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Page 10
"Had Ireland," he writes, "been left to herself she would, in all
human probability, have succeeded, notwithstanding her decadence,
in establishing political unity under a military chief. Had the
country been brought into peaceful contact with continental
civilisation, it must have advanced along the path of modern
progress. Even if it had been conquered by a powerful nation, it
would at least have participated in the progress of the conquering
power. But none of these things happened. England, whose political
and social development had been hastened by the Norman Conquest,
desired to extend her influence to Ireland. 'She wished,' as Froude
strangely tells us, 'to complete the work of civilisation happily
begun by the Danes.' But in actual fact she only succeeded in
trammelling the development of Irish society, and maintaining in
the country an appalling condition of decadent stagnation, as the
result of three centuries and a half of intermittent invasions,
never followed by conquest."
On the other hand the triumph of Irish culture was easy and absolute.
Ireland, unvisited by the legions and the law of Rome, had evolved a
different vision of the life of men in community, or, in other words, a
different idea of the State. Put very briefly the difference lay in
this. The Romans and their inheritors organised for purposes of war and
order, the Irish for purposes of culture. The one laid the emphasis on
police, the other on poets. But for a detailed exposition of the
contrast I must send the reader to Mrs Green's "Irish Nationality." In a
world in which right is little more than a secretion of might, in which,
unless a strong man armed keeps house, his enemies enter in, the
weakness of the Gaelic idea is obvious. But the Roman pattern too had a
characteristic vice which has led logically in our own time to a
monstrous and sinister growth of armaments.
To those who recognise in this deification of war the blackest menace of
our day the vision of a culture State is not without charm. The
shattering possibilities enfolded in it would have fevered Nietzsche and
fascinated Renan. But, be that as it may, Ireland played Cleopatra to
the Antony of the invaders. Some of them, indeed, the "garrison" pure
and simple, had all their interests centred not only in resisting but in
calumniating her. But the majority yielded gaily to her music, her
poetry, her sociability, that magical quality of hers which the Germans
call _Gem�tlichkeit_. In a few centuries a new and enduring phrase had
designated them as more Irish than the Irish themselves. So far as any
superiority of civilisation manifests itself in this first period it is
altogether on the side of Ireland. This power of assimilation has never
decayed. There never was a nation, not even the United States, that so
subdued and re-fashioned those who came to her shores, that so wrought
them into her own blood and tissue. The Norman baron is transformed in a
few generations into an Irish chieftain, and as often as not into an
Irish "rebel." The Jacobite planter of the first decade of the
seventeenth century is in the fifth decade found in arms against
Cromwell; the Cromwellian settler is destined in turn to shed his blood
for James II. and Catholicity. Protestant colonists who, in the early
eighteenth century, enforce and defend the abominable Penal Laws, will
in 1782 demand, with drawn swords, that henceforth there shall be no
longer a Protestant colony but in its place an Irish nation. The
personal history of the captains of the Irish cause in modern times is
no less remarkable. O'Connell begins his public career in the Yeomanry
called out to put down the insurrectionary movement of Emmet. Isaac
Butt comes first into note as the orator of the Orange Party in Dublin.
Parnell himself steps out of a Tory milieu and tradition into the
central tumult of agitation. Wave after incoming wave of them, her
conquerors were conquered. "Once again," cried Parnell in the last
public utterance of his life, "I am come to cast myself into the deep
sea of the love of my people." In that deep sea a hundred diverse
currents of blood have met and mingled; they have lost their individual
drift to become part of the strong tide of national consciousness and
national unity. If Irish history is to be regarded as a test of racial
superiority then Ireland emerges with the crown and garlands of victory.
We came, we the invaders, to dominate, and we remained to serve. For
Ireland has signed us with the oil and chrism of her human sacrament,
and even though we should deny the faith with our lips she would hold
our hearts to the end.
But let us translate her triumph into more concrete speech. The
essential lesson of experience, then, is that no device, plan, or policy
adopted by England for the subjugation of Ireland has ever been anything
except an abject failure. And the positive of this negative is that
every claim that ever formed part of the national programme of Ireland
has won its way against all enmities. No plough to which she ever put
her hand has been turned back or stayed eternally in mid-furrow. It does
not matter what period you call to the witness-box; the testimony is
uniform and unvarying. Until Tudor times, as has been noted, there
cannot be said to have been in any strict sense an English policy in
Ireland; there was only a scuffle of appetites. In so far as there was a
policy it consisted of sporadic murder for the one half, and for the
other of an attempt to prevent all intercourse that might lead to
amalgamation between the two peoples. The Statute of Kilkenny--which is,
all things considered, more important than the Kilkenny cats though not
so well known in England--made it a capital offence for a settler to
marry an Irishwoman or to adopt the Irish language, law, or costume. The
Act no doubt provided a good many ruffians with legal and even
ecclesiastical fig-leaves with which to cover their ruffianism, and
promoted among the garrison such laudable objects as rape and
assassination. But as a breakwater between the two races it did not
fulfil expectation. The Statute was passed in 1367: and two centuries
later Henry VIII. was forced to appoint as his Deputy the famous
Garrett Fitzgerald whose life was a militant denial of every clause and
letter of it. With the Tudors, after some diplomatic preliminaries, a
very clear and business-like policy was developed. Seeing that the only
sort of quiet Irishman known to contemporary science was a dead
Irishman, English Deputies and Governors were instructed to pacify
Ireland by slaughtering or starving the entire population. The record of
their conscientious effort to obey these instructions may be studied in
any writer of the period, or in any historian, say Mr Froude. For Mr
Froude, in his pursuit of the picturesque, was always ready to resort to
the most extreme measures; he sometimes even went so far as to tell the
truth. The noblest and ablest English minds lent their aids. Sir Walter
Raleigh and Edmund Spenser were both rather circumambulatory on paper;
the work of each is 'a long monotone broken by two or three exquisite
immortalities. But they were both as concise in action as an Elizabethan
headsman. Sir Walter helped Lord Grey, the recognised pattern in those
days of the Christian gentleman, to put to death seven hundred
prisoners-of-war at Smerwick. Spenser, being no soldier, leaned rather
to famine. In his famous book he recommends the destruction of crops,
houses, cattle, and all necessaries of life so that the Irish should
"soon be compelled to devour each other." The Commanders-in-Chief and
the Deputies specialised in poison, as became men whose wealth and
learning enabled them to keep in touch with the Italian Renaissance.
Bluff, straightforward troopers like Mountjoy, Malby, Wilmot, Bagenal,
Chichester, and the rest, not pretending to such refinements, did their
best in the way of hanging, stabbing, and burning. In those days as well
as ours the children had their Charter. "Nits," said the trustees of
civilisation, "will grow to lice." And so they tossed them on the points
of their swords, thus combining work with play, or fed them on the roast
corpses of their relatives, and afterwards strangled them with tresses
of their mother's hair.
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