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THE OPEN SECRET OF IRELAND 
 
THE OPEN SECRET OF 
 IRELAND 
 
 By 
 
 T. M. KETTLE 
 
 WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY J. E. REDMOND, M.P. 
 
 11 Also it is a proverbe of olde date, ' The pride of Fraunce, 
 the treason of Inglande, and the warre of Irelande, shall 
 never have ende. ' Which proverbe, touching the warre 
 of Irelande, is like alwaie to continue, without God sette 
 in men's breasts to find some new remedy that never was 
 found before." 
 
 State Papers, Reign of Henry VIII. 
 
 LONDON 
 W. J. HAM-SMITH 
 
 1912 
 
 BOSTON COLLEGE LIBRARY 
 CHESTNUT HILL, MASS.' 
 
"3^^ 
 
 K3 
 
 169838 
 
 Copyright 
 All Rights Reserved 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 INTRODUCTION BY J. E. REDMOND, M.P. . . vii 
 
 PRELIMINARY xi 
 
 CHAP. 
 
 I. AN EXERCISE IN HUMILITY .... I 
 
 II. HISTORY (a) Coloured 17 
 
 III. HISTORY (b) Plain 31 
 
 IV. THE OBVIOUSNESS OF HOME RULE . . 47 
 V. THE RAVAGES OF UNIONISM (i) . . . 65 
 
 VI. THE RAVAGES OF UNIONISM (2). . . 80 
 
 VII. THE HALLUCINATION OF " ULSTER " . . 98 
 
 VIII. THE MECHANICS OF HOME RULE . . 120 
 
 IX. AFTER HOME RULE 144 
 
 X. AN EPILOGUE ON " LOYALTY" . . . l6l 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 The object of Mr Kettle, in writing this book, 
 is, I take it, to reveal to English readers what 
 he not inaptly terms as " The Open Secret of 
 Ireland," in order to bring about a better 
 understanding between the two nations, and to 
 smoothe the way to a just and final settlement 
 of their old-time differences. Any work under- 
 taken on such lines commends itself to a ready 
 welcome and a careful study, and I feel sure 
 that both await Mr Kettle's latest contribution 
 to the literature of the Irish question. As the 
 son of one of the founders of the Land League, 
 and as, for some years, one of the most brilliant 
 members of the Irish Party, and, later, Professor 
 in the School of Economics in the new National 
 University in Dublin, he has won his way to 
 recognition as an eloquent exponent of Irish 
 national ideas; whilst the novelty of his point 
 
 of view, and the freshness, vigour, and pic- 
 
 vii 
 
viii INTRODUCTION 
 
 turesque attractiveness of his style ensure for 
 his work a cordial reception on its literary merits, 
 apart from its political value. 
 
 Undoubtedly, one of the main sources of the 
 Anglo- Irish difficulty has been mutual misunder- 
 standing, generating mutual mistrust and hatred. 
 But the root of the difficulty goes deeper. It 
 is to be sought in the system of misgovernment 
 and oppression which successive generations of 
 British rulers have imposed upon what, with 
 cruel irony, British historians and statesmen 
 have been wont to call "the sister country." 
 This is the real " open secret " of Ireland, a 
 secret that all who run may read, and the effec- 
 tive bearing of which is: that tyranny begets 
 hatred, and that freedom and justice are the only 
 sure foundations of contentment and goodwill 
 between nations. 
 
 During the past thirty years, and especially 
 since 1886, when Mr Gladstone threw the weight 
 of his unrivalled genius and influence into the 
 scale in favour of justice to Ireland, a great deal 
 has been done to erase the bitter memories of 
 the past, and to enable the English and the Irish 
 peoples to regard each other in the light of 
 
INTRODUCTION ix 
 
 truth, and with a more just appreciation of what 
 is essential to the establishment of genuine and 
 lasting friendly relations between them. 
 
 But it would be idle to ignore the fact that, 
 to a considerable section of the English people, 
 Ireland is still a country of which they possess 
 less knowledge than they do of the most insigni- 
 ficant and remote of the many islands over which 
 the British flag floats. Mr Kettle's book ought 
 to be of service in dispelling this ignorance, and 
 in enabling Englishmen to view the Anglo- Irish 
 question from the standpoint of an educated and 
 friendly Irish opinion. 
 
 The output of purely political literature on 
 the Irish problem has been increasing during 
 the past few years, and there is room for a book 
 which aims at focussing attention upon some 
 aspects of it which the mere politician is apt to 
 pass lightly over or to ignore altogether. Like 
 most of Mr Kettle's work, the book bears the 
 impress of his individuality, and, to many of his 
 readers, this will constitute much of its charm 
 and merit. At the same time, in order to pre- 
 vent misunderstanding, it is necessary for me to 
 state that I do not commit myself to acceptance 
 
x INTRODUCTION 
 
 or endorsement of everything which the book 
 contains. I content myself with stating, from 
 personal experience, that nothing which Mr 
 Kettle writes about Ireland can fail to be worthy 
 of notice by everyone interested in the Home 
 Rule controversy, and that I believe the circula- 
 tion of this volume will serve to stimulate 
 thought about Ireland, and so to hasten the 
 advent of that brighter day when the grant of 
 full self-government to Ireland will reveal to 
 England the open secret of making Ireland her 
 friend and helpmate, the brightest jewel in her 
 crown of Empire. 
 
 J. E. Redmond. 
 12th December ', ipu. 
 
PRELIMINARY 
 
 After an intermission of nearly twenty years 
 Ireland once again blocks the way. " Finally 
 rejected " by the House of Commons and the 
 English electorate in 1886, "finally rejected " 
 by the House of Lords in 1893, the Home Rule 
 idea has not only survived but waxed stronger 
 in the wilderness. Time and events have altered 
 its shape only to clothe it with a richer signifi- 
 cance. 
 
 Will Great Britain decide wisely in the choice 
 to which she is now put? Naturally, I do not 
 speak of the Parliamentary future of the Home 
 Rule Bill: that is safe. I have in mind rather 
 that profound moral settlement, that generous 
 reconciliation which we have seen in South 
 Africa, and desire to see in Ireland. What of 
 it ? Did reason and the candid vision of things, 
 as they are, control public affairs, there could be 
 
 little doubt as to the issue in this choice between 
 
 xi 
 
xii PRELIMINARY 
 
 friendship and hatred, between the formula of 
 freedom and that of domination. But, unhappily, 
 we have no assurance that Philip sober rather 
 than Philip drunk will sign the warrant. There 
 exists in England, in respect of all things Irish, 
 a monstrous residuum of prejudice. It lies 
 ambushed in the blood even when it has been 
 dismissed from the mind, and constitutes the 
 real peril of the situation. No effort will be 
 spared to reawaken it. The motto of militant 
 Unionism has always been: When in doubt 
 throw mud. Such a programme naturally begets 
 a predilection for ditches, and when certain 
 orators speak of the " last ditch " they must be 
 taken to mean that which has mcst mud in it 
 The old methods are already once more in 
 operation. The wicked lying of previous cam- 
 paigns no doubt cannot be repeated : bigotry will 
 make no further experiments in Pigottry. But 
 a resolute attempt, lavishly financed and directed 
 by masters of the art of defamation, will be made 
 to blacken Ireland. Every newspaper in every 
 remotest country-town in England will be 
 deluged with syndicated venom. The shop- 
 keeper will wrap up his parcels in Orange 
 
PRELIMINARY xiii 
 
 posters, and the working-man will, I hope, light 
 his pipe for years to come with pamphlets of the 
 same clamant colour. Irishmen, or at all events 
 persons born in Ireland, will be found to testify 
 that they belong to a barbarous people which has 
 never ceased from barbarism, and that they are 
 not fit to govern themselves. Politicians who 
 were never known to risk a five -pound note in 
 helping to develop Ireland will toss down their 
 fifties to help to defame her. Such is the outlook. 
 Against this campaign of malice, hatred, and 
 all uncharitableness it is the duty of every good 
 citizen to say his word, and in the following 
 pages I say mine. This little book is not a 
 compendium of facts, and so does not trench 
 on the province of Mr Stephen Gwynn M.P.'s 
 admirable " Case for Home Rule." It does not 
 discuss the details, financial or otherwise, of a 
 statesmanlike settlement. Such suggestions as 
 I had to make I have already made in " Home 
 Rule Finance," and the reader will find much 
 ampler treatment of the whole subject in " The 
 Framework of Home Rule," by Mr Erskine 
 Childers, and " Home Rule Problems," edited 
 by Mr Basil Williams. In general, my aim has 
 
xiv PRELIMINARY 
 
 been to aid in humanising the Irish Question. 
 The interpretation of various aspects of it, here 
 offered, is intended to be not exhaustive but 
 provocative, a mere set of shorthand rubrics 
 any one of which might have been expanded 
 into a chapter. Addressing the English reader 
 with complete candour, I have attempted to re- 
 commend to him that method of approach, that 
 mental attitude which alone can divest him of his 
 preconceptions, and put him in rapport with the 
 true spirit of the Ireland of actuality. To that 
 end the various lines of discussion converge: — 
 Chapter I is an outline of the pathology of 
 
 the English mind in Ireland. 
 Chapters II and III present the history of 
 Ireland as the epic, not of a futile and 
 defeated, but of an indomitable and 
 victorious people. 
 Chapter IV exhibits the Home Rule idea 
 as a fundamental law of nature, human 
 nature, and government. 
 Chapters V and VI contain a very brief 
 account of the more obvious economic 
 crimes and blunders of Unionism. 
 Chapter VII discusses the queer ideas of 
 
PRELIMINARY xv 
 
 " Ulster," and the queer reasons for 
 the survival of these ideas. 
 Chapter VIII demonstrates that, as a mere 
 matter of political technique, Home 
 Rule must be conceded if any real 
 government is ever to exist again, 
 whether in Great Britain, in Ireland, 
 or in the Empire. 
 Chapter IX dips into the future, and indi- 
 cates that a Home Rule Ireland will 
 have so much interesting work to do as 
 to have no time for civil war or reli- 
 gious oppression. 
 Chapter X shows that everybody who 
 values " loyalty " must of necessity be 
 a Home Ruler. 
 The only moral commended to the reader is 
 that expressed by Browning in a firm and inevi- 
 table line, which has been disastrously forgotten 
 in so many passages of English history: — 
 
 '■' It's fitter being sane than mad." 
 
 I have tried also to convey to him, with what 
 success others must judge, something of the 
 " pride and passion " of Irish nationality. That 
 
xvi PRELIMINARY 
 
 is, in truth, the dream that comes through the 
 multitude of business. If you think that Home 
 Rule is a little thing which must be done in a 
 little way for little reasons, your feet are set on 
 the path to failure. Home Rule is one of those 
 fundamental reforms that are not achieved at all 
 unless they are achieved greatly. 
 
 T. M. K. 
 December, ign. 
 
THE OPEN SECRET OF IRELAND 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 AN EXERCISE IN HUMILITY 
 
 In order to understand Ireland we must begin 
 by understanding England. On no other terms 
 will that complex of facts, memories, and 
 passions, which is called the Irish Question, 
 yield up its secret. "You have always been," 
 said a Lady Clanricarde to some English politi- 
 cian, " like a high wall standing between us and 
 the sun/' The phrase lives. It reveals in a 
 flashlight of genius the historical relations of 
 the two nations. It explains and justifies the 
 principle adopted as the basis of this discus- 
 sion, namely, that no examination of the Irish 
 Problem is possible without a prior examination 
 of the English mind. It used to be said that 
 England dearly loved a Lord, a dictum which 
 may have to be modified in the light of recent 
 
 I A 
 
2 THE OPEN SECRET OF IRELAND 
 
 events. Far more than a Lord does the typical 
 Englishman love a Judge, and the thought of 
 acting as a Judge. Confronted with Ireland 
 he says to himself: "Here are these Irish 
 people ; some maintain that they are nice, others 
 that they are nasty, but everybody agrees that 
 they are queer. Very good. I will study them 
 in a judicial spirit ; I will weigh the evidence 
 dispassionately, and give my decision. When 
 it comes to action, I will play the honest broker 
 between their contending parties." Now this 
 may be a very agreeable way of going about the 
 business, but it is fatally unreal. Great Britain 
 comes into court, she will be pained to hear, not 
 as Judge but rather as defendant. She comes 
 to answer the charge that, having seized Ireland 
 as a " trustee of civilisation," she has, either 
 through incompetence or through dishonesty, 
 betrayed her trust. We have a habit, in every- 
 day life, of excusing the eccentricities of a friend 
 or an enemy by the reflection that he is, after all, 
 as God made him. Ireland is politically as Great 
 Britain made her. Since the twelfth century, 
 that is to say for a great part of the Middle Ages 
 and for the whole of the modern period, the 
 mind of England and not that of Ireland has 
 been the dominant fact in Irish history. 
 
 This state of things — a paradox in action — 
 
AN EXERCISE IN HUMILITY 3 
 
 carries with it certain metaphysical implications. 
 The philosophers tell us that all morality centres 
 in the maxim that others are to be treated as 
 ends in themselves, and not as instruments to 
 our ends. If they are right, then we must 
 picture Ireland as the victim of a radical 
 immoralism. We must think of her as a per- 
 sonality violated in its ideals, and arrested in its 
 development. And, indeed, that is no bad way 
 of thinking: it is the one formula which sum- 
 marises the whole of her experience. But the 
 phrasing is perhaps too high and absolute ; and 
 the decline and fall of Mr Balfour are a terrible 
 example to those of us who, being young, might 
 otherwise take metaphysics too solemnly. It 
 will, therefore, at this stage be enough to repeat 
 that, in contemplating the discontent and un- 
 rest which constitute the Irish difficulty, Great 
 Britain is contemplating the work of her own 
 hands, the creation of her own mind. For that 
 reason we can make no progress until we ascer- 
 tain what sort of mind we have to deal with. 
 
 I do not disguise from myself the extremely 
 unpleasant nature of this inquiry. It is as if a 
 counsel were to open his address by saying: 
 " Gentlemen of the Jury, before discussing the 
 facts of the case I will examine briefly the mental 
 flaws, gaps, kinks, and distortions of you twelve 
 
4 THE OPEN SECRET OF IRELAND 
 
 gentlemen." There is, however, this difference. 
 In the analysis upon which we are engaged the 
 mental attitude of the jury is not merely a fact 
 in the case, it is the whole case. Let me 
 reinforce my weaker appeal by a passage from 
 the wisest pen in contemporary English letters, 
 that of Mr Chesterton. There is in his mere 
 sanity a touch of magic so potent that, although 
 incapable of dullness, he has achieved authority, 
 and although convinced that faith is more 
 romantic than doubt, or even sin, he has got 
 himself published and read. Summarising the 
 "drift" of Matthew Arnold, Mr Chesterton 
 observes : 
 
 11 The chief of his services may perhaps be stated 
 thus, that he discovered (for the modern English) 
 the purely intellectual importance of humility. He 
 had none of that hot humility which is the fascina- 
 tion of saints and good men. But he had a cold 
 humility which he had discovered to be a mere 
 essential of the intelligence." 
 
 Such a humility, purely hygienic in character, 
 is for Englishmen the beginning of wisdom on 
 the Irish Question. It is the needle's eye by 
 which alone they can enter a city otherwise for- 
 bidden to them. Let there be no misunder- 
 standing. The attitude of mind commended to 
 
AN EXERCISE IN HUMILITY 5 
 
 them is not without its agreeable features. 
 Closely scrutinised, it is seen to be a sort of 
 inverted vanity. The student begins by study- 
 ing himself, an exercise in self-appraisal 
 which need not by any means involve self- 
 depreciation. What sort of a mind, then, is 
 the English mind? 
 
 If there is anything in regard to which the 
 love of friends corroborates the malice of 
 enemies it is in ascribing to the English an 
 individualism, hard-shelled beyond all human 
 parallel. The Englishman's country is an 
 impregnable island, his house is a castle, his 
 temperament is a suit of armour. The function 
 common to all three is to keep things out, and 
 most admirably has he used them to that end. 
 At first, indeed, he let everybody in ; he had 
 a perfect passion for being conquered, and 
 Romans, Teutons, Danes, and Normans in 
 succession plucked and ate the apple of 
 England. But with the coming of age of that 
 national consciousness, the bonds of which have 
 never been snapped, the English entered on 
 their lucky and courageous career of keeping 
 things out. They possess in London the only 
 European capital that has never in the modern 
 period been captured by an invader. They 
 withstood the intellectual grandeur of Roman 
 
6 THE OPEN SECRET OF IRELAND 
 
 Law, and developed their own medley of 
 customs into the most eccentric and most equi- 
 table system in the world. They kept out the 
 Council of Trent, and the Spanish Armada. 
 They kept out the French Revolution, and 
 Napoleon. They kept out for a long time the 
 Kantian philosophy, Romanticism, Pessimism, 
 Higher Criticism, German music, French paint- 
 ing, and one knows not how many other of the 
 intellectual experiments that made life worth 
 living, or not worth living, to nineteenth-century 
 Europe. Their insularity, spiritual as well as 
 geographical, has whetted the edge of a thou- 
 sand flouts and gibes. " Those stupid French! " 
 exclaims the sailor, as reported by De Morgan : 
 " Why do they go on calling a cabbage a shoe 
 when they must know that it is a cabbage ? " 
 This was in general the attitude of what Mr 
 Newbolt has styled the " Island Race " when 
 on its travels. Everybody has laughed at the 
 comedy of it, but no one has sufficiently 
 applauded its success. The English tourist 
 declined to be at the trouble of speaking any 
 foreign tongue whatsoever ; instantly every hotel 
 and restaurant on the Continent was forced to 
 learn English. He refused to read their books ; 
 a Leipsic firm at once started to publish his own, 
 and sold him his six-shilling Clapham novels in 
 
AN EXERCISE IN HUMILITY 7 
 
 Lucerne for two francs. He dismissed with 
 indignation the idea of breakfasting on a roll, 
 and bacon and eggs were added unto him. In 
 short, by a straightforward policy of studying 
 nobody else, he compelled everybody else to 
 study him. 
 
