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Page 5
"'In the eyes of the English,' says Taine who had studied them so
minutely, 'there is but one reasonable civilisation, namely their
own. Every other way of living is that of inferior beings, every
other religion is extravagant.' So that, one might add, the
Englishman is doubly personal, first as an individual and again as
a member of the most highly individualised of nations. The moment
the national interest is involved all dissensions cease, there is
on the scene but one single man, one single Englishman, who shrinks
from no expedient that may advance his ends. Morality for him
reduces itself to one precept: Safeguard at any cost the interest
of England."
Like all foreigners he takes Ireland as the one conspicuous and flaming
failure of England. In that instance she has muddled, as usual, but she
has not muddled through.
"The Anglo-Saxons, those great colonisers of far-off lands, have in
their own United Kingdom succeeded only in inflicting a long
martyrdom on Ireland. The insular situation of England had for
pendant the insular situation of Ireland; the two islands lie there
face to face. The English and the Irish, although intellectually
very much alike, have preserved different characters. And this
difference cannot be due essentially to the racial element, for
nearly half Ireland is Germanic. It is due to traditions and
customs developed by English oppression."
Having summarised the main lines of British policy in Ireland, he
concludes:
"It is not easy to detect here any sign of the 'superiority of the
Anglo-Saxons.'"
With Fouill�e we may associate Emile Boutmy. In his "Political
Psychology of the English" he declares that the haughty, taciturn,
solitary, unassimilative temperament of England, so admirable from the
point of view of self-development, shows its worst side and comes to a
malign florescence in the history of Ireland. It explains why
"the relations of Ireland with England have been, for so many
centuries, those of a captive with his jailer, those of a victim
with his torturer."
I pass over De Beaumont, Von Raumer, Perraud, Paul-Dubois, Filon, Bonn.
The considerations already adduced ought to be enough to lead the
English reader to certain conclusions which are fundamental. For the
sake of clearness they may be repeated in all their nudity:
England has failed in Ireland.
Her failure has been due to defects of her own character, and
limitations of her outlook. The same defects which corrupted her policy
in the past distort her vision in the present.
Therefore, if she is to understand and to solve the Irish Question, she
must begin by breaking the hard shell of her individualism, and trying
to think herself into the skin, the soul, and the ideals of the Irish
nation.
Now the English reader is after all human. If he has endured so far the
outrage on his most sacred prejudices perpetrated in this chapter he
must at this moment be hot with resentment. He must feel as if,
proposing to his imagination Pear de Melba, he had in truth swallowed
sand. Let me end with a more comfortable word. We have seen that Irish
history is what the dramatists call an internal tragedy, the secular
disclosure and slow working-out of certain flaws in the English
character. I am not to be understood as ascribing horns to England and a
halo to Ireland. We Irish are not only imperfect but even modest; for
every beam that we detect in another eye we are willing to confess a
mote in our own. The English on the other hand have been not monsters or
demons, but men unstrung.
"In tragic life, God wot,
No villain need be, passions spin the plot;
We are betrayed by what is false within."
Least of all am I to be understood as ascribing to modern Englishmen any
sort of planned, aforethought malice in regard to Ireland. It is what
Bacon might have called a mere idol of the platform to suppose that they
are filled with a burning desire to oppress Ireland. The dream of their
lives is to ignore her, to eliminate from their calculations this
variable constant which sheds bewilderment upon every problem. Could
they but succeed in that, a very Sabbath of peace would have dawned for
them. The modern Englishman is too much worried to plan the oppression
of anybody. "Did you ever," asked Lord Salisbury on a remembered
occasion, "have a boil on your neck?" To the Englishman of 1911--that
troubled man whose old self-sufficiency has in our own time been
shattered beyond repair by Boer rifles, German shipyards, French
aeroplanes--Ireland is the boil on the neck of his political system. It
is the one _p�ch� de jeunesse_ of his nation that will not sleep in the
grave of the past. Like the ghost in "Hamlet" it pursues and plagues him
without respite. Shunned on the battlements it invades his most private
chamber, or, finding him in talk with friends, shames and scares him
with subterranean mutterings. Is there no way out of a situation so
troublesome and humiliating?
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