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Ireland In The New Century

by Sir Horace Curzon Plunkett · English · Gutenberg #14342 · 502,319 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Ireland In The New Century

Author: Sir Horace Curzon Plunkett


        
Release date: December 13, 2004 [eBook #14342]
                Most recently updated: October 28, 2024

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK IRELAND IN THE NEW CENTURY ***

IRELAND

IN THE NEW CENTURY


BY THE RIGHT HON.

SIR HORACE PLUNKETT, K.C.V.O., F.R.S.


LONDON

JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET, W.

1904

_Printed by_ BROWNE AND NOLAN, LTD., _Dublin_



TO THE MEMORY OF

W.E.H. LECKY,


I DEDICATE ALL IN THIS BOOK
THAT IS WORTHY OF THE FRIENDSHIP
WITH WHICH HE HONOURED ME,
AND OF THE COUNSEL WHICH HE GAVE ME
FOR MY GUIDANCE IN IRISH PUBLIC LIFE.




PREFACE

Those who have known Ireland for the last dozen years cannot have failed
to notice the advent of a wholly new spirit, clearly based upon
constructive thought, and expressing itself in a wide range of fresh
practical activities. The movement for the organisation of agriculture
and rural credit on co-operative lines, efforts of various kinds to
revive old or initiate new industries, and, lastly, the creation of a
department of Government to foster all that was healthy in the voluntary
effort of the people to build up the economic side of their life, are
each interesting in themselves. When taken together, and in conjunction
with the literary and artistic movements, and viewed in their relation
to history, politics, religion, education, and the other past and
present influences operating upon the Irish mind and character, these
movements appear to me to be worthy of the most thoughtful consideration
by all who are responsible for, or desire the well-being of the Irish
people.

I should not, however, in days when my whole time and energies belong to
the public service, have undertaken the task of writing a book on a
subject so complex and apparently so inseparable from heated
controversy, were I not convinced that the expression of certain
thoughts which have come to me from practical contact with Irish
problems, was the best contribution I could make to the work on which I
was engaged. I wished, if I could, to bring into clearer light the
essential unity of the various progressive movements in Ireland, and to
do something towards promoting a greater definiteness of aim and method,
and a better understanding of each other's work, among those who are in
various ways striving for the upbuilding of a worthy national life in
Ireland.

So far the task, if difficult, was congenial and free from
embarrassment. Unhappily, it had been borne in upon me, in the course of
a long study of Irish life, that our failure to rise to our
opportunities and to give practical evidence of the intellectual
qualities with which the race is admittedly gifted, was due to certain
defects of character, not ethically grave, but economically paralysing.
I need hardly say I refer to the lack of moral courage, initiative,
independence and self-reliance--defects which, however they may be
accounted for, it is the first duty of modern Ireland to recognise and
overcome. I believe in the new movements in Ireland, principally because
they seem to me to exert a stimulating influence upon our moral fibre.

Holding such an opinion, I had to decide between preserving a discreet
silence and speaking my full mind. The former course would, it appeared
to me, be a poor example of the moral courage which I hold to be
Ireland's sorest need. Moreover, while I am full of hope for the future
of my country, its present condition does not, in my view, admit of any
delay in arriving at the truth as to the essential principles which
should guide all who wish to take a part, however humble, in the work of
national regeneration.

I desire to state definitely that I have not written in any
representative capacity except where I say so explicitly. I write on my
own responsibility, with the full knowledge that there is much in the
book with which many of those with whom I work do not agree.

_December_, 1903.




CONTENTS

PART I.

_THEORETICAL._

CHAPTER I

THE ENGLISH MISUNDERSTANDING.

  Fidelity of the Irish to the National Ideal
  Disregard of Material Advantage in its Pursuit
  Home Rule Movement under Gladstone
  The Anti-Climax under Lord Rosebery
  The Logic of Events and the Dawn of the Practical
  The Mutual Misunderstanding of England and Ireland
  The Dunraven Conference produces a Revolution in English Thought
  about Ireland
  The Actual Change Examined
  Future Misunderstanding best averted by considering Nature of
  Anti-English Feeling
  Illustration from Irish-American Life
  Importance of Sentiment in Ireland--English Habit of Ignoring
  Historical Grievances Still Operative
  The Commercial Restrictions--Remaining Effects of
  Irish Land Tenure--Lord Dufferin on
  Defects of Land Laws--Their Effect on Agriculture
  Right Attitude towards Historic Grievances
  Plea for Broader and more Philosophic View of Irish Question
  Simple Explanations and Panaceas Deprecated
  A Many-Sided Human Problem


CHAPTER II.

THE IRISH QUESTION IN IRELAND.

  Misunderstanding of the Irish People by the English and by Themselves
  Anomalies of Irish Life
  The New Movement--Position of Nationalists and Unionists in it
  North and South
  The Question of Rural Life
  Economic Side of the Question
  Grazing versus Tillage
  Peasant Organisation to be Supplemented by State-Aid
  Uneconomic Holdings too Prevalent
  Remedies Proposed
  Salvation not by Agriculture Alone
  Rural Industries and the Irish Home
  Reasons for Arrested Development of Home Life
  Inter-Dependence of the Sentimental and Practical in Ireland
  Outlines of Succeeding Chapters


CHAPTER III.

THE INFLUENCE OF POLITICS UPON THE IRISH MIND.

  Legislation as a Substitute for Work
  Political Shortcomings of Unionism and Nationalism Compared
  Action of the Unionist Party Reviewed
  Two Main Causes of its Lack of Success
  The Contribution of Ulster
  The Nationalist Party
  Are Irishmen Good Politicians?
  The Irish and the Scotch-Irish in America
  America's Interest in the Problem
  Part Played by English Government in Producing Modern Irish Disabilities
  Causes of the Growth of National Feeling
  Retardation of Political Education by the One-Man System
  And by Politicians of To-Day
  Defence of Nationalist Policy on Ground of Tactics Considered
  The Forces opposed to Home Rule--How Dealt with
  Local Government--How it might have been utilised
  After Home Rule?
  Beginnings of Political Education
  The Irish Parliamentary Party


CHAPTER IV.

THE INFLUENCE OF RELIGION UPON SECULAR LIFE IN IRELAND.

  Influences of Religion in Ireland
  What is Toleration?
  Protestantism in Irish Life
  Roman Catholicism and Economics
  Power of the Roman Catholic Clergy
  Has it been Abused?
  Church Building and Monastic Establishments
  Clerical Education
  Responsibility of the Clergy for Irish Character
  The Church and Temperance
  The Inculcation of Chastity
  The Priest in Politics
  New Movement among the Roman Catholic Clergy
  Duty and Interest of Protestantism
  What each Creed has to Learn from the other


CHAPTER V.

A PRACTICAL VIEW OF IRISH EDUCATION.

  English Government and Education
  The Kildare Street Society
  Scheme of Thomas Wyse
  Early Attempts at Practical Education
  Recent Reports on Irish Systems
  The Policy of the Department of Agriculture
  The Example of Denmark
  University Education for Roman Catholics
  Maynooth and its Limitations
  Trinity College
  Its Lack of Influence on the Irish Mind
  A Democratic University Called for
  National and Economic in its Aims
  Views of Roman Catholic Ecclesiastics
  The Two Irelands
  Lord Chesterfield on Education and Character


CHAPTER VI.

THROUGH THOUGHT TO ACTION.

  A Word to my Critics
  The Gaelic League
  Compared with the Irish Agricultural Organisation Society
  Objects and Constitution of the League
  Filling the Gap in Irish Education
  Patriotism and Industry
  Nationality and Nationalism
  A Possible Danger
  Extravagances in the Movement
  The Gaelic League and the Rural Home
  Meeting with Harold Frederic
  His Pessimistic Views on the Celt
  A New Solution of the Problem--Organised Self-Help
  English and Irish Industrial Qualities
  Special Value of the Associative Qualities
  Conclusion of Part I.

       *       *       *       *       *

PART II.

_PRACTICAL._


CHAPTER VII.

THE NEW MOVEMENT; ITS FOUNDATION ON SELF-HELP.

  Distrust of Novel Schemes often well justified
  The Story of the New Movement
  Necessitated by Foreign Competition
  Production and Distribution
  Causes of Continental Superiority
  Objects for which Combination is Desirable
  How to Organise the Industrial Army
  Help from England
  Doubts and Difficulties
  Some Favouring Conditions
  The Beginning of the Work--Co-operative Creameries
  The Social Problem
  Early Efforts and Experiences
  Foundation of the I.A.O.S.
  Its Present Position
  Agricultural Banks
  The Brightening of Home Life
  Staff of the Society
  Philanthropy and Business
  Enquiries from Abroad
  Moral and Social Effects of the New Movement
  Unknown Leaders


CHAPTER VIII.

THE RECESS COMMITTEE.

  After Six Years
  Opportunity for State-Aid
  Combination of Political and Industrial Leadership
  A Letter to the Press
  Mr. Justin McCarthy's Reply
  Mr. Redmond's Reply
  Formation of the Committee
  Investigations on the Continent
  Recommendations of the Committee
  Position of the Nationalist Members of the Committee
  Chief Reliance on Local Effort
  Public Opinion on the New Proposals
  Adoption of the Bill to give effect to them
  Mr. Gerald Balfour's Policy
  Industrial Home Rule


CHAPTER IX.

A NEW DEPARTURE IN IRISH ADMINISTRATION.

  Functions and Constitution of the New Department
  How it is Financed
  The Representative Element in its Constitution
  The Right to Vote Supplies
  Consultative Committee on Education
  The Department Linked with the Local Government System
  Successful Co-operation with Local Government Bodies
  And with Voluntary Societies
  The New Department and the Congested Districts Board
  The Reception of the Department by the Country
  Some Typical Callers
  A Wrong Impression Anticipated


CHAPTER X.

GOVERNMENT WITH THE CONSENT OF THE GOVERNED.

  Summary of Previous Chapter
  The Attitude of the People towards the Department
  Method of Co-operation with Local Bodies
  State-Aid, Direct and Indirect
  The Department and the Large Towns
  The Department's Plans for Developing Agriculture
  The Industrial Problem and Education
  The Difficulty of Finding Trained Teachers
  How Surmounted
  Difficulties of Agricultural Education
  Decision to Adopt Itinerant Instruction
  Double Purpose of this Instruction
  Relation of the Department with Secondary Schools
  Importance of Domestic Economy Teaching
  Provision of Teachers in Domestic Economy
  Miscellaneous Industries
  Competition of the Factory
  The Department's Fabian Policy Justified
  Its Support by the Country
  Improvement of Live-Stock
  Best Method of giving Object Lessons in Agriculture
  Sea Fisheries
  Continental Tours for Irish Teachers
  Cork Exhibition of 1902
  Things and Ideas
  Concluding Words


INDEX




PART I.

_THEORETICAL_.


     "It is hard to say where history ends, and where religion and
     politics begin; for history, religion and politics grow on one stem
     in Ireland, an eternal trefoil."--_Lady Gregory_.





CHAPTER I.

THE ENGLISH MISUNDERSTANDING.


Whatever may be the ultimate verdict of history upon the long struggle
of the majority of the Irish people for self-government, the picture of
a small country with large aspirations giving of its best unstintingly
to the world, while gaining for itself little beyond sympathy, will
appeal to the imagination of future ages long after the Irish Question,
as we know it, has been buried. It may then, perhaps, be seen that the
aspirations came to nought because they were opposed to the manifest
destiny of the race, and that it should never have been expected or
desired that the Dark Rosaleen should 'reign and reign alone.'
Nevertheless, the fidelity and fortitude with which the national ideal
had been pursued would command admiration, even if the ideal itself were
to be altogether abandoned, or if it were to be ultimately realised in a
manner which showed that the methods by which its attainment had been
sought were the cause of its long postponement. Whatever the future may
have in store for the remnant of the Irish people at home, the continued
pursuit of a separate national existence by a nation which is rapidly
disappearing from the land of all its hopes, and the cherishing of
these hopes, not only by those who stay but also by those who go, will
stand as a monument to human constancy.

The picture will be all the more remarkable when emphasised by a
contrast which the historian will not fail to draw. Across a narrow
streak of sea another people, during the same period, increased and
multiplied and prospered mightily, spread their laws and institutions,
and achieved in every portion of the globe material success which they
can call their own. Yet, although Irishmen have done much to win that
success for the English people to enjoy, and are to-day foremost in
maintaining the great empire which their brain and muscle were ever
ready to augment, Ireland makes no claim for herself in respect of the
achievement. It is to her but a proof of what her sons will do for her
in the coming time; it does not bring her nearer to her heart's desire.

Although the nineteenth century, with all its marvellous contributions
to human progress, left Ireland with her hopes unfulfilled; although its
sun went down upon the British people with their greatest failure still
staring them in the face, its last decade witnessed at first a change in
the attitude of England towards Ireland, and afterwards a profound
revolution in the thoughts of Ireland about herself. The strangest and
most interesting feature of these developments was that in practical
England the Irish Question became the great political issue, while in
sentimental Ireland there set in a reaction from politics and an
inclination to the practical. The twentieth century has already brought
to birth the new Ireland upon whose problems I shall write. If the human
interest of these problems is to be realized, if their significance is
not to be as wholly misunderstood as that of every other Irish movement
which has perplexed the statesmen who have managed our affairs, they
must be studied in their relation to the English and Irish events of the
period in which the new Ireland was conceived.

In 1885 Gladstone, appealing to an electorate with a large accession of
newly enfranchised voters, transferred the struggle over the Irish
Question from Ireland to Great Britain. The position taken up by the
average English Home Ruler was, it will be remembered, simple and
intelligible. The Irish had stated in the proper constitutional way what
they wanted, and that, in the first flush of a victorious democracy,
when counting heads irrespective of contents was the popular method of
arriving at political truth, was assumed to be precisely what they ought
to have. A long but inconclusive contest ensued. At times it looked as
if the Liberal-Irish alliance might snatch a victory for their policy.
But when Gladstone was forced to break with the Irish Leader, and
Parnellism without Parnell became obviously impossible, the English
realised that the working of representative institutions in Ireland had
produced not a democracy but a dictatorship, and they began to attach a
lesser significance to the verdict of the Irish polls. Their faith in
democracy was unimpaired, but, in their opinion, the Irish had not yet
risen to its dignity. So most English Radicals came round to a view
which they had always reprobated when advanced by the English
Conservatives, and political inferiority was added to the other moral
and intellectual defects which made the Irish an inferior race!

The anti-climax to the Gladstone crusade was reached when Lord Rosebery
in 1894 took over the premiership from the greatest English advocate of
the Irish cause. The position of the new leader was very simple. In
effect, he told the Irish Nationalists that the English party he was
about to lead had done its best for them. They must now regard
themselves as partners in the United Kingdom, with the British as the
predominant partner. Until the predominant partner could be brought to
take the Irish view of the partnership, the relations between them must
remain substantially as they were. And not only must the concession of
Home Rule await the conversion of the British electorate, but before the
demand could be effectively preferred, another leader must rise up among
the Irish; and he, for all Lord Rosebery knew, was at the moment being
wheeled in a perambulator. This apparently cynical avowal of the new
premier's own attitude towards Home Rule accurately stated the facts of
the situation, and fairly reflected the mind of the British electorate,
after Irish obstruction had given them an opportunity of studying the
bearing of the Irish Question on English politics.

If the logic of events was thus making for the removal of Home Rule from
the region of practical politics in England, an even more momentous
change was taking place in Ireland. Whilst the Home Rule controversy was
at its height in the 'eighties and early 'nineties, some Irish
grievances were incidentally dealt with--not always under the best
impulses or in the best way. The concentration of all the available
thought and energy of Irish public men upon an appeal to the passions
and prejudices of English parties had led to the further postponement of
all Irish endeavour to deal rationally and practically with her own
problems at home. But during the welter of contention which prevailed
after the fall of Parnell, there grew up in Ireland a wholly new spirit,
born of the bitter lesson which was at last being learned. The Irish
still clung undaunted to their political ideal, but its pursuit to the
exclusion of all other national aims had received a wholesome check.
Thought upon the problems of national progress broadened and deepened,
in a manner little understood by those who knew Ireland from without,
and, indeed, by many of those accounted wise among the observers from
within. Was the realisation of a distinctive national existence, many
began to ask themselves, to be for ever dependent upon the fortunes of a
political campaign? In any scheme of a reconstructed national life to
which the Irish would give of their best, there must be
distinctiveness--that much every man who is in touch with Irish life is
fully aware of--but the question of existence must not be altogether
ignored. At the rate the people were leaving the sinking ship, the Irish
Question would be settled in the not distant future by the disappearance
of the Irish. Had we not better look around and see how other countries
with more or less analogous conditions fared? Could we not--Unionists
and Nationalists alike--do something towards material progress without
abandoning our ideals? Could we not learn something from a study of what
our people were doing abroad? One seemed to hear the voice of Bishop
Berkeley, the biting pertinence of whose _Queries_ is ever fresh, asking
from the grave in which he had been laid to rest nearly a century and a
half ago 'whether it would not be more reasonable to mend our state than
complain of it; and how far this may be in our own power?'

These questionings, though not generally heard on the platform or even
in the street, were none the less working in the depths of the Irish
mind, and found expression not so much in words as in deeds. Yet though
the downfall of Parnell released many minds from the obsession of
politics, the influence of that event was of a negative character, and
it took time to produce a beneficial effect. That fruitful last decade
of the nineteenth century saw the foundation of what will some day be
recognised as a new philosophy of Irish progress. Certain new principles
were then promulgated in Ireland, and gradually found acceptance; and
upon those principles a new movement was built. It is partly, indeed, to
expound and justify some, at any rate, of the principles and to give an
intelligible account of the practical achievement and future
possibilities of this movement that I write these pages.

For English readers, to whom this introductory chapter is chiefly
addressed, I may here reiterate the opinion, which I have always held
and often expressed, that there is no real conflict of interest between
the two peoples and the two countries, and that the mutual
misunderstanding which we may now hope to see removed is due to a wide
difference of temperament and mental outlook. The English mind has never
understood the Irish mind--least of all during the period of the 'Union
of Hearts.' It is equally true that the Irish have largely misunderstood
both the English character and their own responsibility. The result has
been that their leaders, despite the brilliant capacity they have shown
in presenting the unhappy case of their country to the rest of the
world, have rarely presented it in the right way to the English people.
There have been many occasions during the last quarter of a century when
a calm, well-reasoned statement of the economic disadvantages under
which Ireland labours would, I am convinced, have successfully appealed
to British public opinion. It could have been shown that the development
of Ireland--the development not only of the resources of her soil but of
the far greater wealth which lies in the latent capacities of her
people--was demanded quite as much in the interest of one country as in
that of the other.

Here, indeed, is an untilled field for those to whom the Irish Question
is yet a living one. If I could think that each country fully realised
its own responsibility in the matter, if I could think that the
long-continued misunderstanding was at an end, nothing would induce me
to trouble the waters at this auspicious hour, when a better feeling
towards Ireland prevails in Great Britain, and when the Irish people are
fully appreciative of the obviously sincere desire of England to be
generous to Ireland. But an examination of the events upon which the
prevailing optimism is based will show that, unhappily,
misunderstanding, though of another sort, still exists, and that Ireland
is as much as ever a riddle to the English mind.