 Now it is idle to deny this performance the 
 applause which it plainly deserves. The self- 
 evolution of England, as it may perhaps be 
 called, in its economic, political, and literary 
 life, offers an admirable model of concentration 
 and energy. Even where it is a case of obtuse- 
 ness to other civilisations, at least as high but of 
 a different type, the verdict cannot be wholly 
 unfavourable. The Kingdom of Earth is to the 
 thick-skinned, and bad manners have a distinct 
 vital value. A man, too sensitive to the rights 
 and the charms of others, is in grave danger of 
 futility. Either he will become a dilettante, 
 which is the French way, or he will take to drink 
 and mystical nihilism, a career very popular in 
 Russian fiction. Bad manners have indeed a 
 distinct ethical value. We all experience moods 
 in which we politely assent to the thing that is 
 not, because of the fatigue of fighting for the 
 thing that is. A temperament such as has been 
 delineated is therefore, as human types go, an 
 excellent type. But it has its peculiar perils. 
 
8 THE OPEN SECRET OF IRELAND 
 
 To ignore the point of view of those in whose 
 country you eat, drink, sleep, and sight-see may 
 breed only minor discords, and after all you will 
 pay for your manners in your bill. But to 
 ignore the point of view of those whose country 
 you govern may let loose a red torrent of 
 tragedy. Such a temper of mind may, at the 
 first touch of resistance, transform your stolid, 
 laudable, laughable Englishman into the beastli- 
 est of tyrants. It may drive him into a delirium of 
 cruelty and injustice. It may sweep away, in one 
 ruin of war, wealth, culture, and the whole fabric 
 of civilisation. It may darken counsel, and cor- 
 rupt thought. In fact, it may give you something 
 very like the history of the English in Ireland. 
 
 Now it is not denied that most Englishmen 
 believe the English mind to be incapable of 
 such excesses. This, they say, is the Russian 
 in Warsaw, the Austrian in Budapest, the 
 Belgian in the Congo, the blind fool-fury of the 
 Seine. But it is not the English way. Nor is 
 it suggested that this illusion is sheer and mere 
 hypocrisy. It is simply an hallucination of 
 jingoism. Take a trivial instance in point. We 
 have all read in the newspapers derisive accounts 
 of disorderly scenes in the French Chamber or 
 the Austrian Reichstag; we all know the com- 
 placent sigh with which England is wont on 
 
AN EXERCISE IN HUMILITY 9 
 
 such occasions to thank God that she is not as 
 one of those. Does anybody think that this 
 attitude will be at all modified by recent 
 occurrences at Westminster? By no means. 
 Lord Hugh Cecil, his gibbering and gesticula- 
 ting quite forgotten, will be assuring the House 
 next year that the Irish are so deficient in self- 
 restraint as to be unfit for Home Rule. Mr 
 Smith will be deploring that intolerant temper 
 which always impels a Nationalist to shout 
 down, and not to argue down an opponent. Mr 
 Walter Long will be vindicating the cause of 
 law and order in one sentence, and inciting 
 " Ulster " to bloodshed in the next. This is not 
 hypocrisy, it is genius. It is also, by the way, 
 the genesis of the Irish Question. If anyone is 
 disposed to underrate the mad passions of which 
 race hatred can slip the leash, let him recall the 
 crucial examples which we have had in our own 
 time. We have in our own time seen Great 
 Britain inflamed by two frenzies — against 
 France, and against the Boer Republics. In 
 the history of public opinion there are no two 
 chapters more discreditable. In the days of 
 Fashoda the Frenchman was a degenerate 
 tigre-singe, the sworn enemy of religion and 
 soap. He had contributed nothing to civilisa- 
 tion except a loathsome science of sensuality, 
 
io THE OPEN SECRET OF IRELAND 
 
 and the taint of decay was in his bones. In the 
 days of Spion Kop the Boer was an unlaundered 
 savage, fit only to be a target for pig-stickers. 
 His ignorance seemed the most appalling thing 
 in the world until one remembered his hypocrisy 
 and his cowardice. The newspaper which led 
 the campaign of denigration against France has 
 come to another view. Its proprietor now 
 divides his time between signing ,£10,000 
 cheques for triumphant French aviators, and 
 delivering speeches in which their nation is 
 hailed as the pioneer of all great ideas. As 
 regards the Boers, the same reversal of the 
 verdict of ten years ago has taken place. The 
 crowd which in 1900 asked only for a sour apple- 
 tree on which to hang General Botha, adopts 
 him in 191 1 as the idol of the Coronation. At 
 this progress towards sanity we must all rejoice. 
 But most of all we have to ask that these two 
 sinister pageants of race hatred shall not be 
 suffered to dissolve without leaving some wrack 
 of wisdom behind. Writers on psychology have 
 made many studies of what they call the collec- 
 tive illusion. This strange malady, which con- 
 sists in all the world seeing something which 
 in fact does not exist, wrought more potently 
 on the mind of England than did reason and 
 justice in the Home Rule controversies of 1886 
 
AN EXERCISE IN HUMILITY n 
 
 and 1893. What has occurred may recur. 
 And since we are to speak here with all the 
 candour of private conversation I confess that I 
 cannot devise or imagine any specific against 
 such a recurrence except an exercise in humility 
 of the kind suggested by Mr Chesterton. My 
 own argument in that direction is perhaps com- 
 promised by the fact that I am an Irishman. 
 Let us therefore fall back on other testimony. 
 Out of the cloud of witnesses let us choose two 
 or three, and in the first place M. Alfred 
 Fouillee. M. Fouillee is a Platonist — the last 
 Platonist in Europe — and consequently an 
 amiable man. He is universally regarded as 
 the leader of philosophy in France, a position 
 not in the least shaken by Bergson's brief 
 authority. In a charming and lucid study of 
 the " Psychology of the Peoples of Europe " 
 Fouillee has many pages that might serve for 
 an introduction to the Irish Question. The 
 point of interest in his analysis is this: he 
 exhibits Irish history as a tragedy of character, 
 a tragedy which flows with sad, inevitable logic 
 from a certain weakness which he notes, not in 
 the Irish, but in the English character. 
 
 " ' In the eyes of the English,' says Taine who 
 had studied them so minutely, ' there is but one 
 
12 THE OPEN SECRET OF IRELAND 
 
 reasonable civilisation, namely their own. Every 
 other way of living is that of inferior beings, every 
 other religion is extravagant.' So that, one might 
 add, the Englishman is doubly personal, first as 
 an individual and again as a member of the most 
 highly individualised of nations. The moment the 
 national interest is involved all dissensions cease, 
 there is on the scene but one single man, one single 
 Englishman, who shrinks from no expedient that 
 may advance his ends. Morality for him reduces 
 itself to one precept : Safeguard at any cost the 
 interest of England." 
 
 Like all foreigners he takes Ireland as the 
 one conspicuous and flaming failure of England. 
 In that instance she has muddled, as usual, but 
 she has not muddled through. 
 
 11 The Anglo-Saxons, those great colonisers of 
 far-off lands, have in their own United Kingdom 
 succeeded only in inflicting a long martyrdom on 
 Ireland. The insular situation of England had for 
 pendant the insular situation of Ireland; the two 
 islands lie there face to face. The English and the 
 Irish, although intellectually very much alike, have 
 preserved different characters. And this difference 
 cannot be due essentially to the racial element, 
 for nearly half Ireland is Germanic. It is due 
 to traditions and customs developed by English 
 oppression." 
 
 Having summarised the main lines of British 
 policy in Ireland, he concludes: 
 
AN EXERCISE IN HUMILITY 13 
 
 "It is not easy to detect here any sign of the 
 
 I superiority of the Anglo-Saxons.' " 
 
 With Fouillee we may associate Emile 
 Boutmy. In his " Political Psychology of the 
 English " he declares that the haughty, taciturn, 
 solitary, unassimilative temperament of Eng- 
 land, so admirable from the point of view of 
 self-development, shows its worst side and 
 comes to a malign florescence in the history of 
 Ireland. It explains why 
 
 II the relations of Ireland with England have been, 
 for so many centuries, those of a captive with his 
 jailer, those of a victim with his torturer." 
 
 I pass over De Beaumont, Von Raumer, 
 Perraud, Paul-Dubois, Fiion, Bonn. The con- 
 siderations already adduced ought to be enough 
 to lead the English reader to certain conclusions 
 which are fundamental. For the sake of clear- 
 ness they may be repeated in all their nudity : 
 
 England has failed in Ireland. 
 
 Her failure has been due to defects of her own 
 character, and limitations of her outlook. The 
 same defects which corrupted her policy in the 
 past distort her vision in the present. 
 
 Therefore, if she is to understand and to 
 solve the Irish Question, she must begin by 
 
i 4 THE OPEN SECRET OF IRELAND 
 
 breaking the hard shell of her individualism, and 
 trying to think herself into the skin, the soul, 
 and the ideals of the Irish nation. 
 
 Now the English reader is after all human. 
 If he has endured so far the outrage on his most 
 sacred prejudices perpetrated in this chapter 
 he must at this moment be hot with resentment. 
 He must feel as if, proposing to his imagination 
 Pear de Melba, he had in truth swallowed sand. 
 Let me end with a more comfortable word. 
 We have seen that Irish history is what the 
 dramatists call an internal tragedy, the secular 
 disclosure and slow working-out of certain flaws 
 in the English character. I am not to be under- 
 stood as ascribing horns to England and a halo 
 to Ireland. We Irish are not only imperfect 
 but even modest ; for every beam that we detect 
 in another eye we are willing to confess a mote 
 in our own. The English on the other hand 
 have been not monsters or demons, but men 
 unstrung. 
 
 " In tragic life, God wot, 
 No villain need be, passions spin the plot; 
 We are betrayed by what is false within/ ' 
 
 Least of all am I to be understood as ascrib- 
 ing to modern Englishmen any sort of planned, 
 aforethought malice in regard to Ireland. It 
 
AN EXERCISE IN HUMILITY 15 
 
 is what Bacon might have called a mere idol 
 of the platform to suppose that they are filled 
 with a burning desire to oppress Ireland. The 
 dream of their lives is to ignore her, to eliminate 
 from their calculations this variable constant 
 which sheds bewilderment upon every problem. 
 Could they but succeed in that, a very Sabbath 
 of peace would have dawned for them. The 
 modern Englishman is too much worried to 
 plan the oppression of anybody. " Did you 
 ever," asked Lord Salisbury on a remembered 
 occasion, "have a boil on your neck?" To 
 the Englishman of 191 1 — that troubled man 
 whose old self-sufficiency has in our own time 
 been shattered beyond repair by Boer rifles, 
 German shipyards, French aeroplanes — Ireland 
 is the boil on the neck of his political system. 
 It is the one feche de jeunesse of his nation 
 that will not sleep in the grave of the past. Like 
 the ghost in " Hamlet " it pursues and plagues 
 him without respite. Shunned on the battle- 
 ments it invades his most private chamber, or, 
 finding him in talk with friends, shames and 
 scares him with subterranean mutterings. Is 
 there no way out of a situation so troublesome 
 and humiliating? 
 
 There is. Ireland cannot be ignored, but she 
 can easily be appeased. The boil is due to no 
 
16 THE OPEN SECRET OF IRELAND 
 
 natural and incurable condition. It is the direct 
 result of certain artificial ligatures and compres- 
 sions ; remove these and it disappears. This 
 spectre haunts the conscience of England to 
 incite her not to a deed of blood but to a deed 
 of justice ; every wind is favourable and every 
 omen. It is, indeed, true that if she is to 
 succeed, England must do violence to certain 
 prejudices which now afflict her like a blind- 
 ness ; she must deal with us as a man with men. 
 But is not the Kingdom of Heaven taken by 
 violence ? 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 HISTORY 
 
 (a) Coloured 
 
 Mendacity follows the flag. There never yet 
 was an invader who did not, in obedience to a 
 kindly human instinct, lie abundantly respecting 
 the people whose country he had invaded. The 
 reason is very plain. In all ages men delight to 
 acquire property by expedients other than that 
 of honest labour. In the period of private war 
 the most obvious alternative to working is fight- 
 ing, or hiring servants to fight; the sword is 
 mightier than the spade. If we add that an 
 expedition into a foreign country offers the 
 additional advantages of escape from your 
 exacting creditors, and your still more exacting 
 king, we have something very like the economics 
 of the Invasion of Anywhere in early feudal 
 times. Had the leaders of these invasions, or 
 rather their clerkly secretaries, written the plain 
 
i'6 THE OPEN SECRET OF IRELAND 
 
 ' tale of their doings they would have left some 
 / such record as this: "There were we, a band 
 of able-bodied, daring, needy men. Our only 
 trade was war; our only capital our suits of 
 armour, our swords and battle-axes. We heard 
 that there was good land and rich booty to be 
 had in Anywhere; we went and fought for it. 
 Our opponents were brave men, too, but badly 
 organised. In some places we won. There 
 we substituted our own law for the queer sort of 
 law under which these people had lived; when 
 they resisted too strongly we had, of course, no 
 option but to kill them. In other places we got 
 mixed up completely by alliances and marriages 
 with the old stock, and lived most agreeably 
 with them. In others again the natives killed 
 us, and remained in possession. Such was the 
 Invasion of Anywhere." 
 
 But (I had almost said unhappily) the invaders 
 were not content with having swords, they had 
 also consciences. They were Christians, and 
 thought it necessary to justify themselves before 
 the High Court of Christian Europe. Conse- 
 quently the clerks had to write up the record in 
 quite a different fashion. They discovered that 
 their bluff, hard-bitten, rather likeable em- 
 ployers, scarcely one of whom could read or 
 write, had really invaded Anywhere as the 
 
HISTORY 19 
 
 trustees of civilisation. Now it may be said in 
 general — and the observation extends to our 
 own time — that the moment an invader discovers 
 that he is the trustee of civilisation he is irre- 
 trievably lost to the truth. He is forced by his 
 own pose to become not an unprincipled liar, 
 but that much more disgusting object, a liar on 
 principle. He is bound, in order to legitimise 
 his own position, to prove that " the natives " 
 are savages, living in a morass of nastiness and 
 ignorance. All facts must be adapted to this 
 conclusion. The clerks, having made this 
 startling discovery, went on to supplement it by 
 the further discovery that their masters had 
 invaded Anywhere in order to please the Pope, 
 and introduce true religion. This second role 
 completes the dedication of the invaders on the 
 altar of mendacity. It was Leo XIII. himself 
 who, with that charming humour of his, depre- 
 cated the attitude of certain a priori historians 
 who, said he, if they were writing the Gospel 
 story would, in their anxiety to please the Pope, 
 probably suppress the denial of Peter. 
 
 These things which might have happened 
 anywhere did, in fact, happen in Ireland. Out 
 of the footprints of the invaders there sprang up 
 a legion of fictionists, professional cooks of 
 history. Beginning with Giraldus Cambrensis 
 
20 THE OPEN SECRET OF IRELAND 
 
 they ought to have ended, but, as we shall see, 
 did not end with Froude. The significance of 
 these mercenaries of literature can hardly be 
 exaggerated ; it is not too much to say that they 
 found Ireland a nation, and left her a question. 
 It is not at all that they put on record the thing 
 that was not as regards the events of their own 
 period. That might be and has been amended 
 by the labours of impartial scholarship. The 
 real crime of the fabulists lies in this, that 
 their tainted testimony constituted for honest 
 Englishmen the only information about Ireland 
 easily obtainable. The average Englishman 
 (that is to say, the forty millions of him who do 
 not read learned books of any kind) comes to 
 the consideration of contemporary Ireland with 
 a vision distorted almost beyond hope of cure. 
 The treasured lies of seven hundred years are 
 in his heart to-day. For time runs against the 
 cause of truth as well as with it. Once create a 
 Frankenstein of race hatred, and he will gather 
 strength in going. The chronicler's fable of 
 this century becomes the accredited historical 
 fact of the next. Give it what billiard-players 
 call " legs " enough and it will mature into a 
 tradition, a proverb, a spontaneous instinct 
 There is a whole department of research con- 
 cerned with the growth of myths, stage by stage, 
 
HISTORY 21* 
 
 from a little nebulous blotch into a peopled 
 world of illusion. The strange evolution there 
 set forth finds an exact parallel in the develop- 
 ment of English opinion on Ireland. And, in- 
 deed, the more you study " the Irish Question," 
 as it is envisaged by the ruling mind of Great 
 Britain, the more conscious are you of moving 
 in the realm not of reason but of mythology. 
 
