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Page 35
But while none of us can prophesy all of us can conjecture, and in this
case with a great deal of confidence. On the one hand, Ireland is a
country of very definite habits of thought; on the other, her immediate
problems are obvious. These two circumstances facilitate the process
which the learned describe as an attempt to produce the present curve of
evolution into the future. First, then, as to the temper of mind in
which an autonomous Ireland will face the world. The one clear certainty
is that it will not be rhetorical or Utopian. Of all the libels with
which we are pelted the most injurious to our repute is a kindly libel,
that which represents us as a nation of orators. To the primitive Tory
the Nationalist "agitator" appears in the guise of a stormy and
intractable fiend, with futility in his soul, and a College Green
peroration on his lips. The sources of this superstition are easily
traced. The English have created the noblest literature in the world,
and are candidly ashamed of the fact. In their view anybody who succeeds
in words must necessarily fail in business. The Irishman on the contrary
luxuriates, like the artist that he is, in that _splendor verborum_
celebrated by Dante. If a speech has to be made he thinks that it should
be well made, and refuses altogether to accept hums and haws as a token
of genius. He expects an orator not merely to expound facts, but to
stimulate the vital forces of his audience. These contrary conceptions
of the relation of art to life have, throughout the Home Rule campaign,
clashed in the English mind much to our disadvantage. And there has been
another agent of confusion, more widely human in character. Every idea
strongly held and, on the other side, strongly challenged, kindles
spontaneously into passion, and every great cause has its poetry as well
as its dialetics. Men, forced to concentrate all their thought on one
reform, come to see it edged with strange, mystical colours. Let justice
only triumph in this one regard, and our keel will grate on the shore of
the Fortunate Islands, the Earthly Paradise. All the harshness of life
will be dulcified; we shall lie dreaming on golden sands, dipping full
goblets out of a sea that has been transmuted into lemonade. This, the
Utopian mood of humanity, is inextinguishable, and it has embroidered
the Home Rule idea in common with all others. Before the complexity of
modern economic organisation was as well understood as is now the case,
there is no doubt that certain sections of opinion in Ireland did regard
self-government as a sort of Aladdin's Lamp, capable of any miracle. The
necessity of pressing all the energy of the nation into one channel had
the effect of imposing on political life a simplicity which does not
belong to it. But all that is over and past. The Ireland of to-day does
not pay herself with words. She is safe from that reaction and
disillusionment which some prophets have discerned as the first harvest
of Home Rule, because she is already disillusioned. Looking into the
future we see no hope for rhetoricians; what we do see is a strong,
shrewd, indomitable people, at once clear-sighted and idealistic, going
about its business "in the light of day in the domain of reality." No
signs or wonders blaze out a trail for them. The past sags on their
shoulders and in their veins, a grievous burden and a grievous malady.
They make mistakes during their apprenticeship to freedom, for, as
Flaubert says, men have got to learn everything from eating to dying.
But a few years farther on we see the recuperative powers of the nation
once more triumphant. The past is at last dead enough to be buried, the
virus of oppression has been expelled. The creative impulse in industry,
literature, social habit, working in an atmosphere of freedom, has added
to the wealth of humanity not only an old nation renascent, but a new
and kindlier civilisation. In other words, political autonomy is to us
not the epilogue but the prologue to our national drama. It rings the
curtain up on that task to which all politics are merely instrumental,
namely the vindication of justice and the betterment of human life.
From the first, the economic note will predominate in a Home Rule
assembly, not only in the sense in which so much can be said of every
country in the world, but in a very special sense. For the past decade
Ireland has been thinking in terms of woollens and linens, turnips and
fat cattle, eggs and butter, banks and railways. The conviction that the
country is under-developed, and in consequence under-populated, has been
growing both in area and in depth. With it there has been growing the
further conviction that poverty, in the midst of untapped resources, is
a national crime. The propagation of these two beliefs by journals of
the newer school such as _The Leader, Sinn Fein,_ and _The Irish
Homestead_ has leavened the whole mass of Irish life in our time. The
Industrial Development Associations, founded on them as basis, have long
ago "bridged the Boyne." At their annual Conferences Belfast sits side
by side with Cork, Derry with Dublin. It is not merely that the
manufacturers and traders have joined hands to advance a movement
beneficial to themselves; the best thought of every class in the country
has given enthusiastic support to the programme on grounds not of
personal interest but of national duty. We may therefore take it that
the watchword of the Second Empire, _Enrichissez-vous,_ will be the
watchword of a self-governing Ireland. What Parliament and the State can
do to forward that aim will naturally be a subject of controversy. To
Free Traders and Tariff Reformers, alike, the power that controls the
Customs' tariff of a country controls its economic destiny. Both would
seem bound to apply the logic of their respective gospels to Ireland.
But as it is not the aim of this book to anticipate the debates of next
year, but rather to explain the foundations of the Home Rule idea, we
may leave that burning question for the present untouched. Apart from it
we can anticipate the trend of policy in Ireland. The first great task
of a Home Rule Parliament would be above controversy; it would be
neither more nor less than a scientific exploration of the country. No
such Economic Survey has ever been made, and the results are lamentable.
There has been no mapping out of the soil areas from the point of view
of Agricultural Economics, and, for the lack of such impartial
information, the fundamental conflict between tillage and grazing goes
on in the dark. We know where coal is to be found in Ireland; we do not
know with any assurance where it is and where it is not profitably
workable. The same is true of granite, marble, and indeed all our
mineral resources.
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