Now this new optimism in the English view of Ireland seems to be based,
not upon a recognition of the development of what I have ventured to
dignify with the title of a new philosophy of Irish progress, but upon a
belief that the spirit of moderation and conciliation displayed by so
many Irishmen in connection with the Land Act is due to the fact that my
incomprehensible countrymen have, under a sudden emotion, put away
childish things and learned to behave like grown-up Englishmen.
Throughout the press comments upon the Dunraven Conference and in public
speeches both inside and outside Parliament there has run a sense that a
sort of portent, a transformation scene, a sudden and magical
alteration in the whole spirit and outlook of the Irish people, has come
to pass.

I feel some hesitation in asking the reader to believe that a great and
lasting revolution in Irish thought has been brought about in such a
moment in the life of a people as twelve short years. But a lesser
number of months seemed to the English mind adequate for the
accomplishment of the change. And what a change it was that they
conceived! To them, less than a year ago, the Irish Question was not
merely unsolved, but in its essential features appeared unaltered. After
seven centuries of experimental statecraft--so varied that the English
could not believe any expedient had yet to be tried--the vast majority
of the Irish people regarded the Government as alien, disputed the
validity of its laws, and felt no responsibility for administration, no
respect for the legislature, or for those who executed its decrees. And
this in a country forming an integral part of the United Kingdom, where
the fundamental basis of government is assumed to be the consent of the
governed! Nor were any hopes entertained that the cloud would quickly
pass. During the Boer war the prophets of evil, in predicting the
calamity which was to fall upon the British Empire, took as their text
the failure of English government in Ireland. When they wanted to paint
in the darkest colours the coming heritage of woe, they wrote upon the
wall, 'Another Ireland in South Africa'; and if any exception was taken
to the appropriateness of the phrase, it was certainly not on the
ground that Ireland had ceased to be a warning to British statesmen.

I believe, quite as strongly as the most optimistic Englishman, that
there has been a great change from this state of things in Irish
sentiment, and my explanation of that change, if less dramatic than the
transformation theory, affords more solid ground for optimism. This
change in the sentiment of Irishmen towards England is due, not to a
sudden emotion of the incomprehensible Celt, but really to the
opinion--rapidly growing for the last dozen years--that great as is the
responsibility of England for the state of Ireland, still greater is the
responsibility of Irishmen. The conviction has been more and more borne
in upon the Irish mind that the most important part of the work of
regenerating Ireland must necessarily be done by Irishmen in Ireland.
The result has been that many Irishmen, both Unionists and Nationalists,
without in any way abandoning their opposition to, or support of, the
attempt to solve the political problem from without, have been
trying--not without success--to solve some part of the Irish Question
from within. The Report of the Recess Committee, on which I shall dwell
later, was the first great fruit of this movement, and the Dunraven
Treaty, which paved the way for Mr. Wyndham's Land Act, was a further
fruit, and not the result of an inexplicable transformation scene.

The reason why I dwell on the true nature of the undoubted change in
the Irish situation is not in order to exaggerate the importance of the
part played by the new movement in bringing it about, nor to detract
from the importance of Parliamentary action, but because a mistaken view
of the change would inevitably postpone the firm establishment of an
improved mutual understanding between the two countries, which I regard
as an essential of Irish progress. I confess that my apprehension of a
new misunderstanding was aroused by the debates on the Land Bill in the
House of Commons. As regards the spirit of conciliation and moderation
displayed by the Irish, and the sincere desire exhibited by the British
to heal the chief Irish economic sore, the speeches were, if not
epoch-making, at any rate epoch-marking; but they showed little sense of
perspective or proportion in viewing the Irish Question, and little
grasp or appreciation of the large social and economic problems which
the Land Act will bring to the front. Temporary phenomena and
legislative machinery have been endowed with an importance they do not
possess, and miracles, it is supposed, are about to be worked in Ireland
by processes which, whatever rich good may be in them, have never worked
miracles, though they have not seldom excited very similar enthusiasms
in the economic history of other European lands.

I agree, then, with most Englishmen in thinking, though for a different
reason, that the passing of the Land Act marked a new era in Ireland.
They regard it as productive of, or co-incident in time with, the dawn
of the practical in Ireland. I antedate that event by some dozen years,
and regard the Land Act rather as marking a new era, because it removes
the great obstacle which obscured the dawn of the practical for so many,
and hindered it for all.

Whatever may have been the expectations upon which this great measure
was based, I, in common with most Irish observers, watched its progress
with unfeigned delight. The vast majority regarded the hundred millions
of credit and the twelve millions of 'bonus' as a generous concession to
Ireland; and I sympathised with those who deprecated the mischievous
suggestion, not infrequently heard in English political circles, that
this munificence was the 'price of peace.' On one point all were agreed:
the Bill could never have become law had not Mr. Wyndham handled the
Parliamentary situation with masterly tact, temper, and ability. To him
is chiefly due the credit for the fact that the Land Question, in its
old form at any rate, no longer blocks the way, and that the large
problems which remain to be solved, and, above all, the spirit in which
they will have to be approached by those who wish the existing peace to
be the forerunner of material and social progress, can be freely and
frankly discussed.

It is true, as I have said, that Ireland is becoming more and more
practical, and that England is becoming more anxious than ever to do her
substantial justice. But still the manner of the doing will continue to
be as important as the thing which is done. Of the Irish qualities none
is stronger than the craving to be understood. If the English had only
known this secret we should have been the most easily governed people in
the world. For it is characteristic of the conduct of our most important
affairs that we care too little about the substance and too much about
the shadow. It is for this reason that I have discussed the real nature
of one phase of Irish sentiment which has been largely misunderstood,
and it is for the same reason that I propose to preface my examination
of the Irish Question with some reference to the cause and nature of the
anti-English sentiment, for the long continuance of which I can find no
other explanation than the failure of the English to see into the Irish
mind.

I am well acquainted with this sentiment because, in my practical work
in Ireland, it has ever been the main current of the stream against
which I have had to swim. Years spent in the United States had made me
familiar with its full and true significance, for there it can be
studied in an atmosphere not dominated by any present Irish
controversies or struggles. I have found this sentiment of hatred deeply
rooted in the minds of Irishmen who had themselves never known Ireland,
who had no connection, other than a sentimental one, with that country,
who were living quiet business lives in the United States, but who were
ever ready to testify with their dollars, and genuinely believed that
they only lacked opportunity to demonstrate in a more enterprising way,
their "undying hatred of the English name."[1]

With such men I have reasoned, and sometimes not in vain, upon the
injustice and unreason of their attitude. I have not attempted to
controvert the main facts of Ireland's grievances, which they frequently
told me they had gleaned from Froude and Lecky. I used to deprecate the
unqualified application of modern standards to the policies of other
days, and to protest against the injustice of punishing one set of
persons for the misdoings of another set of persons, who have long since
passed beyond the reach of any earthly tribunal. I have given them my
reasons for believing that, even if such a course were morally
admissible, the wit of man could not devise any means of inflicting a
blow upon England which would not react injuriously with tenfold force
upon Ireland. I have gone on to show that the sentiment itself, largely
the accident of untoward circumstances, is alien to the character and
temperament of the Irish people. In short, I have urged that the policy
of revenge is un-Christian and unintelligent, and, that, as the Irish
people are neither irreligious nor stupid, it is un-Irish. I well
remember taking up this position in conversation with some very advanced
Irish-Americans in the Far West and the reply which one of them made.
"Wal," said my half-persuaded friend, "mebbe you're right. I have two
sons, whom I have raised in the expectation that they will one day
strike a blow for old Ireland. Mebbe they won't. I'm too old to change."

I have chosen this incident from a long series of similar reminiscences
of my study of Irish life, to illustrate an attitude of mind, the
historical explanation of which would seem to the practical Englishman
as academic as a psychological exposition of the effect of a red rag
upon a bull. The English are not much to be blamed for resenting the
survival of the feeling, but it appears to me to argue a singular lack
of political imagination that they should still fail to appreciate the
reality, the significance, and the abiding force of a sentiment which
has so far successfully resisted the influence of those governing
qualities which have played a foremost part in the civilisation of the
modern world. The _Spectator_ some time ago came out bluntly with a
truth which an Irishman may, I presume, quote without offence from so
high an English authority:--"The one blunder of average Englishmen in
considering foreign questions is that with white men they make too
little allowance for sentiment, and with coloured men they make none at
all."[2] I am afraid it must be added that 'average Englishmen' make
exactly the same blunder in under-estimating the force of sentiment when
considering Irish questions, with the not unnatural consequence that
the Irish regard them as foreigners, and that, as those foreigners
happen to govern them, the sentiment of nationality becomes political
and anti-English.

There is one reason why this sentiment is not allowed to die which
should always be remembered by those who wish to grasp the inner
workings of the Irish mind. Briefly stated, the view prevails in Ireland
that in dealing with questions affecting our material well-being, the
government of our country by the English was, in the past, characterised
by an unenlightened self-interest. Thoughtful Englishmen admit this
charge, but they say that the past referred to is beyond living memory
and should now be buried. The Irish mind replies that the life of a
nation is not to be measured by the life of individuals, and that a
wrong inflicted by a Government upon a community entitles those who
inherit the consequences of the injury to claim reparation at the hands
of those who inherit the government. With this attitude on the part of
the Irish mind I am not only most heartily in sympathy, but I find every
Englishman who understands the situation equally so. In the later
portions of this book it will be shown that practical recognition, in no
small measure, has been given by England to the righteousness of this
part of the Irish case, and that if the effect thus produced has not
found as full an outward expression as might have been expected, the
Irish people have at any rate responded to the new treatment in a manner
which must, in no distant future, bring about a better understanding.

The only historical causes of our present discontents to which I need
now particularly refer, are the commercial restrictions and the land
system of the past, which stand out from the long list of Irish
grievances as those for which their victims were the least responsible.
No one can be more anxious than I am that we should cease to be for ever
seeking in the past excuses for our present failures. But it is
essential to a correct estimation of Irish agricultural and industrial
possibilities that we should notice the true bearings of these
historical grievances upon existing conditions.

In this connection there arises a question which is very pertinent to
the present inquiry and which must therefore be considered. I have seen
it argued by English economists that the industrial revolution which
took place at the end of the eighteenth and commencement of the
nineteenth century would in any case have destroyed, by force of open
competition, industries which, it is admitted, were previously
legislated away. They point out that the change from the order of small
scattered home industries to the factory system would have suited
neither the temperament nor the industrial habits of the Irish. They
tell us that with the industrial revolution the juxtaposition of coal
and iron became an all-important factor in the problem, and they recall
how the north and west of England captured the industrial supremacy from
the south and east. Incidentally they point out that the people of the
English counties which suffered by these economic causes braced
themselves to meet the changes, and it is suggested that if the people
of Ireland had shown the same resourcefulness, they, too, might have
weathered the storm. And, finally, we are reminded that England, by her
stupid Irish policy, punished her own supporters, and even herself,
quite as much as the 'mere Irish.'

Much of this may be true, but this line of argument only shows that
these English economists do not thoroughly understand the real grievance
which the Irish people still harbour against the English for past
misgovernment. The commercial restraints sapped the industrial instinct
of the people--an evil which was intensified in the case of the
Catholics by the working of the penal laws. When these legislative
restrictions upon industry had been removed, the Irish, not being
trained in industrial habits, were unable to adapt themselves to the
altered conditions produced by the Industrial Revolution, as did the
people in England. And as for commerce, the restrictions, which had as
little moral sanction as the penal laws, and which invested smuggling
with a halo of patriotism, had prevented the development of commercial
morality, without which there can be no commercial success. It is not,
therefore, the destruction of specific industries, or even the sweeping
of our commerce from the seas, about which most complaint is now made.
The real grievance lies in the fact that something had been taken from
our industrial character which could not be remedied by the mere removal
of the restrictions. Not only had the tree been stripped, but the roots
had been destroyed. If ever there was a case where President Kruger's
'moral and intellectual damages' might fairly be claimed by an injured
nation, it is to be found in the industrial and commercial history of
Ireland during the period of the building up of England's commercial
supremacy.

The English mind quite failed, until the very end of the nineteenth
century, to grasp the real needs of the situation which had thus been
created in Ireland The industrial revolution, as I have indicated, found
the Irish people fettered by an industrial past for which they
themselves were not chiefly responsible. They needed exceptional
treatment of a kind which was not conceded. They were, instead, still
further handicapped, towards the middle of the century, by the adoption
of Free Trade, which was imposed upon them when they were not only
unable to take advantage of its benefits, but were so situated as to
suffer to the utmost from its inconveniences.

I am convinced that the long-continued misunderstanding of the
conditions and needs of this country, the withholding, for so long, of
necessary concessions, was due not to heartlessness or contempt so much
as to a lack of imagination, a defect for which the English cannot be
blamed. They had, to use a modern term, 'standardised' their qualities,
and it was impossible to get out of their minds the belief that a
divergence, in another race, from their standard of character was
synonymous with inferiority. This attitude is not yet a thing of the
past, but it is fast disappearing; and thoughtful Englishmen now
recognise the righteousness of the claim for reparation, and are willing
liberally to apply any stimulus to our industrial life which may place
us, so far as this is possible, on the level we might have occupied had
we been left to work out our own economic salvation. Unfortunately, all
Englishmen are not thoughtful, and hence I emphasise the fact that
England is largely responsible for our industrial defects, and must not
hesitate to face the financial results of that responsibility.

When we pass from the domain of commerce, where we have seen that
circumstances reduced to the minimum Ireland's participation in the
industrial supremacy of England, and come to examine the historical
development of Irish agrarian life, we find a situation closely related
to, and indeed, largely created by, that which we have been discussing.
'Debarred from every other trade and industry,' wrote the late Lord
Dufferin, 'the entire nation flung itself back upon the land, with as
fatal an impulse as when a river, whose current is suddenly impeded,
rolls back and drowns the valley which it once fertilised.' The
energies, the hopes, nay, the very existence of the race, became thus
intimately bound up with agriculture. This industry, their last resort
and sole dependence, had to be conducted by a people who in every other
avocation had been unfitted for material success. And this industry,
too, was crippled from without, for a system of land tenure had been
imposed upon Ireland that was probably the most effective that could
have been devised for the purpose of perpetuating and accentuating every
disability to which other causes had given rise.

The Irish land system suffered from the same ills as we all know the
political institutions to have suffered from--a partial and intermittent
conquest. Land holding in Ireland remained largely based on the tribal
system of open fields and common tillage for nearly eight hundred years
after collective ownership had begun to pass away in England. The sudden
imposition upon the Irish, early in the seventeenth century, of a land
system which was no part of the natural development of the country,
ignored, though it could not destroy, the old feeling of communistic
ownership, and, when this vanished, it did not vanish as it did in
countries where more normal conditions prevailed. It did not perish like
a piece of outworn tissue pushed off by a new growth from within: on the
contrary, it was arbitrarily cut away while yet fresh and vital, with
the result that where a bud should have been there was a scar.

This sudden change in the system of land-holding was followed by a
century of reprisals and confiscations, and what war began the law
continued. The Celtic race, for the most part impoverished in mind and
estate by the penal laws, became rooted to the soil, for, as we have
seen, they had, on account of the repression of industries, no
alternative occupation, and so became, in fact, if not in law,
_adscripti glebae_. Upon the productiveness of their labour the
landlord depended for his revenues, but he did little to develop that
productiveness, and the system which was introduced did everything to
lessen it.[3] The wound produced by the original confiscation of the
land was kept from healing by the way in which the tenants' improvements
were somewhat similarly treated. I do not mean that they were
systematically confiscated--the Devon and Bessborough Commissions, as
well as Gladstone, bore witness to the contrary--but the right and the
occasional exercise of the right to confiscate operated in the same way.
In the Irish tenant's mind dispossession was nine-tenths of the law.

An enlightened system of land tenure might have made prosperity and
contentment the lot of the native race, and, perhaps, have rendered
possible such a solution of the Irish problem as was effected between
England and Scotland two centuries ago. What was chiefly required for
agrarian peace was a recognition of that sense of partnership in the
land--a relic of the tribal days--to which the Irish mind tenaciously
adhered. But, like most English concessions, it was not granted until
too late, and then granted in the wrong way. The natural result was
that, when at last the recognition of partnership was enacted, it became
a lever for a demand for complete ownership. But this was the aftermath,
for in the meantime, from the seed sown by English blundering,
Ireland--native population and English garrison alike--had reaped the
awful harvest of the Irish famine, which was followed by a long dark
winter of discontent. Upon the England that sowed the wind there was
visited a whirlwind of hostility from the Irish race scattered
throughout the globe.

It would be altogether outside the scope or purpose of this chapter to
present a complete history of the remedial legislation applied to Irish
land tenure. That history, however, illustrates so vividly the English
misunderstanding, that a short survey of one phase of it may help to
point the moral. The English intellect at long last began to grasp the
agrarian, though not the industrial side of the wrong that had been done
to Ireland, and the English conscience was moved; there came the era of
concessions to which I have alluded, and for over a quarter of a century
attempts, often generous, if not very discriminating, were made to deal
with the situation. In 1870, dispossession was made very costly to the
landlord. In 1881, it became impossible, except on the tenant's default,
and the partnership was fully recognised, the tenant's share being made
his own to sell, and being preserved for his profitable use by a right
to have the rent payable to his sleeping partner, the landlord, fixed by
a judicial tribunal. These rights were the famous three F's--fixity of
tenure, free sale, and fair rent--of the Magna Charta of the Irish
peasant. If these concessions had only been made in time, they would
probably have led to a strengthening of the economic position and
character of the Irish tenantry, which would have enabled them to take
full advantage of their new status, and meet any condition which might
arise; and it is just possible that the system might have worked well,
even at the eleventh hour, had it been launched on a rising market.
Unhappily, it fell upon evil days. The prosperous times of Irish
agriculture, which culminated a few years before the passing of the
'Tenants' Charter,' were followed by a serious reaction, the result of
causes which, though long operative, were only then beginning to make
themselves felt, and some of which, though the fact was not then
generally recognised, were destined to be of no temporary character. The
agricultural depression which has continued ever since was due, as is
now well known, to foreign competition, or, in other words, to the
opening up of vast areas in the Far West to the plough and herd, and the
bringing of the products of distant countries into the home markets in
ever-increasing quantity, in ever fresher condition, and at an
ever-decreasing cost of transportation. Great changes were taking place
in the market which the Irish farmer supplied, and no two men could
agree as to the relative influence of the new factors of the problem, or
as to their probable duration.

Whatever may be said in disparagement of the great experiment commenced
in 1881, there can be no doubt that it enormously improved the legal
position of the Irish tenantry, and I, for one, regard it as a
necessary contribution to the events whose logic was finally to bring
about the abolition of dual ownership. But what a curious instance of
the irony of fate is afforded by this genuine attempt to heal an Irish
sore, what a commentary it is upon the English misunderstanding of the
Irish mind! Mr. Gladstone found the land system intolerable to one
party; he made it intolerable to the other also. For half a century
_laissez-faire_ was pedantically applied to Irish agriculture, then
suddenly the other extreme was adopted; nothing was left alone, and
political economy was sent on its famous planetary excursion.