 All this will seem obvious even to the point 
 of weariness. But it is of interest as furnishing 
 a clue to the English attitude towards Irish 
 history ; I should rather say attitudes, for there 
 are two. The first is that of the Man of Feeling. 
 His mode of procedure recalls inevitably an 
 exquisite story which is to be found somewhere 
 in Rousseau. During country walks, Jean 
 Jacques tells us, his father would suddenly say: 
 " My son, we will speak of your dear, dead 
 mother." And Jean Jacques was expected to 
 reply : " Wait, then, a moment, my dear father. 
 I will first search for my handkerchief, for I 
 perceive that we are going to weep." In pre- 
 cisely such a mood of deliberate melancholy does 
 the sentimentalist address himself to the Confis- 
 cations and the Penal Laws. He is ready to 
 praise without stint any Irish leader who happens 
 to be sufficiently dead. He is ready to confess 
 that all his own British forerunners were abomin- 
 
M THE OPEN SECRET OF IRELAND 
 
 able blackguards. He admits, not only with 
 candour but even with a certain enthusiastic 
 remorse, that England oppressed Ireland in 
 every phase of their relations. Then comes the 
 conclusion. So terrible have been the sins of 
 his fathers that he feels bound to make restitu- 
 tion. And in order to make restitution, to be 
 kind and helpful and remedial, he must retain 
 the management of Irish affairs in his benevolent 
 hands. In order to expiate the crimes of the 
 past he must repeat the basal blunder that was 
 the cause and source of them. For this kind of 
 sympathy we have only to say, in a somewhat 
 vulgar phrase, that we have no use whatever. 
 The Englishman who " sympathises " with 
 Ireland is lost. 
 
 But the more general attitude differs widely 
 from this. Confronting us with a bluff and not 
 unkindly demeanour, worthy of the nation that 
 invented cold baths as a tonic against all spiritual 
 anguish, the practical, modern Englishman 
 speaks out his mind in straight-flung words and 
 few. " You fellows," he says, " brood too much 
 over the past. After all, this is the twentieth 
 century, not the twelfth. What does it matter 
 whether my ancestors murdered yours or not? 
 Both would be dead now in any event. What 
 does it matter whether yours were the saints and 
 
HISTORY 23 
 
 men of letters and mine the savages, or whether 
 the boot was on the other leg ? That's all over 
 and done with. Imitate me. Let bygones be 
 bygones." 
 
 Now this is, in some respects, the authentic 
 voice of health. Undoubtedly the most charac- 
 teristic thing about the past is that it is not 
 present, and to lavish on it too tragic and intense 
 a devotion is to love death more than life. And 
 yet our bluff Englishman can learn in two words 
 how it comes about that his invitation represents 
 a demand for the impossible. In the first place, 
 the bygones have not gone by. Our complaint is 
 made not against the crimes of his fathers, who 
 are dead, but against the crimes of himself and 
 his fellows, who are alive. We denounce not the 
 repealed Penal Laws but the unrepealed Act of 
 Union. If we recall to the memory of England 
 the systematic baseness of the former, it is in 
 order to remind her that she once thought them 
 right, and now confesses that they were cruelly 
 wrong. We Irish are realists, and we hold the 
 problems of the present as of more account than 
 any agonies or tyrannies of the past. But our 
 realism has the human touch in it, and that con- 
 stitutes the second impossibility in the invitation 
 tendered us. Que messieurs les assassins com- 
 mencent I The anti-Irish legend is not dead nor 
 
24 THE OPEN SECRET OF IRELAND 
 
 even sleeping, nor are the resources of calumny 
 yet exhausted. An instance is immediately at 
 hand. I have, at this moment, on my desk a 
 volume lately issued — "The School History of 
 England." It is published by the Clarendon 
 Press, Oxford ; Mr Rudyard Kipling contributes 
 twenty-three pieces of verse, and a Mr C. R. L. 
 Fletcher, whose qualifications are not stated, 
 appears to be responsible for the prose. The 
 book has been praised in most of the papers, and 
 it will no doubt go far. This is the picture of the 
 coming to Ireland of the Cymro-Frankish adven- 
 turers which its pages will imprint on the minds 
 of the youth of England : 
 
 " One event of his reign (Henry II. 's) must not 
 be forgotten, his visit to Ireland in 1171-2. St 
 Patrick, you may have heard, had banished the 
 snakes from that island, but he had not succeeded 
 in banishing the murderers and thieves who were 
 worse than many snakes. In spite of some few 
 settlements of Danish pirates and traders on the 
 eastern coast, Ireland had remained purely Celtic 
 and purely a pasture country. All wealth was 
 reckoned in cows ; Rome had never set foot there, 
 so there was a king for every day in the week, and 
 the sole amusement of such persons was to drive 
 off each other's cows and to kill all who resisted. In 
 Henry II. 's time this had been going on for at 
 least seven hundred years, and during the seven 
 
HISTORY 25 
 
 hundred that have followed much the same thing 
 would have been going on, if the English 
 Government had not occasionally interfered." 
 
 The English whom Henry II. left behind him 
 soon became " as wild and barbarous as the 
 Irishmen themselves." 
 
 Oxford, the home of so many other lost 
 causes, apparently aspires to be also the home 
 of the lost cause of mendacity. The forcible- 
 feeble malice of Mr Fletcher calls for no serious 
 discussion ; submit it to any continental scholar, 
 to any honest British scholar, and he will ask 
 contemptuously, though perhaps with a) little 
 stab of pain, how the name of Oxford comes 
 to be associated with such wicked absurdities. 
 Every other reference to Ireland is marked by 
 the same scientific composure and balanced 
 judgment. And this document, inspired by 
 race hatred, and apparently designed to propa- 
 gate race hatred, is offered to the youth of these 
 countries as an aid towards the consolidation of 
 the Empire. It is a case not merely of the 
 poisoning of a well, but of the poisoning of a 
 great river at its source. The force of cowardice 
 can no farther go. So long as it goes thus far, 
 so long as the Froudes find Fletchers to echo 
 them, Irishmen will inevitably " brood over the 
 
26 THE OPEN SECRET OF IRELAND 
 
 past." We do not share the cult of ancestor- 
 worship, but we hold the belief that the Irish 
 nation, like any other, is an organism endowed 
 with a life in some sort continuous and repeti- 
 tive of its origins. To us it does matter some- 
 thing whether our forerunners were turbulent 
 savages, destitute of all culture, or whether they 
 were valiant, immature men labouring through 
 the twilight of their age towards that dawn which 
 does not yet flush our own horizon. But we 
 are far from wishing that dead centuries should 
 be summoned back to wake old bitterness that 
 ought also to be dead. Hand history over to 
 the scholars, if you will ; let it be marshalled as 
 a multitudinous and coloured pageant, to incite 
 imaginations and inspire literature. Such is our 
 desire, but when we read the clotted nonsense 
 of persons like Mr Fletcher we can only repeat: 
 Que messieurs les assassins commencent I 
 
 For the purpose of this inquiry it is inevitable 
 that some brief account should be rendered of 
 the past relations between England and Ireland. 
 The reader need not shrink back in alarm ; it is 
 not proposed to lead him by the reluctant nose 
 through the whole maze and morass of Irish 
 history. The past is of value to political realists 
 only in that residue of it which survives, namely, 
 the wisdom which it ought to have taught us. 
 
HISTORY 27 
 
 Englishmen are invited to consider the history 
 of Ireland solely from that point of view. They 
 are prayed to purge themselves altogether of 
 pity, indignation, and remorse; these are 
 emotions far too beneficent to waste on things 
 outside the ambit of our own immediate life. If 
 they are wise they will come to Irish history as 
 to a school, and they will learn one lesson that 
 runs through it like the refrain of a ballad. A 
 very simple lesson it is, just this : Ireland cannot 
 be put down. Ireland always has her way 
 in the end. If the opposite view is widely held 
 the explanation lies on the surface. Two causes 
 have co-operated to produce the illusion. 
 Everybody agrees that Great Britain has acted 
 in a most blackguardly fashion towards Ireland ; 
 everybody assumes that blackguardism always 
 succeeds in this world, therefore Ireland is a 
 failure. The only flaw in this syllogism is that 
 it is in direct conflict with every known fact. 
 For the rest we have to thank or blame the 
 sentimentalism of Mr Matthew Arnold. His 
 proud but futile Celts who " went down to battle 
 but always fell " have been mistaken for the 
 Irish of actual history. The truth is, of course, 
 that the phrase is in the grand manner of sym- 
 bolism. When Ecclesiastes laments that the 
 eye is not filled with seeing nor the ear with 
 
28 THE OPEN SECRET OF IRELAND 
 
 hearing we do not argue him deaf and blind ; 
 we take his words as a proclamation of that 
 famine and fierce appetite of the spirit which 
 has created all the higher religions. Ireland 
 agrees with Ecclesiastes. Perceiving that there 
 is in matter no integral and permanent reality 
 she cannot be content with material victories; 
 her poets are subtle in what a French writer 
 styles the innuendoes by which the soul makes 
 its enormous claims. The formula of her 
 aspiration has been admirably rendered by the 
 late Mrs Nora Chesson: 
 
 " He follows after shadows when all your 
 chase is done; 
 He follows after shadows, the King of 
 Ireland's son." 
 
 Were I to read the poem, of which these 
 lines are the motif, to certain genial English- 
 men of my acquaintance they would observe 
 that the gentleman in question was a " queer 
 cove, staying up late at night and catching cold, 
 and that no doubt there was a woman in the 
 case." But these are considerations a little 
 remote from the daily dust of politics. In the 
 sense in which every life is a failure, and the 
 best life the worst failure, Ireland is a failure. 
 But in every other sense, in all that touches the 
 
HISTORY 29 
 
 fathomable business of daylight, she has been 
 a conspicuous success. 
 
 A certain type of fanaticism is naive enough 
 to regard the intercourse of England with Ire- 
 land as that of a superior with an inferior race. 
 This is the sanction invoked to legitimise every 
 adventure in invasion and colonisation. M. 
 Jules Hormand, who has attempted, in his 
 recent book, " Domination et Colonisation," to 
 formulate a theory of the whole subject, touches 
 bed-rock when he writes : 
 
 " We must then accept as our point of departure 
 the principle that there is a hierarchy of races and 
 of civilisations, and that we belong to the higher 
 race and civilisation. . . . The essential legitima- 
 tion of conquest is precisely this conviction of our 
 own superiority. . . . Nations which do not hold 
 this belief, because incapable of such sincerity to- 
 wards themselves, should not attempt to conquer 
 others." 
 
 The late Lord Salisbury was grasping at such 
 a justification when he likened the Irish to 
 Hottentots ; it would be a justification of a kind 
 if it chanced to be validated by the facts. But 
 it does not. There is so much genuine humour 
 in the comparison that, for my part, I am unable 
 to take offence at it. I look at the lathe painted 
 to look like iron, and I set over against him 
 
30 THE OPEN SECRET OF IRELAND 
 
 Parnell. That is enough ; the lathe is smashed 
 to fragments amid the colossal laughter of the 
 gods. The truth is that in every shock and 
 conflict of Irish civilisation with English, it is 
 the latter that has given way. The obscuration 
 of this obvious fact is probably to be ascribed to 
 the military successes of the Norman, or rather 
 the Cymro-Frankish invaders. If we were the 
 higher race why did we not put them out? 
 Replying on the same plane of thought we 
 observe that if they were the higher race they 
 would have put us down. But a more detailed 
 assignment of qualities between the two peoples 
 is possible. In general it may be said that the 
 two stood on much the same level of mentality, 
 but that they had specialised on different sub- 
 jects, the Normans on war and politics, the Irish 
 on culture. Of the many writers who help us 
 to reconstruct the period we ought to signalise 
 one, Mrs A. S. Green, who to a rare scholarship 
 adds something rarer, the genius of common 
 sense. This is not the place in which to recall 
 the whole substance of her " Making of Ireland 
 and its Undoing " and her " Irish Nationality " ; 
 but from borrowings thence and elsewhere we 
 can piece together a plain tale of that first 
 chapter of the Irish Question, 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 HISTORY 
 
 (b) Plain 
 
 In those days war was the most lucrative 
 industry open to a young man of breeding, 
 courage, and ability. Owners of capital re- 
 garded it as a sound investment. What Pro- 
 fessor Oman tells us of the Normans in 1066 
 was equally true of them in 11 69: 
 
 11 Duke William had undertaken his expedition 
 not as a mere feudal lord of the barons of Nor- 
 mandy but rather as the managing director of a 
 great joint-stock company for the conquest of 
 England, in which not only his own subjects but 
 hundreds of adventurers, poor and rich, from all 
 parts of Western Europe had taken shares." 
 
 The Normans, then, came to Ireland with 
 their eyes on three objects. In the first place, 
 property. This was to be secured in the case 
 of each individual adventurer by the overthrow 
 
 3i 
 
32 THE OPEN SECRET OF IRELAND 
 
 of some individual Irish chieftain. It necessi- 
 tated war in the shape of a purely local, and 
 indeed personal grapple. In the second place, 
 plunder. This was to be secured by raids, 
 incursions, and temporary alliances. In the 
 third place, escape from the growing power 
 and exactions of the Crown. This was to be 
 secured geographically by migration to Ireland, 
 and politically by delaying, resolutely if dis- 
 creetly, the extension in that country of the 
 over-lordship of the King. Herein lies the 
 explanation of the fact that for three and a half 
 centuries the English penetration into Ireland 
 is a mere chaos of private appetites and 
 egotisms. The invaders, as we have said, were 
 specialists in war. and in the unification of states 
 through war. This they had done for Eng- 
 land ; this they failed to do for Ireland. The 
 one ingredient which, if dropped into the seeth- 
 ing cauldron of her life, must have produced 
 the definite crystallisation of a new nationality, 
 complete in structure and function, was not 
 contributed. True, the Cymro-Franks proved 
 themselves strong enough in arms to maintain 
 their foothold ; if that physical test is enough to 
 establish their racial superiority then let us 
 salute Mr Jack Johnson as Zarathustna, the 
 superman. But in their one special and charac- 
 
HISTORY 33 
 
 teristic task they failed lamentably. Instead of 
 conquest and consolidation they gave us mere 
 invasion and disturbance. The disastrous role 
 played by them has been unfolded by many 
 interpreters of history, by none with a more 
 vivid accuracy than we find in the pages of M. 
 Paul-Dubois : 
 
 " Had Ireland," he writes, " been left to herself 
 she would, in all human probability, have suc- 
 ceeded, notwithstanding her decadence, in estab- 
 lishing political unity under a military chief. Had 
 the country been brought into peaceful contact 
 with continental civilisation, it must have advanced 
 along the path of modern progress. Even if it 
 had been conquered by a powerful nation, it would 
 at least have participated in the progress of the 
 conquering power. But none of these things hap- 
 pened. England, whose political and social de- 
 velopment had been hastened by the Norman 
 Conquest, desired to extend her influence to 
 Ireland. ' She wished,' as Froude strangely tells 
 us, ' to complete the work of civilisation happily 
 begun by the Danes.' But in actual fact she only 
 succeeded in trammelling the development of Irish 
 society, and maintaining in the country an appal- 
 ling condition of decadent stagnation, as the result 
 of three centuries and a half of intermittent inva- 
 sions, never followed by conquest." 
 
 On the other hand the triumph of Irish cul- 
 ture was easy and absolute. Ireland, unvisited 
 
 c 
 
34 THE OPEN SECRET OF IRELAND 
 
 by the legions and the law of Rome, had evolved 
 a different vision of the life of men in com- 
 munity, or, in other words, a different idea of 
 the State. Put very briefly the difference lay 
 in this. The Romans and their inheritors 
 organised for purposes of war and order, the 
 Irish for purposes of culture. The one laid 
 the emphasis on police, the other on poets. 
 But for a detailed exposition of the contrast I 
 must send the reader to Mrs Green's " Irish 
 Nationality." In a world in which right is little 
 more than a secretion of might, in which, unless 
 a strong man armed keeps house, his enemies 
 enter in, the weakness of the Gaelic idea is 
 obvious. But the Roman pattern too had a 
 characteristic vice which has led logically in our 
 own time to a monstrous and sinister growth of 
 armaments. 
 
 To those who recognise in this deification of 
 war the blackest menace of our day the vision 
 of a culture State is not without charm. The 
 shattering possibilities enfolded in it would 
 have fevered Nietzsche and fascinated Renan. 
 But, be that as it may, Ireland played Cleopatra 
 to the Antony of the invaders. Some of them, 
 indeed, the " garrison " pure and simple, had 
 all their interests centred not only in resisting 
 but in calumniating her. But the majority 
 
HISTORY 35 
 
 yielded gaily to her music, her poetry, her 
 sociability, that magical quality of hers which 
 the Germans call Gemiitlichkeit. In a few 
 centuries a new and enduring phrase had desig- 
 nated them as more Irish than the Irish them- 
 selves. So far as any superiority of civilisation 
 manifests itself in this first period it is altogether 
 on the side of Ireland. This power of assimila- 
 tion has never decayed. There never was a 
 nation, not even the United States, that so 
 subdued and re-fashioned those who came to her 
 shores, that so wrought them into her own blood 
 and tissue. The Norman baron is transformed 
 in a few generations into an Irish chieftain, and 
 as often as not into an Irish " rebel. " The 
 Jacobite planter of the first decade of the 
 seventeenth century is in the fifth decade found 
 in arms against Cromwell ; the Cromwellian 
 settler is destined in turn to shed his blood for 
 James II. and Catholicity. Protestant colonists 
 who, in the early eighteenth century, enforce and 
 defend the abominable Penal Laws, will in 1782 
 demand, with drawn swords, that henceforth 
 there shall be no longer a Protestant colony but 
 in its place an Irish nation. The personal history 
 of the captains of the Irish cause in modern times 
 is no less remarkable. O'Connell begins his 
 public career in the Yeomanry called out to put 
 
36 THE OPEN SECRET OF IRELAND 
 
 down the insurrectionary movement of Emmet. 
 Isaac Butt comes first into note as the orator of 
 the Orange Party in Dublin. Parnell himself 
 steps out of a Tory milieu and tradition into the 
 central tumult of agitation. Wave after incom- 
 ing wave of them, her conquerors were con- 
 quered. " Once again," cried Parnell in the 
 last public utterance of his life, " I am come to 
 cast myself into the deep sea of the love of my 
 people." In that deep sea a hundred diverse 
 currents of blood have met and mingled ; they 
 have lost their individual drift to become part 
 of the strong tide of national consciousness 
 and national unity. If Irish history is to be 
 regarded as a test of racial superiority then 
 Ireland emerges with the crown and garlands of 
 victory. We came, we the invaders, to domi- 
 nate, and we remained to serve. For Ireland has 
 signed us with the oil and chrism of her human 
 sacrament, and even though we should deny the 
 faith with our lips she would hold our hearts to 
 the end. 
 
