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Page 39
It is, of course, a pity that the liberty thus established was better
fitted for the home market than for export. But this does not affect the
fact that, at the end of the process, the English people were in the
saddle. But the Irish people are not in the saddle, they are under it.
Indeed, the capital sin of Dublin Castle is that it is a bureaucracy
which has seized upon the estate of the people. In Ireland, under its
_r�gime_, the nation has had as much to say to its own public policy as
a Durbar-elephant has to say to the future of India. There is just this
difference in favour of the elephant: at least he has riot to pay for
the embroidered palanquins, and the prodding-poles, of his riders. We
are all agreed that loyalty is a duty. It is the duty of every
government to be loyal to the welfare, the nobler traditions, the
deep-rooted ideals, the habit of thought of its people. It is the duty
of every government to be loyal to the idea of duty, and to that austere
justice through which the most ancient heavens abide fresh and strong.
And until these prime duties have been faithfully performed, no
government need expect and none can exact "loyalty" from its subjects.
But it seems that we are compromised on other grounds. The inscription
on the Parnell Memorial is trumpeted about the constituencies with equal
energy by opponents wise and otherwise:
"No man has a right to fix the boundary to the march of a nation.
No man has a right to say to his country, 'Thus far shalt thou go
and no farther.' We have never attempted to fix the _ne plus ultra_
to the progress of Ireland's nationhood, and we never shall."
What the precise matter of offence may be one finds it difficult to
discover. Mr Balfour very properly characterises as the utterance of a
statesman, this passage in which Parnell declines to usurp the throne
and sceptre of Providence. But Mr Smith complains that it deprives Home
Rule of the note of "finality." With the suggestion that Home Rule is
not at all events the end of the world we are, of course, in warm
agreement. But if Mr Smith has entered public affairs in pursuit of
static formul� for dynamic realities, if he wants things fixed and
frozen and final, he has come to the wrong world to gratify such
desires. And even if he were to go to the next, he would have to be very
careful in choosing his destination, for all the theologians tell us
that, in Heaven, personalities continue to grow and develop. In fact, if
anybody wants "finality," I am afraid that we can only recommend him to
go to Hell. As for the world, in which we live, it is a world of flux.
Physicists allow the earth a long road to travel before it tumbles into
dissolution, and seers and prophets of various kinds foretell an equally
long cycle of development for human nature, as we now know it. The fate
of all our present political combinations is doubtful, and no nation has
received absolute guarantees for its future. An All-Europe State with
its capital at London, a Federation of the World with its capital at
Dublin, a Chinese Empire with its capital at Paris--these are all
possibilities. Australia may be annexed by Japan, Canada by the United
States, or vice versa; South Africa may spread northwards until it
absorbs the Continent, or shrink southwards until it expires on the
point of the Cape. The Superman may, as I am informed, appear on the
stage of history at any moment, and make pie of everything. And not one
of these appalling possibilities disturbs Mr Smith in the least. But he
is going to vote against justice for Ireland unless we can promise him
that throughout all the �ons, as yet unvouchsafed, and to the last
syllable of recorded time, her political destiny is going to be in all
details regulated by the Home Rule Bill of 1912. This is not an
intelligent attitude.
Of course the real innuendo is that we in Ireland are burning to levy
war on Great Britain, and would welcome any foreign invasion to that
end. On these two points one is happy to be able to give assurances, or
rather to state intentions. As for foreign invasion, we have had quite
enough of it. It is easier to get invaders in than to get them out
again, and we have not spent seven hundred years in recovering Ireland
for ourselves in order to make a present of it to the Germans, or the
Russians, or the Man in the Moon, or any other foreign power whatever.
The present plan of governing Ireland in opposition to the will of her
people does indeed inevitably make that country the weak spot in the
defences of these islands, for such misgovernment produces discontent,
and discontent is the best ally of the invader. Alter that by Home Rule,
and your cause instantly becomes ours. Give the Irish nation an Irish
State to defend, and the task of an invader becomes very unenviable. As
for levying war on Great Britain, we have no inclination in that
direction. The best thought in Ireland has always preferred civilisation
to war, and we have no wealth to waste on expensive stupidities of any
kind. In addition we are handicapped on sea by the smallness of our
official navy which, so far as I can gather, consists of the
_Granuaile_, a pleasure-boat owned by the Congested Districts Board. In
land operations, we are still more seriously hampered by the
non-existence of our army. And although, in point of population, our
numerical inferiority is so trivial as one to ten, even this slight
disproportion may be regarded by an Irish Parliament as a fact not
unworthy of consideration.
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