loan from France to 
 defeat the Russian Revolution, threw itself into the 
 still more anti-revolutionary arms of Germany. Then 
 the Poles, like the Georgians, were known to have a 
 party that looked to Germany for liberty as well as 
 a party that looked to the Allies. Then Finland, 
 fearing red ruin, permitted itself to become practi- 
 cally the ally of Germany. It is hardly to be 
 wondered at that many a sentimentalist who had 
 undergone a sudden conversion to the cause of small 
 nations in the early days of the war began to wonder
 
 COMMON-SENSE ABOUT LITTLE NATIONS 231 
 
 whether he had not, in the phrase of Lord Salisbury, 
 backed the wrong horse. During the last few 
 months, indeed, I have seen articles in various papers 
 urging that the small nations have been one of the 
 disappointments of the war. They have undoubtedly 
 been a disappointment to the sentimentalist who 
 never took the trouble to understand their point of 
 view and judged them only by the test whether they 
 fell in with his. The sentimentalist is an egoist in 
 disguise. He enjoys a sort of vanity of virtue. He 
 is a despot of sounding words, and easily persuades 
 himself that those who interfere with his plans are 
 the enemies of God. His life is bound to be a con- 
 tinual disappointment because he does not accept 
 the conditions of human nature or realise that all 
 human beings and all nations are fallible, and that 
 their policies and opinions fluctuate from day to day. 
 He demands the flattery of assent, not an exchange 
 of opinions among equals. He will himself be the 
 first to turn and rend one of his beneficiaries who 
 does not seem to be sufficiently grateful. Though 
 he may not understand human nature, he has his 
 share of it. 
 
 Luckily, there is plenty of common-sense and 
 idealism as well as sentimentality in the modern 
 democracy. And it is on common-sense and idealism, 
 not on sentimentality, that the future of the small 
 nations depends. There is no need to pretend to 
 ourselves that the small nations are nobler than the 
 great nations. They are not. Russia and France 
 and England have no need to feel gross and vulgar 
 and self-seeking in comparison with Poland and 
 Belgium and Ireland. They have been more suc- 
 cessful, but not necessarily more prone to wickedness. 
 If we rejoice to see Bohemia free from Austria, it is 
 not because she is better than Austria, but because 
 she is different from Austria. The small nations,
 
 232 IRELAND A NATION 
 
 like the great nations, have each of them a sufficient 
 retinue of vices to justify a long and damning in- 
 dictment. But each of them has also, assuredly, a 
 sufficient core of virtue to justify the daring experi- 
 ment of liberty. Some of them we may like ; some 
 of them we may dislike. Some may be given to 
 vices to which we ourselves feel no inclination, and 
 which therefore fill us with peculiar loathing. The 
 London clubman, for instance, never having been 
 tempted to commit an agrarian crime, is firmly per- 
 suaded that it is something far blacker than adultery 
 or profiteering. He has lived in circumstances in 
 which it would have been unsafe to be a pro-German : 
 he never asks himself whether, if he had been a Finn, 
 he might not have found pro-Germanism a more 
 tempting vice. In any case, if we are concerned for 
 the liberty of the world, we shall not ask a small 
 nation to produce its good-conduct card or its 
 political confession of faith before setting it free. 
 To liberate a small nation simply because one ap- 
 proves of it is mere whimsicality. Nations, like 
 human beings, must be made free, not in any arbi- 
 trariness of the affections but because the conscience 
 of the modern world is revolted by the denial of 
 freedom. Even though every small nation in Europe 
 had taken the part of Germany in the present war 
 and, as a matter of fact, the great mass of the small 
 nations from the Shannon to the Volga threw their 
 weight into the scale on the side of the Allies it 
 would still be entitled to its freedom, just as an 
 individual voter is entitled to freedom, whether he 
 voted Conservative, Liberal or Labour at the last 
 election. President Wilson has said that it is not 
 enough to be just to the nations to which we wish 
 to be just. We must be just even to the nations 
 that irritate us and that we actively dislike. 
 