 But let us translate her triumph into more 
 concrete speech. The essential lesson of 
 experience, then, is that no device, plan, or 
 policy adopted by England for the subjugation 
 of Ireland has ever been anything except an 
 abject failure. And the positive of this nega- 
 
HISTORY 37 
 
 tive is that every claim that ever formed part of 
 the national programme of Ireland has won its 
 way against all enmities. No plough to which 
 she ever put her hand has been turned back 
 or stayed eternally in mid-furrow. It does not 
 matter what period you call to the witness-box; 
 the testimony is uniform and unvarying. Until 
 Tudor times, as has been noted, there cannot 
 be said to have been in any strict sense an 
 English policy in Ireland ; there was only a 
 scuffle of appetites. In so far as there was a 
 policy it consisted of sporadic murder for the 
 one half, and for the other of an attempt 
 to prevent all intercourse that might lead to 
 amalgamation between the two peoples. The 
 Statute of Kilkenny — which is, all things con- 
 sidered, more important than the Kilkenny cats 
 though not so well known in England — made it 
 a capital offence for a settler to marry an Irish- 
 woman or to adopt the Irish language, law, or 
 costume. The Act no doubt provided a good 
 many ruffians with legal and even ecclesi- 
 astical fig-leaves with which to cover their 
 ruffianism, and promoted among the garrison 
 such laudable objects as rape and assassination. 
 But as a breakwater between the two races it 
 did not fulfil expectation. The Statute was 
 passed in 1367: and two centuries later Henry 
 
38 THE OPEN SECRET OF IRELAND 
 
 VIII. was forced to appoint as his Deputy the 
 famous Garrett Fitzgerald whose life was a 
 militant denial of every clause and letter of it. 
 With the Tudors, after some diplomatic pre- 
 liminaries, a very clear and business-like policy 
 was developed. Seeing that the only sort of 
 quiet Irishman known to contemporary science 
 was a dead Irishman, English Deputies and 
 Governors were instructed to pacify Ireland by 
 slaughtering or starving the entire population. 
 The record of their conscientious effort to obey 
 these instructions may be studied in any writer 
 of the period, or in any historian, say Mr 
 Froude. For Mr Froude, in his pursuit of 
 the picturesque, was always ready to resort to 
 the most extreme measures ; he sometimes even 
 went so far as to tell the truth. The noblest 
 and ablest English minds lent their aids. Sir 
 Walter Raleigh and Edmund Spenser were both 
 rather circumambulatory on paper ; the work of 
 each is a long monotone broken by two or 
 three exquisite immortalities. But they were 
 both as concise in action as an Elizabethan 
 headsman. Sir Walter helped Lord Grey, the 
 recognised pattern in those days of the Christian 
 gentleman, to put to death seven hundred 
 prisoners-of-war at Smerwick. Spenser, being 
 no soldier, leaned rather to famine. In his 
 
HISTORY 39 
 
 famous book he recommends the destruction 
 of crops, houses, cattle, and all necessaries of 
 life so that the Irish should " soon be compelled 
 to devour each other." The Commanders-in- 
 Chief and the Deputies specialised in poison, as 
 became men whose wealth and learning enabled 
 them to keep in touch with the Italian Renais- 
 sance. Bluff, straightforward troopers like 
 Mountjoy, Malby, Wilmot, Bagenal, Chichester, 
 and the rest, not pretending to such refinements, 
 did their best in the way of hanging, stabbing, 
 and burning. In those days as well as ours the 
 children had their Charter. " Nits," said the 
 trustees of civilisation, " will grow to lice." And 
 so they tossed them on the points of their swords, 
 thus combining work with play, or fed them on 
 the roast corpses of their relatives, and after- 
 wards strangled them with tresses of their 
 mother's hair. 
 
 I do not recall these facts in order to show 
 that Elizabethan policy was a riot of blackguar- 
 dism. That is obvious, and it is irrelevant. I 
 mention them in order to show that the black- 
 guardism under review was an unrelieved failure. 
 At one time, indeed, it seemed to have suc- 
 ceeded. 
 
 II Ireland, brayed as in a mortar, to use Sir John 
 Davies' phrase," writes M. Paul-Dubois, " at last 
 
4 o THE OPEN SECRET OF IRELAND 
 
 submitted. In the last years of the century half 
 the population had perished. Elizabeth reigned 
 over corpses and ashes. Hibernia Pacata — Ireland 
 is ' pacified.' " 
 
 The blunder discloses itself at a glance. 
 Only half the population had perished; there 
 were still alive, according to the most probable 
 estimate, quite two hundred thousand Irishmen. 
 The next generation helps to illustrate not only 
 the indestructibility of Ireland, but her all but 
 miraculous power of recuperation. So abun- 
 dant are the resources of his own vitality that, 
 as Dr Moritz Bonn declares, an Irish peasant 
 can live where a continental goat would starve. 
 And not having read Malthus — Mr Malthus at 
 that time being even less readable than since — 
 the Irish remnant proceeded to develop anew 
 into a nation. In forty years it was marching 
 behind that beau chevalier Owen Roe O'Neill 
 to battle and victory. O'Neill, a general fa- 
 mous through Europe, the one man who might 
 have measured equal swords with Cromwell, 
 was removed by poison, and then came the 
 massacres. In eleven years, Sir William Petty 
 assures us, 616,000 out of a total population of 
 1,466,000 perished by the sword or by starva- 
 tion. For the remainder the policy of root and 
 branch extermination was abandoned in favour 
 
HISTORY 41 
 
 of a policy of State-aided migration and emi- 
 gration. As an alternative to hell the Irish 
 were deported to Connaught or the Barbadoes. 
 Henceforth there were to be three provinces of 
 loyal English, and one of rebelly Irish. This 
 again was not a radiant success. The trans- 
 formation of the Cromwellian settler has been 
 indicated ; if you were to search for him to-day 
 you would probably find him President of the 
 local branch of the United Irish League. The 
 story repeats itself period after period. The 
 Penal Laws did not protestantise Ireland. 
 The eighteenth century may be said to mark 
 the lowest ebb of national life, but the tide was 
 to turn. After Aughrim and the Boyne, the new 
 device of England was to sacrifice everything 
 to the " garrison." " Protestant Ireland," as 
 Grattan put it, " knelt to England on the necks 
 of her countrymen." In one aspect the garrison 
 were tyrants ; in another they were slaves. 
 They were at once oppressors and oppressed. 
 There was a sort of " deal " between them and 
 the English Government by which the public 
 welfare was to be sacrificed to the English 
 Government, the Irish Catholics to the " garri- 
 son." A vile programme, but subtle and 
 adroit, it bore its unnatural fruit of legislation, 
 passed by the Westminster Parliament and the 
 
42 THE OPEN SECRET OF IRELAND 
 
 Dublin Garrison Parliament alike, for the de- 
 struction of every manufacturing and commer- 
 cial interest in Ireland that was thought to 
 conflict with a similar interest in England. But 
 another debacle has to be chronicled. Out of 
 the very baseness of this regime a new pa- 
 triotism was begotten. The garrison, awakening 
 abruptly to the fact that it had no country, deter- 
 mined to invent one; and there was brought 
 to birth that modern Ireland, passionate for free- 
 dom, which has occupied the stage ever since. 
 In our own time it has knit, as a fractured limb 
 knits, into one tissue with the tradition of the 
 Gaelic peasantry. Hanging and burning, tor- 
 ture and oppression, poison and Penal Laws, 
 bribes and blackguardism so far from extermi- 
 nating the Irish people actually hammered them 
 into a nation, one and indestructible, proud of 
 its past and confident of its future. 
 
 Take instances still more recent and particu- 
 lar — the struggle for religious freedom or the 
 struggle for the land. Catholic emancipation 
 is a leading case: obstinacy against obstinacy, 
 the No! of England against the Yes! of Ire- 
 land, and the former sprawling in the ditch at 
 the end of the tussle. "The Law," ran the 
 dictum of an eighteenth-century Lord Chan- 
 cellor, "does not suppose any such person to 
 
HISTORY 43 
 
 exist as an Irish Roman Catholic." At this 
 moment a Catholic holds the seals and purse 
 of the Chancellorship. Never did ministers 
 swallow their own stubborn words more incon- 
 tinently than did Peel and Wellington. So 
 late as 1828 Peel was loudly declaring that 
 the continuance of these bars, which excluded 
 the Catholics from the acquisition of political 
 power, was necessary for the maintenance of the 
 Constitution and the safety of the Church, and 
 Wellington was echoing his words. A year 
 later, utterly defeated by O'Connell, Peel was 
 introducing the Catholic Relief Bill in the 
 Commons. Wellington had it for his task to 
 induce, or rather frighten the king to assent. 
 Ireland not only emancipated the Catholics, 
 she went on to emancipate the Dissenters, a 
 service of freedom of conscience which is too 
 often forgotten. 
 
 The Tithe System was similarly declared to 
 be part of the fabric of the Constitution, to be 
 upheld at the point of the bayonet. Scythe in 
 hand, the Irish peasant proclaimed that it must 
 go. It went. Still more fundamental was the 
 existence of the Protestant Established Church. 
 To touch it was to lay hands on the Ark. 
 Orange orators threatened civil war; two hun- 
 dred thousand Ulstermen were to shoulder their 
 
44 THE OPEN SECRET OF IRELAND 
 
 Minie Rifles, and not merely slaughter the 
 Catholics but even depose Queen Victoria. 
 
 Ireland said that the Establishment too 
 must go ; and, with the echoed menace of 
 Fenianism ringing in his ears, Mr Gladstone 
 hauled down the official blazon of Ascendancy. 
 " Ulster " did not fight. But the fierce struggle 
 for the land affords the crucial test. Landlor- 
 dism of that most savage type which held for its 
 whole gospel that a man may do what he likes 
 with his own was conceived to be the very 
 corner-stone of British rule in Ireland. It con- 
 trolled Parliament, the judiciary, the schools, 
 the Press, and possessed in the Royal Irish 
 Constabulary an incomparable watch-dog. It 
 had resisted the criticism and attack loosened 
 against it by the scandal of the Great Famine. 
 Then suddenly Ireland took the business in 
 hand. On a certain day in October 1879, some 
 thirty men met in a small hotel in Dublin and, 
 under the inspiration of Michael Davitt, founded 
 the Land League. To the programme then 
 formulated, the expropriation of the landlords 
 at twenty years' purchase of their rents, England 
 as usual said No ! The proposal was thundered 
 against as confiscation, communism, naked and 
 shameful. To any student, with patience suffi- 
 cient for the task, the contemporary files of such 
 
HISTORY 45 
 
 journals as the Times will furnish an exquisite 
 chapter in the literature of obtuseness. Eng- 
 land sustained her No! with batons, bullets, 
 plank-beds, Coercion courts, and an occasional 
 halter ; Ireland her Yes ! with " agitation." Is 
 it necessary to ask who won? Is it necessary 
 to trace step by step the complete surrender of 
 the last ditchers of those days? The fantastic 
 and wicked dreams of the agitators have in 
 thirty years translated themselves into Statute 
 Law and solid fact. An English statesman of 
 the period, say Mr Balfour or Mr Wyndham, is 
 fortunate if, with a few odd rags pilfered from 
 the Land League wardrobe, he can conceal from 
 history his utter poverty of ideas. 
 
 This, then, is the essential wisdom of Irish 
 history: Ireland has won all along the line. 
 The Normans did not normanise her. The 
 Tudors did not exterminate her. She has un- 
 done the Confiscations, and drawn a cancelling 
 pen through the Penal Laws. The Act of 
 Union, so far from suppressing her individu- 
 ality or overwhelming it, has actually brought it 
 to that full self-consciousness which constitutes 
 the coming of age of a nation. Tears, as we 
 read in Wordsworth, to human suffering are 
 due ; if there be anyone with tears at command 
 he may shed them, with great fitness, and with 
 
46 THE OPEN SECRET OF IRELAND 
 
 no profit at all, over the long martyrdom of Ire- 
 land. But let him, at least if he values facts, 
 think twice before he goes on to apply to 
 her that other line which speaks of human 
 hopes defeated and overthrown. No other 
 people in the world has held so staunchly to its 
 inner vision; none other has, with such fiery 
 patience, repelled the hostility of circumstances, 
 and in the end reshaped them after the desire 
 of her heart. Hats off to success, gentlemen! 
 Your modern God may well be troubled at sight 
 of this enigmatic Ireland which at once despises 
 him, and tumbles his faithfullest worshippers 
 in the sand of their own amphitheatre. Yet, 
 so it is. The Confederate General, seeing 
 victory suddenly snatched from his hands, and 
 not for the first time, by Meagher's Brigade, ex- 
 claimed in immortal profanity : " There comes 
 that damned Green Flag again ! " I have often 
 commended that phrase to Englishmen as ad- 
 mirably expressive of the historical role and 
 record of Ireland in British Politics. The 
 damned Green Flag flutters again in their eyes, 
 and if they will but listen to the music that 
 marches with it, they will find that the lamenting 
 fifes are dominated wholly by the drums of 
 victory. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 THE OBVIOUSNESS OF HOME RULE 
 
 Ireland, then, has made it her foible to be not 
 only right but irresistible in her past demands. 
 What is it that she now claims, and on what 
 grounds? She claims the right to enter into 
 possession of her own soul. She claims the 
 toga virilis, and all the strengthening burdens 
 of freedom. Now it is difficult to represent 
 such a demand in terms of argument. Liberty- 
 is no mere conclusion of linked logic long- 
 drawn out: it is an axiom, a flaming avatar. 
 The arguments by which it is defended are 
 important, but they bear to it much the same 
 relation that a table of the wave-lengths of 
 various rays of light bears to the immediate 
 glory of a sunrise. There is another obstacle. 
 Self-government, like other spiritual realities, 
 say love or civilisation, is too vast, obvious, 
 and natural to be easily imprisoned in words. 
 You are certainly in love; suppose you were 
 
 47 
 
48 THE OPEN SECRET OF IRELAND 
 
 suddenly asked " to state the case " for love ? 
 You are probably civilised ; suppose you were 
 suddenly asked " to state the case for civilisa- 
 tion "? So it is with the Home Rule idea. To 
 ask what is the gate of entrance to it is like 
 asking what was the gate of entrance to 
 hundred-gated Thebes. My friend, Mr Barry 
 O'Brien, in lecturing on Ireland, used to begin 
 by recounting a very agreeable and appropriate 
 story. A prisoner on trial was asked whether 
 he would accept for his case the jury which had 
 tried the last. He objected very vehemently. 
 "Well, but," said the Judge, "what is the 
 nature of your objection? Do you object to 
 the panel or to the array ? " " Ah ! " replied the 
 traverser, " if you want to know, I object to 
 the whole damned business." That is approxi- 
 mately our objection to the present system of 
 government in Ireland. But let me attempt to 
 group under a series of somewhat arbitrary 
 headings the " case for Home Rule," that is to 
 say, the case for applying to Ireland the plain 
 platitudes of constitutional freedom. 
 
 The whole matter roots in the fact of 
 nationality. Nationality is to political life what 
 personality is to mental life, the mainspring, 
 namely, of the mechanism. The two principles 
 of organisation have this in common, that 
 
OBVIOUSNESS OF HOME RULE 49 
 
 although by, through, and for them the entire 
 pageant of our experience is unfolded, we are 
 unable to capture either of them in a precise 
 formula. That I am a person I know; but 
 what is a person? That Ireland is a nation I 
 know ; but what is a nation ? "A community 
 of memories and hopes," says Anatole France ; 
 but that applies to a football club. Something 
 for which a man will die, says Mr T. M. Healy: 
 but men will die for strange reasons ; there was 
 a French poet who shot himself because the 
 trees were always green in the spring and never, 
 for a change, blue or red. A cultural unit, 
 say the anthropologists ; an idea of the divine 
 mind, declare Mazzini and the mystics of 
 sociology. Each of these formulas possesses a 
 certain relative truth, but all of them together 
 come short of the whole truth. Nationality, 
 which acts better perhaps than it argues, is one 
 of the great forces of nature and of human nature 
 that have got to be accepted. Nationality will 
 out, and where it exists it will, in spite of all 
 resistance, strain fiercely to express itself in 
 some sort of autonomous government. 
 
