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Page 16
Translated into terms of administration the gospel of autonomy becomes
the doctrine of "the man on the spot." That is the Eleven Rule of
Imperial Policy, and although it has sometimes been ridden to death, in
fact to murder, as in the Denshawai hangings, it is a sound rule. A man
who has gone to the trouble of being born, bred, and ordinarily
domiciled in, say, Kamskatcka is more likely to understand the affairs
of Kamskatcka than a man whose life oscillates daily like a pendulum
between Clapham and the Strand. The old natural philosophers accepted
the theory of _actio distans_, that is to say they assumed that a body
could act effectively where it was not. This was Unionism in science,
and needless to say it was wrong. In politics it is equally wrong, and
it has been repudiated everywhere except in Ireland. Physical vision is
limited in range; as the distance increases the vision declines in
clearness, becomes subject to illusion, finally ceases. Now you in
London, through mere limitations of human faculty, cannot see us in
Dublin. You are trying to govern Ireland in the fashion in which,
according to Wordsworth, all bad literature has been written, that is to
say, without your eye on the object. But it is time to have done with
this stern, long chase of the obvious.
Translated into terms of economics the gospel of autonomy becomes the
doctrine of a "stake in the country." England has, indeed, a stake in
Ireland. She has the same interest in seeing Ireland prosperous that a
bootmaker has in learning from his farmer client that the crops are
good. Each country is in great measure the economic complement of the
other. But if the bootmaker were to insist on having his finger in the
farmer's pie, the pie, destined for the bootmaker's own appetite, would
not be improved. If he were to insist on applying to the living cow
those processes which he applies with such success to the dead leather,
the cow would suffer and ultimately there would be no boots. Generally
speaking, each of us improves his own business by declining to mind
anybody else's. Home Rule will give England precisely this chance of
sticking to her last. To Ireland it will come with both hands full of
new opportunities and new responsibilities.
To realise that the national idea in Ireland arouses an emotion, at once
massive, intense, and enduring, is to understand many derivative
riddles. We are all familiar with the complaint that there is in Ireland
too much politics and too little business. Of course there is, and not
only too little business but too little literature, too little
philosophy, too little social effort, too little fun. We Nationalists
have grasped this better and proclaimed it more steadily than any
Unionist. There is as much truth in saying that life begins where
politics end, as in saying that love begins where love-making ends.
Constitutional freedom is not the fifth act of the social drama in
modern times, it is rather the prologue, or, better still, the theatre
in which other ideas that move men find an arena for their conflict.
Ireland, a little exhausted by her intense efforts of the last thirty
years, does assuredly need a rest-cure from agitation. But this healing
peace is itself a gift of autonomy. A tooth-ache concentrates the whole
mind on one particular emotion, which is a bad thing, and breeds
profanity, which is worse. But it is idle to tell a man with a
tooth-ache that what he needs in his life is less cursing and more
business. He cannot work effectively so long as he suffers; the only way
to peace is to cure the tooth-ache. And in order to get rid of politics
in Ireland, you must give Ireland Home Rule.
CHAPTER V
THE RAVAGES OF UNIONISM (I)
Ireland, as we have seen, has had the misfortune to provoke many worthy
writers to a sad debauch of sentimentalism. It has pleased their fancy
especially to picture her as a sphinx, mysterious, elusive, inscrutable.
It is impossible to govern her, declare these theorists, because it is
impossible to understand her. She is the _femme incomprise_ of modern
politics. Her temperament is a magnet for disaster, her soul a sanctuary
of inviolable secrets. So runs the rhapsody, and many of my own
countrymen have thought it good strategy to accept and exploit it. They
have this to urge, indeed, that failure to make oneself understood is
commonly regarded as a sign of the superior mind. Lord Rosebery, for
example, has told us that he himself, for all his honey-dropping tongue,
has never been properly understood. And Hegel, the great German
philosopher, who was so great a philosopher that we may without
impropriety mention his name even in the brilliant vicinage of the Earl
of Midlothian, used to sigh: "Alas! in the whole of my teaching career I
had but one student who understood my system, and he mis-understood it."
This is all very well in its way, and a climate of incomprehension may
suit orators and metaphysicians admirably; but it will not do for
politics. The party or people that fails to make its programme
understood is politically incompetent, and Ireland is assuredly safe
from any such imputation. She has her spiritual secrets, buried deep in
what we may call the subliminal consciousness of the race, and to the
disclosure of these secrets we may look with confidence for the
inspiration of a new literature. But in politics Ireland has no secrets.
All her cards are on the table, decipherable at the first glance. Her
political demand combines the lucidity of an invoice with the axiomatic
rectitude of the Ten Commandments. There is no doubt about what she
wants, and none about why she ought to have it. In that sense the case
for Home Rule is made, and this book, having justified its title, ought
to come to an end. But convention prescribes that about the nude contour
of principles there should be cast a certain drapery of details, and
such conventions are better obeyed.
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