 All that I have written is sufficiently obvious in
 
 COMMON-SENSE ABOUT LITTLE NATIONS 233 
 
 logic. It is not, unfortunately, regarded as obvious 
 in practical politics. In practical politics we are 
 often guided by prejudice rather than reason, and 
 an impatient phrase, such as " Beastly little nations !" 
 may carry more weight than a library of political 
 philosophy. Hence it is vitally important that we 
 should keep clear before us the true reasons for 
 securing to every small nation the right to choose 
 its own way of life. The fact that the Czechs or 
 some of them have behaved well has no more to 
 do with the case for the small nations than the fact 
 that the Finns or some of them have behaved 
 badly. The case for the small nations is merely, as 
 Emile Boutroux, the philosopher, pointed out at the 
 beginning of the war, a logical development of the 
 liberating principles of the French Revolution. 
 Writing on the French theory of nationality, Bou- 
 troux then said : " Basing its deductions on the 
 Hellenic and Christian conception of human nature, 
 the Declaration of 1789 had proclaimed, as also had 
 America, that men are born free, and equal in their 
 rights, and that they continue so. The French theory 
 of nationality consists in extending to nations that 
 which, in this maxim, is affirmed of individuals." 
 Nations, in other words, have the same claim to 
 freedom and equality as men have. This conception 
 of nations as persons is the only possible alternative 
 to the theory of the Prussians, who "substitute 
 hierarchy in the place of equality between nations, 
 and posit the existence of a head nation whose 
 mission it is to dominate the rest and assign to them 
 their place and function in the universe." The 
 Prussian theory is one that for the moment stinks 
 in the nostrils of the world. But it is a theory that 
 has at one time or another attracted most of the 
 great nations and many great and little men. Mr 
 Kipling was a prophet of " head-nationism," as surely
 
 234 IRELAND A NATION 
 
 as Bernhardi. The Peace will fail to bring peace 
 to the world unless it results in the defeat not only 
 of Prussia but this ever so enticing Prussian ideal. 
 The Peace should, as President Wilson and Mr 
 Asquith have again and again said, be founded on 
 the equal right of every nation, great and small, to 
 choose its own way of life and to contribute the gift 
 of its own peculiar genius unhampered to the common 
 store of the world's civilisation. If we do not get 
 this peace, then we shall not get peace at all, but 
 the seedbed of future war. The seed of a great 
 plague may be sown in a tiny swamp, and the seed 
 of a great war may be sown in a tiny nation. Hence 
 it behoves us at least to be afraid to be unjust. That 
 is the common-sense position with regard to the 
 small nations, and luckily it points in the same 
 direction as idealism.
 
 CHAPTER XXIV 
 
 EPILOGUE 
 
 WHEN Mr Will Thorne returned from a visit to 
 Russia during the Kerensky revolution, he said that 
 the British delegates were being constantly met with 
 the question : " What about Ireland ?" Englishmen 
 who visited Scandinavia during the war came back 
 with the same story. And at the present moment 
 apparently the inevitable question greets the English- 
 man almost everywhere he goes in America. English 
 newspaper correspondents send home beseeching 
 messages, asking their government to do something 
 to " counteract the anti-British propaganda and state 
 the British case." They seem all to be agreed on 
 one point, that there exists a powerful British case 
 for refusing Irishmen the right to choose their own 
 rulers a case that, if properly stated, would convince 
 any fair-minded man. Americans, they tell us 
 pathetically, have heard only one side of the question. 
 This, in point of fact, is not true. Money has been 
 spent on anti-Irish propaganda as well as on pro- 
 Irish propaganda in America probably, a great 
 deal more money. A futile censorship has even 
 done what it could to prevent the facts about Ireland 
 from reaching America. This, from the official point 
 of view, is intelligible enough. There is no possible 
 answer to the facts. The only hope is to silence 
 them. There is, as regards Ireland, simply no 
 " British case " which an honest man can state. 
 Even an almost fanatical pro - Englishman like 
 
