The New Irish Constitution Part 16

PART II. A HISTORICAL ARGUMENT

VIII.-Irish Nationality. BY MRS. J. R. GREEN

"Justice requires power, intelligence, and will."-(_Leonardo da Vinci_.)

"Sinister information," reported a Governor of Ireland under Henry VIII., "hath been of more hindrance to the reformation of Ireland than all the rebels and Irishry within the realm." The complaint is as true to-day as it was nearly four hundred years ago, for false tongues still gain power through ignorance. Irish history has the misfortune of being at the same time trite and unknown. Men hear with the old acquiescence the old formulae, and the well-known words carry to them the solace of the ancient prejudices.

There is indeed in these latter days a change of accusation. In former times Irishmen were marked off as an inferior people, but within the last few years the attack is altered; and it is now the fashion to a.s.sume that the Irish fail, not as individuals, but only in their corporate capacity.

To Irishmen is still denied "the delight of admiration and the duty of reverence." Holding in their hearts the image of a nation, they are warned not to ask whether it was a nation of any value, whether there has been any conspicuous merit which justifies the devotion that the Irish people feel to their race, and which may claim the regard of others. For it is not enough to have the mere instinct of pa.s.sion for our country, unless our heart and reason are convinced that we give our allegiance to a people that, in spite of human errors, has been of n.o.ble habit and distinguished spirit.

The policy of "Unionist" leaders is to meet the Irish desire for an uplifting pride in the life of the Irish commonwealth by a flat denial.

Ireland, we are told, is not, nor ever has been, nor ever can be, a nation. A disorganized and contentious people, incapable of rightly using any polity Irish or English, we have not, it is said, even the materials of a nation. We are only "material," to use an old Irish expression, for an Empire. The island in fact was never a kingdom till England gave it a king worthy the name; so how could it be a nation? To the gift of a king England added her invention of a Parliament, but the failure of Parliament in Ireland was open and flagrant; how then talk about a nation?

"There are Englishmen and Scotchmen," says Mr. Balfour, "who really suppose that England has deprived Ireland of its own national inst.i.tutions, has absorbed Ireland, which had a polity and a civilization of its own-has absorbed it in the wider sphere of British politics; and who think that a great wrong has thereby been done to a separate nationality.... It is a profound illusion.

It has no basis in historical fact at all."

He gives a history of his own.

"Those whom the Nationalists choose more particularly and especially to call Irishmen, namely, the original inhabitants of Ireland-those who were there before the Celt and before the Saxon and before the Norman-never had the chance of developing, they never could have developed, a polity of their own, any more than the Highlanders. That does not mean that they are in any sense inferior, but it does mean that all this talk of restoring to Ireland Irish inst.i.tutions, and of governing Ireland according to Irish ideas, has no historic basis whatever."

It is for such wayward imaginings that the historic claim of Ireland is denied. What meaning shall we give to this new dogma of the partiality of Nationalists for some pre-Celtic race-whether Iberian, or whether (as some explain the phrase) Finn Macc.u.mhaill and his followers, ingeniously regarded by Mr. Balfour as having adorned Ireland before the Celtic age?

Where was the "Saxon" settlement in Ireland between the Celts and the Normans? What is the comparison of the Highlanders with the original inhabitants of Ireland? Why should Mr. Balfour's doubts of a pre-Celtic polity put an end to all talk of Irish inst.i.tutions and Irish ideas?

To come to somewhat later times, under the clan system, says Mr. Balfour, it was impossible to rise to civilization. "And when England dealt with Ireland, Ireland was completely under the tribal system" (a theory false to history). The superior English polity in due time, however, spread its hand over Iberian chaos. "An Irish Parliament is a British invention"-the word, with Mr. Balfour's easy adjustment of history to politics, is probably chosen to give the Scotch a gratuitous share in the credit, with a compliment to their spirit; for, as he says, "my Lowland ancestors in Scotland had precisely the same contempt for my Highland fellow-countrymen as the English had for the Irish in Ireland"-(the word Lowland being here misused in a non-historic sense). "Every political idea in Ireland is of English growth-the Irish dependent Parliament, the Irish independent Parliament-it is all of British extraction." Mr. Balfour seems to imagine in his indifferent way that the "dependent form" was the first; he seems to guess that it was a single form, "_the_ dependent Parliament"; and he calls his "independent Parliament" "a practically sovereign legislature."

It would be hard to gather more fundamental errors into one sentence. At any rate in his simplified scheme both forms of "the British invention"

failed in Ireland. But in the success of the Union and the a.s.sembly at Westminster, England has established successfully what Mr. Balfour calls "the unity which we have inherited from our forefathers."