When Mr. Gladstone was attempting to settle the land question on the
basis of dual ownership, the seed of a new kind of single
ownership--peasant proprietorship--was sown through the influence of
John Bright. The operations of the land purchase clauses in the Church
Disestablishment Act of 1869, and the Land Acts of 1870 and 1881, were
enormously extended by the Land Purchase Acts introduced by the
Conservative Party in 1885 and in 1891, and the success which attended
these Acts accentuated the defects and sealed the fate of dual
ownership, which all parties recently united to destroy. In other words,
Parliament has been undoing a generation's legislative work upon the
Irish land question.

This is all I need say about that stage of the Irish agrarian situation
at which we have now arrived. What I wish my readers to bear in mind is
that the effect of a bad system of land tenure upon the other aspects of
the Irish Question reaches much further back than the struggles,
agitations, and reforms in connection with Irish land which this
generation has witnessed. The same may be said with regard to the other
economic grievances. No one can be more anxious than I am to fasten the
mind of my countrymen upon the practical things of to-day, and to wean
their sad souls from idle regrets over the sorrows of the past. If I
revive these dead issues, it is because I have learned that no man can
move the Irish mind to action unless he can see its point of view, which
is largely retrospective. I cannot ignore the fact that the attitude of
mind which causes the Irish people to put too much faith in legislative
cures for economic ills is mainly due to the belief that their ancestors
were the victims of a long series of laws by which every industry that
might have made the country prosperous was jealously repressed or
ruthlessly destroyed. Those who are not too much appalled by the
quantity to examine into the quality of popular oratory in Ireland are
familiar with the subordination of present economic issues to the dreary
reiteration of this old tale of woe. Personally I have always held that
to foster resentment in respect of these old wrongs is as stupid as was
the policy which gave them birth; and, even if it were possible to
distribute the blame among our ancestors, I am sure we should do
ourselves much harm, and no living soul any good, in the reckoning. In
my view, Anglo-Irish history is for Englishmen to remember, for Irishmen
to forget.

I may now conclude my appeal to outside observers for a broader and more
philosophic view of my country and my countrymen with a suggestion born
of my own early mistakes, and with a word of warning which is called for
by my later observation of the mistakes of others. The difficulty of the
outside observer in understanding the Irish Question is, no doubt,
largely due to the fact that those in intimate touch with the actual
conditions are so dominated by vehement and passionate conviction that
reason is not only at a discount but is fatal to the acquisition of
popular influence. Of course the power of knowledge and thought, though
kept in the background, is not really eliminated. But it is in the
circumstances not unnatural that most of us should fall into the error
of attributing to the influence of prominent individuals or
organisations the events and conditions which the superficial observer
regards as the creation of the hour, but which are in reality the
outcome of a slow and continuous process of evolution. I remember as a
boy being captivated by that charming corrective to this view of
historical development, Buckle's _History of Civilization_, which in
recent years has often recurred to my mind, despite the fact that many
of his theories are now somewhat discredited. Buckle, if I remember
right, almost eliminates the personal factor in the life of nations.
According to his theory, it would not have made much difference to
modern civilisation if Napoleon had happened, as was so near being the
case, to be born a British instead of a French subject. It would also
have followed that if O'Connell had limited his activities to his
professional work, or if Parnell had chanced to hate Ireland as bitterly
as he hated England, we should have been, politically, very much where
we are to-day. The student of Irish affairs should, of course, avoid the
extreme views of historical causation; but in the search for the truth
he will, I think, be well advised to attach less significance to the
influence of prominent personality than is the practice of the ordinary
observer in Ireland.

The warning I have to offer, I think, will be justified by a reflection
upon the history of the panaceas which we have been offered, and upon
our present state. To those of my British readers who honestly desire to
understand the Irish Question, I would say, let them eschew the sweeping
generalisations by which Irish intelligence is commonly outraged. I may
pass by the explanation which rests upon the cheap attribution of racial
inferiority with the simple reply that our inferior race has much of the
superior blood in its veins; yet the Irish problem is just as acute in
districts where the English blood predominates as where the people are
'mere Irish.' If this view be disputed, the matter is not worth arguing
about, because we cannot be born again. But there are three other common
explanations of the Irish difficulty, any one of which taken by itself
only leads away from the truth. I refer, I need hardly say, to the
familiar assertions that the origin of the evil is political, that it is
religious, or that it is neither one nor the other, but economic. In
Irish history, no doubt, we may find, under any of these heads, cause
enough for much of our present wrong-goings. But I am profoundly
convinced that each of the simple explanations to which I have just
alluded--the racial, the political, the religious, the economic--is
based upon reasoning from imperfect knowledge of the facts of Irish
life. The cause and cure of Irish ills are not chiefly political,
broaden or narrow our conception of politics as we will; they are not
chiefly religious, whatever be the effect of Roman Catholic influence
upon the practical side of the people's life; they are not chiefly
economic, be the actual poverty of the people and the potential wealth
of the country what they may. The Irish Question is a broad and deeply
interesting human problem which has baffled generation after generation
of a great and virile race, who complacently attribute their incapacity
to master it to Irish perversity, and pass on, leaving it unsolved by
Anglo-Saxons, and therefore insoluble!

FOOTNOTES:

[1] My own experience confirms Mr. Lecky's view of the chief cause of
this extraordinary feeling. "It is probable," he writes, "that the true
source of the savage hatred of England that animates great bodies of
Irishmen on either side of the Atlantic has very little real connection
with the penal laws, or the rebellion, or the Union. It is far more due
to the great clearances and the vast unaided emigrations that followed
the famine."--_Leaders of Public Opinion in Ireland_, Vol. II., p, 177.

[2] _Spectator_, 6th September, 1902.

[3] The title to the greater part of Irish land is based on
confiscation. This is true of many other countries, but what was
exceptional in the Irish confiscations was that the grantees for the
most part did not settle on the lands themselves, drive away the
dispossessed, or come to any rational working agreement with them.




CHAPTER II.

THE IRISH QUESTION IN IRELAND.


Whilst attributing the long continued failure of English rule in Ireland
largely to a misunderstanding of the Irish mind, I have given
England--at least modern England--credit for good intentions towards us.
I now come to the case of the misunderstood, and shall from henceforth
be concerned with the immeasurably greater responsibility of the Irish
people themselves for their own welfare. The most characteristic, and by
far the most hopeful feature of the change in the Anglo-Irish situation
which took place in the last decade of the nineteenth century, and upon
the meaning of which I dwelt in the preceding chapter, is the growing
sense amongst us that the English misunderstanding of Ireland is of far
less importance, and perhaps less inexcusable, than our own
misunderstanding of ourselves.

When I first came into practical touch with the extraordinarily complex
problems of Irish life, nothing impressed me so much as the universal
belief among my countrymen that Providence had endowed them with
capacities of a high order, and their country with resources of
unbounded richness, but that both the capacities and the resources
remained undeveloped owing to the stupidity--or worse--of British rule.
It was asserted, and generally taken for granted, that the exiles of
Erin sprang to the front in every walk of life throughout the world, in
every country but their own--though I notice that in quite recent times
endeavours have been made to cool the emigration fever by painting the
fortunes of the Irish in America in the darkest colours. To suggest that
there was any use in trying at home to make the best of things as they
were was indicative of a leaning towards British rule; and to attempt to
give practical effect to such a heresy was to draw a red herring across
the path of true Nationalism.

It is not easy to account for the long continuance of this attitude of
the Irish mind towards Irish problems, which seems unworthy of the
native intelligence of the people. The truth probably is that while we
have not allowed our intellectual gifts to decay, they have been of
little use to us because we have neglected the second part of the old
Scholastic rule of life, and have failed to develop the moral qualities
in which we are deficient. Hence we have developed our critical
faculties, not, unhappily, along constructive lines. We have been
throughout alive to the muddling of our affairs by the English, and have
accurately gauged the incapacity of our governors to appreciate our
needs and possibilities. But we recognised their incapacity more readily
than our own deficiencies, and we estimated the failure of the English
far more justly than we apportioned the responsibility between our
rulers and ourselves. The sense of the duty and dignity of labour has
been lost in the contemplation of circumstances over which it was
assumed that we have no control.

It is a peculiarity of destructive criticism that, unlike charity, it
generally begins and ends abroad; and those who cultivate the gentle art
are seldom given to morbid introspection. Our prodigious ignorance about
ourselves has not been blissful. Mistaking self-assertion for
self-knowledge, we have presented the pathetic spectacle of a people
casting the blame for their shortcomings on another people, yet bearing
the consequences themselves. The national habit of living in the past
seems to give us a present without achievement, a future without hope.
The conclusion was long ago forced upon me that whatever may have been
true of the past, the chief responsibility for the remoulding of our
national life rests now with ourselves, and that in the last analysis
the problem of Irish ineffectiveness at home is in the main a problem of
character--and of Irish character.

I am quite aware that such a diagnosis of our mind disease--from which
Ireland is, in my belief, slowly but surely recovering--will not pass
unchallenged, but I would ask any reader who dissents from this view to
take a glance at the picture of our national life as it might unfold
itself to an unprejudiced but sympathetic outsider who came to Ireland
not on a political tour but with a sincere desire to get at the truth of
the Irish Question, and to inquire into the conditions about which all
the controversy continues to rage.

This hypothetical traveller would discover that our resources are but
half developed, and yet hundreds of thousands of our workers have gone,
and are still going, to produce wealth where it is less urgently needed.
The remnant of the race who still cling to the old country are not only
numerically weak, but in many other ways they show the physical and
moral effects of the drain which emigration has made on the youth,
strength, and energy of the community. Our four and a quarter millions
of people, mainly agricultural, have, speaking generally, a very low
standard of comfort, which they like to attribute to some five or six
millions sterling paid as agricultural rent, and three millions of
alleged over-taxation. They face the situation bravely--and,
incidentally, swell the over-taxation--with the help of the thirteen or
fourteen millions worth of alcoholic stimulants which they annually
consume. The still larger consumption in Great Britain may seem to lend
at least a respectability to this apparent over-indulgence, but it looks
odd. The people are endowed with intellectual capacities of a high
order. They have literary gifts and an artistic sense. Yet, with a few
brilliant exceptions, they contribute nothing to invention and create
nothing in literature or in art. One would say that there must be
something wrong with the education of the country; and most people
declare that it is too literary, though the Census returns show that
there are still large numbers who escape the tyranny of books. The
people have an extraordinary belief in political remedies for economic
ills; and their political leaders, who are not as a rule themselves
actively engaged in business life, tell the people, pointing to ruined
mills and unused water power, that the country once had diversified
industries, and that if they were allowed to apply their panacea,
Ireland would quickly rebuild her industrial life. If our hypothetical
traveller were to ask whether there are no other leaders in the country
besides the eloquent gentlemen who proclaim her helplessness, he would
be told that among the professional classes, the landlords, and the
captains of industry, are to be found as competent popular advisers as
are possessed by any other country of similar economic standing. But
these men take only a dilettante part in politics, and no value is set
on industrial, commercial or professional success in the choice of
public men. Can it be that to the Irish mind politics are, what Bulwer
Lytton declared love to be, "the business of the idle, and the idleness
of the busy"?

These, though only a few of the strange ironies of Irish life, are so
paradoxical and so anomalous that they are not unnaturally attributed to
the intrusion of an alien and unfriendly power; and this furnishes the
reason why everything which goes wrong is used to nourish the
anti-English sentiment. At the same time they give emphasis to the
growing doubt as to the wisdom of those to whom the Irish Question
presents itself only as a single and simple issue--namely, whether the
laws which are to put all these things right shall be made at St.
Stephen's by the collective wisdom of the United Kingdom, aided by the
voice of Ireland--which is adequately represented--or whether these laws
shall be made by Irishmen alone in a Parliament in College Green.

It is obviously necessary that, in presenting a comprehensive scheme for
dealing with the conditions I have roughly indicated. I should make some
reference to the attitude towards Home Rule of both the Nationalists and
the Unionists who have joined in work which, whatever be its
irregularity from the standpoint of party discipline as enforced in
Ireland, has succeeded in some degree in directing the energies of our
countrymen to the development of the resources of our country. Many of
my fellow-workers were Nationalists who, while stoutly adhering to the
prime necessity for constitutional changes, took the broad view, which
was unpopular among the Irish Party, that much could be done, even under
present conditions, to build up our national life on its social,
intellectual, and economic sides. The well-known constitutional changes
which were advocated in the political party to which they belonged would
then, they believed, be more effectively demanded by Ireland, and more
readily conceded by England. Unionists who worked with me were similarly
affected by the changing mental outlook of the country. They, too, had
to break loose from the traditions of an Irish party, for they felt that
the exclusively political opposition to Home Rule was not less
demoralising than the exclusively political pursuit of Home Rule. Just
as the Nationalists who joined the movement believed that all progress
must make for self-government, so my Unionist fellow-workers believed
it would ultimately strengthen the Union. Each view was thoroughly sound
from the standpoint of those who held it, and could be regarded with
respect by those who did not. We were all convinced that the way to
achieve what is best for Ireland was to develop what is best in
Irishmen. And it was the conviction that this can be done by Irishmen in
Ireland that brought together those whose thought and work supplies
whatever there may be of interest in this book.

If I have fairly stated the attitude towards each other of the workers
to whose coming together must be attributed as much of the change in the
Irish situation as is due to Irish initiation, it will be seen that what
had so long kept them apart in public affairs, outside politics, was a
difference of opinion, not so much as to the conditions to be dealt
with, nor, indeed, as to the end to be sought, but rather as to the
means most effective for the attainment of that end. I naturally regard
the view which I am putting forward as being broader than that which has
hitherto prevailed. Some Nationalists may, however, contend that it is
essential to progress that the thoughts and energies of the nation
should be focussed upon a single movement, and not dissipated in the
pursuit of a multiplicity of ideals. I quite admit the importance of
concentration. But I strongly hold that any movement which is closely
related to the main currents of the people's life and subservient to
their urgent economic necessities, and which gives free play to the
intellectual qualities, while strengthening the moral or industrial
character, cannot be held to conflict with any national programme of
work, without raising a strong presumption that there is something wrong
with the programme. The exclusively political remedy I shall discuss in
the next chapter, but here I propose to consider some of the problems
which the new movement seeks to solve without waiting for the political
millenium.

It is a commonplace that there are two Irelands, differing in race, in
creed, in political aspiration, and in what I regard as a more potent
factor than all the others put together--economic interest and
industrial pursuit. In the mutual misunderstanding of these two
Irelands, still more than in the misunderstanding of Ireland by England,
is to be found the chief cause of the still unsettled state of the Irish
Question. I shall not seek to apportion the blame between the two
sections of the population; but as the mists clear away and we can begin
to construct a united and contented Ireland, it is not only legitimate,
but helpful in the extreme, to assign to the two sections of our
wealth-producers their respective parts in repairing the fortunes of
their country. In such a discussion of future developments chief
prominence must necessarily be given to the problems affecting the life
of the majority of the people, who depend directly on the land, and
conduct the industry which produces by far the greater portion of the
wealth of the country. It is, of course, essential to the prosperity of
the whole community that the North should pursue and further develop
its own industrial and commercial life. That section of the community
has also, no doubt, economic and educational problems to face, but these
are much the same problems as those of industrial communities in other
parts of the United Kingdom[4]; and if they do not receive, vitally
important as is their solution to the welfare of Ireland, any large
share of attention in this book, it is because they are no part of what
is ordinarily understood by the Irish Question.

Nevertheless, the interest of the manufacturing population of Ulster in
the welfare of the Roman Catholic agricultural majority is not merely
that of an onlooker, nor even that of the other parts of the United
Kingdom, but something more. It is obvious that the internal trade of
the country depends mainly upon the demand of the rural population for
the output of the manufacturing towns, and that this demand must depend
on the volume of agricultural production. I think the importance of
developing the home market has not been sufficiently appreciated, even
by Belfast. The best contribution the Ulster Protestant population can
make to the solution of this question is to do what they can to bring
about cordial co-operation between the two great sections of the
wealth-producers of Ireland. They should, I would suggest, learn to take
a broader and more patriotic view of the problems of the Roman Catholic
and agricultural majority, upon the true nature of which I hope to be
able to throw some new light. My purpose will be doubly served if I
have, to some extent, brought home to the minds of my Northern friends
that there is in Ireland an unsettled question in which they are largely
concerned, a rightly unsatisfied people by helping whom they can best
help themselves.

The Irish Question is, then, in that aspect which must be to Irishmen of
paramount importance, the problem of a national existence, chiefly an
agricultural existence, in Ireland. To outside observers it is the
question of rural life, a question which is assuming a social and
economic importance and interest of the most intense character, not only
for Ireland North and South, but for almost the whole civilised world.
It is becoming increasingly difficult in many parts of the world to keep
the people on the land, owing to the enormously improved industrial
opportunities and enhanced social and intellectual advantages of urban
life. The problem can be better examined in Ireland than elsewhere, for
with us it can, to a large extent, be isolated, since we have little
highly developed town life. Our rural exodus takes our people, for the
most part, not into Irish or even into British towns, but into those of
the United States. What is migration in other countries is emigration
with us, and the mind of the country, brooding over the dreary
statistics of this perennial drain, naturally and longingly turns to
schemes for the rehabilitation of rural life--the only life it knows.

We cannot exercise much direct influence upon the desire to emigrate
beyond spreading knowledge as to the real conditions of life in America,
for which home life in Ireland is often ignorantly bartered.[5] We
cannot isolate the phenomenon of emigration and find a cure for it apart
from the rest of the Irish Question. We must recognise that emigration
is but the chief symptom of a low national vitality, and that the first
result of our efforts to stay the tide may increase the outflow. We
cannot fit the people to stay without fitting them to go. Before we can
keep the people at home we have got to construct a national life with,
in the first place, a secure basis of physical comfort and decency. This
life must have a character, a dignity, an outlook of its own. A
comfortable Boeotia will never develop into a real Hibernia Pacata. The
standard of living may in some ways be lower than the English standard:
in some ways it may be higher. But even if statesmanship and all the
forces of philanthropy and patriotism combined can construct a contented
rural Ireland for the people, it can only be maintained by the people.
It will have to accord with the national sentiment and be distinctively
Irish. It is this national aspiration, and the remarkable promise of the
movements making for its fruition, which give to the work of Irish
social and economic reform the fascination which those who do not know
the Ireland of to-day cannot understand. This work of reform must, of
course, be primarily economic, but economic remedies cannot be applied
to Irish ills without the spiritual aids which are required to move to
action the latent forces of Irish reason and emotion.