 235
 
 236 IRELAND A NATION 
 
 myself has been unable to discover one. There are, 
 in one sense, two sides to every question. Even in a 
 criminal case there is the side of the prosecution and 
 the side of the defence. This does not mean, how- 
 ever, that both sides equally have a case that would 
 impress honest men. The case of the man accused of 
 housebreaking is hopeless unless he can prove either 
 that housebreaking is a good thing or that he himself 
 is not guilty of it. England in Ireland is admittedly 
 in the position of a housebreaker. There is no 
 defence except that the thing has become a habit. 
 Strategical reasons may have been some excuse in 
 the old days before men fought to set the world free 
 from Prussianism. Germany's possession of Alsace- 
 Lorraine and her designs on the coast of Flanders 
 were, it will be remembered, both justified by 
 strategic reasons. The moral sense of the world 
 will no longer endure strategic reasons as an excuse 
 for Imperial crimes. Men have come to see that 
 they have to choose between making the world safe 
 for strategy and making the world safe for democracy. 
 Anti-Irish propagandists, realising this advance in 
 the moral sense of mankind, for the most part fall 
 back on the pretence that English statesman are 
 only too anxious to give Ireland what she wants, 
 but that Irishmen cannot agree among themselves 
 and that Ulster blocks the way. As a matter of fact, 
 no English statesman has ever offered Ireland any- 
 thing approaching self-determination. Mr Lloyd 
 George has declared that England will never consent 
 to the establishment of an Irish Republic, however 
 much Irishmen desire it, and he warned the Conven- 
 tion which sat under the presidency of Sir Horace 
 Plunkett that it must not even ask for Dominion 
 Home Rule. It was not in the name of Ulster but 
 in the name of England that he denied the right 
 of Ireland to be an independent republic. It is
 
 EPILOGUE 237 
 
 ridiculous then to pretend that Irishmen have only to 
 agree among themselves in order to get whatever 
 they want. Thousands of individual Englishmen are, 
 I know, willing and even anxious to grant Ireland 
 the same rights of self- determination as England 
 itself possesses. But no English statesman has 
 shown himself to be so as yet. Irish internal differ- 
 ences and the Ulster difficulty, on the contrary, so 
 far from being causes of regret to the Cabinet 
 Minister, are exceedingly welcome pretexts which 
 enable him to feel moral and just in continuing to 
 govern Ireland against its will. Mr Lloyd George 
 was recently asked whether he would not submit the 
 question of the future government of Ireland to an 
 Irish referendum. He declared that this was im- 
 possible, owing to the difficulty of deciding upon the 
 area for the referendum. Strange to say, he and his 
 cabinet colleagues found no difficulty three years 
 earlier in deciding upon the area to be represented 
 at the bogus convention. The area was all Ireland. 
 Statesmen merely invent difficulties of this kind as a 
 means of denying to Irishmen the rights conceded 
 to every other nation of white men. But, even if we 
 were to admit which one cannot honestly do that 
 the Irish question is beyond the capacity of straight- 
 forward English statesmanship to solve, the damning 
 fact remains that English statesmen have steadily 
 refused to allow anyone else to solve it for them. 
 Not only have they refused to allow Irishmen them- 
 selves to solve it, but they have refused to allow the 
 question to go before either the Peace Conference 
 or a Conference of the Premiers and statesmen of 
 the British Empire. As regards its submission to 
 the Peace Conference, they were deaf alike to the 
 demands of the Sinn Feiners and to the appeal of 
 the Irish soldiers who fought in the British Army 
 in the war against Germany. The enemies of Ireland
 
 238 IRELAND A NATION 
 
 like to pretend that the only Irishmen who desire 
 a national status for their country among the free 
 peoples of the world are moved by anti-British animus. 
 Thisis the falsest of calumnies. That the Irish demand 
 for self-determination is no mere anti-English clamour 
 is shown by such a document as the official leaflet 
 of the Irish Nationalist Veterans' Association, in 
 support of Ireland's appeal to the Peace Conference. 
 [I quote it in full on the next page.] 
 
 The widow of Willie Redmond, the widow of Lieut. 
 T. M. Kettle, Captain W. A. Redmond, D.S.O., 
 and Captain Stephen Gwynn were among the 
 signatories to this significant appeal. Their con- 
 ception of Irish freedom, no doubt, differs sub- 
 stantially from that of the Sinn Feiners. But, like 
 the Sinn Feiners, they hold that the Irish question 
 is not a domestic British question but is first an 
 Irish question and then a world question, and they 
 appeal from England to the world for their country's 
 freedom. They at least have proved by their sacrifices 
 that hatred of England plays no part in their politics. 
 Nor, indeed, is it hatred of England that makes 
 other Irishmen republicans. " Ireland a republic " is 
 a noble, not a base ideal. It is founded upon the 
 passion for liberty that passion which led a young 
 French soldier on the eve of his death to write : 
 " The true death would be to live in a conquered 
 country." Irishmen at the present moment are in 
 revolt against the shame of living in a conquered 
 country. Republicanism is simply a determination 
 to undo the conquest of Ireland. What Englishman 
 who loves liberty can fail to wish well to the cause ? 
 