Such are the "General Principles" which Mr. Balfour-speaking with all the authority of an "Unionist" statesman, head of a great English party, leader for a generation of those who refuse to Ireland any claim to national memory or national hope, absolute ruler for four years of that island-has issued in his book "Aspects of Home Rule" to rally his followers. This confusion of fictions, in all their brave untruth, furnishes the historic background and justification of the Unionist creed.

We might not easily expect an "Imperial" leader so far to forego respect for himself or for his public.

There is an Old Irish proverb: "Three candles that illumine every darkness: truth, nature, knowledge." But Mr. Balfour is as a man for his pleasure wandering in the dark among the tombs of vain things. And from places of death comes as of old "sinister information" to minister to ignorance and prejudice, and to be still the hindrance to the reformation of Ireland.

These comprehensive charges cover the two strongly-contrasted periods of Irish history-the period of Gaelic civilization, and that of Norman, or later of English settlement. All races are alike condemned. The one people had no inst.i.tutions. The other misused what were given to it. In either case the fault is said to be "Irish"-the general word of contempt.

Confounded together by Mr. Balfour for his own purposes, the two accusations have nothing in common, and must be separately considered if we wish to think justly.

We may, however, observe that to both races is denied the praise of a "nation" or "nationality."

The definition of a "nation" may be varied: every man has his opinion, for, as the old Irish saying went, "'tis his own head he has on him." But in the matter nature and history cannot be wholly set aside, and we may attach some importance to the unity of a country, the persistence of its race, and the continuity of its life. If we consider outward form, who ever thinks of the map of Great Britain as a whole? The form that is in men's minds is of two configurations, one of England and one of Scotland, two countries mapped out on separate sheets. The names of the countries have changed, Alban and Scotland; Britain and England; and the t.i.tle of the whole is a somewhat awkward evasion or compromise. Ireland on the other hand has its unchangeable boundaries fixed by the Ocean, its provinces from immemorial times subordinate territories of the undivided country. Its successive peoples, perhaps for some four thousand years, have never known it but by one name, Erin; or by the variations of that name as it pa.s.sed into other speech, Iberia, Hibernia, Ire-land. The Old Irish knew it some fourteen hundred years ago as their "Fatherland." As far back as we can go the unity of the country as a whole is prominent in their thought; as, for example, in an ancient poem on the pa.s.sing of the pagan world and the triumph of Christianity:

"G.o.d's counsel at every time concerning virgin Erin is greater than can be told; though glittering Liffey is thine to-day, it has been the land of others in their turn."

In the Middle Irish period a legend of the coming to Tara of the most ancient of all the sages carried to the people the same rapt love of Ireland. When all the a.s.sembly rose up before him:

"There is no need to make rejoicing for me, for I am sure of your welcome as every son is sure of his foster-mother, and this, then, is my foster-mother," said Fintan, "the island in which ye are, even Erin, and the familiar knee of this island in which ye are, namely, Tara. Moreover it is the mast and the produce, the flowers and the food of this island that have sustained me from the deluge until this day. And I am skilled in its feasts and its cattle-spoils, its destructions and its courtships, in all that have taken place from the deluge until now."

Every race in turn that entered Ireland drank in the spirit of the soil: all became citizens of the one land. Even that gift of "English invention"

and "British extraction," the Pale Parliament, was by mere human nature and necessity stirred to loyalty for "the land of Ireland." "More conveniently," so they urged in a statute of 1460, "a proper coin distinct from the coin of the realm of England was to be had therein." And the Anglo-Norman colonists decreed that of the coins they ordered one should be called an "_Irelands_," with that name engraven on it, and the other a "_Patrick_," with the name and cross of the national Irish saint.

This persistence of the name of Ireland with its national pride, and its perpetual recalling of a distinct people, was displeasing to Englishmen in the height of their "G.o.dly conquest." If the name was extinguished the fact might be more easily denied. They pleaded, as we learn in the Carew Papers (I. 251-2), for its disappearance, in the true spirit of modern Unionism. When Paul IV. gave to Philip and Mary the t.i.tle of King and Queen of Ireland:

"Men of judgment, ... thought it a vanity, not seeing what profit, either of authority or honour, it might bring to a King to have many t.i.tles in the country which he possesseth, considering that the Most Christian King is more honoured by the only t.i.tle of King of France, than if his state were divided into as many kingly t.i.tles as he hath provinces.... But it seemed hard to induce England to quit that which two kings had used, and the Queen, not thinking much of it, had continued."

There was indeed a power in nature far older than the habit of two English kings; and in spite of the Unionist grumblings the ancient name survived, and the ancient fact. Cardinal Pole was appointed legate to "the realms of England and Ireland." Our amba.s.sadors and consuls still carry with them abroad the significant t.i.tle "of Great Britain and Ireland"; and we may read in a Russian newspaper concerned with the East, of the "policy of Great Britain and Ireland in Afghanistan."