       *       *       *       *       *

The task which we have to face is, then, a two-sided one, but its
economic and its purely practical aspects first demand consideration.
Many even of the agrarian aspects of the question have, so far, been
somewhat neglected in Ireland owing to a cause which is not far to seek.
It has often been asserted that the Irish Question is, at bottom, the
Land Question. There is a great deal of truth in this view, but almost
all those who hold it have fallen into the grave error of tacitly
identifying the land question with the tenure question--an error which
vitiates a great deal of current theorising about Ireland. It was,
indeed, inevitable that Irish agriculturists, with such an economic
history behind them as I have outlined in the previous chapter, should
have concentrated their attention during the latter half of the
nineteenth century upon obtaining a legislative cure for the ills
produced by legislation, to the comparative neglect of those equally
difficult, if less obvious economic questions, which have been brought
into special prominence by the agricultural depression of the last
quarter of a century. Now, however, that the Land Act of 1903 has been
passed and the solution of the tenure question is in sight, we in
Ireland are more free to direct our attention to what is at present the
most important aspect of the agrarian situation--the necessity for
determining the social and economic conditions essential to the
well-being of the peasant proprietary, which, though it is to be started
with as bright an outlook as the law can give, must stand or fall by its
own inherent merits or defects. Not only are we now free to give
adequate consideration to this question, but it is also imperative that
we should do so, for whilst I am hopeful that the Land Act will settle
the question of tenure, it will obviously not merely leave the other
problems of agricultural existence--problems some of which are not
unknown in other parts of the United Kingdom--still unsolved, but will
also increase the necessity for their solution, and will, moreover,
bring in its train complex difficulties of its own.

The main features of the depressing outlook of rural life in the United
Kingdom are well known. The land steadily passes from under the plough
and is given over to stock raising. As the kine increase the men decay.
In Ireland the rural exodus takes, as I have already said, the shape,
mainly, not of migration to Irish urban centres, but rather the uglier
form of an emigration which not only depletes our population but drains
it of the very elements which can least be spared.

The reason generally given for the widespread resort to the lotus-eating
occupation of opening and shutting gates, in preference to tilling the
soil, is that in the existing state of agricultural organisation, and
while urban life is ever drawing away labour from the fields, the
substitution of pasturage for tillage is the readiest way to meet the
ruinous competition of Eastern Europe, the Western Hemisphere, and
Australasia. Yet upon the economic merits of this process I have heard
the most diverse opinions stated with equal conviction by men thoroughly
well informed as to the conditions. One of the largest graziers in
Ireland recently gave me a picture of what he considered to be an ideal
economic state for the country. If two more Belfasts could be
established on the east coast, and the rest of the country divided into
five hundred acre farms, grazing being adopted wherever permanent grass
would grow, the limits of Irish productivity would be reached. On the
other hand, Dr. O'Donnell, the Roman Catholic Bishop of Raphoe, who may
be taken as an authoritative exponent of the trend of popular thought in
the country, not long ago advocated ploughing the grazing lands of
Leinster right up to the slopes of Tara.[6] Moreover, many theories have
been advanced to show that the decline of tillage, whatever be its
cause, involves an enormous waste of national resources. But of
practical suggestion, making for a remedy, there is very little
forthcoming.

The solution of all such problems largely depends upon certain
developments which, for many reasons, I regard as absolutely essential
to the success of the new agrarian order. One of these developments is
the spread of agricultural co-operation through voluntary associations.
Without this agency of social and economic progress, small landholders
in Ireland will be but a body of isolated units, having all the
drawbacks of individualism, and none of its virtues, unorganised and
singularly ill-equipped for that great international struggle of our
time, which we know as agricultural competition. Moreover, there is
another equally important, if less obvious, consideration which renders
urgent the organisation of our rural communities. From Russia, with its
half-communistic Mir to France with its modern village commune, there is
no country in Europe except the United Kingdom where the peasant
land-holders have not some form of corporate existence. In Ireland the
transition from landlordism to a peasant proprietary not only does not
create any corporate existence among the occupying peasantry but rather
deprives them of the slight social coherence which they formerly
possessed as tenants of the same landlord. The estate office has its
uses as well as its disadvantages, and the landlord or agent is by no
means without his value as a business adviser to those from whom he
collects the rent.

The organisation of the peasantry by an extension of voluntary
associations, which is a condition precedent of social and economic
progress, will not, however, suffice to enable them to face and solve
the problems with which they are confronted, and whose solution has now
become a matter of very serious concern to the British taxpayer. The
condition of our agrarian life clearly indicates the necessity for
supplementing voluntary effort with a sound system of State aid to
agriculture and industry--a necessity fully recognised by the
governments of every progressive continental country and of our own
colonies. An altogether hopeful beginning of combined self-help and
State assistance has been already made. Those who have been studying
these problems, and practically preparing the way for the proper care of
a peasant proprietary, have overcome the chief obstacles which lay in
their path. They have gained popular acceptance for the principle that
State aid should not be resorted to until organised voluntary effort has
first been set in motion, and that any departure from this principle
would be an unwarrantable interference with the business of the people,
a fatal blow to private enterprise.[7]

The task before the people, and before the State, of placing the new
agrarian order upon a permanent basis of decency and comfort is no light
one. Indeed, I doubt whether Parliament realises one-tenth of the
problems which the latest land legislation--by far the best we have yet
had--leaves unsolved. This becomes only too clear the moment we consider
seriously the fundamental question of the relation of population to area
in rural Ireland, or, in other words, when we inquire how many people
the agricultural land will support under existing circumstances, or
under any attainable improvement of the conditions in our rural life.
Roughly speaking, the surface area of the island is 20,000,000 acres, of
which 5,000,000 are described in the official returns as 'barren
mountain, bog and waste.' This leaves us with some 15,000,000 acres
available for agriculture and grazing, which area is now divided into
some 500,000 holdings. Thus we have an average of thirty acres in extent
for the Irish agricultural holding. But, unhappily, the returns show
that some 200,000 of these holdings are from one to fifteen acres in
extent. Nor do the mere figures show the case at its worst. For it
happens that the small holdings in Ireland, unlike those on the
Continent, are generally on the poorest land, and the majority of them
cannot come within any of the definitions of an 'economic holding.'

These 200,000 holdings, the homes of nearly a million persons, threaten
to prove the greatest danger to the future of agricultural Ireland. As
the majority of them, as at present constituted, do not provide the
physical basis of a decent standard of living, the question arises, how
are they to be improved? Putting aside emigration, which at one period
was necessary and ought to have been aided and controlled by the State,
but which is now no longer a statesman's remedy, there is obviously no
solution except by the migration of a portion of the occupiers, and the
utilisation of the vacated holdings in order to enable the peasants who
remain to prosper--much as a forest is thinned to promote the growth of
trees. In typical congested districts this operation will have to be
carried out on a much larger scale than is generally realised, for a
considerable majority of families will have to be removed, in order to
allow a sufficient margin for the provision of adequate holdings for
those who remain. In some cases, there are large grazing tracts in close
proximity to the congested area which might be utilised for the
re-settlement, but where this is not so and the occupiers of the vacated
holdings have to migrate a considerable distance, the problem becomes
far more difficult. I need not dwell upon the administrative
difficulties of the operation, which are not light. I may assume, also,
that there will be no difficulty in obtaining suitable land somewhere. I
do not myself attach much weight to the unwillingness of the people to
leave their old holdings for better ones, or to the alleged objection of
the clergy to allow their parishioners to go to another parish. More
serious is the possible opposition of those who live in the vicinity of
the unoccupied land about to be distributed, and who feel that they have
the first claim upon the State in any scheme for its redistribution with
the help of public credit. Mr. Parnell promoted a company with the sole
object of practically demonstrating how this problem could be solved. A
large capital was raised, and a large estate purchased; but the company
did not effect the migration of a single family. Still these are minor
considerations compared with the larger one, to which I must briefly
refer.

Under the Land Act of 1903 much has been done to facilitate the transfer
of peasants to new farms, but it is obvious that land cannot be handed
over as a gift from the State to the families which migrate. They will
become debtors for the value of the land itself, less perhaps a small
sum which may be credited to them in respect of the tenant's interest in
the holdings they have abandoned. This deduction will, however, be lost
in the expenditure required upon houses, buildings, fences, and other
improvements which would have to be effected before the land could be
profitably occupied. Speaking generally they will have no money or
agricultural implements, and their live stock will in many cases be
mortgaged to the local shopkeeper who has always financed them. It will
be necessary for the future welfare of the country to give them land
which admits of cultivation upon the ordinary principles of modern
agriculture; but without working capital, and bringing with them neither
the skill nor the habits necessary for the successful conduct of their
industry under the new conditions, it will be no easy task to place them
in a position to discharge their obligations to the State. It is all
very easy to talk about the obvious necessity of giving more land to
cultivators who have not enough to live upon; and there is, no doubt, a
poetic justice in the Utopian agrarianism which dangles before the eyes
of the Connaught peasantry the alternative of Heaven or Leinster. But
when we come down to practical economics, and face the task of giving to
a certain number of human beings, in an extremely backward industrial
condition, the opportunity of placing themselves and their families on a
basis of permanent well-being, it will be evident that, so far, at any
rate, as this particular community is concerned, the mere provision of
an economic holding is after all but a part of an economic existence.

I have touched upon this question of migration from uneconomic to
economic holdings because it signally illustrates the importance of the
human, in contradistinction to the merely material considerations
involved in the solution of the many-sided Irish Question. I must now
return to the wider question of the relation of population to area in
rural Ireland, as it affects the general scheme of agricultural and
industrial development.

It is obvious that there must be a limit to the number of individuals
that the land can support. Allowing an average of five members for each
family, and allowing for a considerable number of landless labourers, it
seems that the land at present directly supports about 2,500,000
persons--a view which, I may add, is fully borne out by the figures of
the recent census; and it is hard to see how a population living by
agriculture can be much increased beyond this number. Even if all the
land in Ireland were available for re-distribution in equal shares, the
higher standard of comfort to which it is essential that the condition
of our people should be raised would forbid the existence of much more
than half a million peasant proprietors.[8] Hence the evergreen query,
'What shall we do with our boys?' remains to be answered; for while the
abolition of dual ownership will enable the present generation to bring
up their children according to a higher standard of living, the change
will not of itself provide a career for the children when they have been
brought up. The next generation will have to face this problem:--the
average farm can support only one of the children and his family, what
is to become of the others? The law forbids sub-division for two
generations, and after that, _ex hypothesi_, the then prevailing
conditions of life will also prevent such partition. A few of the next
generation may become agricultural labourers, but this involves
descending to the lowest standard of living of to-day, and in any case
the demand for agricultural labourers is not capable of much extension
in a country of small peasant proprietors.

Against this view I know it is pointed out that in the earlier part of
the nineteenth century the agricultural population of Ireland was as
large as is the total population of to-day; but we know the sequel.
Instances are also cited of peasant proprietaries in foreign countries
which maintain a high standard of living upon small, sometimes
diminutive, and highly-rented holdings. We must remember, however, that
in these foreign countries State intervention has undoubtedly done much
to render possible a prosperous peasant proprietary by, for example, the
dissemination of useful information, admirable systems of technical
education in agriculture, cheap and expeditious transport, and even
State attention to the distribution of agricultural produce in distant
markets. Again, in many of these countries rural life is balanced by a
highly industrial town life, as, for instance, in the case of Belgium;
or is itself highly industrialised by the existence of rural industries,
as in the case of Switzerland; while in one notable instance--that of
Württemberg--both these conditions prevail.

The true lesson to be drawn from these foreign analogies is that not by
agriculture alone is Ireland to be saved. The solution of the rural
problem embraces many spheres of national activity. It involves, as I
have already said, the further development of manufactures in Irish
towns. One of the best ways to stimulate our industries is to develop
the home market by means of an increased agricultural production, and a
higher standard of comfort among the peasant producers. We shall thus
be, so to speak, operating on consumption as well as on production, and
so increasing the home demand for Irish manufactures. Perhaps more
urgent than the creation or extension of manufactures on a larger scale
is the development of industries subsidiary to agriculture in the
country. This is generally admitted, and most people have a fair
knowledge of the wide and varied range of peasant industries in all
European countries where a prosperous peasantry exists. Nor is there
much difficulty in agreeing upon the main conditions to be satisfied in
the selection of the industries to meet the requirements of our case.
The men and boys require employment in the winter months, or they will
not stay, and the rural industries promoted should, as far as possible,
be those which allow of intermittent attention. The female members of
the family must have profitable and congenial employment. The
handicrafts to be promoted must be those which will give scope to the
native genius and aesthetic sense. But unless we can thus supply the
demand of the peasant-industry market with products of merit or
distinctiveness, we shall fail in competition with the hereditary skill
and old established trade of peasant proprietors which have solved this
part of the problem generations ago. This involves the vigorous
application of a class of instruction of which something will be said
in the proper place.

So far the rural industry problem, and the direction in which its
solution is to be found, are fairly clear. But there is one disadvantage
with which we have to reckon, and which for many other reasons besides
the one I am now immediately concerned with, we must seek to remove. A
community does not naturally or easily produce for export that for which
it has itself no use, taste, or desire. Whatever latent capacity for
artistic handicrafts the Irish peasant may possess, it is very rarely
that one finds any spontaneous attempt to give outward expression to the
inward aesthetic sense. And this brings me to a strange aspect of Irish
life to which I have often wished, on the proper occasion, to draw
public attention. The matter arises now in the form of a peculiar
difficulty which lies in the path of those who endeavour to solve the
problem of rural life in Ireland, and which, in my belief, has
profoundly affected the fortunes of the race both at home and abroad.

To a sympathetic insight there is a singular and significant void in the
Irish conception of a home--I mean the lack of appreciation for the
comforts of a home, which might never have been apparent to me had it
not obtruded itself in the form of a hindrance to social and economic
progress.[9] In the Irish love of home, as in the larger national
aspirations, the ideal has but a meagre material basis, its appeal being
essentially to the social and intellectual instincts. It is not the
physical environment and comfort of an orderly home that enchain and
attract minds still dominated, more or less unconsciously, by the
associations and common interests of the primitive clan, but rather the
sense of human neighbourhood and kinship which the individual finds in
the community. Indeed the Irish peasant scarcely seems to have a home in
the sense in which an Englishman understands the word. If he love the
place of his habitation he does not endeavour to improve or to adorn it,
or indeed to make it in any sense a reflection of his own mind and
taste. He treats life as if he were a mere sojourner upon earth whose
true home is somewhere else, a fact often attributed to his intense
faith in the unseen, but which I regard as not merely due to this cause,
but also, and in a large measure, as the natural outcome of historical
conditions, to which I shall presently refer.

What the Irishman is really attached to in Ireland is not a home but a
social order. The pleasant amenities, the courtesies, the leisureliness,
the associations of religion, and the familiar faces of the neighbours,
whose ways and minds are like his and very unlike those of any other
people; these are the things to which he clings in Ireland and which he
remembers in exile. And the rawness and eagerness of America, the lust
of the eye and the pride of life that meet him, though with no welcoming
aspect, at every turn, the sense of being harshly appraised by new
standards of the nature of which he has but the dimmest conception, his
helplessness in the fierce current of industrial life in which he is
plunged, the climatic extremes of heat and cold, the early hours and few
holidays: all these experiences act as a rude shock upon the
ill-balanced refinement of the Irish immigrant. Not seldom, he or she
loses heart and hope and returns to Ireland mentally and physically a
wreck, a sad disillusionment to those who had been comforted in the
agony of the leave-taking by the assurance that to emigrate was to
succeed.

The peculiar Irish conception of a home has probably a good deal to do
with the history of the Irish in the United States. It is well known
that whatever measure of success the Irish emigrant has there achieved
is pre-eminently in the American city, and not where, according to all
the usual commonplaces about the Irish race, they ought to have
succeeded, in American rural life. There they were afforded, and there
they missed, the greatest opportunity which ever fell to the lot of a
people agriculturally inclined. During the days of the great emigrations
from Ireland, a veritable Promised Land, rich beyond the dreams of
agricultural avarice, was gradually opened up between the Alleghanies
and the Rocky Mountains, which the Irish had only to occupy in order to
possess. Making all allowances for the depressing influences which had
been brought to bear upon the spirit of enterprise, and for their
impoverished condition, I am convinced that a prime cause of the failure
of almost every effort to settle them upon the land was the fact that
the tenement house, with all its domestic abominations, provided the
social order which they brought with them from Ireland, and the lack of
which on the western prairie no immediate or prospective physical
comfort could make good.

Recently a daughter of a small farmer in County Galway with a family too
'long' for the means of subsistence available, was offered a comfortable
home on a farm owned by some better-off relatives, only thirty miles
away, though probably twenty miles beyond the limits of her utmost
peregrinations. She elected in preference to go to New York, and being
asked her reason by a friend of mine, replied in so many words, 'because
it is nearer.' She felt she would be less of a stranger in a New York
tenement house, among her relatives and friends who had already
emigrated, than in another part of County Galway. Educational science in
Ireland has always ignored the life history of the subject with which it
dealt. In no respect has this neglect been so unconsciously cruel as in
its failure to implant in the Irish mind that appreciation of the
material aspects of the home which the people so badly need both in
Ireland and in America If the Irishman abroad became 'a rootless
colonist of alien earth,' the lot of the Irishman in Ireland has been
not less melancholy. Sadness there is, indeed, in the story of 'the
sea-divided Gael,' but, to me, it is incomparably less pathetic than
their homelessness at home.

There are, as I have said, historic reasons for the Celtic view of home
to which my personal observation and experience has induced me to devote
so much space. The Irish people have never had the opportunity of
developing that strong and salutary individualism which, amongst other
things, imperiously demands, as a condition of its growth, a home that
shall be a man's castle as well as his abiding place. In this, as in so
much else, a healthy evolution was constantly thwarted by the clash of
two peoples and two civilisations. The Irish had hardly emerged from the
nomad pastoral stage, when the first of that series of invasions, which
had all the ferocity, without the finality of conquest, made settled
life impossible over the greater part of the island. An old chronicle
throws some vivid light upon the way in which the idea of home life
presented itself to the mind of the clan chiefs as late as the days of
the Tudors. "Con O'Neal," we are told, "was so right Irish that he
cursed all his posterity in case they either learnt English, sowed wheat
or built them houses; lest the first should breed conversation, the
second commerce, and with the last they should speed as the crow that
buildeth her nest to be beaten out by the hawk."[10] The penal laws,
again, acted as a disintegrant of the home and the family; and,
finally, the paralysing effect of the abuses of a system of land tenure,
under which evidences of thrift and comfort might at any time become
determining factors in the calculation of rent, completed a series of
causes which, in unison or isolation, were calculated to destroy at its
source the growth of a wholesome domesticity. These causes happily, no
longer exist, and powerful forces are arising to overcome the defects
and disadvantages which they have bequeathed to us; and I have little
doubt that it will be possible to deal successfully with this obstacle
which adds so peculiar a feature to the problem of rural life in
Ireland.

If I have dwelt at what may appear to be a disproportionate length upon
the Irishman's peculiar conception of a home, it is because this
difficulty, which Irish social and economic reformers still encounter,
and with which they must deal sympathetically if they are to succeed in
the work of national regeneration, strikingly illustrates the two-sided
character of the Irish Question and the never-to-be-forgotten
inter-dependence of the sentimental and the practical in Ireland. I
admit that this condition which adds to the interest of the problem, and
perhaps makes it more amenable to rapid solution, is an indication of a
weakness of moral fibre to which must be largely attributed our failure
to be master of our circumstances. Indeed, as I come into closer touch
with the efforts which are now being made to raise the material
condition of the people, the more convinced I become, much as my
practical training has made me resist the conviction, that the Irish
Question is, in its most difficult and most important aspects, the
problem of the Irish mind, and that the solution of this problem is to
be found in the strengthening of Irish character.