 German romance depicts for us the misery 
 and restlessness of a man who had lost his 
 shadow. Catholic theologians — if the masters 
 of a wisdom too high and too austere for these 
 
 P 
 
50 THE OPEN SECRET OF IRELAND 
 
 days may be invoked — tell us that the departed 
 soul, even though it be in Paradise, hungers 
 with a great desire for the Resurrection that it 
 may be restored to its life-long comrade, the 
 body. 
 
 " The crimson-throbbing glow 
 Into its old abode aye pants to go." 
 
 Look again at Ireland and you will discern, 
 under all conflicts, that unity of memory, of will, 
 of material interest, of temperamental atmos- 
 phere which knits men into a nation. You will 
 notice the presence of these characteristics, but 
 it is an absence, a void that will most impress 
 you. You will see not a body that has lost its 
 shadow, but something more sinister — a soul 
 that has been sundered from its natural body. 
 She demands restoration. She sues out a habeas 
 corpus of a kind not elsewhere to be paralleled. 
 That is the " Irish Question." 
 
 You may not like this interpretation of things. 
 It may seem to you fantastic, nasty, perilous 
 to all comfort. Life often does make on the 
 tender-hearted an impression of coarse violence ; 
 life, nevertheless, always has its way. What 
 other interpretation is possible ? Lancashire, to 
 take any random contrast, is much richer than 
 Ireland in wealth and population ; but Lanca- 
 shire is not a " Question." Lancashire is not 
 
OBVIOUSNESS OF HOME RULE 51 
 
 a " Question " because Lancashire is not a 
 nation. Ireland is a " Question " because Ire- 
 land is a nation. Her fundamental claim is 
 a claim for the constitutional recognition of 
 nationality. 
 
 We have seen that in almost every conflict 
 between English and Irish ideas the latter have 
 had the justification of success. This holds 
 good also as regards our long insistence on 
 nationality as a principle of political organisa- 
 tion. In various passages of the nineteenth 
 century it seemed to be gravely compromised. 
 Capital, its mobility indefinitely increased by 
 the improved technique of exchange, became 
 essentially a citizen of the world. The earth 
 was all about it where to choose ; its masters, 
 falsely identifying patriotism with the Protec- 
 tionism then dominant, struck at both, and the 
 Free Trade movement philosophised itself into 
 cosmopolitanism. Labour, like capital, showed 
 a rapid tendency to become international or 
 rather supernational. " The workers/- pro- 
 claimed Marx, " have no fatherland." While 
 this was the drift of ideas in the economic 
 sphere, that in the political was no more favour- 
 able. Belgium seemed on the point of extinc- 
 tion, Italy was a mere geographical expression, 
 Hungary was abject and broken. In the 
 
52 THE OPEN SECRET OF IRELAND 
 
 narrower but even more significant sphere of 
 British colonial policy the passion for centrali- 
 sation had not yet been understood in all its 
 folly. Downing Street still functioned as the 
 Dublin Castle of the Empire. The possibility 
 of the overseas possessions developing that 
 rich, strong individuality which characterises 
 them to-day would have been dismissed with 
 horror. The colour and texture of men's 
 thought on these subjects has undergone a no- 
 table transformation. Cosmopolitanism of the 
 old type is a slain hallucination. Capital in our 
 time is not content to be a patriot, it is a Jingo. 
 As to labour, if we turn to its politics we find 
 Herr Bebel declaring that the German socialist 
 is first of all a German, and Mr Ramsay 
 MacDonald pledging his adherents to support 
 any war necessary for the assertion of English 
 prestige. If we turn to its theoretical sociology 
 we find the national idea rehabilitated and 
 triumphant. 
 
 Such intellectual reconstructions do not, as a 
 rule, begin in England, or find in English their 
 characteristic formulae. Mr Blatchford might 
 indeed be cited, but it is in the brilliant litera- 
 ture of German Social Democracy that the 
 most scientific expression of the new spirit 
 is to be sought. Truly Marx has been indeed 
 
OBVIOUSNESS OF HOME RULE 53 
 
 translated. His abstract and etiolated inter- 
 nationalism has been replaced by the warm 
 humanity of writers like, say, David or Perner- 
 storfer. The principle of nationality is vindi- 
 cated by the latter in a noble passage. I quote 
 it from Sombart's " Socialism and the Social 
 Movement." 
 
 11 Nationality in its highest form is ... a 
 precious possession. It is the highest expression 
 of human civilisation in an individual form, and 
 mankind is the richer for its appearance. Our pur- 
 pose is not only to see to it that men shall be 
 housed and fed and clothed in a manner worthy of 
 human beings, but also that they may become 
 humanised by participation in the culture of cen- 
 turies, that they may themselves possess culture 
 and produce it. All culture is national. It takes 
 its rise in some special people, and reaches its 
 highest form in national character. . . . Social- 
 ism and the national idea are thus not opposed to 
 each other. Every attempt to weaken the national 
 idea is an attempt to lessen the precious possessions 
 of mankind. . . . Socialism wants to organise, 
 and not disintegrate, humanity. But in the 
 organisms of mankind, not individuals, but nations 
 are the tissues, and if the whole organism is to 
 remain healthy it is necessary for the tissues to be 
 healthy. . . . The peoples, despite the changes 
 they undergo, are everlasting, and they add to their 
 own greatness by helping the world upward. And 
 
54 THE OPEN SECRET OF IRELAND 
 
 so we are at one and the same time good Socialists 
 and good Germans." 
 
 This might almost seem to be a rhapsody, 
 but every movement of continental politics in 
 recent times confirms and enforces its plain 
 truth. " The spirit of resurgent nationality," as 
 Professor Bury of Cambridge tells us, "has 
 governed, as one of the most puissant forces, the 
 political course of the last century and is still 
 unexhausted." It has governed not only the 
 West but the East ; the twain have met in that 
 demand for a constitutional national State which 
 in our day has flamed up, a fire not to be put 
 out, in Turkey, Persia, Egypt. But it is 
 in Imperial politics that the bouleversement has 
 been most complete. When critics now find 
 fault with the structure of the Empire they 
 complain not that there is too much Downing 
 Street in it, but that the residual power of Down- 
 ing Street is not visible to the naked eye. To 
 us Irish the blindness of England to the mean- 
 ing of her own colonial work is a maddening 
 miracle. A wit of the time met Goldsmith at 
 dinner. The novelist was a little more disconcert- 
 ing than usual, a result, let us charitably hope, 
 of the excellence of the claret. Afterwards they 
 asked his fellow-diner what he thought of the 
 
OBVIOUSNESS OF HOME RULE 55 
 
 author. " Well," he replied, " I believe that 
 that man wrote ' The Vicar of Wakefield,' and, 
 let me tell you, it takes a lot of believing. ,, 
 Similarly when we in Ireland learn that Great 
 Britain has founded on the principle of local 
 autonomy an Empire on which the sun never 
 sets, we nerve ourselves to an Act of Faith. It 
 is not inappropriate to observe that a large part 
 of the " founding " was done by Irishmen. 
 
 But the point of immediate interest lies in 
 this. The foolishness of England in Ireland 
 finds an exact parallel, although on a smaller 
 scale and for a shorter period, in the early 
 foolishness of England in her own colonies. In 
 both cases there is an attempt to suppress 
 individuality and initiative, to exploit, to bully, 
 to Downing Street-ify. It was a policy of 
 Unionism, the sort of Unionism that linked 
 the destiny of the lady to that of the tiger. The 
 fruits of it were a little bitter in the eating. The 
 colonies in which under the Home Rule regime 
 " loyalty " has blossomed like the rose, were in 
 those days most distressingly disloyal. 
 
 Cattle-driving and all manner of iniquities of 
 that order in Canada; the boycott adopted not 
 as a class, but as a national, weapon in Cape 
 Colony; the Eureka stockade in Australia; 
 Christian De Wet and the crack of Mausers in the 
 
56 THE OPEN SECRET OF IRELAND 
 
 Transvaal — such were the propaedeutics to the 
 establishment of freedom and the dawn of loyalty 
 in the overseas possessions. But in this field of 
 government the gods gave England not only a 
 great pioneer, Lord Durham, but also the grace 
 to listen to him. His Canadian policy set a 
 headline which has been faithfully and fruitfully 
 copied. Its success was irresistible. Let the 
 " Cambridge Modern History " tell the tale of 
 before and after Home Rule in the Dominion: 
 
 11 Provincial jealousies have dwindled to vanish- 
 ing point ; racial antipathies no longer imperil the 
 prosperity of the Dominion ; religious animosities 
 have lost their mischievous power in a new atmos- 
 phere of common justice and toleration. Canada, 
 as the direct outcome of Confederation, has grown 
 strong, prosperous, energetic. The unhappy divi- 
 sions which prevailed at the beginning of the 
 nineteenth century, and which darkened with actual 
 revolt and bloodshed the dawn of the Victorian 
 era, are now only a memory. The links which bind 
 the Dominion to Great Britain may on paper seem 
 slight, but they are resistless. Imperial Federation 
 has still great tasks to accomplish within our widely 
 scattered Imperial domains, but its success in 
 Canada may be accepted as the pledge of its triumph 
 elsewhere. Canada is a nation within the Empire, 
 and in Kipling's phrase is ' daughter in her 
 mother's house and mistress in her own.' " 
 
OBVIOUSNESS OF HOME RULE 57 
 
 This is the authentic harvest of freedom. 
 
 The " unity " of the old regime which, in a 
 Bismarckian phrase, was like paper pasted over 
 ever-widening cracks, was abandoned. The 
 Separatist programme triumphed. And the out- 
 come ? The sham unity of government has been 
 replaced by a real unity of interest, affection and 
 cultural affinity. We find administrators like 
 Mr Lyttleton, former Tory Secretary for the 
 Colonies, engaged to-day not in suppressing but 
 in celebrating the " varied individuality " of the 
 overseas possessions. As for the political 
 effects of the change, every English writer 
 repeats of the Colonies what Grattan, in other 
 circumstances, said of the Irish: Loyalty is their 
 foible. There is indeed one notable flaw in the 
 colonial parallel. I have spoken as if the claim 
 of the Colonies on foot of the principle of 
 nationality was comparable to that of Ireland. 
 That of course was not the case. They were 
 at most nations in the making ; she was a nation 
 made. Home Rule helped on their growth ; in 
 its benign warmth Australia, Canada, New 
 Zealand, and South Africa have developed not 
 only a political complexion characteristic of each 
 but a literature, an art and even a slang equally 
 characteristic. Ireland, on the other hand, has 
 manifested throughout her whole history an 
 
58 THE OPEN SECRET OF IRELAND 
 
 amazing faculty of assimilating and nationalising 
 everything that came to her from without. 
 
 The will to preserve her nationality motived 
 her whole life, especially in the modern period. 
 The declared dream of Grattan was, as we have 
 seen, to transform a Protestant colony into an 
 Irish nation. Wolfe Tone confessed the same 
 inspiration; Emmet's speech from the dock 
 was that and nothing else. It was the whole of 
 Davis in thought, and of O'Connell in action. 
 Isaac Butt yielded to its fascination, and found 
 for it the watchword, Home Rule. It was formu- 
 lated by Parnell in a speech the capital passage 
 of which forms the inscription on his monument. 
 It echoes and re-echoes through the resolutions 
 of every meeting, and constitutes for many 
 orators their total stock of political ideas. It 
 provides the title of the Irish delegation to Par- 
 liament, and is endorsed at General Election 
 after General Election by a great and unchang- 
 ing majority. A people such as this is not to 
 be exterminated. An ideal such as this is not 
 to be destroyed. Recognise the one, sever the 
 ligatures that check the free flow of blood 
 through the veins of the other, and enrich your 
 federation of autonomous peoples with another 
 rich individuality. Imitate in Ireland your own 
 wisdom in dealing with the Colonies, and the 
 
OBVIOUSNESS OF HOME RULE 59 
 
 same policy will bear the same harvest. For 
 justice given the Colonies gave you friendship, 
 as for injustice stubbornly upheld they had given 
 you hatred. The analogy with Ireland is com- 
 plete so far as the cards have been played. The 
 same human elements are there, the same pride, 
 the same anger, the same willingness to forget 
 anger. Why should the augury fail? 
 
 I can hear in imagination the sniff of the 
 unimaginative reader; I can figure to myself 
 his instant dismissal of all these considerations 
 as " sentiment." Let the word stand, coloured 
 though it is with associations that degrade it. 
 But is " sentiment " to be ignored in the fixing 
 of constitutions ? Ruskin asks a pertinent ques- 
 tion. What is it after all but " sentiment," he 
 inquires, that prevents a man from killing his 
 grandmother in time of hunger? Sentiment is 
 the most respectable thing in human psychology. 
 No one believes in it more thoroughly than your 
 reactionary Tory. But he wears his heart on 
 his sleeve with a difference. He is so greedily 
 patriotic that he would keep all the patriotism 
 in the world to himself. That he should love 
 his country is natural and noble, a theme so high 
 as to be worthy of Mr Kipling or even Mr 
 Alfred Austin himself. That we should love 
 ours is a sort of middle term between treason 
 
60 THE OPEN SECRET OF IRELAND 
 
 and insanity. It is as if a lover were to insist 
 that no poems should be written to any woman 
 except his mistress. It is as if he were to put 
 the Coercion Act in force against anyone found 
 shedding tears over the sufferings of any mother 
 except his mother. In fact it is the sort of 
 domineering thick-headedness that never fails 
 to produce disloyalty. 
 
 The national idea, then, is the foundation of 
 the " case for Home Rule." It might indeed 
 be styled the whole case, but this anthem of 
 nationality may be transposed into many keys. 
 Translated into terms of ethics it becomes that 
 noble epigram of Sir Henry Campbell Banner- 
 man s for which I would exchange a whole 
 library of Gladstonian eloquence : " Good 
 government is no substitute for self-govern- 
 ment." In Ireland we have enjoyed neither. 
 Political subjection has mildewed our destiny, 
 leaf and stem. But were it not so, had we in- 
 creased in wealth like Egypt, in population like 
 Poland, the vital argument for autonomy would 
 be neither weaker nor stronger. Rich or poor, 
 a man must be master of his own fate. Poor 
 or rich, a nation must be captain of her own soul. 
 In the suburban road in which you live there 
 are probably at least a hundred other house- 
 holds. Now if you were all, each suppressing 
 
OBVIOUSNESS OF HOME RULE 61 
 
 his individuality, to club together you could 
 build in place of the brick-boxes in which you 
 live a magnificent phalanstery. There you 
 could have more air for your lungs and more 
 art for your soul, a spacious and a gracious 
 life, cheaper washing, cheaper food, and a royal 
 kitchen. But you will not do it. Why ? Because 
 it profiteth a man nothing to gain the services of 
 a Paris maitre oT hotel and to lose his own soul. 
 In an attic fourteen feet by seven, which he can 
 call his own, a man has room to breathe ; in a 
 Renaissance palace, controlled by a committee 
 on which he is in a permanent minority of one, 
 he has no room to breathe. Home Rulers are 
 fond of phrasing their programme as a demand 
 on the part of Ireland that she shall control 
 the management of her domestic affairs. The 
 language fits the facts like a glove. The differ- 
 ence between Unionism and Home Rule is the 
 difference between being compelled to live in an 
 ostentatious and lonely hotel and being per- 
 mitted to live in a simple, friendly house of 
 one's own. 
 
 Translated into terms of administration the 
 gospel of autonomy becomes the doctrine of 
 " the man on the spot." That is the Eleven Rule 
 of Imperial Policy, and although it has some- 
 times been ridden to death, in fact to murder, 
 
62 THE OPEN SECRET OF IRELAND 
 
 as in the Denshawai hangings, it is a sound 
 rule. A man who has gone to the trouble of 
 being born, bred, and ordinarily domiciled in, 
 say, Kamskatcka is more likely to understand 
 the affairs of Kamskatcka than a man whose 
 life oscillates daily like a pendulum between 
 Clapham and the Strand. The old natural phil- 
 osophers accepted the theory of actio distans, 
 that is to say they assumed that a body could 
 act effectively where it was not. This was 
 Unionism in science, and needless to say it was 
 wrong. In politics it is equally wrong, and 
 it has been repudiated everywhere except in 
 Ireland. Physical vision is limited in range ; as 
 the distance increases the vision declines in 
 clearness, becomes subject to illusion, finally 
 ceases. Now you in London, through mere 
 limitations of human faculty, cannot see us in 
 Dublin. You are trying to govern Ireland in 
 the fashion in which, according to Wordsworth, 
 all bad literature has been written, that is to say, 
 without your eye on the object. But it is time 
 to have done with this stern, long chase of the 
 obvious. 
 
 Translated into terms of economics the 
 gospel of autonomy becomes the doctrine of a 
 " stake in the country." England has, indeed, 
 a stake in Ireland, She has the same interest 
 
OBVIOUSNESS OF HOME RULE 63 
 
 in seeing Ireland prosperous that a bootmaker 
 has in learning from his farmer client that the 
 crops are good. Each country is in great 
 measure the economic complement of the other. 
 But if the bootmaker were to insist on having 
 his finger in the farmer's pie, the pie, destined 
 for the bootmaker's own appetite, would not be 
 improved. If he were to insist on applying to 
 the living cow those processes which he applies 
 with such success to the dead leather, the cow 
 would suffer and ultimately there would be no 
 boots. Generally speaking, each of us improves 
 his own business by declining to mind anybody 
 else's. Home Rule will give England precisely 
 this chance of sticking to her last. To Ireland 
 it will come with both hands full of new oppor- 
 tunities and new responsibilities. 
 