The persistence of race in Ireland was no less remarkable than the triumph of its name. There are some who profess to distinguish the Iberians. We know that successive streams of immigrants, Danes, Normans, English, French, have been merged in the commonwealth. But the Registrar-General gives, in spite of outgoings of the Celtic and incomings of Teutonic peoples, an overwhelming majority of men of Celtic blood and name-a majority which is in fact less than the truth, owing to the continual change during centuries of Celtic into English surnames. But it is not on purity of race that Ireland, any more than other countries, would rely.

Difference in blood was recognised, but it was not held a bar to patriotism. Ireland was the common country to which all races who entered it were bound by every human interest. It had a unity of its own, which as "the Pale" shrank and the sense of country deepened, laid hold on the minds of the later as of the earlier inhabitants. Belfast Orangemen indeed, as "the loyalists of Ireland," accepted the doctrine in 1886 that a Parliament in Dublin chosen by the whole Irish people "must be to them a _foreign_ and _alien_ a.s.sembly." It was the echo of an old fiction. We know that the ascendency of a constantly recruited English group, above all of safe men born in England and consequently held worthy of trust there, was for seven centuries the favourite dream of English politicians; and that it invariably failed before the broader and humaner influences that move communities of men dwelling side by side under the equal heavens. Faithful citizens of Norman or English stock did brave service for their country: "Ireland-men" they called themselves, or "commonwealth men," or "good 'country men' as they would be gloriously termed." What name indeed is there for men of Ireland to take unless they frankly own their country? The term chosen for them by _The Times_: "The British Colony on the other side of St. George's Channel" will scarcely endure.

Mr. Balfour is probably the last statesman to press a claim to ascendency in the partial favour of Great Britain for a selected group, "who, of all others in the United Kingdom, surely deserve the protection of England and Scotland." It is a curious return in these days of equal citizenship to the tyrannical distinctions of the middle ages-"wild Irish our enemies, Irish rebels, and obedient English," who had varying claims on the dominating race according to their deserts.

To return, however, to the special charges urged against Gaelic life in Ireland. The island may be the same, and the race of ancient date, and with no less than their ancient pride; but what of that, if the people could not have, nor ever did have, a polity of their own, nor any Irish inst.i.tutions nor an Irish idea of government? "The fiction has been a.s.siduously propagated," says a Unionist writer in the _Morning Post_, "by the Irish extreme section ... that the nationhood of Ireland is a thing which once had an actual objective existence.... But such teaching, however romantically attractive, is simply incompatible with the plain facts of history. Ireland as a political ent.i.ty dates from the period of the conquest by England, when for the first time the princes and chieftains with their followers were fused into something like national unity." So Macedon might have boasted that for the first time it had put some order into Greece, given it a political ent.i.ty, and brought it into line with modern Imperial civilization.

Is this unhistoric statement all the Unionists have in the end got to give us of the Irish story? Is there nothing behind it-no trace of any soul of the people in Ireland? How then was it that with so incomplete a military or political organization, they could defy for centuries the whole power of England? Ireland in fact drew her strength from a remarkable State system of her own. In the Gaelic form of civilization the national sentiment did not gather round a military king, as in the Teutonic states, but round a common learning, literature, and tradition; and this exalted belief in the spiritual existence of a nation, though it is not the English idea of a kingdom, may belong nevertheless to a high order of human aspiration. It produced in Ireland a literature which has not been surpa.s.sed among any people for its profound and ardent sense of nationality.

The union of the Irish people lay in the absolute community of learning, inst.i.tutions, and law. Irish law was one of the most striking products of Irish genius. If we know nothing of its beginnings, we see it as a body of custom that spread over the entire country, varying not at all from province to province. Highly finished, highly technical, worked on for hundreds of years by successive commentators, it still remained the law of the people, and claimed their allegiance-an allegiance could only have been possible to a law founded on reason and justice, and expedient and efficient in practice. If we take that which in an agricultural country comes home to every peasant-the land system-the native law in Ireland was equal, enduring, and respected. The farmer was a.s.sured a fair rent and compensation for improvements. No chief in Ireland could molest the people in their ancient privilege; he could neither evict them, nor take their grazing-lands, nor make a forest waste and impose a forest law for his hunting. Five hundred years after the Norman invasion Irish farmers holding under the old Irish law were still paying the same rent that their forefathers had paid centuries before. It is certain that no system can wholly prevent misfortune, injustice, or usurpation; but there seems to have been among the people a social content far beyond that in mediaeval England, a long security of farmers, a pa.s.sionate belief in their land system, an extraordinary tenacity in its defence against any other, and as far as we can see no bitterness of cla.s.ses. A satirist might mock at the depth of the chief's pocket, as deep as the pocket of the Church or of the poet; but the Irish no more wanted to get rid of the chief than of the poet or the priest. In Tudor times the only way in which a chief could be absolutely alienated and divided from his people was by pledging him to the English land system and government.

