|
Main
- books.jibble.org
My Books
- IRC Hacks
Misc. Articles
- Meaning of Jibble
- M4 Su Doku
- Computer Scrapbooking
- Setting up Java
- Bootable Java
- Cookies in Java
- Dynamic Graphs
- Social Shakespeare
External Links
- Paul Mutton
- Jibble Photo Gallery
- Jibble Forums
- Google Landmarks
- Jibble Shop
- Free Books
- Intershot Ltd
|
books.jibble.org
Previous Page
| Next Page
Page 13
The whole matter roots in the fact of nationality. Nationality is to
political life what personality is to mental life, the mainspring,
namely, of the mechanism. The two principles of organisation have this
in common, that although by, through, and for them the entire pageant
of our experience is unfolded, we are unable to capture either of them
in a precise formula. That I am a person I know; but what is a person?
That Ireland is a nation I know; but what is a nation? "A community of
memories and hopes," says Anatole France; but that applies to a football
club. Something for which a man will die, says Mr T. M. Healy: but men
will die for strange reasons; there was a French poet who shot himself
because the trees were always green in the spring and never, for a
change, blue or red. A cultural unit, say the anthropologists; an idea
of the divine mind, declare Mazzini and the mystics' of sociology. Each
of these formulas possesses a certain relative truth, but all of them
together come short of the whole truth. Nationality, which acts better
perhaps than it argues, is one of the great forces of nature and of
human nature that have got to be accepted. Nationality will out, and
where it exists it will, in spite of all resistance, strain fiercely to
express itself in some sort of autonomous government.
German romance depicts for us the misery and restlessness of a man who
had lost his shadow. Catholic theologians--if the masters of a wisdom
too high and too austere for these days may be invoked--tell us that
the departed soul, even though it be in Paradise, hungers with a great
desire for the Resurrection that it may be restored to its life-long
comrade, the body.
"The crimson-throbbing glow
Into its old abode aye pants to go."
Look again at Ireland and you will discern, under all conflicts, that
unity of memory, of will, of material interest, of temperamental
atmosphere which knits men into a nation. You will notice the presence
of these characteristics, but it is an absence, a void that will most
impress you. You will see not a body that has lost its shadow, but
something more sinister--a soul that has been sundered from its natural
body. She demands restoration. She sues out a _habeas corpus_ of a kind
not elsewhere to be paralleled. That is the "Irish Question."
You may not like this interpretation of things. It may seem to you
fantastic, nasty, perilous to all comfort. Life often does make on the
tender-hearted an impression of coarse violence; life, nevertheless,
always has its way. What other interpretation is possible? Lancashire,
to take any random contrast, is much richer than Ireland in wealth and
population; but Lancashire is not a "Question." Lancashire is not a
"Question" because Lancashire is not a nation. Ireland is a "Question"
because Ireland is a nation. Her fundamental claim is a claim for the
constitutional recognition of nationality.
We have seen that in almost every conflict between English and Irish
ideas the latter have had the justification of success. This holds good
also as regards our long insistence on nationality as a principle of
political organisation. In various passages of the nineteenth century it
seemed to be gravely compromised. Capital, its mobility indefinitely
increased by the improved technique of exchange, became essentially a
citizen of the world. The earth was all about it where to choose; its
masters, falsely identifying patriotism with the Protectionism then
dominant, struck at both, and the Free Trade movement philosophised
itself into cosmopolitanism. Labour, like capital, showed a rapid
tendency to become international or rather supernational. "The workers,"
proclaimed Marx, "have no fatherland." While this was the drift of ideas
in the economic sphere, that in the political was no more favourable.
Belgium seemed on the point of extinction, Italy was a mere geographical
expression, Hungary was abject and broken. In the narrower but even
more significant sphere of British colonial policy the passion for
centralisation had not yet been understood in all its folly. Downing
Street still functioned as the Dublin Castle of the Empire. The
possibility of the overseas possessions developing that rich, strong
individuality which characterises them to-day would have been dismissed
with horror. The colour and texture of men's thought on these subjects
has undergone a notable transformation. Cosmopolitanism of the old type
is a slain hallucination. Capital in our time is not content to be a
patriot, it is a Jingo. As to labour, if we turn to its politics we find
Herr Bebel declaring that the German socialist is first of all a German,
and Mr Ramsay MacDonald pledging his adherents to support any war
necessary for the assertion of English prestige. If we turn to its
theoretical sociology we find the national idea rehabilitated and
triumphant.
Such intellectual reconstructions do not, as a rule, begin in England,
or find in English their characteristic formul�. Mr Blatchford might
indeed be cited, but it is in the brilliant literature of German Social
Democracy that the most scientific expression of the new spirit is to be
sought. Truly Marx has been indeed translated. His abstract and
etiolated internationalism has been replaced by the warm humanity of
writers like, say, David or Pernerstorfer. The principle of nationality
is Vindicated by the latter in a noble passage. I quote it from
Sombart's "Socialism and the Social Movement."
Previous Page
| Next Page
|
|