 To realise that the national idea in Ireland 
 arouses an emotion, at once massive, intense, 
 and enduring, is to understand many derivative 
 riddles. We are all familiar with the complaint 
 that there is in Ireland too much politics and 
 too little business. Of course there is, and not 
 only too little business but too little literature, 
 too little philosophy, too little social effort, too 
 little fun. We Nationalists have grasped this 
 better and proclaimed it more steadily than any 
 Unionist. There is as much truth in saying 
 
64 THE OPEN SECRET OF IRELAND 
 
 that life begins where politics end, as in saying 
 that love begins where love-making ends. Con- 
 stitutional freedom is not the fifth act of the 
 social drama in modern times, it is rather the 
 prologue, or, better still, the theatre in which 
 other ideas that move men find an arena for 
 their conflict. Ireland, a little exhausted by 
 her intense efforts of the last thirty years, does 
 assuredly need a rest-cure from agitation. But 
 this healing peace is itself a gift of autonomy. 
 A tooth-ache concentrates the whole mind on 
 one particular emotion, which is a bad thing, 
 and breeds profanity, which is worse. But it 
 is idle to tell a man with a tooth-ache that what 
 he needs in his life is less cursing and more 
 business. He cannot work effectively so long 
 as he suffers ; the only way to peace is to cure 
 the tooth-ache. And in order to get rid of 
 politics in Ireland, you must give Ireland Home 
 Rule. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 THE RAVAGES OF UNIONISM (i) 
 
 Ireland, as we have seen, has had the mis- 
 fortune to provoke many worthy writers to a sad 
 debauch of sentimentalism. It has pleased their 
 fancy especially to picture her as a sphinx, 
 mysterious, elusive, inscrutable. It is impos- 
 sible to govern her, declare these theorists, 
 because it is impossible to understand her. She 
 is the femme incornprise of modern politics. 
 Her temperament is a magnet for disaster, her 
 soul a sanctuary of inviolable secrets. So runs 
 the rhapsody, and many of my own countrymen 
 have thought it good strategy to accept and 
 exploit it. They have this to urge, indeed, that 
 failure to make oneself understood is commonly 
 regarded as a sign of the superior mind. Lord 
 Rosebery, for example, has told us that he 
 himself, for all his honey-dropping tongue, 
 has never been properly understood. And 
 Hegel, the great German philosopher, who was 
 §o great a philosopher that we may without 
 
 65 E 
 
66 THE OPEN SECRET OF IRELAND 
 
 impropriety mention his name even in the bril- 
 liant vicinage of the Earl of Midlothian, used to 
 sigh : " Alas ! in the whole of my teaching career 
 I had but one student who understood my 
 system, and he mis-understood it." This is all 
 very well in its way, and a climate of incom- 
 prehension may suit orators and metaphysicians 
 admirably ; but it will not do for politics. The 
 party or people that fails to make its programme 
 understood is politically incompetent, and Ire- 
 land is assuredly safe from any such impu- 
 tation. She has her spiritual secrets, buried 
 deep in what we may call the subliminal 
 consciousness of the race, and to the disclosure 
 of these secrets we may look with confidence 
 for the inspiration of a new literature. But in 
 politics Ireland has no secrets. All her cards 
 are on the table, decipherable at the first glance. 
 Her political demand combines the lucidity of 
 an invoice with the axiomatic rectitude of the 
 Ten Commandments. There is no doubt about 
 what she wants, and none about why she ought to 
 have it. In that sense the case for Home Rule 
 is made, and this book, having justified its title, 
 ought to come to an end. But convention pre- 
 scribes that about the nude contour of principles 
 there should be cast a certain drapery of details, 
 and such conventions are better obeyed. 
 
THE RAVAGES OF UNIONISM 67 
 
 Where we are to begin is another matter. 
 We are, as has been so often suggested, in 
 presence of a situation in which one cannot see 
 the trees for the forest. The principle of the 
 government of Ireland is so integrally wrong 
 that it is difficult to signalise any one point in 
 which it is more wrong than it is in any other. 
 A timber-chaser, that is to say a pioneer for a 
 lumber firm, in the Western States of America 
 once found himself out of spirits. He decided 
 to go out of life, and being thorough in his ways 
 he left nothing to chance. He set fire to his 
 cabin, and, mounting the table, noosed his 
 neck to a beam, drank a large quantity of 
 poison, and, as he kicked over the table, simul- 
 taneously shot himself through the head and 
 drew a razor across his throat. Later on the 
 doctor had to fill in the usual certificate. At 
 " Cause of Death " he paused, pondered, and 
 at last wrote, " Causes too numerous to specify." 
 The fable possesses a certain suggestive value 
 upon which we need not enlarge. How, one 
 may well ask, are we to itemise the retail iniqui- 
 ties of a system of government which is itself 
 a wholesale iniquity? But since we must begin 
 somewhere let us begin with the Economics 
 of Unionism. 
 
 In this often-written, and perhaps over- 
 
68 THE OPEN SECRET OF IRELAND 
 
 written story there is one feature of some little 
 comfort. Whatever quarrel there may be as 
 to causes, the facts are not disputed. Pitt and 
 his friends promised that the Union would be 
 followed by general prosperity, development of 
 manufacturers, and expansion of commerce. 
 
 " Among the great and known defects of 
 Ireland," he declared in a typical statement, " one 
 of the most prominent features is its want of in- 
 dustry and of capital. How are these wants to be 
 supplied but by blending more closely with Ireland 
 the industry and capital of Great Britain? " 
 
 It was a Witches' Promise making smooth 
 the path to damnation. In every point in which 
 Pitt had prophesied white the moving finger of 
 history began, from the very day of the Union, 
 to write black. The injury to the whole 
 economic tissue of Ireland was immediate, 
 cumulative, in the end crushing. 
 
 We have at hand authoritative figures of the 
 decline collected by various Commissions and 
 private inquirers. Let us note some of these 
 as summarised by Monsignor O'Riordan in his 
 remarkable book, " Catholicism and Progress " : 
 
 " Again, in 1800 there were 91 woollen manu- 
 facturers in Dublin and 4938 hands employed; in 
 1840 there were only 12 manufacturers, and 683 
 
THE RAVAGES OF UNIONISM 69 
 
 hands employed; in 1880, only 3 manufacturers in 
 Dublin and around it. In 1800 there were 56 blan- 
 ket manufacturers in Kilkenny, and 3000 hands 
 employed; in 1840 there were 12 manufacturers and 
 925 hands employed. In 1800 there were 900 hands 
 employed on ratteens and friezes in Roscrea ; in 
 1840 the industry had completely disappeared. In 
 1800 there were 1000 flannel looms in County 
 Wicklow; in 1840 there was not one. In 1800 
 there were 2500 looms at work in Dublin for the 
 manufacture of silk and poplin ; in 1840 there were 
 only 250. In 1800 there were 27,000 cotton workers 
 in Belfast and around it; in 1840 there were only 
 12,000. In 1800 there were 61,075 tradesmen in 
 Dublin for the woollen, silk, and cotton industries; 
 in 1834 there were only 14,446, and of these 4412 
 were idle, showing a decrease of 51,041 in the 
 employed." 
 
 There was, we must add, an increase in other 
 directions. For instance, whereas there had 
 been only seven bankruptcies decreed in Dublin 
 in 1799 there were 125 in 1810. The number 
 of insolvent houses grew in seven years from 
 880 to 4719. These figures are not random but 
 symptomatic. Mr Pitt had promised to blend 
 Ireland with the capital and industry of Great 
 Britain ; he blended them as the edge of a toma- 
 hawk is blended with the spattered brains of its 
 victim. We have glanced at the condition of 
 
70 THE OPEN SECRET OF IRELAND 
 
 manufacture. Lest it should be assumed that 
 the tiller of land at least had profited by the 
 Napoleonic Wars, with their consequent high 
 prices, let me hasten to add that the Grey 
 Commission, reporting in 1836, had to inform 
 the Government that 2,385,000 persons, nearly 
 one-third of the population, were " in great need 
 of food." 
 
 11 Their habitations," the Report proceeds, " are 
 wretched hovels; several of the family sleep to- 
 gether on straw, or on the bare ground, sometimes 
 with a blanket, sometimes not even so much to 
 cover them. Their food commonly consists of dry 
 potatoes ; and with these they are at times so 
 scantily supplied as to be obliged to stint them- 
 selves to one spare meal in the day. . . . They 
 sometimes get a herring or a little milk, but they 
 never get meat except at Christmas, Easter, and 
 Shrovetide." 
 
 But a truce to these dismal chronicles. The 
 post hoc may be taken as established ; was it 
 a propter hoc? Was the Union the cause as 
 well as the antecedent of this decay? No 
 economist, acquainted with the facts, can fail to 
 answer in the affirmative. The causal connec- 
 tion between two realities could not be more 
 manifest. Let us examine it very briefly. 
 
 I begin of necessity with the principle of 
 
THE RAVAGES OF UNIONISM 71 
 
 freedom, for freedom is the dominating force 
 in economic life. No instance can be cited of 
 a modern people of European civilisation 
 that ever prospered while held politically in 
 subjection. 
 
 11 All history," writes Professor Marshall of 
 Cambridge, the doyen of Political Economy in 
 England, " is full of the record of inefficiency 
 caused in varying degrees by slavery, serfdom, 
 and other forms of civil and political oppression 
 and repression." 
 
 The Act of Union was, as has been said, 
 one of those spiritual outrages which, in their 
 reactions, are like lead poured into the veins. 
 It lowered the vital resources of Ireland. It 
 made hope an absentee, and enterprise an exile. 
 That was its first-fruits of disaster. 
 
 These commonplaces of the gospel of free- 
 dom " for which Hampden died in the field and 
 Sidney on the scaffold " will possibly appear to 
 their modern descendants mystical, sentimental, 
 and remote from real life. For there is no one 
 in the world so ready as your modern English- 
 man to deny that he is a man in order to prove 
 that he is a business-man. Fortunately we can 
 establish for this strange being, who has thus 
 indecently stripped himself of humanity, and 
 
72 THE OPEN SECRET OF IRELAND 
 
 establish in very clear and indisputable fashion 
 the cash nexus between Unionism and decay. 
 The argument is simple. 
 
 The Union came precisely in the period in 
 which capital was beginning to dominate the 
 organisation of industry. The Union denuded 
 Ireland of the capital which would have enabled 
 her to transform the technique of her manufac- 
 tures, and so maintain the ground won under 
 Grattan's Parliament. The channels through 
 which this export of capital proceeded were 
 absenteeism and over-taxation. 
 
 The first statement in this paragraph of plaint 
 calls for no elaboration. Arnold Toynbee took 
 as the terminal dates of the Industrial Revolu- 
 tion the years 1760 and 1830. The last genera- 
 tion of the eighteenth century brought to birth 
 the great inventions, but it was the first genera- 
 tion of the nineteenth that founded on them 
 large scale production, and settled the structure 
 of modern industry. Not without profound 
 disturbance and incalculable suffering was the 
 new system established in England ; the story 
 may be read in the pages of Marx, Cunningham, 
 Cooke Taylor, or any of the economic his- 
 torians. But, for all the blood and tears, it was 
 established. Insulated from the continental 
 turmoil, served by her Titanic bondsmen coal 
 
THE RAVAGES OF UNIONISM 73 
 
 and iron, England was able to defeat the Titan, 
 Napoleon. Now it is idle to deny that this 
 period would under any government have 
 strained Ireland, as the phrase goes, to the pin 
 of her collar. But the Union made her task 
 impossible. Lord Castlereagh was quite right 
 in pointing to the accumulation of capital as the 
 characteristic advantage of England. Through 
 centuries of political freedom that process had 
 gone on without interruption. Ireland, on the 
 contrary, had been scientifically pillaged by the 
 application to her of the " colonial system " from 
 1663 to 1779; I deliberately exclude the pre- 
 vious waste of war and confiscation. She had 
 but twenty years of commercial freedom, and, 
 despite her brilliant success in that period, she 
 had not time to accumulate capital to any great 
 extent. But Grattan's Parliament had shown 
 itself extraordinarily astute and steady of pur- 
 pose in its economic policy. Had its guidance 
 continued — conservative taxation, adroit boun- 
 ties, and that close scrutiny and eager discussion 
 of the movements of industry which stands 
 recorded in its Journal — the manufactures of 
 Ireland would have weathered the storm. But 
 the luck was as usual against her. Instead of 
 wise leadership from Dublin the gods decreed 
 that she should have for portion the hard 
 
74 THE OPEN SECRET OF IRELAND 
 
 indifference and savage taxation of Westminster. 
 Reduced to the position of a tributary nation, 
 stripped of the capital that would have served 
 as a commissariat of advance in that crucial 
 struggle, she went down. 
 
 I am not to make here the case for Ireland 
 in respect of over-taxation. It was made 
 definitely in the Report of the Childers Com- 
 mission, a document which no Englishman 
 reads, lest in coming to the light he should have 
 his sins too sharply rebuked. It has been 
 developed and clarified in many speeches and 
 essays and in some books. To grasp it is to find 
 your road to Damascus on the Irish Question. 
 But for the moment we are concerned with but 
 one aspect, namely, the export of capital from 
 Ireland as a result of the Union, and the 
 economic reactions of that process. Since we 
 are to use moderation of speech and banish all 
 rhetoric from these pages, one is at a loss 
 to characterise Union arrangements and post- 
 Union finance. Let it suffice to say that they 
 combined the moral outlook of Captain Kidd 
 with the mathematical technique of a super- 
 bucket-shop. From the first Great Britain 
 robbed the Irish till ; from the first she skimmed 
 the cream off the Irish milk, and appropriated it 
 for her own nourishment. One has a sort of 
 
THE RAVAGES OF UNIONISM 75 
 
 gloomy pride in remembering that although 
 cheated in all these transactions we were not 
 duped. Mr Foster, Speaker of the Irish 
 House of Commons — in those days the Speaker 
 actually spoke, a whimsical Irish custom — 
 tore the cloak off Lord Castlereagh's strutting 
 statesmanship, and laid bare his real motives. 
 Speaking on the first Union proposal in 1799 
 he said : 
 
 11 But the noble Lord has told us the real motives 
 of this scheme of Union, and I thank him for 
 stating them so fairly. Ireland, he says, must 
 contribute to every war, and the Minister won't 
 trust to interest, affection, or connection for guiding 
 her conduct. He must have her parse within his 
 own grasp. While three hundred men hold it in 
 Ireland he cannot put his hand into it, they are out 
 of his reach, but let a hundred of you carry it over 
 and lay it at his feet, and then he will have full and 
 uncontrolled power." 
 
 So it came about. Even before the Union 
 Grattan's Parliament had, of its own free will 
 and out of an extravagant loyalty, run itself into 
 debt for the first time to help England against 
 France. But, as Foster indicated, the Irish 
 members felt that they were coming to the end 
 of their resources. They were about to call a 
 halt, and so the Union became a necessary 
 
76 THE OPEN SECRET OF IRELAND 
 
 ingredient of Pitt's foreign policy. By it Ireland 
 was swept into the vortex of his anti-French 
 hysteria, and of what Mr Hartley Withers so 
 properly styles his " reckless finance." In six- 
 teen years she was brought to the edge of 
 bankruptcy. Between 1801 and 181 7 her 
 funded debt was increased from £28,541,157 
 to £1 12,684,773, an augmentation of nearly 300 
 per cent. In the first fifteen years following the 
 Union she paid in taxes £"78,000,000 as against 
 £31,000,000 in the last fifteen years preceding 
 the Union. After the amalgamation of the 
 Exchequers in 181 7 the case becomes clearer. 
 In 1819-20, for instance, the revenue con- 
 tributed by Ireland was ,£5,256,564, of which 
 only ,£1,564,880 was spent in Ireland, leaving 
 a tribute for Great Britain of £3,691,684. For 
 1829-30 the tribute was £4,156,576. 
 
 Let us now inquire how things stood with 
 regard to absenteeism. This had existed before 
 the Union ; indeed, if the curious reader will 
 turn to Johnson's " Dictionary " he will find it 
 damned in a definition. But it was enormously 
 intensified by the shifting of the centre of gravity 
 of Irish politics, industry, and fashion from 
 Dublin to London. The memoirs of that day 
 abound in references to an exodus which has 
 left other and more material evidence in those 
 
THE RAVAGES OF UNIONISM 77 
 
 fallen and ravaged mansions which now consti- 
 tute the worst slums of our capital city. 
 
 One figure may be cited by way of illustra- 
 tion. Before the Union " 98 Peers, and a 
 proportionate number of wealthy Commoners " 
 lived in Dublin. The number of resident Peers 
 in 1825 was twelve. At present, as I learn from 
 those who read the sixpenny illustrateds, there 
 is one. But when they abandoned Ireland they 
 did not leave their rents behind. And it was a 
 time of rising rents ; according to Toynbee they 
 at least doubled between 1790 and 1833. 
 Precise figures are not easily arrived at, but Mr 
 D'Alton in his " History of the County Dublin," 
 a book quite innocent of politics, calculates that 
 the absentee rental of Ireland was in 1804 not 
 less than ,£3,000,000, and in 1830 not less than 
 ,£4,000,000, an under-estimate. If we average 
 these figures over the period we find that during 
 the first thirty years of Union, that is to say 
 during the most critical phase of the Industrial 
 Revolution, not less than £"105,000,000 of Irish 
 capital was " exported " from Ireland to Great 
 Britain through the channel of absenteeism. 
 