The Irish were further reminded of their essential unity by the great genealogical compilations in which every element of the population, Celtic and aboriginal, free and unfree, were traced to a common ancestry. Pride in the country which they possessed was maintained by the _Dinnsenchus_ or collection of topographical legends dealing with hundreds of places, mountains, rivers, earthworks, roads, strands, venerable trees, in every nook and corner of Ireland-none elsewhere-all evidently things of interest to the whole people. The dignity of their race and history was recalled to them in the semi-legendary history of pagan Ireland-which is really a great epic in prose and verse, in two main sections, the Book of Invasions and the Irish Book of Kings. The subject of this work is simply Ireland.

It has no other connecting motive than to satisfy the desire of the Irish to possess a complete and brilliant picture of Ireland from all antiquity.

The charge was a solemn one, and carried out by generations of scholars with exact fidelity. There is no parallel elsewhere to the writing down of the great pagan epics five hundred years after Christianity, with no more direct influence of Christianity on them than we might find in the Odyssey or the Iliad.

Nor was their language the least of the spiritual possessions of the Gaelic people-that language which, following their people over Scotland, Lowlands and Highlands and the Isles, remained for some fourteen centuries the symbol of immemorial unity of their race. The pride of the race in their language was beyond that of any other people in Europe outside of the Greeks and Romans. Grammars of Irish were written in the eighth or ninth centuries, perhaps earlier, full of elaborate declensions and minute rules, accounts of obsolete words and forms and esoteric literary jargons, treatises on the Ogham alphabet, dictionaries of celebrated men and women of Ireland from remote antiquity, numerous festilogies of the national saints in prose and verse, with their pedigrees and legends. What mediaeval language in Europe had a school of grammarians, and at what date? It may seem strange to Englishmen that this affection should have stirred the hearts of pastoral and agricultural people; but no Irish man was far removed from the immaterial and spiritual life of his country. The famous works in verse and prose, the stories, the hymns, and the songs of heroes old and new, were known by heart, and handed down faithfully for centuries in thousands of cabins; and the Irish tiller of the ground in remote places has even in our own day a rich vocabulary of six or seven thousand words. The pleasure and pride of art, so widely diffused among the ma.s.s of the people by the Irish scheme of life and education, became a natural part of the Irishman's thoughts. Their main concern in the Danish devastations was the threatened destruction of an ancient order of civilization. Before the "flood of outlanders," says the "Colloquy of the Sages," written probably before 850, "every art will be buffoonery, and every falsehood will be chosen." Poems would be dark, music would be given over to boors, and embroidery to fools and base women so that no more beauty of colour could be expected; everyone will turn his art into false teaching and false intelligence, to seek to surpa.s.s his teacher.

Instruction and skill would end, they lamented, with lawful princes and sages, belief and offerings, the respect of ranks and families, due honour of the young to the old, the ordered hospitality of the wealthy, and the high justice on the hilltop: "On every hill-top treachery will adventure."

The great expression of Gaelic life was the a.s.sembly of the people, those "parles upon hills" that seemed so grievous to Elizabethan rulers. In every Federal State, such as Leinster or Munster, and in every petty State, they were the ever-recurring guarantee of the national civilization. The feeling of the people is shown by the constant references to "frequent a.s.semblies," "an a.s.sembly according to rules," "a lawful synod." The serious organization of these gatherings in stately form had been brought to a fine art. The business and science of the country was there open to the whole democracy. Many were the directions for the right conduct of those who took part in the a.s.semblies-against stiffness of delivery, a muttering speech, hair-splitting, uncertain proofs, despising books, inciting the mult.i.tude, very violent urging, playing a dangerous game to disconcert the meeting, above all against ignorant or false pleading. The authority of the a.s.sembly in its exposition of the law was never questioned by the people.

"Irishmen," wrote an English judge to Henry VIII., "doth observe and keep such laws and statutes which they make upon hills in their country firm and stable, without breaking them for any favour or reward."

"As touching their government in their corporations where they bear rule," wrote an Englishman, Payne, from Connacht in 1589, "is done with such wisdom, equity, and justice, as demerits worthy commendations. For I myself divers times have seen in several places within their jurisdictions well near twenty causes decided at one sitting, with such indifference that, for the most part, both plaintiff and defendant hath departed contented; yet many that make show of peace and desireth to live by blood do utterly mislike this or any good thing that the poor Irishman doth."