With this enunciation of the main proposition of my book, I may now
indicate the order in which I shall endeavour to establish its truth. I
have said enough to show that I do not ignore the historical causes of
our present state; but with so many facts with which we can deal
confronting us, I propose to review the chief living influences to which
the Irish mind and character are still subjected. These influences fall
naturally into three distinct categories and will be treated in the
three succeeding chapters. The first will show the effect upon the Irish
mind of its obsession by politics. The next will deal with the influence
of religious systems upon the secular life of the people. I shall then
show how education, which should not only have been the most potent of
all the three influences in bringing our national life into line with
the progress of the age, but should also have modified the operation of
the other two causes, has aggravated rather than cured the malady.

Whatever impression I may succeed in making upon others, I may here
state that, as the result of observation and reflection, the conclusion
has been forced upon me that the Irish mind is suffering from
considerable functional derangement, but not, so far as I can discern,
from any organic disease. This is the basis of my optimism. I shall
submit in another chapter, which will conclude the first, the critical
part of my book, certain new principles of treatment which are indicated
by the diagnosis; and I would ask the reader, before he rejects the
opinions which are there expressed, to persevere through the narrative
contained in the second part of the book. There he will find in process
of solution some of the problems which I have indicated, and the
principles for which a theoretical approval has been asked, in practical
operation, and already passing out of the experimental stage. The story
of the Self-help Movement will strike the note of Ireland's economic
hopes. The action of the Recess Committee will be explained, and the
concession of their demand by the establishment of a 'Department of
Agriculture and other rural industries and for Technical Instruction for
Ireland,' will be described. This will complete the story of a quiet,
unostentatious movement which will some day be seen to have made the
last decade of the nineteenth century a fit prelude to a future
commensurate with the potentialities of the Irish people.

FOOTNOTES:

[4] I speak from personal knowledge when I say that the leaders of Irish
industry and commerce are fully alive to the practical consideration
which they have now to devote to the new conditions by which they are
surrounded. They recognise that the intensified foreign competition
which harasses them is due chiefly to German education and American
enterprise. They are deep in the consideration of the form which
technical education should take to meet their peculiar needs; and I am
confident that Ulster will make a sound and useful contribution to the
solution of the commercial and industrial problems which confront the
manufacturers of the United Kingdom.

[5] That such a knowledge is still required, though the need is becoming
less urgent, is shown by an incident which illustrates the pathos of the
Irish exodus. A poor woman once asked me to help her son to emigrate to
America, and I agreed to pay his passage. Early in the negotiations,
finding that she was somewhat vague as to her boy's prospects, I asked
her whether he wanted to go to North or South America. This detail she
seemed to consider immaterial. "Ach, glory be to God, I lave that to yer
honner. Why wouldn't I?" Had I shipped him to Peru she would have been
quite satisfied. Why wouldn't she?

[6] Yet another view which seems to uproot most agrarian ideas in
Ireland has been put forward by Dr. O'Gara in _The Green Republic_
(Fisher Unwin, 1902). His main conclusion is that the present disastrous
state of our rural economy is due to our treating land as an object of
property and not of industry. He advocates the cultivation of the land
by syndicates holding farms of 20,000 acres and tilling them by the
lavish application of modern machinery as the only way to meet American
competition. His book is able and suggestive, but it is perhaps, a work
of supererogation to discuss a theory the whole moral of which is the
expediency of absolutely divorcing the functions of the proprietor and
the manager of land at a time when the consensus of opinion in Ireland
is in favour of uniting them, and in view of the fact that under the new
Land Act the future of the country seems inevitably to lie for a long
time in the hands of a peasant proprietary.

[7] The reader may wonder why I touch so lightly upon a fact of such
profound significance as the Irishman's acceptance of self-help as a
condition precedent of State aid in the development of agriculture and
industry. But such a cursory treatment, in the early chapters, of this
and of other equally important aspects of the Irish situation is
necessitated by the plan I have adopted. I am attempting to give in the
first part of the book a philosophic insight into the chief Irish
problems, and then, in the second part of the book, to present the facts
which appear to me to illustrate these problems in process of solution.

[8] The best expert agricultural opinion tells me that under present
conditions a family cannot live in any decent standard of comfort--such
as I hope to see prevail in Ireland--on less than 30 acres of Irish
land, taking the bad land with the good.

[9] It is, of course, unnecessary for me to dwell upon the part played
by the home in the standard of living, especially amongst a rural
community. But it may not be irrelevant to note that M. Desmolins, who,
in his remarkable book, _A quoi tient la superiorité des Anglo-saxons_?
hands over the future of civilisation to the Anglo-Saxons, ascribes to
the English rural home much of the success of the race.

[10] Speed's Chronicle, quoted in _Calendar of State Papers, Ireland,_
1611-14, p. xix.




CHAPTER III.

THE INFLUENCE OF POLITICS UPON THE IRISH MIND.


Among the humours of the Home Rule struggle, the story was current in
England that a peasant in Connemara ceased planting his potatoes when
the news of the introduction of the Home Rule Bill in 1886 seemed to
bring the millenium into the region of practical politics. Those who
used the story were not slow to suggest that, had the Bill become law,
the failure of spontaneous generation in the Connemara potato patch
might have been typical of much analogous disillusionment elsewhere.
Even to those who are familiar with our history, the faith of the Irish
people in the potentialities of government, which this little tale
illustrates by caricature, will give cause for reflection of another and
more serious kind. The moral to be drawn by Irish politicians is that we
in Ireland have yet to free ourselves from one of the worst legacies of
past misgovernment, the belief that any legislation or any legislature
can provide an escape from the physical and mental toil imposed through
our first parents upon all nations for all time.

'The more business in politics, and the less politics in business, the
better for both,' is a maxim which I brought home from the Far West and
ventured to advocate publicly some years ago. Being still of the same
mind, I regret that I am compelled to introduce a whole chapter of
politics into this book, which is a study of Irish affairs mainly from a
social and economic point of view. But to ignore, either in the
diagnosis or in the treatment of the 'mind diseased,' the political
obsession of our national life would be about as wise as to discuss and
plan a Polar expedition without taking account of the climatic
conditions to be encountered.

In such an examination of Irish politics as thus becomes necessary I
shall have to devote the greater part of my criticism to the influence
of the Nationalist party upon the Irish mind. But it will be seen that
this course is not taken with a view to making party capital for my own
side. As I read Irish history, neither party need expect very much
credit for more than good intentions. Whichever proves to be right in
its main contention, each will have to bear its share of the
responsibility for the long continuance of the barren controversy. Each
has neglected to concern itself with the settlement of vitally important
questions the consideration of which need not have been postponed
because the constitutional question still remained in dispute.
Therefore, though I seem to throw upon the Nationalist party the chief
blame for our present political backwardness, and, so far as politics
affect other spheres of national activity, for our industrial
depression, candour compels me to admit that Irish Unionism has failed
to recognise its obligation--an obligation recognised by the Unionist
party in Great Britain--to supplement opposition to Home Rule with a
positive and progressive policy which could have been expected to
commend itself to the majority of the Irish people--the Irish of the
Irish Question.

To my own party in Ireland then, I would first direct the reader's
attention. I have already referred to the deplorable effects produced
upon national life by the exclusion of representatives of the landlord
and the industrial classes from positions of leadership and trust over
four-fifths of the country. I cannot conceive of a prosperous Ireland in
which the influence of these leaders is restricted within its present
bounds. It has been so restricted because the Irish Unionist party has
failed to produce a policy which could attract, at any rate, moderate
men from the other side, and we have, therefore, to consider why we have
so failed. Until this is done, we shall continue to share the blame for
the miserable state of our political life which, at the end of the
nineteenth century, appeared to have made but little advance from the
time when Bishop Berkeley asked 'Whether our parties are not a burlesque
upon politics.'

The Irish Unionist party is supposed to unite all who, like the author,
are opposed to the plunge into what is called Home Rule. But its
propagandist activities in Ireland are confined to preaching the
doctrine of the _status quo_, and preaching it only to its own side.
From the beginning the party has been intimately connected with the
landlord class; yet even upon the land question it has thrown but few
gleams of the constructive thought which that question so urgently
demanded, and which it might have been expected to apply to it. Now and
again an individual tries to broaden the basis of Irish Unionism and to
bring himself into touch with the life of the people. But the nearer he
gets to the people the farther he gets from the Irish Unionist leaders.
The lot of such an individual is not a happy one: he is regarded as a
mere intruder who does not know the rules of the game, and he is treated
by the leading players on both sides like a dog in a tennis court.

Two main causes appear to me to account for the failure of the Irish
Unionist party to make itself an effective force in Irish national life.
The great misunderstanding to which I have attributed the unhappy state
of Anglo-Irish relations kept the country in a condition of turmoil
which enabled the Unionist party to declare itself the party of law and
order. Adopting Lord Salisbury's famous prescription, 'twenty years of
resolute government,' they made it what its author would have been the
last man to consider it, a sufficient justification for a purely
negative and repressive policy. Such an attitude was open to somewhat
obvious objections. No one will dispute the proposition that the
government of Ireland, or of any other country, should be resolute, but
twenty years of resolute government, in the narrow sense in which it
came to be interpreted, needed for its success, what cannot be had under
party government, twenty years of consistency. It may be better to be
feared than to be loved, but Machiavelli would have been the first to
admit that his principle did not apply where the Government which sought
to establish fear had to reckon with an Opposition which was making
capital out of love. Moreover, the suggestion that the Irish Question is
not a matter of policy but of police, while by no means without
influential adherents, is altogether vicious. You cannot physically
intimidate Irishmen, and the last thing you want to do is morally to
intimidate a people whose greatest need at the moment is moral courage.

The second cause which determined the character of Irish Unionism was
the linking of the agrarian with the political question; the one being,
in effect, a practical, the other a sentimental issue. The same thing
happened in the Nationalist party; but on their side it was intentional
and led to an immense accession of strength, while on the Unionist side
it made for weakness. If the influence of Irish Unionists was to be even
maintained, it was of vital importance that the interest of a class
should not be allowed to dominate the policy of the party. But the
organisation which ought to have rallied every force that Ireland could
contribute to the cause of imperial unity came to be too closely
identified with the landlord class. That class is admittedly essential
to the construction of any real national life. But there is another
element equally essential, to which the political leaders of Irish
Unionism have not given the prominence which is its due. The Irish
Question has been so successfully narrowed down to two simple policies,
one positive but vague, the other negative but definite, that to suggest
that there are three distinct forces--three distinct interests--to be
taken into account seems like confusing the issue. It is a fact,
nevertheless, that a very important element on the Unionist side, the
industrial element, has been practically left out of the calculation by
both sides. Yet the only expression of real political thought which I
have observed in Ireland, since I have been in touch with Irish life,
has emanated from the Ulster Liberal-Unionist Association, whose weighty
pronouncements, published from time to time, are worthy of deep
consideration by all interested in the welfare of Ireland.

It will be remembered that when the Home Rule controversy was at its
height, the chief strength of the Irish opposition to Mr. Gladstone's
policy, and the consideration which most weighed with the British
electorate, lay in the business objection of the industrial population
of Ulster; though on the platform religious and political arguments were
more often heard. The intensely practical nature of the objection which
came from the commercial and industrial classes of the North who opposed
Home Rule was never properly recognised in Ireland. It was, and is still
unanswered. Briefly stated, the position taken up by their spokesmen was
as follows:--'We have come,' they said in effect, 'into Ireland, and not
the richest portion of the island, and have gradually built up an
industry and commerce with which we are able to hold our own in
competition with the most progressive nations in the world. Our success
has been achieved under a system and a polity in which we believe. Its
non-interference with the business of the people gave play to that
self-reliance with which we strove to emulate the industrial qualities
of the people of Great Britain. It is now proposed to place the
manufactures and commerce of the country at the mercy of a majority
which will have no real concern in the interests vitally affected, and
who have no knowledge of the science of government. The mere shadow of
these changes has so depressed the stocks which represent the
accumulations of our past enterprise and labour that we are already
commercially poorer than we were.'[11]

My sole criticism of those leaders of commerce and industry in Belfast,
who, whenever they turn their attention from their various
pre-occupations, import into Irish politics the valuable qualities which
they display in the conduct of their private affairs, is that they do
not go further and take the necessary steps to give practical effect to
their views outside the ranks of their immediate associates and
followers. Had the industrial section made its voice heard in the
councils of the Irish Unionist party, the Government which that party
supports might have had less advice and assistance in the maintenance of
law and order, but it would have had invaluable aid in its constructive
policy. For the lack of the wise guidance which our captains of industry
should have provided, Irish Unionism has, by too close adherence to the
traditions of the landlord section, been the creed of a social caste
rather than a policy in Ireland. The result has been injurious alike for
the landlords, the leaders of industry, and the people. The policy of
the Unionist party in Ireland has been to uphold the Union by force
rather than by a reconciliation of the people to it. It has held aloof
from the masses, who, bereft of the guidance of their natural leaders,
have clung the more closely to the chiefs of the Nationalist party; and
these in their turn have not, as I shall show presently, risen to their
responsibility, but have retarded rather than advanced the march of
democracy in Ireland. If there is to be any future for Unionism in
Ireland, there must be a combination of the best thought of the country
aristocracy and that of the captains of industry. Then, and not till
then, shall we Unionists as a party exercise a healthful and stimulating
influence on the thought and action of the people.

I cannot, therefore, escape from the conclusion that whilst the Irish
section of the party to which I belong is, in my opinion, right on the
main political question, its influence is now for the most part
negative. Hence I direct attention mainly to the Home Rule party, as the
more forceful element in Irish political life; and if it receives the
more criticism it is because it is more closely in touch with the
people, and because any reform in its principles or methods would more
generally and more rapidly prove beneficial to the country than would
any change in Unionist policy.

In examining the policy of the Nationalist party my chief concern will
be to arrive at a correct estimate of the effect which is produced upon
the thought and action of the Irish people by the methods employed for
the attainment of Home Rule. I propose to show that these methods have
been in the past, and must, so long as they are employed, continue to be
injurious to the political and industrial character of the people, and
consequently a barrier to progress. I know that most of the Nationalist
leaders justify the employment of these methods on the ground that, in
their opinion, the constitutional reforms they advocate are a condition
precedent to industrial progress. I believe, on the contrary, and I
shall give my reasons for believing, that their tactics have been not
only a hindrance to industrial progress, but destructive even to the
ulterior purpose they were intended to fulfil.

It is commonly believed--a belief very naturally fostered by their
leaders--that, if there is one thing the Irish do understand, it is
politics. Politics is a term obviously capable of wide interpretation,
and I fear that those who say that my countrymen are pre-eminently
politicians use the term in a sense more applicable to the conceptions
of Mr. Richard Croker than of Aristotle. In intellectual capacity for
discrimination upon political issues the average Irish elector is, I
believe, far superior to the average English elector. But there is as
yet something wanting in the character of our people which seems to
prohibit the exercise by them of any independent political thought and,
consequently, of any effective or permanent political influence.

The assumption that Irishmen are singularly good politicians seems to
stand seriously in the way of their becoming so; and yet it is a matter
of the greatest importance that they should become good politicians in a
real sense, for in no country would sound political thought exercise a
more beneficial influence upon the life of the people than in Ireland.
Indeed I would go further and give it as my strong conviction that,
properly developed and freed from the narrowing influences of the party
squabbles by which it has been warped and sterilised, the political
thought of the Irish people would contribute a factor of vital
importance to the life of the British empire. But at the moment I am
dealing only with the influence of politics on Irish social and economic
life.

I am aware that any political deficiencies which the Irish may display
at home, are commonly attributed to the political system which has been
imposed upon Ireland from without. If you want to see Irish genius in
its highest political manifestation, it must be studied, we are told, in
the United States, the widest and freest arena which has ever been
offered to the race. This view is not in accordance with the facts as I
have observed them. These facts are somewhat obscured by the natural,
but misleading habit of reckoning to the account of Ireland at large
achievements really due to the Scotch-Irish, who helped to colonise
Pennsylvania, and who undoubtedly played a dominant part in developing
the characteristic features of the American political system. The
Scotch-Irish, however, do not belong to the Ireland of the Irish
Question Descended, largely, as their names so often testify, from the
early Irish colonists of western Scotland, they came back as a distinct
race, dissociating themselves from the Irish Celts by refusing to adopt
their national traditions, or intermarry with them, and both here and in
America disclaiming the appellation of Irish.[12]

Leaving, then, out of consideration the political achievements of the
Scotch-Irish, it appears to me that the part played in politics by the
Irish in America does not testify to any high political genius. They
have shown there an extraordinary aptitude for political organisation,
which, if it had been guided by anything approaching to political
thought, would have placed them in a far higher position in American
public life than that which they now occupy. But the fact is that it
would be much easier to find evidence of high political capacity and
success in the history of the Irish in British colonies; and the reason
for this fact is not only very germane to the purpose of this book, but
has a strong practical interest for Americans as well. Irishmen when
they go to America find themselves united by a bond which does not and
could not exist in the Colonies--though it does exist in Ireland--the
bond of anti-English feeling, and by the hope of giving practical effect
to this feeling through the policy of their adopted country. Imbued with
this common sentiment, and influenced by their inherited clannishness,
the Irish in America readily lend themselves to the system of political
groups, a system which the 'boss' for his own ends seeks to perpetuate.
The result is a sort of political paradox--it has made the Irish in
America both stronger and weaker than they ought to be. They suffer
politically from the defects of their political qualities: they are
strong as a voting machine, but the secret of their collective strength
is also the secret of their individual weakness. This organisation into
groups is much commoner among the Irish than among other American
immigrants, for the anti-English feeling with which so many of the Irish
land in America is carefully kept alive by the 'boss,' whose sedulous
fostering of the instinctive clannishness and inherited leader-following
habits of the Irish saps their independence of thought and prevents them
from ceasing to be mere political agents and developing a citizenship
which would furnish its due quota of statesmen to the service of the
Republic. They lack in the United States just what they lack at home,
the capacity, or at any rate the inclination, to use their undoubted
abilities in a large and foreseeing manner, and so are becoming less and
less powerful as a force in American politics.