 As for the Ulster difficulty, the truth is never told 
 about it in the speeches of Cabinet ministers. They 
 defend the continued coercion of Ireland on the 
 ground that it would be wicked to coerce Ulster. 
 Honest men would feel that it must at least be
 
 Irish Soldiers ! Irish Sailors ! Irish Airmen ! 
 
 SIGN 
 
 IRELAND'S CLAIM TO 
 NATIONAL FREEDOM 
 
 should be referred to 
 
 THE PEACE CONFERENCE IN 
 PARIS 
 
 to decide impartially upon the ancient issue between 
 
 IRELAND a? GREAT BRITAIN 
 
 COMRADES ! 
 
 Let every patriotic Irishman who has served against 
 the Germans sign the PETITION to further the 
 foregoing object. CLOSE UPON 250 IRISH 
 
 OFFICERS HAVE ALREADY SIGNED. 
 
 Comrades who have fallen in the War can be 
 
 signed for by their next-of-kin or some near 
 
 relative. 
 
 LET ALL DISCHARGED & DEMOBILISED 
 IRISHMEN STICK TOGETHER. 
 
 Note. The Petition may be seen and signed at the 
 
 Offices of the IRISH NATIONALIST VETERANS' 
 
 ASSOCIATION, College Park Chambers, 10 Nassau St. 
 
 (first floor), Dublin. 
 
 Copies of the Petition will also be circulated for signature.
 
 240 IRELAND A NATION 
 
 wickeder to coerce a nation than to coerce half-a- 
 province of a nation. The truth is, however, Cabinet 
 ministers have no moral objection whatever to 
 coercing Ireland. If they have any objection to 
 coercing Ulster, it is not on moral grounds but 
 because Ulster provides them with a plausible 
 palliation for their guilt in denying freedom to a race 
 of white men. One cannot fairly be called unfair 
 in making this grave charge. Those who know 
 history know that the Ulster question is an invention 
 of British statesmen. It did not exist in the 
 eighteenth century when Ireland had a national 
 Parliament. Ulster had then, as now, certain 
 sectarian passions but she had no anti-national 
 passions. She was as Nationalist as the American 
 colonies. If she has been anti-national in recent 
 years she has been so in close collusion with British 
 statesmen. There has been no "Ulster" movement 
 in our time that was not simply an affair of collu- 
 sion with British statesmen. A writer in The New 
 Statesman has suggested that, even in his latest 
 post-war threat to levy war on the British Parliament, 
 Sir Edward Carson was given his cue from inside 
 the Cabinet. Sir Edward Carson has certainly never 
 taken a step in the wildest days of his career without 
 the knowledge that he was helping either British 
 ministers or British ex-ministers to maintain their 
 traditional policy. It is ludicrous for them to raise 
 their hands helplessly at the obstacle of Carsonism. 
 The obstacle of Carsonism was not only rapturously 
 engineered but rapturously financed from London. 
 Political Ulster was made in London, and it is gross 
 hypocrisy to pretend that it is mainly an Irish 
 problem. It is mainly an English problem, and 
 English statesmen could solve it in five years by 
 the simple magic of the will to set Ireland free. 
 But, it may be asked, " What about the principle
 
 EPILOGUE 241 
 
 of self-determination in Ulster ? " Well, personally, 
 I am in favour of the fullest self-determination for 
 Ulster in so far as it does not conflict with self- 
 determination for Ireland. I believe that the future 
 happiness of the world depends largely on the con- 
 cession of self-determination to minorities. In the 
 seventeenth century, people used to think it im- 
 possible to grant modified self-determination to 
 religious minorities. They attempted to compel 
 men to go to national churches in which they did 
 not believe. To do otherwise, they thought, would 
 be to destroy national unity. They discovered later 
 that it was actually a help to national unity to 
 admit the right of self-determination in religious 
 matters to Catholics, Presbyterians, Baptists and 
 Plymouth Brethren. In modern times, we have 
 gone further. We have in matters of local govern- 
 ment given a certain amount of self-determination 
 to counties, rural districts and towns. The modern 
 theory of education favours even a sort of self- 
 determination for school children. We are losing 
 the intolerable mechanical theory of sameness, and 
 we no longer blind ourselves to the possibility of 
 having communities within communities, States 
 within States. We realise that that State is the 
 freest which contains the greatest number of free 
 societies and free individuals. Even the Imperialists 
 have accepted in some degree this view of freedom. 
 " Why, then," someone may say, " not ' go the whole 
 hog' in the matter of self-determination and admit 
 the right of a minority to secede from a nation 
 altogether?" I confess I am on the side of those 
 who ask this question. I hold that any homogeneous 
 minority, desiring to secede, should be permitted to 
 take its case before the League of Nations and, if it 
 can substantiate it, should be allowed to contract 
 out" of the nation of which it is an unwilling
 