 Averaging the figures of the taxation-tribute 
 in similar fashion, and taking the lowest esti- 
 mates, I am unable to reach a less total than 
 ^120,000,000 for the same period. In other 
 
78 THE OPEN SECRET OF IRELAND 
 
 words, the effect of the Union was to withdraw 
 from Ireland during the thirty years that settled 
 the economic structure of modern industry not 
 less than ^225,000,000. Let me draw the 
 argument together in words which I have used 
 elsewhere, and which others can no doubt easily 
 better : 
 
 11 We have heard, in our day, a long-drawn de- 
 nunciation of a Liberal government on the score 
 that it had, by predatory taxation, driven English 
 capital out of the country, and compromised the 
 industrial future of England. We have seen in 
 our own day gilt-edged securities, bank, insurance, 
 railway, and brewery shares in Great Britain, 
 brought toppling down by a Tory waste of 
 ^250,000,000 on the Boer War. We know that 
 in economic history effects are, in a notable way, 
 cumulative ; so clearly marked is the line of con- 
 tinuity as to lead a great writer to declare that there 
 is not a nail in all England that could not be traced 
 back to savings made before the Norman Conquest. 
 A hundred instances admonish us that, in indus- 
 trial life, nothing fails like failure. When we put 
 all these considerations together, and give them a 
 concrete application, can we doubt that in over- 
 taxation and the withdrawal of capital we have the 
 prime causa causans of the decay of Ireland under 
 the Union? " 
 
 In this wise did Pitt " blend Ireland 
 
THE RAVAGES OF UNIONISM 79 
 
 with the industry and capital of Great Britain." 
 Cupped by his finance she gave the venal blood 
 of her industry to strengthen the predominant 
 partner, and to help him to exclude for a time 
 from these islands that pernicious French 
 Democracy in which all states and peoples have 
 since found redemption. Such was the first 
 chapter in the Economics of Unionism. 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 THE RAVAGES OF UNIONISM (2) 
 
 If the reader cares to push forward the line 
 of thought suggested in the preceding pages 
 and to submit it to a concrete test he can do so 
 without difficulty. He has but to compare the 
 post-Union history of linen with that of cotton. 
 Linen in Ireland had been a perfect type of the 
 State-created, spoon-fed industry characteristic 
 of the period of mercantilism. Within certain 
 limits — such as the steady resolve to confine it, 
 in point of religion, to Protestants, and, in point 
 of geography, to Ulster — it had behind it at the 
 Union a century of encouragement. It is cal- 
 culated that between 1700 and 1800 it had 
 received bounties, English and Irish, totalling 
 more than ,£2,500,000. In other words it had 
 a chance to accumulate capital. Even linen 
 declined after the Union partly from the direct 
 effects of that measure, partly from the growing 
 intensity of the Industrial Revolution. But the 
 
 80 
 
THE RAVAGES OF UNIONISM 81 
 
 capital accumulated, the commercial good name 
 established under native government carried 
 the manufacturers through. These were able 
 towards 1830 to introduce the new machinery 
 and the new processes, and to weather the 
 tempest of competition. Cotton, on the other 
 hand, was a very recent arrival. It had de- 
 veloped very rapidly, and in 1 800 gave promise 
 of supplanting linen. But the weight of capital 
 told more and more as changes in the technique 
 of transportation and production ushered in our 
 modern world. Lacking the solid reserves of 
 its rival, involved in all the exactions that fall 
 on a tributary nation, the cotton manufacture of 
 Ireland lost ground, lost heart, and disappeared. 
 But let us resume the parable. If the " busi- 
 ness man " responds to capital, he will certainly 
 not be obtuse to the appeal of coal. In this 
 feeder of industry Ireland was geologically at 
 a disadvantage, and it was promised that the 
 free trade with Great Britain inaugurated by the 
 Union would " blend " with her the resources of 
 the latter country. Did she obtain free trade in 
 coal? Miss Murray, a Unionist, in her " Com- 
 mercial Relations between England and Ire- 
 land " tells the story in part : 
 
 " Coals again had hitherto been exported from 
 
 *? 
 
 T 
 
82 THE OPEN SECRET OF IRELAND 
 
 Great Britain at a duty of gd. per ton ; this duty 
 was to cease but the Irish import duty on coal 
 was to be made perpetual, and that at a time when 
 all coasting duties in England and Scotland had 
 been abolished. Dublin especially would suffer 
 from this arrangement, for the duty there on coals 
 imported was is. 8fd. per ton, while that in the rest 
 of Ireland was only gjd. This was because a local 
 duty of is. per ton existed in Dublin for the in- 
 ternal improvement of the city ; this local duty 
 was blended by the Union arrangements with the 
 general duty on the article, and its perpetual con- 
 tinuance was thus enforced. All this shows how 
 little Irish affairs were understood in England." 
 
 But was it a failure of the English intellect or 
 a lapse of the English will? Except through 
 the Platonic intuition which reduces all sin to 
 terms of ignorance I cannot accept the former 
 explanation. What is certain is that there was 
 no lack of contemporary protest. There 
 existed in Dublin in 1828 a Society for 
 the Improvement of Ireland, an active body 
 which included in its membership the Lord 
 Mayor (a high Tory, of course), Lord Clon- 
 curry, and a long list of notable names such 
 as Latouche, Sinclair, Houghton, Leader, 
 Grattan, Smith O'Brien, George Moore, and 
 Daniel O'Connell. In the year mentioned the 
 Society appointed a number of committees to 
 
THE RAVAGES OF UNIONISM 83 
 
 report on the state of Irish agriculture, com- 
 merce, and industry. One of these reports is 
 full of information touching the drain of capital 
 from the country, and its consequent decay, as 
 registered by contemporaries ; we shall learn 
 from another how things stood with regard to 
 coal. At the time of the Union the Irish Parlia- 
 ment granted a bounty of 2s. per ton on Irish 
 coal carried coastwise to Dublin, and levied a 
 duty of io^d. per ton on coal imported from 
 Great Britain. The effect of the Union was to 
 abolish the bounty and double the levy on 
 imports. Writing twenty-eight years later the 
 Committee summarise in a brief passage the 
 disastrous effects of a policy, so foolish and 
 so unjust. The last sentence opens up sombre 
 vistas to any student of economic history: 
 
 11 Severe, however, as the operation of the coal 
 duty in arresting the progress of manufacture may 
 have been in other parts of Ireland, in Dublin, 
 under the circumstances to which your Committee 
 are about to call the attention of the Society, it has 
 produced all the effects of actual prohibition, all 
 the mischiefs of the most rigorous exclusion. It is 
 a singular circumstance that, in the metropolis of 
 the country, possessing local advantages in respect 
 to manufactures and facilities for trade with the 
 interior, superior, probably, to any other city or 
 
84 THE OPEN SECRET OF IRELAND 
 
 town in this portion of the empire, with a popula- 
 tion excessive as to the means of employment, in 
 a degree which probably has not a parallel in 
 Europe, there is not a factory for the production of 
 either silk, linen, cotton, or woollen manufactures 
 which is worked or propelled by a steam engine ." 
 
 The writers go on to ask for the repeal of the 
 local duty on coal in Dublin, and to suggest that 
 the necessary revenue should be raised by a duty 
 on spirits. This course Belfast had been per- 
 mitted to Mlow — one of the numberless make- 
 weights thrown into the scale so steadily on the 
 side of the Protestant North. In my part of the 
 country the people used to say of any very expert 
 thief: "Why, he'd steal the fire out of your 
 grate." Under the Union arrangements Great 
 Britain stole the fire out of the grate of Ireland. 
 And having so dealt with capital and coal the 
 predominant partner next proceeded by a logical 
 development to muddle transportation. 
 
 The Drummond Commission, appointed in 
 1836 to consider the question of railway con- 
 struction in Ireland, issued a report in 1838 
 which practically recommended public and not 
 private enterprise as appropriate " to accomplish 
 so important a national object." What came 
 after is best related in the official terminology of 
 the Scotter Commission of 1906-10: 
 
THE RAVAGES OF UNIONISM 85 
 
 "This report was presented in July 1838, and 
 early in the following year a great public meeting, 
 held in Dublin, passed a resolution that inasmuch 
 as an adequate system of railways could not be 
 constructed by private capital, the Government 
 should be urged to take the work into its own hands, 
 thereby saving the cost of Private Bill legislation. 
 Promises were also made that the lands necessary 
 for railway construction would be given free of 
 cost. Similar resolutions were adopted at another 
 meeting held about the same time in the north of 
 Ireland. In addition, an address to the Queen 
 was presented by a number of Irish Peers, headed 
 by the Duke of Leinster, praying that action might 
 be taken on the Drummond Commission Report." 
 
 The government saw the light, and pro- 
 ceeded to sin against it. They embodied the 
 Dublin programme in resolutions which were 
 adopted by the House of Common3 In March 
 1839, and they then abruptly abandoned the 
 whole business. The last chance was not yet 
 lost. During the Great Famine of 1847 the 
 Opposition proposed to raise ^16,000,000 by 
 State loans for the construction of railways as 
 relief works. A suggestion so sane could not 
 hope to pass. It was in fact rejected ; the star- 
 ving peasants were set to dig large holes and fill 
 them up again, and to build bad roads leading 
 nowhere. And instead of a national railway 
 
86 THE OPEN SECRET OF IRELAND 
 
 system Ireland was given private enterprise with 
 all its waste and all its clash of interests. 
 
 The two most conspicuous gifts of Unionism 
 to Ireland have been, as all the world knows, 
 poverty and police. Soon after 1830, that is 
 to say when the first harvest of government from 
 Westminster was ripe to the sickle, Irish desti- 
 tution had assumed what politicians call men- 
 acing proportions. One person in every three of 
 the population never had any other alimentary 
 experience than the difference between hunger 
 and starvation. In these circumstances a Royal 
 Commission was appointed to consider the 
 advisability of extending the English Poor Law 
 to Ireland. Their report is a pioneer document 
 in the development of economic thought. Just 
 as the Railway Commission a few years later 
 was to give the watchword of the future, 
 nationalisation, so the Poor Law Commission 
 gave within its province the watchword of the 
 future, prevention before relief. They pointed 
 the contrast between the two countries. I quote 
 the words of the later Irish Poor Law Commis- 
 sion of 1903-6: 
 
 " Having regard to the destitution and poverty 
 that were prevalent in Ireland owing to want of 
 employment, the Royal Commissioners in their 
 Report of 1836 came to the conclusion that the 
 
THE RAVAGES OF UNIONISM 87 
 
 English workhouse system would be unsuitable for 
 Ireland, because after unchecked demoralisation 
 by profuse out-door relief in England, the Work- 
 house system was devised in order to make the lazy 
 and idle seek ordinary employment which could be 
 got. The situation in Ireland was, on the con- 
 trary, one in which the able-bodied and healthy 
 were willing and anxious to work for any wages, 
 even for twopence a day, but were unable to obtain 
 such or any employment." 
 
 Ireland at the end of a generation of Unionism 
 was suffering, as the commissioners proceed to 
 point out, not from over-population, but from 
 under-development. They tabled two sets of 
 recommendations. The relief programme ad- 
 vised compulsory provision for the sick, aged, 
 infirm, lunatics, and others incapable of work; 
 in all essential matters it anticipated in 1836 that 
 Minority Report which to the England of 191 2 
 still seems extravagantly humane. The preven- 
 tion programme outlined a scheme for the 
 development of Irish resources. Including, as 
 it did, demands for County Fiscal Boards, 
 agricultural education, better cottages for the 
 labourers, drainage, reclamation, and changes in 
 the land system, it has been a sort of lucky bag 
 into which British ministers have been dipping 
 without acknowledgment ever since. But the 
 
S§ THE OPEN SECRET OF IRELAND 
 
 report itself was, like the Railway Report, too 
 sane and too Irish to stand a chance. There 
 was sent over from England a Mr Nicholls, 
 who, after a six weeks' flutter through the 
 country, devised the Poor Law System under 
 which we still labour. Mr Nicholls afterwards 
 became Sir George, and when he died it is 
 probable that a statue was erected to him. If 
 that is so the inscription must always remain 
 inadequate until this is added : " Having under- 
 stood all about Ireland in six weeks he gave 
 her, as the one thing needful to redeem her, the 
 workhouse." 
 
 But, of course, the capital exploit of the 
 Economics of Unionism was its dealing with the 
 problem of land tenure. I shrink from inviting 
 the reader into the desert of selfishness and 
 stupidity which constitutes English policy, in 
 this regard, from the Union to the triumph of 
 the Land League. Let him study it at large in 
 Davitt's " Fall of Feudalism." We are not con- 
 cerned here to revive that calamitous pageant. 
 Our interest is of another kind, namely to 
 signalise the malign influence introduced into 
 the agrarian struggle by government from West- 
 minster as against government from Dublin. 
 Even had Grattan's Parliament remained, the 
 battle for the land would have had to go forward ; 
 
THE RAVAGES OF UNIONISM 89 
 
 for that Parliament was an assembly controlled 
 by landlords who, for the most part, believed as 
 strongly in the sacredness of rent as they did in 
 the sacredness of nationality. But by the Union 
 the conflict was embittered and befouled. The 
 landlords invented their famous doctrine of con- 
 ditional loyalty. They bargained with Great 
 Britain to the effect that, if they were permitted 
 to pillage their tenantry, they would in return 
 uphold and maintain British rule in Ireland. 
 
 It was the old picture with which M. Paul- 
 Dubois has acquainted us, that of the " Garri- 
 son " kneeling to England on the necks of the 
 Irish poor. In this perversion, which under 
 autonomy would have been impossible, we 
 find the explanation of the extreme savagery of 
 Union land policy in Ireland. Its extreme, its 
 bat-eyed obtuseness is to be explained in another 
 way. Souchon in his introduction to the French 
 edition of Philippovich, the great Austrian 
 economist, observes with great truth that 
 England has not even yet developed any sort of 
 Agrarpolitik, that is to say any systematic 
 Economics of Agriculture. In the early nine- 
 teenth century her own land problems were 
 neglected, and her political leaders were in- 
 creasingly dominated by an economic gospel of 
 shopkeepers and urban manufacturers. Forced 
 
9 o THE OPEN SECRET OF IRELAND 
 
 into the context of agrarian life such a gospel 
 was bound to manifest itself as one of folly and 
 disaster. 
 
 If we put these two elements together we are 
 enabled to understand why the Union land 
 policy in Ireland was such a portentous muddle 
 and scandal. In 1829 the question assumed a 
 fresh urgency, in consequence of the eviction 
 campaign which followed the disfranchisement 
 of the small holders under Catholic Emancipa- 
 tion. That Irish opinion, which in an Irish 
 Parliament would have had its way, began to 
 grapple with the situation. 
 
 Between 1829 and 1858 twenty-three Irish 
 Land Reform Bills were introduced in the House 
 of Commons; every one was rejected. In the 
 same period thirty-five Coercion Bills were in- 
 troduced ; every one was passed. So it began, 
 so it continued, until at last Irish opinion did in 
 some measure prevail. The Westminster Par- 
 liament clapped the " agitators " into prison, and 
 while they were at work breaking stones stole 
 their programme. . . . But I have promised to 
 spare the reader the detailed hideousness of this 
 Inferno, and this section must close without a 
 word said about that miserable triad, famine, 
 eviction, and emigration. What may be called 
 the centre of relevancy lies elsewhere. We 
 
THE RAVAGES OF UNIONISM 91 
 
 have been concerned to show how Union- 
 ism, having wrecked the whole manufacturing 
 economy of Ireland, went on, at its worst, to 
 wreck, at its best, to refuse to save, its whole 
 agricultural economy. 
 
 But why recall all this " dead history"? For 
 two reasons : first, because it illustrates the 
 fundamental wrongness of Unionism ; secondly, 
 because it is not dead. 
 
 On the first point no better authority can be 
 found than Mr W. A. S. Hewins, the intellect 
 of Tariff Reform. The differences between 
 England and Ireland, he writes in his introduc- 
 tion to Miss Murray's book, are of " an organic 
 character." In that phrase is concentrated the 
 whole biology of Home Rule. Every organism 
 must suffer and perish unless its external 
 circumstances echo its inner law of development. 
 The sin of the Union was that it imposed on 
 Ireland from without a sort of spiked strait- 
 jacket which could have no effect but to squeeze 
 the blood and breath out of every interest in 
 the country. What was meat to England was 
 poison to Ireland, and even honest Englishmen, 
 hypnotised by the economists of the day, were 
 unable to perceive this plain truth. Let me 
 give another illustration. The capital exploit of 
 Union Economics was, as has been said, its 
 
92 THE OPEN SECRET OF IRELAND 
 
 dealing with the land question, but perhaps its 
 most pathetic fallacy was the policy with which 
 it met the Great Famine. Now the singular 
 thing about this famine is that during it there 
 was no scarcity of food in Ireland; there was 
 only a shortage of potatoes. 
 
 " In 1847 alone," writes Mr Michael Davitt in 
 his " Fall of Feudalism," H food to the value of 
 ^44,958,000 sterling was grown in Ireland accord- 
 ing to the statistical returns for that year. But a 
 million of people died for want of food all the 
 same." 
 
 The explanation is obvious: the peasants 
 grew potatoes to feeu themselves, they raised 
 corn to pay their rents. A temporary suspension 
 of rent-payments and the closing of the ports 
 would have saved the great body of the people. 
 But the logic of Unionism worked on other lines. 
 The government opened the ports, cheapened 
 corn, and made rents harder to pay. At the 
 same time they passed a new Coercion Act, and 
 reorganised the police on its present basis to 
 ensure that rents should be paid. To the wisdom 
 of this policy, history is able to call witnesses 
 by the million — unhappily however it has to call 
 them from famine graveyards, and the waste 
 womb of the Atlantic. 
 
