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Page 23
The explanation is obvious: the peasants grew potatoes to feed
themselves, they raised corn to pay their rents. A temporary suspension
of rent-payments and the closing of the ports would have saved the great
body of the people. But the logic of Unionism worked on other lines. The
government opened the ports, cheapened corn, and made rents harder to
pay. At the same time they passed a new Coercion Act, and reorganised
the police on its present basis to ensure that rents should be paid. To
the wisdom of this policy, history is able to call witnesses by the
million--unhappily however it has to call them from famine graveyards,
and the waste womb of the Atlantic.
This essential wrongness of Unionism, so amply illustrated in every
year of its working, continues. But at least, our bluff Englishman
urges, the dead past can be suffered to bury those crimes and blunders
of Unionism which you have enumerated. Let us start with a clean slate.
Now, as will have been gathered from a previous chapter, we recognise in
this invitation an accent of soundness. We modern Home Rulers desire
above all to be loyal to the century in which we live. We are sick of
that caricature which depicts Ireland as the mad heroine of a sort of
perpetual suttee, in which all the interests of the present are
immolated on the funeral-pyre of the past. But let us come closer to
things. How do you clean a slate except by liquidating the debts of
which it keeps the record? The late Vicomte de Vogu� wrote an admirable
novel, "Les Morts qui Parlent." The dead are always speaking; you cannot
stop their strong eloquence with a mouthful of clay. The "business man"
thinks no doubt that the Napoleonic War is no more than Hecuba to him,
or he to Hecuba. But he pays annual tribute to it, for he has to make
annual provision for the �600,000,000 which it added to the National
Debt. And just as Mr Pitt's foreign policy is in that respect a living
reality of our own time, so also, but in a much graver form, are the
past depredations and ineptitudes of Unionism living realities in the
present economy of Ireland.
The ruling fallacy of the English mind on these matters consists in the
assumption that the mere repeal of an old oppression restores a people
to the _status quo ante_. In the case of Ireland the old oppressions
have not been repealed except in two or three points, but even if they
had been wholly cancelled it would be absurd to expect immediate
recovery from their effects. If you have been beating a man on the head
with a bludgeon for half an hour, and then leave off, there is no sense
in saying to him: "There, I have given over bludgeoning you. Why on
earth don't you get up, and skip about like me?" If you have been
robbing a man's till for ten years, and then decide--by the way you have
not yet decided--to leave off, there is no sense in saying to him: "Why
the devil are you always hard up? Look at me doing the same sort of
business as you on absolutely equal terms, and I'm able to keep two
motor-cars and six servants." But that is precisely what is said to us.
You are eternally expecting from Ireland new miracles of renaissance.
But although she does possess recuperative powers, hardly to be
paralleled, even she must have time to slough the corruptions of the
past. You cannot, as some Englishmen imagine, cancel six centuries
before breakfast. Your Penal Laws, for instance, have been long since
struck out of the Statute Book, but they have not yet been eliminated
from social habitudes or from certain areas of commercial life.
You began to tax Ireland beyond her capacity in 1801, and you are still
overtaxing her. In the interval you withdraw from her economic life a
tribute of not less than �325,000,000. You broke her industrial
tradition, injured her credit, depressed her confidence. You forced upon
her a fiscal system devised to suit your needs in utter contempt of
hers. To clean that slate you must first, by some measure of
restitution, clean your conscience. And when that has been done you will
have to wait for the curative effects of time to undo the Economics of
Unionism.
You suffered landlordism to devastate Ireland unchecked. The capital
that should have gone to enrich and develop the soil was squeezed out of
it in rack-rents, largely absentee. The whole agricultural economy of
the country was stricken with a sort of artificial an�mia. Then very
late in the day you enact in shreds and fragments a programme of reform
proposed half a century before by the leaders of the Irish people.
To-day rural Ireland is convalescent, but it is absurd to rate her if
she does not at once manifest all the activities of robust health. It is
even more absurd to expect her to glow with gratitude.
You muddled our whole system of transportation; your muddle stands
to-day in all its ruinous largeness unamended, and, it may be, beyond
amendment. You muddled the Poor Law; and, in the workhouses which you
thrust upon us, 8000 children are year by year receiving on their lives
the brand of degradation. You marred education, perverting it into a
discipline of denationalisation, and that virus has not yet been
expelled.
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