The fallacious views about the nature and sphere of politics, which the
Irish bring with them from Ireland, and which are perpetuated in
America, have the effect not only of debarring the Irish from real
political progress, but also, as at home, from gaining success in
industrial pursuits which their talents would otherwise win for them.
They succeed as journalists owing to their quick intelligence and
versatility, and as contractors mainly owing to their capacity for
organising gangs of workmen--a faculty which seems to be the only good
thing resulting from their political education. They are as brilliant
soldiers in the service of the United States as they are in that of
Britain--more it would be impossible to say--and they have produced
types of daring, endurance, and shrewdness like the 'Silver Kings' of
Nevada which testify to the exceptional powers always developed by the
Irish in exceptional circumstances. But in the humdrum business of
everyday life in the United States they suffer from defects which are
the outcome of their devotion to mistaken political ideals and of their
subordination of industry to politics, which are not always purely
American, but are often influenced by considerations of the country of
their birth. On the whole, a quarter of a century of not unsympathetic
observation of the Irish in the United States has convinced me that the
position they occupy there is not one which either they or the American
people can look on with entire satisfaction. The Irish immigrants are
felt to belong to a kind of _imperium in imperio_, and to carry into
American politics ideas which are not American, and which might easily
become an embarrassment if not a danger to America. Hence the powerful
interest which America shares with England, though of course in a less
degree, in understanding and helping to settle the complex difficulty
called the Irish Question. The Irish remember Ireland long after they
have left it. They are not in the same position as the German or English
immigrants who have no cause at home which they wish to forward. Every
echo in the States of political or social disturbance in Ireland rouses
the immigrant and he becomes an Irishman once more, and not a citizen of
the country of his adoption. His views and votes on international
questions, in so far as they affect these Islands, are thus often
dictated more by a passionate sympathy for and remembrance of the land
he no longer lives in, than by any right understanding of the interests
of the new country in which he and his children must live.

The only reason why I have examined the assumption that Irishmen display
marked political capacity in the United States is to make it clear that
the political deficiencies they manifest at home are to be attributed
mainly to defects of character, and to a conception of politics for
which modern English government is very slightly responsible. I admit
that English government in the past had no small share in producing the
results we deplore to-day, but the motives and manner of its action
have, it seems to me, been very imperfectly understood.

The fact is that the difficulties of English government in Ireland,
until a complete military conquest had been effected, were of a
peculiarly complex character. Before the English could impose upon
Ireland their own political organisation--and the idea that any other
system could work better among the Irish never entered the English
mind--it was obviously necessary that the very antithesis of that
organisation, the clan system, should be abolished. But there were
military and financial objections to carrying out this policy. Irish
campaigns were very costly, and England was in those days by no means
wealthy. English armies in Ireland, after a short period spent in
desultory warfare with light armed kernes in the fever-stricken Munster
forests, began to melt away. For many generations, therefore, England,
adopting a policy of _divide et impera_, set clan against clan. Later
on, statecraft may be said to have supervened upon military tactics. It
consisted of attempts made by alternate threats and bribes to induce the
chiefs to transform the clan organisation by the acceptance of English
institutions. But any systematic endeavours to complete the
transformation were soon rendered abortive by being coupled with huge
confiscations of land. The policy of converting the members of the clans
into freeholders was subordinated to the policy of planting British
colonists. After this there was no question of fusion of races or
institutions. Plantations on a large scale, self-supporting,
self-protecting, became the policy alike of the soldier and the
statesman.

The inevitable result of these methods was that it was not until a
comparatively late date that a political conception of an Irish nation
first began to emerge out of the congeries of clans. In the State Papers
of the sixteenth century the clans are frequently spoken of as
'nations.' Even as late as the eighteenth century a Gaelic poet, in a
typical lament, thus identifies his country with the fortunes of her
great families:--

    The O'Doherty is not holding sway, nor his noble race;
    The O'Moores are not strong, that once were brave--
    O'Flaherty is not in power, nor his kinsfolk;
    And sooth to say, the O'Briens have long since become English.

    Of O'Rourke there is no mention--my sharp wounding!
    Nor yet of O'Donnell in Erin;
    The Geraldines they are without vigour--without a nod,
    And the Burkes, the Barrys, the Walshes of the slender ships.[13]

The modern political idea of Irish nationality at length asserted itself
as the result of three main causes. The bond of a common grievance
against the English foe was created by the gradual abandonment of the
policy of setting clan against clan in favour of impartial confiscation
of land from friendly as well as from hostile chiefs. Secondly, when the
English had destroyed the natural leaders, the clan chiefs, and
attempted to proselytise their adherents, the political leadership
largely passed to the Roman Catholic Church, which very naturally
defended the religion common to the members of all the clans, by trying
to unite them against the English enemy. Nationality, in this sense, of
course applied only to Celtic Roman Catholic Ireland. The first real
idea of a United Ireland arose out of the third cause, the religious
grievances of the Protestant dissenters and the commercial grievances of
the Protestant manufacturers and artisans in the eighteenth century, who
suffered under a common disability with the Roman Catholics, and many of
whom came in the end to make common cause with them. But even long after
this conception had become firmly established, the local representative
institutions corresponding to those which formed the political training
of the English in law and administration either did not exist in Ireland
or were altogether in the hands of a small aristocracy, mostly of
non-Irish origin, and wholly non-Catholic. O'Connell's great work in
freeing Roman Catholic Ireland from the domination of the Protestant
oligarchy showed the people the power of combination, but his methods
can hardly be said to have fostered political thought. The efforts in
this direction of men like Gavan Duffy, Davis, and Lucas were
neutralised by the Famine, the after effects of which also did much to
thwart Butt's attempts to develop serious public opinion amongst a
people whose political education had been so long delayed. The prospect
of any early fruition of such efforts vanished with the revolutionary
agrarian propaganda, and independent thinking--so necessary in the
modern democratic state--never replaced the old leader-following habit
which continued until the climax was reached under Parnell.

The political backwardness of the Irish people revealed itself
characteristically when, in 1884, the English and Irish democracies were
simultaneously endowed with a greatly extended franchise. In theory this
concession should have developed political thought in the people and
should have enhanced their sense of political responsibility. In England
no doubt this theory was proved by the event to be based on fact; but in
Ireland it was otherwise. Parnell was at the zenith of his power. The
Irish had the man, what mattered the principles? The new suffrages
simply became the figures upon the cheques handed over to the Chief by
each constituency, with the request that he would fill in the name of
the payee. On one or two occasions a constituency did protest against
the payee, but all that was required to settle the matter was a personal
visit from the Chief. Generally speaking, the electorate were quite
docile, and instances were not wanting of men discovering that they had
found favour with electors to whom their faces and even their names were
previously unknown.

No doubt, the one-man system had a tactical value, of which the English
themselves were ever ready to make use. "If all Ireland cannot rule this
man, then let this man rule all Ireland," said Henry VII. of the Earl of
Kildare; and the echo of these words was heard when the Kilmainham
Treaty was negotiated with the last man who wore the mantle of the
chief. But whatever may be said for the one-man system as a means of
political organisation, it lacked every element of political education.
It left the people weaker, if possible, and less capable than it found
them; and assuredly it was no fit training for Home Rule. While
Parnell's genius was in the ascendant, all was well--outwardly. When a
tragic and painful disclosure brought about a crisis in his fate, it
will hardly be contended by the most devoted admirer of the Irish people
that the situation was met with even moderate ability and foresight. But
the logic of events began to take effect. The decade of dissension which
followed the fall of Parnell will, perhaps, some day be recognised as a
most fruitful epoch in modern Irish history. The reaction from the
one-man system set in as soon as the one man had passed away. The
independence which Parnell's former lieutenants began to assert when the
laurels faded upon the brow of the uncrowned King communicated itself to
some extent to the rank and file. The mere weighing of the merits of
several possible successors led to some wholesome questioning as to the
merits of the policies, such as they were, which they respectively
represented The critical spirit which was now called forth, did not, at
first, go very far; but it was at least constructive and marked a
distinct advance towards real political thought. I believe the day will
come, and come soon, when Nationalist leaders themselves will recognise
that while bemoaning faction and dissension and preaching the cause of
'unity' they often mistook the wheat for the tares. They will, I feel
sure, come to realise that the passing of the dictatorship, which to
outward appearances left the people as "sheep without a shepherd, when
the snow shuts out the sky," in fact turned the thoughts of Ireland in
some measure away from England into her own bosom, and gave birth there
to the idea of a national life to which the Irish people of all classes,
creeds, and politics could contribute of their best.

I sometimes wonder whether the leaders of the Nationalist party really
understand the full effect of their tactics upon the political character
of the Irish people, and whether their vision is not as much obscured by
a too near, as is the vision of the Unionist leaders by a too distant,
view of the people's life. Everyone who seeks to provide practical
opportunities for Irish intellect to express-itself worthily in active
life--and this, I take it, is part of what the Nationalist leaders wish
to achieve--meets with the same difficulty. The lack of initiative and
shrinking from responsibility, the moral timidity in glaring contrast
with the physical courage--which has its worst manifestation in the
intense dread of public opinion, especially when the unknown terrors of
editorial power lurk behind an unfavourable mention 'on the paper,'
are, no doubt, qualities inherited from a primitive social state in
which the individual was nothing and the community everything. These
defects were intensified in past generations by British statecraft,
which seemed unable to appreciate or use the higher instincts of the
race; they remain to-day a prominent factor in the great human problem
known as the Irish Question--a factor to which, in my belief, may be
attributed the greatest of its difficulties.

It is quite clear that education should have been the remedy for the
defects of character upon which I am forced to dwell so much; and I
cannot absolve any body of Irishmen, possessed of actual or potential
influence, of failure to recognise this truth. But here I am dealing
only with the political leaders, and trying to bring home to them the
responsibility which their power imposes upon them, not only for the
political development but also for the industrial progress of their
followers. They ought to have known that the weakness of character which
renders the task of political leadership in Ireland comparatively easy
is in reality the quicksand of Irish life, and that neither
self-government nor any other institution can be enduringly built upon
it.

The leaders of the Nationalist party are, of course, entitled to hold
that, in existing political conditions, any non-political movement
towards national advancement, which in its nature cannot be linked, as
the land question was linked, to the Home Rule movement constitutes an
unwarrantable sacrifice of ends to means. And so holding, they are
further entitled to subject any proposal to elevate popular thought, or
to direct popular activities, to a strict censorship as to its remote as
well as to its immediate effect upon the electorate. I know, too, that
it is held by some thinking Nationalists who take no active part in
politics that the politicians are justified on tactical grounds in this
exclusive pursuit of their political aims, and in the methods by which
they pursue them. They consider the present system of government too
radically wrong to mend, and they can undoubtedly point to agrarian
legislation as evidence of the effectiveness of the means they employ to
gain their end.

This view of things has sunk very deep into the Irish mind. The policy
of 'giving trouble' to the Government is looked upon as the one road to
reform and is believed in so fervently that, except for religion, which
sometimes conflicts with it, there is scarcely any capacity left for
belief in anything else. I am far from denying that the past offers much
justification for the belief that nothing can be gained by Ireland from
England except through violent agitation. Until recently, I admit,
Ireland's opportunity had to wait for England's difficulty. But, as
practised in the present day, I believe this doctrine to be mischievous
and false. For one thing, there is a new England to deal with. The
England which, certainly not in deference to violent agitation,
established the Congested Districts Board, gave Local Government to
Ireland, and accepted the recommendations of the Recess Committee for
far-reaching administrative changes, as well as those of the Land
Conference which involved great financial concessions, is not the
England of fifty years ago, still less the England of the eighteenth
century. Moreover, in riveting the mind of the country on what is to be
obtained from England, this doctrine of 'giving trouble,' the whole
gospel of the agitator, has blinded the Irish people to the many things
which Ireland can do for herself. Whatever may be said of what is called
'agitation' in Ireland as an engine for extorting legislation from the
Imperial Parliament, it is unquestionably bad for the much greater end
of building up Irish character and developing Irish industry and
commerce. 'Agitation,' as Thomas Davis said, 'is one means of redress,
but it leads to much disorganisation, great unhappiness, wounds upon the
soul of a country which sometimes are worse than the thinning of a
people by war.'[14] If Irish politicians had at all realised this truth,
it is difficult to believe that the popular movement of the last quarter
of a century would not have been conducted in a manner far less
injurious to the soul of Ireland and equally or more effective for
legislative reform as well as all other material interests.

Now, modern Nationalism in Ireland is open to damaging criticism not
only from my Unionist point of view, which was also, in many respects,
the view of so strong a Nationalist as Thomas Davis; it is also open to
grave objection from the point of view of the effectiveness of the
tactics employed for the attainment of its end--the winning of Home
Rule.

Before examining the effect of these tactics I may point out that this
conception of Nationalist policy, even if justifiable from a practical
point of view, does not relieve the leaders from the obligation of
giving some assurance that they are ready with a consistent scheme of
re-construction, and are prepared to build when the ground has been
cleared. In this connection I might make a good deal of Unionist
capital, and some points in support of my condemnation of the political
absorption of the Irish mind, out of the total failure of the
Nationalist party to solve certain all-important constitutional and
financial problems which months of Parliamentary debate in 1893 tended
rather to obscure than to elucidate. I am, however, willing for
argument's sake to postpone all such questions, vital as they are, to
the time when they can be practically dealt with. I am ready to assume
that the wit of man can devise a settlement of many points which seemed
insoluble in Mr. Gladstone's day. But even granting all this, I think it
can easily be shown that the means which the political thought
available on the Nationalist side has evolved for the attainment of
their end, and which _ex hypothesi_ are only to be justified on tactical
grounds, are the least likely to succeed; and that, consequently, they
should be abandoned in favour of a constructive policy which, to say the
least, would not be less effective towards advancing the Home Rule
cause, if that cause be sound, and which would at the same time help the
advancement of Ireland in other than political directions.

Tactics form but a part of generalship, and half the success of
generalship lies in making a correct estimate of the opposing forces.
This is as true of political as it is of military operations. Now, of
what do the forces opposed to Home Rule consist? The Unionists, it may
be admitted, are numerically but a small minority of the population of
Ireland--probably not more than one-fourth. But what do they represent?
First, there are the landed gentry. Let us again make a concession for
the sake of argument and accept the view that this class so wantonly
kept itself aloof from the life of the majority of the people that the
Nationalists could not be expected to count them among the elements of a
Home Rule Ireland. I note, in passing, with extreme gratification that
at the recent Land Conference it was declared by the tenants'
representatives that it was desirable, in the interests of Ireland, that
the present owners of land should not be expatriated, and that
inducements should be afforded to selling owners to continue to reside
in the country.

But I may ignore this as I wish here to recall attention to that other
element, which was, as I have already said, the real force which turned
the British democracy against Home Rule--I mean the commercial and
industrial community in Belfast and other hives of industry in the
north-east corner of the country, and in scattered localities elsewhere.
I have already admitted that the political importance of the industrial
element was not appreciated in Irish Unionist circles. No less
remarkable is the way in which it has been ignored by the Nationalists.
The question which the Nationalists had to answer in 1886 and 1893, and
which they have to answer to-day, is this:--In the Ireland of their
conception is the Unionist part of Ulster to be coerced or persuaded to
come under the new regime? To those who adopt the former alternative my
reply is simply that, if England is to do the coercion, the idea is
politically absurd. If we were left to fight it out among ourselves, it
is physically absurd. The task of the Empire in South Africa was light
compared with that which the Nationalists would have on hands. I am
aware that, at the time when we were all talking at concert pitch on the
Irish Question, a good deal was said about dying in the last ditch by
men who at the threat of any real trouble would be found more discreetly
perched upon the first fence. But those who know the temper and fighting
qualities of the working-men opponents of Home Rule in the North are
under no illusion as to the account they would give of themselves if
called upon to defend the cause of Protestantism, liberty, and imperial
unity as they understand it. Let us, however, dismiss this alternative
and give Nationalists credit for the desire to persuade the industrial
North to come in by showing it that it will be to its advantage to join
cordially in the building up of a united Ireland under a separate
legislature.

The difficulties in the way of producing this conviction are very
obvious. The North has prospered under the Act of Union--why should it
be ready to enter upon a new 'variety of untried being'? What that state
of being will be like, it naturally gauges from the forces which are
working for Home Rule at present. Looking at these simply from the
industrial standpoint and leaving out of account all the powerful
elements of religious and race prejudice, the man of the North sees two
salient facts which have dominated all the political activity of the
Nationalist campaign. One is a voluble and aggressive disloyalty, not
merely to 'England' and to the present system of government, but to the
Crown which represents the unity of the three kingdoms, and the other is
the introduction of politics into business in the very virulent and
destructive form known as boycotting.

Now, hostility to the Crown, if it means anything, means a struggle for
separation as soon as Home Rule has given to the Irish people the power
to organise and arm. And (still keeping to the sternly practical point
of view) that would, for the time being at least, spell absolute ruin to
the industrial North. The practice of boycotting, again, is the very
antithesis of industry--it creates an atmosphere in which industry and
enterprise simply cannot live. The North has seen this practice condoned
as a desperate remedy for a desperate ill, but it has seen it continued
long after the ill had passed away, used as a weapon by one Nationalist
section against another, and revived when anything like a really
oppressive or arbitrary eviction had become impossible. There seems to
have been in Nationalist circles, since the time of O'Connell, but
little appreciation of the deadly character of this social curse; and
the prospect of a Government which would tolerate it naturally fills the
mind of the Northern commercial man with alarm and aversion.

Again, the democratisation of local government which gave the
Nationalist leaders a unique opportunity of showing the value, has but
served to demonstrate the ineffectiveness, of their political tactics.
North of Ireland opinion was deeply interested in this reform, and
appreciated its far-reaching importance. Elsewhere, I think it will be
safe to say, people generally were indifferent to it until it came, and
the leaders seemed to see in it only a weapon to be used for political
purposes. To the great vista of useful and patriotic work opened out by
the Act of 1898, to the impression that a proper use of that Act might
make on Northern opinion, they were blind. It is true that the Councils
when left to themselves did admirably, and fully justified the trust
reposed in them. But at the inauguration of local government it was
naturally not the work of the Councils but the attitude of the party
leaders which appeared to stamp the reception of the Act by the Irish
people.

It is true, of course, that many thoughtful men among the Nationalist
party repudiate the idea that the methods of to-day would be continued
in a self-governed Ireland. I fail to see any reason why they should
not. Under any system of limited Home Rule questions would arise which
would afford much the same sort of justification for the employment of
such methods, and they could hardly be worse for the welfare of the
country then than they are now. There is abundant need and abundant work
in the present day for thoughtful and far-seeing men in a party
constitutionally so strong as that of the Irish Nationalists. If those
among them who possess, or at any rate can make effective use of
qualities of constructive statesmanship are as few as the history of
recent years would lead us to suppose, what assurance can Ulster
Unionists feel that such men would spring up spontaneously in an Ireland
under Home Rule? I admit, indeed, that a considerable measure of such
assurance might be derived from the attitude of the leaders of the party
at and since the Land Conference. But this adoption of statesmanlike
methods which cannot be too widely understood or too warmly commended is
a matter of very recent history; and though we may hope that the success
attending it will help materially in the political education of the
Irish people, that will not, by itself, undo the effect of a quarter of
a century of political agitation governed by ideas the very reverse of
those which are now happily beginning to find favour.

I have thought it necessary to examine at some length the defence on the
ground of tactics which is often made for Nationalist politics, because
it is the only defence ever made by those apologists who admit the
disturbing influence upon our economic and social life of Nationalist
methods. A broader and saner view of political tactics than prevailed
ten years ago is now possible, for circumstances are becoming friendly
and helpful to the development of political thought. Though the United
Irish League apparently restored 'unity' to the ranks of the
Nationalists, the country is, I believe, getting restless under the
political bondage, and is seething with a wholesome discontent. In this
very matter of political education, the stir of corporate life, the
sense of corporate responsibility which in every parish of Ireland are
now being fostered by the reformed system of local government, must make
their influence felt in wider spheres. Even now I believe that the field
is ready for the work of those who would bid the old leader-following
habit, the product partly of the dead clan system, partly of dying
national animosities, depart as a thing that has had its day, and who
would endeavour to train up a race of free, self-reliant, and
independent citizens in a free state.

