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Page 6
There is. Ireland cannot be ignored, but she can easily be appeased. The
boil is due to no natural and incurable condition. It is the direct
result of certain artificial ligatures and compressions; remove these
and it disappears. This spectre haunts the conscience of England to
incite her not to a deed of blood but to a deed of justice; every wind
is favourable and every omen. It is, indeed, true that if she is to
succeed, England must do violence to certain prejudices which now
afflict her like a blindness; she must deal with us as a man with men.
But is not the Kingdom of Heaven taken by violence?
CHAPTER II
HISTORY
_(a) Coloured_
Mendacity follows the flag. There never yet was an invader who did not,
in obedience to a kindly human instinct, lie abundantly respecting the
people whose country he had invaded. The reason is very plain. In all
ages men delight to acquire property by expedients other than that of
honest labour. In the period of private war the most obvious alternative
to working is fighting, or hiring servants to fight; the sword is
mightier than the spade. If we add that an expedition into a foreign
country offers the additional advantages of escape from your exacting
creditors, and your still more exacting king, we have something very
like the economics of the Invasion of Anywhere in early feudal times.
Had the leaders of these invasions, or rather their clerkly secretaries,
written the plain tale of their doings they would have left some such
record as this: "There were we, a band of able-bodied, daring, needy
men. Our only trade was war; our only capital our suits of armour, our
swords and battle-axes. We heard that there was good land and rich booty
to be had in Anywhere; we went and fought for it. Our opponents were
brave men, too, but badly organised. In some places we won. There we
substituted our own law for the queer sort of law under which these
people had lived; when they resisted too strongly we had, of course, no
option but to kill them. In other places we got mixed up completely by
alliances and marriages with the old stock, and lived most agreeably
with them. In others again the natives killed us, and remained in
possession. Such was the Invasion of Anywhere."
But (I had almost said unhappily) the invaders were not content with
having swords, they had also consciences. They were Christians, and
thought it necessary to justify themselves before the High Court of
Christian Europe. Consequently the clerks had to write up the record in
quite a different fashion. They discovered that their bluff,
hard-bitten, rather likeable employers, scarcely one of whom could read
or write, had really invaded Anywhere as the trustees of civilisation.
Now it may be said in general--and the observation extends to our own
time--that the moment an invader discovers that he is the trustee of
civilisation he is irretrievably lost to the truth. He is forced by his
own pose to become not an unprincipled liar, but that much more
disgusting object, a liar on principle. He is bound, in order to
legitimise his own position, to prove that "the natives" are savages,
living in a morass of nastiness and ignorance. All facts must be adapted
to this conclusion. The clerks, having made this startling discovery,
went on to supplement it by the further discovery that their masters had
invaded Anywhere in order to please the Pope, and introduce true
religion. This second role completes the dedication of the invaders on
the altar of mendacity. It was Leo XIII. himself who, with that charming
humour of his, deprecated the attitude of certain _a priori_ historians
who, said he, if they were writing the Gospel story would, in their
anxiety to please the Pope, probably suppress the denial of Peter.
These things which might have happened anywhere did, in fact, happen in
Ireland. Out of the footprints of the invaders there sprang up a legion
of fictionists, professional cooks of history. Beginning with Giraldus
Cambrensis they ought to have ended, but, as we shall see, did not end
with Froude. The significance of these mercenaries of literature can
hardly be exaggerated; it is not too much to say that they found Ireland
a nation, and left her a question. It is not at all that they put on
record the thing that was not as regards the events of their own period.
That might be and has been amended by the labours of impartial
scholarship. The real crime of the fabulists lies in this, that their
tainted testimony constituted for honest Englishmen the only information
about Ireland easily obtainable. The average Englishman (that is to say,
the forty millions of him who do not read learned books of any kind)
comes to the consideration of contemporary Ireland with a vision
distorted almost beyond hope of cure. The treasured lies of seven
hundred years are in his heart to-day. For time runs against the cause
of truth as well as with it. Once create a Frankenstein of race hatred,
and he will gather strength in going. The chronicler's fable of this
century becomes the accredited historical fact of the next. Give it what
billiard-players call "legs" enough and it will mature into a tradition,
a proverb, a spontaneous instinct. There is a whole department of
research concerned with the growth of myths, stage by stage, from a
little nebulous blotch into a peopled world of illusion. The strange
evolution there set forth finds an exact parallel in the development of
English opinion on Ireland. And, indeed, the more you study "the Irish
Question," as it is envisaged by the ruling mind of Great Britain, the
more conscious are you of moving in the realm not of reason but of
mythology.
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