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Page 37
There are other urgent questions upon which unanimity exists even at
present, for example Poor Law Reform. I have outlined in an earlier
chapter the honourable record of Ireland in this regard. We were agreed
in 1836 that the workhouse should never have come; we are now agreed
that it must go. Whether in Antrim or in Clare, the same vicious system
has produced the same vicious results. Uniform experience has issued in
unanimous agreement as to the lines upon which reform ought to proceed.
At the same time there are differences as to detail, and the task of
fusing together various views and hammering out of them a workable Bill
will be an ideal task for a representative assembly. But it is difficult
to believe that the discussion will be, in all particulars, governed
either by the Council of Trent, or by the Westminster Confession.
Then there is education. English public men have been brought up to
assume that in Ireland education must be a battleground inevitably, and
from the first. It would be a mere paradox to say that this question,
which sunders parties the world over as with a sword, will leave opinion
in Ireland inviolately unanimous. But our march to the field of
controversy will be over a non-controversial road. Union policy has left
us a rich inheritance of obvious evils. The position of the primary
teachers is unsatisfactory, that of the secondary teachers is
impossible. When we attempt improvement of both will "Ulster" fight? And
there is something even more human and poignant. The National Schools of
this country are in many cases no better than ramshackle barns. Unless
the teacher and the manager, out of their own pockets, mend the broken
glass, put plaster on the walls, and a fire in the grate, the children
have got to shiver and cough for it. Winter in Ireland, like the King in
constitutional theory, is above politics. When its frosts get at the
noses, and fingers, and sometimes the bare toes, of the children it
leaves them neither green nor orange but simply blue. Then again other
schools, especially in Belfast, are shamefully over-crowded. Classes are
held on the stairs, in the cloak-room, the hall, or the yard. For the
more fortunate, class-rooms are provided with an air-space per
individual only slightly less than that available in the Black Hole of
Calcutta. All over the country, children go to school breakfastless and
stupid with hunger, and the local authorities have no power to feed them
as in England, and in most European countries. Then again, even where
the physical conditions are reasonable, the programme lacks actuality.
It is unpractical, out of touch with the facts of life and locality, a
veritable castle hung absurdly in the air and not based on any solid
foundation. The view still lingers in high places that the business of
education is to break the spirit of a people, to put them down and not
to lift them up. In token of this, the teachers are denied the civil
rights of freemen. Now all these ineptitudes are contrary to the humane
tradition of Ireland. Go they must, but, when an Irish Parliament starts
to remove them, I cannot imagine Captain Craig, with a Union Jack
wrapped around his bosom, straddling like Apollyon across the path. The
Captain has far too much sense, and too much feeling in him.
It will be observed that we are getting on. A nation so busy with
realities will have no time to waste on civil war. _Inter leges arma
silent_. But this is a mere outline sketch of the preliminary task of
the initial sessions of an Irish Parliament. Problems with a far heavier
fist will thunder at its doors, the problems of labour. The democratic
group in Ireland, that group which everywhere holds the commission of
the future, has long since declared that, to it, Home Rule would be a
barren counter-sense unless it meant the redemption of the back streets.
The Titanic conflict between what is called capital and what is called
labour, shaking the pillars of our modern Society, has not passed
Ireland by like the unregarded wind. We can no longer think of ourselves
as insulated from the world, immune from strikes, Socialists, and
Syndicalism. The problems of labour have got to be faced. But will they
be solved by a grapple between the Orange Lodges and the Ancient Order
of Hibernians? It is obvious that under their pressure the old order
must change, yielding place to a new. Every Trade Union has already
bridged the Boyne. Every strike has already torn the Orange Flag and the
Green Flag into two pieces, and stitched them together again after a new
and portentous pattern.
What does it all come to? Simply this, that Ireland under Home Rule will
be most painfully like every other modern country of western
civilisation. Some Unionists think that, if they could only get rid of
the Irish Party, all would be for the best in the best of all possible
worlds. Why then are they not Home Rulers? For Home Rule will most
assuredly get rid of the Irish Party. It will shatter the old political
combinations like a waggon-load of dynamite. New groups will crystallise
about new principles. The future in Ireland belongs to no old fidelity:
it may belong to any new courage.
Assuredly we must not seem to suggest that, in an autonomous Ireland,
public life will be all nougat, velvet, and soft music. There will be
conflicts, and vehement conflicts, for that is the way of the twentieth
century, and they will no doubt centre, for the most part, about
taxation and education. But the political forces of the country will
have moved into totally new formations. One foresees plainly a vertical
section of parties into Agrarian and Urban, a cross section into Labour
and Capitalistic. Each of these economic groupings is indefinitely
criss-crossed by an indefinite number of antagonisms, spiritual and
material. In a situation so complicated it is idle to speculate as to
the conditions of the future. A box of bricks so large, and so
multi-coloured, may be arranged and re-arranged in an infinity of
architectures. The one thing quite certain is that all the arrangements
will be new. In taxation, as I have suggested, a highly conservative
policy will prevail. In education the secularist programme, if advanced
at all, will be overwhelmed by a junction of Catholic and Protestant.
For religion, to the _anima naturaliter Christiana_, of Ireland is not
an argument but an intuition. It seems to us as reasonable to prepare
children for their moral life by excluding religion as to prepare them
for their physical life by removing the most important lobe of their
brains.
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