In this work the very men whose mistaken conception of a united Ireland
I have criticised will, I doubt not, take a leading part. In many
respects, and these not the least important, no one could desire a
better instrument for the achievement of great reforms than the Irish
party. They are far beyond any similar group of English members in
rhetorical skill and quickness of intelligence and decision, qualities
which no doubt belong to the mechanism rather than the soul of politics,
but which the practical worker in public life will not despise. But even
when tried by a higher standard the Irish members need not fear the
judgment of history. They have often, in my opinion, misconceived the
true interests of their country, but they have been faithful to those
interests as they understood them, and have proved themselves notably
superior to sordid personal aims. These gifts and virtues are not
common, but still rarer is it to see such gifts and virtues cursed with
the doom of futility. The influence of the Irish political leaders has
neither advanced the nation's march through the wilderness nor taught
the people how they are to dispense with manna from above when they
reach the Promised Land. With all their brilliancy, they have thrown but
little helpful light on any Irish problem. In this want of political and
economic foresight Irish Nationalist politicians, with some exceptions
whom it would be invidious to name, have fallen lamentably short of what
might be expected of Irish intellect. For the eight years during which I
represented an Irish constituency I always felt that an Irish night in
the House of Commons was one of the strangest and most pathetic of
spectacles. There were the veterans of the Irish party hardened by a
hundred fights, ranging from Venezuela to the Soudan in search of
battlefields, making allies of every kind of foreign potentate, from
President Cleveland to the Mahdi, from Mr. Kruger to the Akhoom of Swat,
but looking with suspicion on every symptom of an independent national
movement in Ireland; masters of the language of hate and scorn, yet
mocked by inevitable and eternal failure; winners of victories that turn
to dust and ashes; devoted to their country, yet, from ignorance of the
real source of its malady, ever widening the gaping wound through which
its life-blood flows. While I recall these scenes, there rises before my
mind the picture vividly drawn by Miss Lawless of their prototypes, the
'Wild Geese,' who carried their swords into foreign service after the
final defeat of the Stuarts:--

    War-battered dogs are we,
    Fighters in every clime,
    Fillers of trench and of grave,
    Mockers, bemocked by Time;
    War-dogs, hungry and grey,
    Gnawing a naked bone,
    Fighting in every clime
    Every cause but our own.[15]

Irishmen have been long in realising that the days of the 'Wild Geese'
are over, and that there are battles for Ireland to be fought and won in
Ireland--battles in which England is not the enemy she was in the days
of Fontenoy, but a friend and helper. But there will be little gain in
replacing the traditional conception of England as the inexorable foe by
the more modern conception, which threatened to become traditional in
its turn, of England as the source of all prosperity and her favour as
the condition of all progress in Ireland. In the recent Land Conference
I recognise something more valuable even than the financial and
legislative results which flowed from it, for it showed that the
conception of reliance upon Irishmen in Ireland, not under some future
and problematical conditions, but here and now, for the solution of
Irish questions, is gaining ground among us. If this conception once
takes firm hold, as I think it is beginning to do, of the Nationalist
party in Ireland, much of the criticism of this chapter will lose its
meaning. The mere substitution of a positive Irish policy for a negative
anti-English policy will elevate the whole range of Nationalist
political activity in and out of Ireland. And I am certain that if the
ultimate goal of Nationalist politics be desirable, and continue to be
desired, it will not be rendered more difficult, but on the contrary
very much easier of attainment if those who seek it take possession of
the great field of work which, without waiting for any concessions from
Westminster, is offered by the Ireland of to-day.

FOOTNOTES:

[11] This view of the case was powerfully stated by the deputation from
the Belfast Chamber of Commerce which waited on Mr. Gladstone in the
spring of 1893. They pointed out _inter alia_ that the members of the
deputation were poorer by thousands of pounds owing to the fall in Irish
stocks consequent upon the introduction of the Home Rule Bill in that
year.

[12] The term 'Scotch-Irish' does not mean an amalgam of Scotch and
Irish, but a race of Scottish immigrants who settled in north-east
Ireland. I may point out that in these criticisms of Irish-American
politics I refer, of course, mainly to the Irish-born immigrants and not
to the Irish, Scotch-Irish or other, who are American-born. Nobody can
have a higher appreciation than I of the great part played by the
American-Irish once they have assimilated the full spirit of American
institutions.

[13] _Poems of Egan O'Rahilly._ Edited, with translation, by the Rev.
P.S. Dinneen, M.A., for the Irish Texts Society, p. 11. O'Rahilly's
charge against Cromwell is that he "gave plenty to the man with the
flail," but beggared the great lords, p. 167.

[14] _Prose Writings of Thomas Davis_, p. 284. 'The writers of _The
Nation_,' wrote Davis in another place, 'have never concealed the
defects or flattered the good qualities of their countrymen. They have
told them in good faith that they wanted many an attribute of a free
people, _and that the true way to command happiness and liberty was by
learning the arts and practising the culture that fitted men for their
enjoyment'_ (p. 176). The thing that especially distinguished Davis
among Nationalist politicians was the essentially constructive mind
which he brought to bear on Irish questions, as illustrated in the
passage I have italicised. It is, I am afraid, the part of his legacy of
thought which has been least regarded by his admirers.

[15] _With the Wild Geese_. Poems by the Hon. Emily Lawless. I have
never read a better portrayal of the historic Irish sentiment than is
set forth in this little volume. By the way, there is a preface by Mr.
Stopford Brooke, which is singularly interesting and informing.




CHAPTER IV.

THE INFLUENCE OF RELIGION UPON SECULAR LIFE IN IRELAND.


In the preceding chapter I attempted to estimate the influence of our
political leaders as a potential and as an actual force. I come now to
the second great influence upon the thought and action of the Irish
people, the influence of religion, especially the power exercised by the
priests and by the unrivalled organisation of the Roman Catholic Church.
I do not share the pessimism which sees in this potent influence nothing
but the shackles of mediævalism restraining its adherents from falling
into line with the progress of the age. I shall, indeed, have to admit
much of what is charged against the clerical leaders of popular thought
in Ireland, but I shall be able to show, I hope, that these leaders are
largely the product of a situation which they themselves did not create,
and that not only are they as susceptible as are the political leaders
to the influences of progressive movements, but that they can be more
readily induced to take part in their promotion. In no other country in
the world, probably, is religion so dominant an element in the daily
life of the people as in Ireland, and certainly nowhere else has the
minister of religion so wide and undisputed an authority. It is obvious,
therefore, that, however foreign such a theme may _prima facie_ appear
to the scope and aim of the present volume, I have no choice but to
analyse frankly and as fully as my personal experience justifies, what I
conceive to be the true nature, the salutary limits, and the actual
scope of clerical influence in this country.

But before I can discuss what I may call the religious situation, there
is one fundamental question--a question which will appear somewhat
strange to anyone not in touch with Irish life--which I must, with a
view to a general agreement on essentials, submit to some of my
co-religionists. In all seriousness I would ask, whether in their
opinion the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland is to be tolerated. If the
answer be in the negative, I can only reply that any efforts to stamp
out the Roman Catholic faith would fail as they did in the past; and the
practical minds among those I am now addressing must admit that in
toleration alone is to be found the solution of that part of the Irish
difficulty which is due to sectarian animosities.

This brings us face to face with the question, What is religious
toleration--I do not mean as a pious sentiment which we are all
conscious of ourselves possessing in a truer sense than that in which it
is possessed by others, but rather toleration as an essential of the
liberty which we Protestants enjoy under the British Constitution, and
boast that all other creeds equally enjoy? Perhaps I had better state
simply how I answer this question in my own mind. Toleration by the
Irish minority, in regard to the religious faith and ecclesiastical
system of the Irish majority, implies that we admit the right of Rome to
say what Roman Catholics shall believe and what outward forms they shall
observe, and that they shall not suffer before the State for these
beliefs and observances. I do not think exception can be taken to the
statement that toleration in this narrow sense cannot be refused
consistently with the fundamental principles of British government.

Now, however, comes a less obvious, but, as I think, no less essential
condition of toleration in the sense above indicated. The Roman Catholic
Hierarchy claim the right to exercise such supervision and control over
the education of their flock as will enable them to safe-guard faith and
morals as preached and practised by their Church. I concede this second
claim as a necessary corollary of the first. Having lived most of my
life among Roman Catholics--two branches of my own family belonging to
that religion--I am aware that this control is an essential part of the
whole fabric of Roman Catholicism. Whether the basis of authority upon
which that system is founded be in its origin divine or human is beside
the point. If we profess to tolerate the faith and religious system of
the majority of our countrymen we must at least concede the conditions
essential to the maintenance of both the one and the other, unless our
tolerance is to be a sham.

So far all liberal-minded Protestants, who know what Roman Catholicism
is, will be with me; and for the main purposes of the argument contained
in this chapter it is not necessary to interpret toleration in any wider
sense than that which I have indicated. Many Protestants, among whom I
am one, do, it is true, make a further concession to the claim of our
Roman Catholic fellow-countrymen. We would give them in Ireland
facilities for higher education which we would not give them in England,
and we would advocate liberal endowment by the State to this end. But
this attitude is, I admit, based upon something more than tolerance, and
those who would withhold this concession need not be accused of bigotry
or intolerance for so doing. They may be, and often are, actuated by the
most liberal motives, by a perfectly legitimate conception of
educational principles, or by other considerations which are neither of
a narrow nor sectarian character.

I need hardly say that in criticising religious systems and their
ministers I have not the faintest intention of entering on the
discussion of doctrinal issues. I am, of course, here concerned with
only those aspects of the religious situation which bear directly on
secular life. I am endeavouring, it must be remembered, to arrive at a
comprehensive and accurate appreciation of the chief influences which
mould the character, guide the thought, and, therefore, direct the
action of the Irish people as citizens of this world and of their own
country. From this standpoint let us try to make a dispassionate survey
of Protestantism and Roman Catholicism in Ireland, and see wherein
their votaries fulfil, or fail to fulfil, their mission in advancing our
common civilisation. Let us examine, in a word, not merely the direct
influence which the creed of each of the two sections of Irishmen
produces on the industrial character of its adherents, but also its
indirect effects upon the mutual relations and regard for each other of
Protestants and Roman Catholics.

Protestantism has its stronghold in the great industrial centres of the
North and among the Presbyterian farmers of five or six Ulster counties.
These communities, it is significant to note, have developed the
essentially strenuous qualities which, no doubt, they brought from
England and Scotland. In city life their thrift, industry, and
enterprise, unsurpassed in the United Kingdom, have built up a
world-wide commerce. In rural life they have drawn the largest yield
from relatively infertile soil. Such, in brief, is the achievement of
Ulster Protestantism in the realm of industry. It is a story of which,
when a united Ireland becomes more than a dream, all Irishmen will be
proud.

But there is, unhappily, another side to the picture. This industrial
life, otherwise so worthily cultivated, is disturbed by manifestations
of religious bigotry which sadly tarnish the glory of the really heroic
deeds they are intended to commemorate. It is impossible for any close
observer of these deplorable exhibitions to avoid the conclusion that
the embers of the old fires are too often fanned by men who are
actuated by motives, which, when not other than religious, are certainly
based upon an unworthy conception of religion. I am quite aware that it
is only a small and decreasing minority of my co-religionists who are
open to the charge of intolerance, and that the geographical limits of
the July orgy are now strictly circumscribed. But this bigotry is so
notorious, as for instance in the exclusion of Roman Catholics from many
responsible positions, that it unquestionably reacts most unfavourably
upon the general relations between the two creeds throughout the whole
of Ireland. The existence of such a spirit of suspicion and hatred, from
whatever motive it emanates, is bound to retard our progress as a people
towards the development of a healthy and balanced national life.

Many causes have recently contributed to the unhappy continuance of
sectarian animosities in Ireland. The Ritualistic movement and the
struggle over the Education Bill in England, the renewed controversy on
the University Question in Ireland, instances of bigotry towards
Protestants displayed by County, District, and Urban Councils in the
three southern provinces of Ireland, the formation of the Catholic
Association, the question of the form of the King's oath, and, more
remotely, the protest against clericalism in such Roman Catholic
countries as France and Austria, have one and all helped to keep alive
the flame of anti-Roman feeling among Irish Protestants.[16]

There are, happily, other influences now at work in a contrary
direction. Among the industrial leaders a better spirit prevails. A
well-known Ulster manufacturer told me recently that only a few years
ago, when an applicant for employment appeared at certain Northern
factories, which my friend named, the first question always put was,
'Are you a Protestant or Roman Catholic?' Now, he said, it is not what a
man believes, but what he can do, which is considered when engaging
workers. And outside the cities there are most gratifying signs of
better relations between the two creeds. We are on the eve of the
creation of a peasant proprietary, involving the rehabilitation of rural
life, and one essential condition of the successful inauguration of the
new agrarian order is the elimination of anything approaching to
sectarian bitterness in communities which will require every advantage
derivable from joint deliberation and common effort to enable them to
hold their own against foreign competition. I recall a trivial but
significant incident in the course of my Irish work which left a deep
impression on my mind. After attending a meeting of farmers in a very
backward district in the extreme west of Mayo, I arrived one winter's
evening at the Roman Catholic priest's house. Before the meeting I had
been promised a cup of tea, which, after a long, cold drive, was more
than acceptable. When I presented myself at the priest's house, what was
my astonishment at finding the Protestant clergyman presiding over a
steaming urn and a plate of home-made cakes, having been requested to do
the honours by his fellow-minister, who had been called away to a sick
bed. A cycle of homilies on the virtue of tolerance could add nothing to
the simple lesson which these two clergymen gave to the adherents of
both their creeds. I felt as I went on my way that night that I had had
a glimpse into the kind of future for Ireland towards which my
fellow-workers are striving.

It is, however, with the religion of the majority of the Irish people
and with its influence upon the industrial character of its adherents
that I am chiefly concerned. Roman Catholicism strikes an outsider as
being in some of its tendencies non-economic, if not actually
anti-economic. These tendencies have, of course, much fuller play when
they act on a people whose education has (through no fault of their own)
been retarded or stunted. The fact is not in dispute, but the difficulty
arises when we come to apportion the blame between ignorance on the part
of the people and a somewhat one-sided religious zeal on the part of
large numbers of their clergy. I do not seek to do so with any precision
here. I am simply adverting to what has appeared to me, in the course of
my experience in Ireland, to be a defect in the industrial character of
Roman Catholics which, however caused, seems to me to have been
intensified by their religion. The reliance of that religion on
authority, its repression of individuality, and its complete shifting of
what I may call the moral centre of gravity to a future existence--to
mention no other characteristics--appear to me calculated, unless
supplemented by other influences, to check the growth of the qualities
of initiative and self-reliance, especially amongst a people whose lack
of education unfits them for resisting the influence of what may present
itself to such minds as a kind of fatalism with resignation as its
paramount virtue.

It is true that one cannot expect of any church or religion, as a
condition of its acceptance, that it will furnish an economic theory;
and it is also true that Roman Catholicism has, at different periods of
history, advantageously affected economic conditions, even if it did not
act from distinctively economic motives--for example, by its direct
influence in the suppression of slavery[17] and its creation of the
mediæval craft guilds. It may, too, be admitted that during the Middle
Ages, when Roman Catholicism was freer than now to manifest its
influence in many directions, owing to its practically unchallenged
supremacy, it favoured, when it did not originate, many forms of sound
economic activity, and was, to say the least, abreast of the time in its
conception of the working of economic causes. But from the time when
the Reformation, by its demand for what we Protestants conceive to be a
simpler Christianity, drove Roman Catholicism back, if I may use the
expression, on its first line of defence, and constrained it to look to
its distinctively spiritual heritage, down to the present day, it has
seemed to stand strangely aloof from any contact with industrial and
economic issues. When we consider that in this period Adam Smith lived
and died, the industrial revolution was effected, and the world-market
opened, it is not surprising that we do not find Roman Catholic
countries in the van of economic progress, or even the Roman Catholic
element in Protestant countries, as a rule, abreast of their
fellow-countrymen. It would, however, be an error to ignore some notable
exceptions to this generalisation. In Belgium, in France, in parts of
Germany and Austria, and in the north of Italy economic thought is
making headway amongst Roman Catholics, and the solution of social
problems is being advanced by Roman Catholic laymen and clergymen. Even
in these countries, however, much remains to be done. The revolution in
the industrial order, and its consequences, such as the concentration of
immense populations within restricted areas, have brought with them
social and moral evils that must be met with new weapons. In the
interests of religion itself, principles first expounded to a Syrian
community with the most elementary physical needs and the simplest of
avocations, have to be taught in their application to the conditions of
the most complex social organisation and economic life. Taking people
as we find them, it may be said with truth that their lives must be
wholesome before they can be holy, and while a voluntary asceticism may
have its justification, it behoves a Church to see that its members,
while fully acknowledging the claims of another life, should develop the
qualities which make for well-being in this life. In fact, I believe
that the influence of Christianity upon social progress will be best
maintained by co-ordinating these spiritual and economic ideals in a
philosophy of life broader and truer than any to which the nations have
yet attained.

What I have just been saying with regard to Roman Catholicism generally,
in relation to economic doctrines and industrial progress, applies, of
course, with a hundred fold pertinence to the case of Ireland. Between
the enactment of the first Penal Laws and the date of Roman Catholic
Emancipation, Irish Roman Catholics were, to put it mildly, afforded
scant opportunity, in their own country, of developing economic virtues
or achieving industrial success. Ruthlessly deprived of education, are
they to be blamed if they did not use the newly acquired facilities to
the best advantage? With their religion looked on as the badge of legal
and social inferiority, was it any wonder that priests and people alike,
while clinging with unexampled fidelity to their creed, remained
altogether cut off from the current of material prosperity? Excluded, as
they were, not merely from social and political privileges, but from the
most ordinary civil rights, denied altogether the right of ownership of
real property, and restricted in the possession of personalty, is it
any wonder that they are not to-day in the van of industrial and
commercial progress? Nay, more, was it to have been expected that the
character of a people so persecuted and ostracised should have come out
of the ordeal of centuries with its adaptability and elasticity
unimpaired? That would have been impossible. Those who are intimate with
the Roman Catholic people of Ireland, and at the same time familiar with
their history, will recognise in their character and mental outlook many
an inheritance of that epoch of serfdom. I speak, of course, of the
mass, for I am not unmindful of many exceptions to this generalisation.