 242 IRELAND A NATION 
 
 part. The difficulty about Ulster is that it is not 
 homogeneous. The Nationalist minority in Ulster is 
 greater proportionately than the Ulster minority in 
 Ireland. How many Englishmen realise that, if we 
 leave out the city of Belfast, there is actually a 
 Nationalist majority in Ulster? 5O'Oi6 per cent, of 
 the population outside Belfast are Catholic, while 
 49'o84 per cent, are Protestant. These figures, 
 however, are not quite fair to the Nationalists, for, 
 while practically all the Catholics are Nationalists, 
 a great number of the Protestants are not Unionists. 
 Even if we take the four predominantly Unionist 
 counties of Ulster Cabinet ministers usually pretend 
 that there are six we shall find that at least 30 per 
 cent, of the population is Nationalist. The entire 
 Ulster Unionist population, on the other hand, is 
 only about 20 per cent, of the population of Ireland. 
 If we believe in self-determination, is it not juggling 
 with the facts to pretend that the 20 per cent, 
 minority of Carsonites has greater rights than the 
 vast majority of Irishmen or than the Nationalist 
 majority in Ulster outside Belfast or than the 30 per 
 cent. Nationalist minority in Carsonite Ulster? If 
 the Germans had held Belgium, they would have 
 made use of the minority of pro-German Flemings 
 exactly as Cabinet ministers make use of Ulster. 
 During their occupation, indeed, they were already 
 creating an " Ulster question " in Belgium. It is 
 with make-shifts of this kind that Imperial states- 
 men fool the democracies. 
 
 What British statesmen have deliberately made of 
 Ulster may be gathered, by contrast, by anyone who 
 turns back to the records of the pro-Irish Ulster that 
 existed when Ireland had a national Parliament. 
 How many people realise that, in the days of 
 Grattan's Parliament, Protestants and Catholics united 
 in the Orange stronghold of Derry to celebrate the
 
 EPILOGUE 243 
 
 Williamite defence of that city of which we have 
 heard so much ? In The Siege and History of 
 Londonderry, edited by John Hempton, we find a 
 significant account of the commemoration festivities 
 held in Derry in the year 1788. One paragraph in 
 especial shows that the Ulstermen of those days did 
 not hate each other for their religious beliefs : 
 
 "At four o'clock" (runs the account) "the Mayor 
 and Corporation, the Clergy, the Officers of the Navy 
 and Army, the Roman Catholic Clergy, . . . etc., sat 
 down to a plain but plentiful dinner in the Town 
 Hall. . . . Religious dissensions, in particular, seemed 
 to be buried in oblivion, and Roman Catholics vied 
 with Protestants in expressing, by every possible 
 mark, their sense of the blessings secured to them by 
 our happy Constitution, and the cordial part they 
 took in the celebrations of this joyful day. 
 
 All Ulstermen were Nationalists in those days. If 
 Ulster did not develop along these lines of patriotism 
 and tolerance, where can we lay the blame except on 
 the Union and on the settled policy of Cabinet 
 ministers in succeeding generations? Occasionally, 
 an English statesman has drawn back in horror from 
 the Frankenstein's monster of civil hatred his pre- 
 decessors have created. But the traditional policy 
 of Cabinets has been one of war on Irish patriotism 
 and of rewards for Orange sectarianism. Few 
 Ulster Unionist members have been allowed to go 
 to their graves without some mark of Government 
 esteem. Mr Lloyd George has but followed the 
 tradition in heaping honours on the fomentors of 
 anti- Irish strife. And yet he has the audacity to 
 pretend that he finds Ulster an embarrassment ! 
 
