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Page 38
The only other prognostication that appears to emerge is the probable
predominance in a Home Rule Ireland of the present Ulster Unionist
party. That group is likely, for many reasons, to retain its solidarity
after ours has been dissipated. Should that prove to be the case,
self-government will put the balance of power on almost all great
conflicts of opinion into the hands of Sir Edward Carson and his
successors. The "minority," adroitly handled, will exploit the majority
almost as effectively after Home Rule as before it. Captain Craig will
dictate terms to us not from the last ditch, but from a far more
agreeable and powerful position, the Treasury Bench. And we undertake
not to grumble, for these are the chances of freedom.
CHAPTER X
AN EPILOGUE ON "LOYALTY"
According to precedent, well-established if not wise, no discussion of
political Ireland must end without some observations on "loyalty." The
passion of the English people for assurances on this point is in curious
contrast with their own record. It is not rhetoric, but crude history,
to say that the title-deeds of English freedom are in great part written
in blood, and that the seal which gave validity to all the capital
documents was the seal of "treason." No other nation in the world has so
clearly recognised and so stoutly insisted that, in the ritual game of
loyalty, the first move is with governments. With that premised, the
difference between the two countries is very simple. England has
developed from within the type of government that her people want. She
expresses satisfaction with the fact. This is loyalty. Ireland, on the
contrary, has had forced on her from without a type of government which
her people emphatically do not want. She expresses dissatisfaction with
the fact. This is disloyalty. Loyalty, in brief, is the bloom on the
face of freedom, just as beauty is the bloom on the face of health.
If we examine the methods by which England attained her very desirable
position we are further enlightened. It is a study admirably adapted to
inculcate liberty, not at all so well adapted to inculcate "loyalty."
The whole burden of English history is that, whenever these two
principles came in conflict, every man in England worth his salt was
disloyal even to the point of war. Whenever the old bottle was
recalcitrant to the new wine of freedom it was ignominiously scrapped. A
long effort has been made to keep Irish history out of our schools in
the interests of "loyalty." But it is English history that ought to be
kept out, for it is full of stuff much more perilous. You teach Irish
children the tale of Runnymede, covering with contempt the king of that
day, and heaping praise on the barons who shook their fists under his
nose. This is dangerous doctrine. It is doubly dangerous seeing that
these children will soon grow up to learn that the Great Charter, which
is held to justify all these tumultuous proceedings, has never even to
our own day been current law in Ireland. You introduce them to the Wars
of the Roses as a model of peaceful, constitutional development; to the
slaying of Edward II., Richard II., and I know not how many more as
object-lessons in the reverence which angry Englishmen accord to an
anointed king when they really dislike him. Later centuries show them
one Stuart beheaded outside his own palace, another dethroned and
banished in favour of a Dutch prince. Of romantic loyalty to the person
of a sovereign they find no trace or hint in the modern period. Lost
causes and setting suns, whatever appeal they may have made to Ireland,
do but rarely fire with their magical glimmer the raw daylight of the
English political mind. As for that more facile, after-dinner
attachment, in which it is charged that we do not join with sufficient
fervour, it seems to us always fulsome, and often mere hyprocrisy. In
the development of English ceremonial, "God Save the King!" gets to the
head of the toast-list only when the king has been thoroughly saved from
all the perils and temptations incidental to the possession of power. So
long as he claims any shred of initiative his English subjects continue
in a perpetual chafe and grumble of disloyalty; as soon as the Crown has
been rasped and sand-papered down to a decorative zero their loyalty
knows no bounds.
The simple and honourable truth is that all through her history England
strove after national freedom, and declined to be quiet until she got
it. There could not be a better statement of the methods which she
employed than Mr Rudyard Kipling's:
"Axe and torch and tumult, steel and gray-goose wing,
Wrung it, inch and ell, and all, slowly from the King."
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