But I must now pass on to a more definite consideration of the present
action and attitude of the Irish Roman Catholic clergy towards the
economic, educational, and other issues discussed in this book. The
reasons which render such a consideration necessary are obvious. Even if
we include Ulster, three quarters of the Irish people are Roman
Catholics, while, excluding the Northern province, quite nine-tenths of
the population belong to that religion. Again, the three thousand
clergymen of that denomination exercise an influence over their flocks
not merely in regard to religious matters, but in almost every phase of
their lives and conduct, which is, in its extent and character, quite
unique, even, I should say, amongst Roman Catholic communities. To a
Protestant, this authority seems to be carried very far beyond what the
legitimate influence of any clergy over the lay members of their
congregation should be. We are, however, dealing with a national life
explicable only by reference to a very exceptional and gloomy history of
religious persecution. What I may call the secular shortcomings of the
Roman Catholics in Ireland cannot be fairly judged except as the results
of a series of enactments by which they were successively denied almost
all means of succeeding as citizens of this world.

From such study as I have been able to give to the history of their
Church, I have come to the conclusion that the immense power of the
Irish Roman Catholic clergy has been singularly little abused. I think
it must be admitted that they have not exhibited in any marked degree
bigotry towards Protestants. They have not put obstacles in the way of
the Roman Catholic majority choosing Protestants for political leaders,
and it is significant that refugees, such as the Palatines, from
Catholic persecutions in Europe, found at different times a home amongst
the Roman Catholic people of Ireland. My own experience, too, if I may
again refer to that, distinctly proves that it is no disadvantage to a
man to be a Protestant in Irish political life, and that where
opposition is shown to him by Roman Catholics it is almost invariably on
political, social, or agrarian, but not on religious grounds.

A charge of another kind has of late been often brought against the
Roman Catholic clergy, which has a direct bearing upon the economic
aspect of this question. Although, as I read Irish history, the Roman
Catholic priesthood have, in the main, used their authority with
personal disinterestedness, if not always with prudence or discretion,
their undoubted zeal for religion has, on occasion, assumed forms which
enlightened Roman Catholics, including high dignitaries of that Church,
think unjustifiable on economic grounds, and discourage even from a
religious standpoint. Excessive and extravagant church-building in the
heart and at the expense of poor communities is a recent and notorious
example of this misdirected zeal. It has been, I believe, too often
forgotten that the best monument of any clergyman's influence and
earnestness must always be found in the moral character and the
spiritual fibre of his flock, and not in the marbles and mosaics of a
gaudy edifice. And without doubt a good many motives which have but a
remote connection with religion are, unfortunately, at work in the
church-building movement. It may, however, to some extent, be regarded
as an extreme re-action from the penal times, when the hunted _soggarth_
had to celebrate the Mass in cabins and caves on the mountain side--a
re-action the converse of which was witnessed in Protestant England when
Puritanism rose up against Anglicanism in the seventeenth century. This
expenditure, however, has been incurred; and, no one, I take it, would
advocate the demolition of existing religious edifices on the ground
that their erection had been unduly costly! The moral is for the present
and the future, and applies not merely to economy in new buildings, but
also in the decoration of existing churches.[18]

But it is not alone extravagant church building which in a country so
backward as Ireland, shocks the economic sense. The multiplication--in
inverse ratio to a declining population--of costly and elaborate
monastic and conventual institutions, involving what in the aggregate
must be an enormous annual expenditure for maintenance, is difficult to
reconcile with the known conditions of the country. Most of these
institutions, it is true, carry on educational work, often, as in the
case of the Christian Brothers and some colleges and convents, of an
excellent kind. Many of them render great services to the poor, and
especially to the sick poor. But, none the less, it seems to me, their
growth in number and size is anomalous. I cannot believe that so large
an addition to the 'unproductive' classes is economically sound, and I
have no doubt at all that the competition with lay teachers of celibates
'living in community' is excessive and educationally injurious. Strongly
as I hold the importance of religion in education, I personally do not
think that teachers who have renounced the world and withdrawn from
contact with its stress and strain are the best moulders of the
characters of youths who will have to come into direct conflict with the
trials and temptations of life. But here again we must accept the
situation and work with the instruments ready to hand. The practical and
statesmanlike action for all those concerned is to endeavour to render
these institutions as efficient educational agencies as may be possible.
They owe their existence largely to the gaps in the educational system
of this country which religious and political strife have produced and
maintained, and they deserve the utmost credit for endeavouring to
supply missing steps in our educational ladder.[19] If they now fully
respond to the spirit of the new movements and meet the demand for
technical education by the employment of the most approved methods and
equipment, and by the thorough training on sound lines of their staffs,
it is impossible that their influence on the young generation should not
be as salutary as it will be wide-reaching.

But, after all, these criticisms are, for the purposes of my argument,
of minor relevance and importance. The real matter in which the direct
and personal responsibility of the Roman Catholic clergy seems to me to
be involved, is the character and _morale_ of the people of this
country. No reader of this book will accuse me of attaching too little
weight to the influence of historical causes on the present state,
social, economic and political, of Ireland, but even when I have given
full consideration to all such influences I still think that, with their
unquestioned authority in religion, and their almost equally undisputed
influence in education, the Roman Catholic clergy cannot be exonerated
from some responsibility in regard to Irish character as we find it
to-day. Are they, I would ask, satisfied with that character? I cannot
think so. The impartial observer will, I fear, find amongst a majority
of our people a striking absence of self-reliance and moral courage; an
entire lack of serious thought on public questions; a listlessness and
apathy in regard to economic improvement which amount to a form of
fatalism; and, in backward districts, a survival of superstition, which
saps all strength of will and purpose--and all this, too, amongst a
people singularly gifted by nature with good qualities of mind and
heart.

Nor can the Roman Catholic clergy altogether console themselves with the
thought that religious faith, even when free from superstition, is
strong in the breasts of the people. So long, no doubt, as Irish Roman
Catholics remain at home, in a country of sharply defined religious
classes, and with a social environment and a public opinion so
preponderatingly stamped with their creed, open defections from Roman
Catholicism are rare. But we have only to look at the extent of the
'leakage' from Roman Catholicism amongst the Irish emigrants in the
United States and in Great Britain, to realise how largely emotional and
formal must be the religion of those who lapse so quickly in a
non-Catholic atmosphere.[20]

It is not, of course, to the causes of the defections from a creed to
which I do not subscribe that my criticism is directed. I refer to the
matter only in order to emphasise the large share of responsibility
which belongs to the Roman Catholic clergy for what I strongly believe
to be the chief part in the work of national regeneration, the part
compared with which all legislative, administrative, educational or
industrial achievements are of minor importance. Holding, as I do, that
the building of character is the condition precedent to material, social
and intellectual advancement, indeed to all national progress, I may,
perhaps, as a lay citizen, more properly criticise, from this point of
view, what I conceive to be the great defect in the methods of clerical
influence. For this purpose no better illustration could be afforded
than a brief analysis of the results of the efforts made by the Roman
Catholic clergy to inculcate temperance.

Among temperance advocates--the most earnest of all reformers--the Roman
Catholic clergy have an honourable record. An Irish priest was the
greatest, and, for a brief spell, the most successful temperance apostle
of the last century, and statistics, it is only fair to say, show that
we Irish drink rather less than people in other parts of the United
Kingdom. But the real question is whether we more often drink to
intoxication, and police statistics as well as common experience seem to
disclose that we do. Many a temperate man drinks more in his life than
many a village drunkard. Again, the test of the average consumption of
man, woman and child is somewhat misleading, especially in Ireland
where, owing to the excessive emigration of adults, there is a
disproportionately large number of very young and old. Moreover, we
Irish drink more in proportion to our means than the English, Scotch,
and Welsh, whose consumption is absolutely larger. Anyone who attempts
to deal practically with the problems of industrial development in
Ireland realises what a terribly depressing influence the drink evil
exercises upon the industrial capacity of the people. 'Ireland sober is
Ireland free,' is nearer the truth, than much that is thought and most
of what is said about liberty in this country.

Now, the drink habit in Ireland differs from that of the other parts of
the United Kingdom. The Irishman is, in my belief, physiologically less
subject to the craving for alcohol than the Englishman, a fact which is
partially attributable, I should say, to the less animal dietary to
which he is accustomed. By far the greater proportion of the drinking
which retards our progress is of a festive character. It takes place at
fairs and markets, sometimes, even yet, at 'wakes,' those ghastly
parodies on the blessed consolation of religion in bereavement. It is
intensified by the almost universal sale of liquor in the country shops
'for consumption on the premises,' an evil the demoralising effects of
which are an hundredfold greater than those of the 'grocer's licences'
which temperance reformers so strenuously denounce. It is an evil in
defence of which nothing can be said, but it has somehow escaped the
effective censure of the Church.

The indiscriminate granting of licences in Ireland, which has resulted
in the provision of liquor shops in a proportion to the population
larger than is found in any other country, is in itself due mainly to
the moral cowardice of magistrates, who do not care to incur local
unpopularity by refusing licences for which there is no pretence of any
need beyond that of the applicant and his relatives. Not long ago the
magistrates of Ireland met in Dublin in order to inaugurate common
action in dealing with this scandal. Appropriate resolutions were
passed, and much good has already resulted from the meeting, but had the
unvarnished truth been admissible, the first and indeed the only
necessary resolution should have run, "Resolved that in future we be
collectively as brave as we have been individually timid, and that we
take heart of grace and carry away from this meeting sufficient strength
to do, in the exercise of our functions as the licensing authority, what
we have always known to be our plain duty to our country and our God."
No such resolution was proposed, for though patriotism is becoming real
in Ireland, it is not yet very robust.

I do not think it unfair to insist upon the large responsibility of the
clergy for the state of public opinion in this matter, to which the few
facts I have cited bear testimony. But I attribute their failure to deal
with a moral evil of which they are fully cognisant to the fact that
they do not recognise the chief defect in the character of the people,
and to a misunderstanding of the means by which that character can be
strengthened. There are, however, exceptions to this general statement.
It is of happy augury for the future of Ireland that many of the clergy
are now leading a temperance movement which shows a real knowledge of
the _causa causans_ of Irish intemperance. The Anti-Treating League, as
it is called, administers a novel pledge which must have been conceived
in a very understanding mind. Those enlisted undertake neither to treat
nor to be treated. They may drink, so far as the pledge is concerned, as
much as they like; but they must drink at their own expense; and others
must not drink at their expense. The good nature and sociability of
Irishmen, too often the mere result of inability to say 'no,' need not
be sacrificed. But even if they were, the loss of these social graces
would be far more than compensated by a self-respect and seriousness of
life out of which something permanent might be built. Still, even this
League makes no direct appeal to character, and so acts rather as a cure
for than as a preventive of our moral weakness.

The methods by which clerical influence is wielded in the inculcation of
chastity may be criticised from exactly the same standpoint as that from
which I have found it necessary to deal with the question of temperance.
Here the success of the Irish priesthood is, considering the conditions
of peasant life, and the fire of the Celtic temperament, absolutely
unique. No one can deny that almost the entire credit of this moral
achievement belongs to the Roman Catholic clergy. It may be said that
the practice of a virtue, even if the motive be of an emotional kind,
becomes a habit, and that habit proverbially develops into a second
nature. With this view of moral evolution I am in entire accord; but I
would ask whether the evolution has not reached a stage where a gradual
relaxation of the disciplinary measures by which chastity is insured
might be safely allowed without any danger of lowering the high standard
of continence which is general in Ireland and which of course it is of
supreme importance to maintain.

There are, however, many parishes where in this matter the strictest
discipline is rigorously enforced Amusements, not necessarily or even
often vicious, are objected to as being fraught with dangers which would
never occur to any but the rigidly ascetic or the puritanical mind. In
many parishes the Sunday cyclist will observe the strange phenomenon of
a normally light-hearted peasantry marshalled in male and female groups
along the road, eyeing one another in dull wonderment across the
forbidden space through the long summer day. This kind of discipline,
unless when really necessary, is open to the objection that it
eliminates from the education of life, especially during the formative
years, an essential of culture--the mutual understanding of the sexes.
The evil of grafting upon secular life a quasi-monasticism which, not
being voluntary, has no real effect upon the character, may perhaps
involve moral consequences little dreamed of by the spiritual guardians
of the people. A study of the pathology of the emotions might throw
doubt upon the safety of enforced asceticism when unaccompanied by the
training which the Church wisely prescribes for those who take the vow
of celibacy. But of my own knowledge I can speak only of another aspect
of the effect upon our national life of the restrictions to which I
refer. No Irishmen are more sincerely desirous of staying the tide of
emigration than the Roman Catholic clergy, and while, wisely as I think,
they do not dream of a wealthy Ireland, they earnestly work for the
physical and material as well as the spiritual well-being of their
flocks. And yet no man can get into the confidence of the emigrating
classes without being told by them that the exodus is largely due to a
feeling that the clergy are, no doubt from an excellent motive, taking
joy--innocent joy--from the social side of the home life.

To go more fully into these subjects might carry me beyond the proper
limits of lay criticism. But, clearly, large questions of clerical
training must suggest themselves to those to whom their discussion
properly belongs--whether, for example, there is not in the instances
which I have cited evidence of a failure to understand that mere
authority in the regions of moral conduct cannot have any abiding
effect, except in the rarest combination of circumstances, and with a
very primitive people. Do not many of these clergy ignore the vast
difference between the ephemeral nature of moral compulsion and the
enduring force of a real moral training?

I have dealt with the exercise of clerical influence in these matters as
being, at any rate in relation to the subject matter of this book, far
more important than the evil commonly described as "The Priest in
Politics." That evil is, in my opinion, greatly misrepresented. The
cases of priests who take an improper part in politics are cited without
reference to the vastly greater number who take no part at all, except
when genuinely assured that a definite moral issue is at stake. I also
have in my mind the question of how we should have fared if the control
of the different Irish agitations had been confined to laymen, and if
the clergy had not consistently condemned secret associations. But
whatever may be said in defence of the priest in politics in the past,
there are the strongest grounds for deprecating a continuance of their
political activity in the future. As I gauge the several forces now
operating in Ireland, I am convinced that if an anti-clerical movement
similar to that which other Roman Catholic countries have witnessed,
were to succeed in discrediting the priesthood and lowering them in
public estimation, it would be followed by a moral, social, and
political degradation which would blight, or at least postpone, our
hopes of a national regeneration. From this point of view I hold that
those clergymen who are predominantly politicians endanger the moral
influence which it is their solemn duty to uphold. I believe however,
that the over-active part hitherto taken in politics by the priests is
largely the outcome of the way in which Roman Catholics were treated in
the past, and that this undesirable feature in Irish life will yield,
and is already yielding to the removal of the evils to which it owed its
origin and in some measure its justification.[21]

One has only to turn to the spirit and temper of such representative
Roman Catholics as Archbishop Healy and Dr. Kelly, Bishop of Ross--to
their words and to their deeds--in order to catch the inspiration of a
new movement amongst our Roman Catholic fellow-countrymen at once
religious and patriotic. And if my optimism ever wavers, I have but to
think of the noble work that many priests are to my own knowledge
doing, often in remote and obscure parishes, in the teeth of innumerable
obstacles. I call to mind at such times, as pioneers in a great
awakening, men like the eminent Jesuit, Father Thomas Finlay, Father
Hegarty of Erris, Father O'Donovan of Loughrea, and many others--men
with whom I have worked and taken counsel, and who represent, I believe,
an ever increasing number of their fellow priests.[22]

My position, then, towards the influence of the Roman Catholic
clergy--and this influence is a matter of vital importance to the
understanding of Irish problems--- may now be clearly defined. While
recognising to the full that large numbers of the Irish Roman Catholic
clergy have in the past exercised undue influence in purely political
questions, and, in many other matters, social, educational, and
economic, have not, as I see things, been on the side of progress, I
hold that their influence is now, more than ever before, essential for
improving the condition of the most backward section of the population.
Therefore I feel it to be both the duty and the strong interest of my
Protestant fellow-countrymen to think much less of the religious
differences which divide them from Roman Catholics, and much more of
their common citizenship and their common cause. I also hold with equal
strength and sincerity to the belief, which I have already expressed,
that the shortcomings of the Roman Catholic clergy are largely to be
accounted for, not by any innate tendency on their part towards
obscurantism, but by the sad history of Ireland in the past. I would
appeal to those of my co-religionists who think otherwise to suspend
their judgment for a time. That Roman Catholicism is firmly established
in Ireland is a fact of the situation which they must admit, and as this
involves the continued powerful influence of the priesthood upon the
character of the people, it is surely good policy by liberality and fair
dealing, especially in the matter of education, to turn this influence
towards the upbuilding of our national life.

To sum up the influence of religion and religious controversy in
Ireland, as it presents itself from the only standpoint from which I
have approached the matter in this chapter, namely, that of material,
social, and intellectual progress, I find that while the Protestants
have given, and continue to give, a fine example of thrift and industry
to the rest of the nation, the attitude of a section of them towards the
majority of their fellow-countrymen has been a bigoted and unintelligent
one. On the other hand, I have learned from practical experience amongst
the Roman Catholic people of Ireland that, while more free from bigotry,
in the sense in which that word is usually applied, they are apathetic,
thriftless, and almost non-industrial, and that they especially require
the exercise of strengthening influences on their moral fibre. I have
dealt with their shortcomings at much greater length than with those of
Protestants, because they have much more bearing on the subject matter
of this book. North and South have each virtues which the other lacks;
each has much to learn from the other; but the home of the strictly
civic virtues and efficiencies is in Protestant Ireland. The work of the
future in Ireland will be to break down in social intercourse the
barriers of creed as well as those of race, politics, and class, and
thus to promote the fruitful contact of North and South, and the
concentration of both on the welfare of their common country. In the
case of those of us, of whatever religious belief, who look to a future
for our country commensurate with the promise of her undeveloped
resources both of intellect and soil, it is of the essence of our hope
that the qualities which are in great measure accountable for the actual
economic and educational backwardness of so many of our
fellow-countrymen, and for the intolerance of too many who are not
backward in either respect, are not purely racial or sectarian, but are
the transitory growth of days and deeds which we must all try to forget
if our work for Ireland is to endure.

FOOTNOTES:

[16] The reproach which is brought upon Irish Christianity mainly by the
extravagances of a section of my co-religionists, to which I have been
obliged to refer, came home to me not long ago in a very forcible way. I
happened to remark to a friend that it was a disgrace to Christianity
that Mussulman soldiery were employed at the Holy Sepulchre to keep the
peace between the Latin and Greek Christians. He reminded me that the
prosperous and progressive municipality of Belfast, with a population
eminently industrious, and predominantly Protestant, has to be policed
by an Imperial force in order to restrain two sections of Irish
Christians from assaulting each other in the name of religion.

[17] '_Pro salute animae meae_' was, I am reminded, the consideration
usually expressed in the old charters of manumission.

[18] One of the unfortunate effects of this passion for building costly
churches is the importation of quantities of foreign art-work in the
shape of woodcarvings, stained glass, mosaics, and metal work. To good
foreign art, indeed, one could not, within certain limits, object. It
might prove a valuable example and stimulus. But the articles which have
actually been imported, in the impulse to get everything finished as
soon as possible, generally consist of the stock pieces produced in a
spirit of mere commercialism in the workshops of Continental firms which
make it their business to cater for a public who do not know the
difference between good art and bad. Much of the decoration of
ecclesiastical buildings, whether Roman Catholic o

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