 The truth is Ulster is the Cabinet minister's " white 
 hope." With the help of Ulster he will dare to
 
 244 IRELAND A NATION 
 
 continue an Imperialist policy which would otherwise 
 be universally recognised to be out of date in these 
 days of the League of Nations. Only two states in 
 Europe, I believe, now continue to call themselves 
 Empires the German and the British. And the 
 British is the only one which claims to hold against 
 its will a subject nation of white men. I confess I 
 wish England and Germany would both abandon 
 the name of Empire for that of Commonwealth. 
 The denial of freedom, which seems normal in an 
 Empire, would be seen to be an anomaly and an 
 outrage in a Commonwealth. Apart from this, does 
 it not strike the average Englishman as an appalling 
 fact that, in a war for liberty, while the defeated 
 empires ended perforce by setting their subject 
 nations free, the victorious British Empire alone, 
 though it fought on the side of liberty, claims the 
 right to keep its subject nation subject still ? Some 
 Sinn Feiners at the beginning of the war declared 
 that Ireland could be liberated only as a result of 
 the defeat of the British Empire. Others of us 
 denied this. We said that an England victoriously 
 fighting for the right could be trusted to further Irish 
 liberty better than a triumphant Germany. If 
 Ireland is not given the same liberty as Bohemia, 
 however, what argument is left to us of the pro- 
 Ally faith ? The ordinary Irishman will say that 
 the history of the war proves that the only hope for 
 a small subject nation lies in the defeat and over- 
 throw of the empire of which it forms a part. 
 Human nature being what it is, he will pray that 
 wars may continue till Ireland is free. It is a terrible 
 choice to thrust on a human being, if you tell him 
 that the path to the liberty of his country necessarily 
 lies through the disaster of a world-war. Yet what 
 Englishman would not prefer a world-war rather 
 than the destruction of English liberty ? Surely it
 
 EPILOGUE 245 
 
 is possible to form a society of nations, each of which 
 will feel that in preserving the peace of the world 
 it is preserving its own freedom. In any case, we 
 may be sure of one thing. No peace of nations 
 which violates the liberty of even one nation can 
 last. 
 
 Luckily, more and more Englishmen have in 
 recent years been coming to realise these things. 
 They see that it is an outrage to pretend that 
 Ireland alone among European countries has no 
 right to be free. England has always been rich in 
 chivalrous men, and a fine chivalry has lately 
 modified the views on Ireland of many Unionists 
 such as Lord Henry Cavendish Bentinck and Major 
 Hills, as well as those of Liberals and Socialists. In 
 this matter chivalry coincides with practical common- 
 sense. Lord Northcliffe's campaign for making 
 Ireland a dominion (with a difference) is the result 
 not merely of sentimental but of statesmanlike 
 considerations. His scheme is in some respects an 
 advance on Asquithian Home Rule. But it suffers 
 from the defect that it implies that England has 
 the right to impose on Ireland a settlement other 
 than Ireland herself desires. If Ireland by a 
 referendum chose the Northcliffe scheme, that would 
 alter the situation entirely. Personally, I believe 
 that the only thing for England to do is to put the 
 Home Rule Act into immediate operation, hold an 
 Irish general election, summon the Home Rule 
 Parliament, and leave the Irish representatives 
 themselves to hammer out a Constitution for their 
 country, republican or colonial, according to the 
 national will. The greatest service England can do 
 to Ireland is to evacuate it. Then, if I may adapt a 
 saying of Kettle's, the two countries will not only be 
 free but be free to be friends. 
 
 But, some one may once again ask, what about
 
 246 IRELAND A NATION 
 
 Ulster? Well, Ulster may either come into the 
 Irish Parliament and make terms or she may prefer 
 a policy of passive resistance. First get the Irish 
 national question settled, and we shall see. In any 
 case, no Nationalist can, without deserting his 
 principles, ask for the aid of English troops in 
 compelling Ulster to make up her mind. And no 
 Nationalist ever has, so far as I am aware, suggested 
 the coercion of Ulster by British armed forces. 
 Sane Irish Nationalists know that the happiness 
 and unity of Ireland depend, not on the defeat of 
 Ulster but on the persuasion of Ulster. They know, 
 however, that the persuasion of Ulster will be 
 impossible while the Lloyd Georges and the Bonar 
 Laws incite Ulster to declare herself a separate 
 nation. The persuasion of Ulster must in the first 
 instance be begun by the two Front Benches in the 
 House of Commons acting in unison. When British 
 statesmen of all parties unite in a bona-fide declaration 
 of Irish independence, the Ulster question will solve 
 itself as if by a miracle. . . . And now, statesmen of 
 England, the world waits.
 
 
 
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