THE RAVAGES OF UNIONISM 93 
 
 This essential wrongness of Unionism, so 
 amply illustrated in every year of its working, 
 continues. But at least, our bluff Englishman 
 urges, the dead past can be suffered to bury 
 those crimes and blunders of Unionism which 
 you have enumerated. Let us start with a clean 
 slate. Now, as will have been gathered from a 
 previous chapter, we recognise in this invitation 
 an accent of soundness. We modern Home 
 Rulers desire above all to be loyal to the century 
 in which we live. We are sick of that caricature 
 which depicts Ireland as the mad heroine of a 
 sort of perpetual suttee, in which all the interests 
 of the present are immolated on the funeral-pyre 
 of the past. But let us come closer to things. 
 How do you clean a slate except by liquidating 
 the debts of which it keeps the record ? The late 
 Vicomte de Vogue wrote an admirable novel, 
 " Les Morts qui Parlent." The dead are always 
 speaking; you cannot stop their strong elo- 
 quence with a mouthful of clay. The " business 
 man " thinks no doubt that the Napoleonic War 
 is no more than Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba. 
 But he pays annual tribute to it, for he has to 
 make annual provision for the ^600,000,000 
 which it added to the National Debt. And just 
 as Mr Pitt's foreign policy is in that respect a 
 living reality of our own time, so also, but in a 
 
94 THE OPEN SECRET OF IRELAND 
 
 much graver form, are the past depredations and 
 ineptitudes of Unionism living realities in the 
 present economy of Ireland. 
 
 The ruling fallacy of the English mind on 
 these matters consists in the assumption that 
 the mere repeal of an old oppression restores 
 a people to the status quo ante. In the case 
 of Ireland the old oppressions have not been 
 repealed except in two or three points, but even 
 if they had been wholly cancelled it would be 
 absurd to expect immediate recovery from their 
 effects. If you have been beating a man on the 
 head with a bludgeon for half an hour, and then 
 leave off, there is no sense in saying to him: 
 " There, I have given over bludgeoning you. 
 Why on earth don't you get up, and skip about 
 like me ? " If you have been robbing a man's 
 till for ten years, and then decide — by the way 
 you have not yet decided — to leave off, there is 
 no sense in saying to him : " Why the devil are 
 you always hard up? Look at me doing the 
 same sort of business as you on absolutely equal 
 terms, and I'm able to keep two motor-cars and 
 six servants." But that is precisely what is said 
 to us. You are eternally expecting from Ireland 
 new miracles of renaissance. But although she 
 does possess recuperative powers, hardly to be 
 paralleled, even she must have time to slough 
 
THE RAVAGES OF UNIONISM 95 
 
 the corruptions of the past. You cannot, as 
 some Englishmen imagine, cancel six centuries 
 before breakfast. Your Penal Laws, for instance, 
 have been long since struck out of the Statute 
 Book, but they have not yet been eliminated 
 from social habitudes or from certain areas of 
 commercial life. 
 
 You began to tax Ireland beyond her capacity 
 in 1 80 1, and you are still overtaxing her. In 
 the interval you withdraw from her economic 
 life a tribute of not less than ^325,000,000. 
 You broke her industrial tradition, injured her 
 credit, depressed her confidence. You forced 
 upon her a fiscal system devised to suit your 
 needs in utter contempt of hers. To clean that 
 slate you must first, by some measure of restitu- 
 tion, clean your conscience. And when that has 
 been done you will have to wait for the curative 
 effects of time to undo the Economics of 
 Unionism. 
 
 You suffered landlordism to devastate Ireland 
 unchecked. The capital that should have gone 
 to enrich and develop the soil was squeezed out 
 of it in rack-rents, largely absentee. The whole 
 agricultural economy of the country was stricken 
 with a sort of artificial anaemia. Then very late 
 in the day you enact in shreds and fragments a 
 programme of reform proposed half a century 
 
q6 THE OPEN SECRET OF IRELAND 
 
 before by the leaders of the Irish people. To- 
 day rural Ireland is convalescent, but it is 
 absurd to rate her if she does not at once 
 manifest all the activities of robust health. It 
 is even more absurd to expect her to glow with 
 gratitude. 
 
 You muddled our whole system of transporta- 
 tion ; your muddle stands to-day in all its ruinous 
 largeness unamended, and, it may be, beyond 
 amendment. You muddled the Poor Law ; and, 
 in the workhouses which you thrust upon us, 
 8000 children are year by year receiving on 
 their lives the brand of degradation. You 
 marred education, perverting it into a discipline 
 of denationalisation, and that virus has not yet 
 been expelled. 
 
 What economic, what intellectual problem in 
 Ireland have you not marred and muddled, 
 England, my England (as the late Mr W. E. 
 Henley used to say) ? You have worsened the 
 maledictions of the Bible. The sins of your 
 fathers will lie as a damnosa hcereditas, a 
 damnable heritage, upon the mortgaged shoul- 
 ders of our children. It is better, as Plato 
 taught, to suffer injustice than to inflict it. In 
 the light of that ethical principle you are long 
 since judged and condemned. But with the 
 customary luck of England you are allowed 
 
THE RAVAGES OF UNIONISM 97 
 
 what others were not allowed, the opportunity 
 of penitence and reform. The messengers of 
 the new gospel are at your doors, offering you 
 in return for the plain rudiments of justice not 
 only forgiveness but friendship. It is for you to 
 accept or reject. We, the Irish, whom you have 
 wronged, look to your decision with interest 
 rather than with concern. Why should we be 
 concerned? Our flag has been an Aaron's 
 serpent to swallow yours. Your policies, your 
 ambitions, your administrations have passed by 
 us like the transient and embarrassed phantoms 
 that they were. We remain. All the roads lead 
 to Rome, and all the years to retribution. This 
 is your year ; you have met the messengers on 
 your threshold. Your soul is in your own 
 wardship. But yet we cannot wholly separate 
 your destiny from ours. Dedicated as we are to 
 the general progress of humanity and to all the 
 generosities of life, we await expectantly your 
 election between the good and the evil side. 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 THE HALLUCINATION OF " ULSTER " 
 
 Ulster Unionism, in the leaders, is not so much 
 a programme of ideas as a demand for dom- 
 ination. In the rank and file it is largely 
 a phenomenon of hysteria. I do not know 
 whether my readers have ever participated in an 
 agreeable game known as odd man out. Each 
 player tosses a penny, and whoever disagrees 
 with the rest, showing a head to their tails or vice 
 versa, captures the pool. Such is in all essential 
 particulars the " Ulster Question." We find 
 ourselves there in presence of a minority which, 
 on the sole ground that it is a minority, claims 
 that in the government of Ireland it shall be 
 not merely secure but supreme. Sir Edward 
 Carson as odd man out (and I do not deny that 
 he is odd enough for anything) is to be Dictator 
 of Ireland. If eighty-four Irish constituencies 
 declare for Home Rule, and nineteen against 
 Home Rule, then, according to the mathematics 
 
 98 
 
HALLUCINATION OF " ULSTER " 99 
 
 of Unionism, the Noes have it. In their non- 
 Euclidean geometry the part is always greater 
 than the whole. In their unnatural history the 
 tail always wags the dog. On the plane of poli- 
 tics it is not necessary to press the case against 
 " Ulster " any farther than that. Even majori- 
 ties have their rights. If a plurality of nine to 
 two is not sufficient to determine policy and con- 
 duct business in a modern nation, then there is 
 no other choice except anarchy, or rather an 
 insane atomism. Not merely every party, but 
 every household and, in last resort, every indi- 
 vidual will end as a Provisional Government. 
 Separatism of this type is a very ecstasy of non- 
 sense, and none of my readers will think so 
 cheaply of his own intelligence as to stay to dis- 
 cuss it. It is in other terms that we must handle 
 the problem of " Ulster." 
 
 The existence in certain nooks and corners of 
 Ireland of a democratic vote hostile to Home 
 Rule is, let us confess, a conundrum. But it is 
 a conundrum of psychology rather than of poli- 
 tics. It may seem rude to say so, but Oran- 
 geism consists mainly of a settled hallucination 
 and an annual brainstorm. No one who has not 
 been present at a Twelfth of July procession can 
 realise how completely all its manifestations 
 belong to the life of hysteria and not to that 
 
ioo THE OPEN SECRET OF IRELAND 
 
 of reason. M. Paul-Dubois, whom we may 
 summon out of a cloud of witnesses, writes of 
 them as " demagogic orgies with a mixed inspira- 
 tion of Freemasonry and the Salvation Army." 
 The Twelfth of July is, or rather was, for its fine 
 furies are now much abated, a savage carnival 
 comparable only to the corroborees of certain 
 primitive tribes. 
 
 14 A monster procession," continues M. Paul- 
 Dubois, " marches through Belfast, as through 
 every town and village of Orange Ulster, ending 
 up with a vast meeting at which the glories of 
 William of Orange and the reverses of James II. 
 are celebrated in song. . . . Each ' lodge ' sends 
 its delegation to the procession with banners and 
 drums. On the flags are various devices: ' Dia- 
 mond Heroes,' ' True Blues,' ' No Pope.' The 
 participants give themselves over to character 
 dances, shouting out their favourite songs: ' The 
 Boyne Water ' and ' Croppies Lie Down.' The 
 chief part is played by the drummers, the giants 
 of each ' lodge,' who with bared arms beat their 
 drums with holy fury, their fists running with 
 blood, until the first drum breaks and many more 
 after it, until in the evening they fall half-dead in 
 an excess of frenzy." 
 
 Such is the laboratory in which the mind of 
 Orange Ulster is prepared to face the tasks of 
 the twentieth century. Barbaric music, the 
 
HALLUCINATION OF " ULSTER " 101 
 
 ordinary allowance of drum to fife being three to 
 one, ritual dances, King William on his white 
 horse, the Scarlet Woman on her seven hills, a 
 grand parade of dead ideas and irrelevant ghosts 
 called up in wild speeches by clergymen and 
 politicians — such is Orangeism in its full heat 
 of action. Can we, with this key to its intellec- 
 tual history, be really astonished that Shankhill 
 Road should move all its life in a red mist of 
 superstition The North of Ireland abounds in 
 instances, trivial and tragic, of this obsession. 
 Here it is the case of the women of a certain town 
 who, in order to prevent their children from 
 playing in a dangerous swamp close by, have 
 taught them that there are " wee Popes " in it. 
 There it is a case of man picked up, maimed and 
 all but unconscious after an accident, screwing 
 up his lips to utter one last " To Hell with the 
 Pope ! " before he dies. I remember listening 
 in Court to the examination of an old Orangeman 
 who had been called as a witness to the peaceable 
 disposition of a friend of his. " What sort of 
 man," asked the counsel, " would you say Jamie 
 Williamson is ? " "A quiet, decent man." " Is 
 he the sort of man that would be likely to be 
 breaking windows?" "No man less likely." 
 " Is he the sort of man that you would expect to 
 find at the head of a mob shouting, ' To Hell 
 
102 THE OPEN SECRET OF IRELAND 
 
 with the Pope ' ? " Witness, with great emphasis : 
 " No. Certainly not. Jamie was never any 
 ways a religions man." These bewildering cor- 
 ruptions of sense and sanity overwhelm you at 
 every turn. Ask your neighbour offhand at a 
 dinner in Dublin: "What is so-and-so, by the 
 way ? " He will reply that so-and-so is a doctor, 
 or a government official, or a stockbroker, as it 
 may happen. Ask him the same question at a 
 dinner in Belfast, and he will automatically tell 
 you that so-and-so is a Protestant or a " Papist.^ 
 The plain truth is that it would be difficult to 
 find anywhere a more shameful exploitation, 
 intellectual and economic, than that which has 
 been practised on the Ulster Orangeman by his 
 feudal masters. Were I to retort the abuse, with 
 which my own creed is daily bespattered, I should 
 describe him further as the only victim of clerical 
 obscurantism to be found in Ireland. Herded 
 behind the unbridged waters of the Boyne, he has 
 been forced to live in a very Tibet of intellectual 
 isolation. Whenever he moved in his thoughts 
 a little towards that Ireland to which, for all his 
 separatism, he so inseparably belongs, the ring 
 of blockhouses, called Orange Lodges, was 
 drawn tighter to strangle his wanderings. Mr 
 Robert Lynd in his " Home Life in Ireland," a 
 book which ought to have been mentioned earlier 
 
HALLUCINATION OF " ULSTER " 103 
 
 in these pages, relates the case of a young man 
 who was refused ordination in the Presbyterian 
 Church because he had permitted himself to 
 doubt whether the Pope was in fact anti-Christ. 
 And he writes with melancholy truth : 
 
 11 If the Presbyterian clergy had loved Ireland as 
 much as they have hated Rome they could have 
 made Ulster a home of intellectual energy and 
 spiritual buoyancy long ago. They have preferred 
 to keep Ulster dead to fine ideas rather than risk 
 the appearance of a few unsettling ideas among the 
 rest." 
 
 It has not been, one likes to think, a death, 
 consummated and final, but rather an interrup- 
 tion of consciousness from which recovery is 
 possible. Drugged with a poisonous essence, 
 distilled from history for him by his exploiters, 
 the Orangeman of the people has lived in a world 
 of phantoms. In politics he has never in his 
 whole career spoken for himself. The Catholic 
 peasant comes to articulate, personal speech in 
 Davitt; the national aristocracy in Parnell. 
 The industrial worker discovers within his own 
 camp a multitude of captains. Even land- 
 lordism, although it has produced no leader, has 
 produced many able spokesmen. Every other 
 section in Ireland enriches public life with an 
 
104 THE OPEN SECRET OF IRELAND 
 
 interpreter of its mind sprung from its own ranks. 
 Orange Ulster alone has never yet given to its 
 own democracy a democratic leader. This is 
 indeed the cardinal misfortune, as well as the 
 central secret, of Ulster Unionism. The pivot on 
 which it turns resides, not in the farms of Down 
 or the factories of Belfast, but in the Library of 
 the Four Courts. Of the nineteen representa- 
 tives who speak for it in Parliament no fewer 
 than seven are King's Counsel. In the whole 
 list there is not one delegate of labour, nor 
 one farmer. A party so constituted is bound to 
 produce prodigies of nonsense such as those 
 associated with Sir Edward Carson. The 
 leaders of the orchestra openly despise the 
 instruments on which they play. For followers, 
 reared in the tradition of hysteria depicted above, 
 no raw-head is thought to be too raw, and no 
 bloody-bones too bloody. And so we have 
 Kings Counsel, learned in the law, devising 
 Provisional Governments, and Privy Councillors 
 wallowing in imaginative treason. As for the 
 Bishops, they will talk daggers as luridly as the 
 rest, but they will not even threaten to use any. 
 And so does the pagan rage, and the heathen 
 prophesy vain things. 
 
 That such a farce-tragedy can find a stage in 
 the twentieth century is pitiable. But it is not a 
 
HALLUCINATION OF " ULSTER M 105 
 
 serious political fact. It has the same relation 
 to reality that the cap-hunting exploits of Tar- 
 tarin of Tarascon had to the Franco-German 
 war. It has been devised merely to make flesh 
 creep in certain tabernacles of fanaticism in the 
 less civilised parts of England and Scotland. 
 So far as action goes it will end in smoke, but not 
 in gunpowder-smoke. There will no doubt be 
 riots in Belfast and Portadown, for which the 
 ultimate responsibility will rest on learned 
 counsel of the King. But there have been riots 
 before, and the cause of Home Rule has sur- 
 vived all the blackguardism and bloodshed. It 
 is lamentable that ministers of the gospel of 
 Christ and leaders of public opinion should so 
 inflame and exploit the superstitions of ignorant 
 men; but not by these methods will justice be 
 intimidated. 
 
 And if " Ulster " does fight after all? In that 
 event we must only remember how sorry George 
 Stephenson was for the cow. The military 
 traditions of the Protestant North are not very 
 alarming. The contribution of the Ennis- 
 killeners to the Battle of the Boyne appears to 
 have consisted in running away with great 
 energy and discretion. Nor did they, or their 
 associates, in later years shed any great lustre 
 even on Imperial arms. I have never heard that 
 
io6 THE OPEN SECRET OF IRELAND 
 
 the Connaught Rangers had many recruits from 
 the Shankhill Road, or the Dublin Fusiliers from 
 Portadown ; consequently the present situation 
 disgusts rather than terrifies us. If rifle-levers 
 ever click in rebellion against a Home Rule 
 government, duly established by statute under 
 the authority of the Crown, it will be astonishing 
 to find that every bullet in Ireland is a member 
 of an Orange Lodge. If " Ulster " repudiates 
 the arbitrament of reason, and the verdict of a 
 free ballot, she simply puts herself outside the 
 law. And she may be quite assured that the 
 law, driven back on its ultimate sanction of force, 
 will very sharply and very amply vindicate itself. 
 
 But it is not courteous to the reader to detain 
 him among such unrealities as Sir Edward Car- 
 son's Civil War. Treason, that is to say platform 
 treason, is not so much an eccentricity as a habit 
 of Orangeism. It is a way they have in the 
 Lodges, and their past history supplies a cor- 
 rective to their present outburst. Perhaps their 
 most notable exploit in armed loyalty was their 
 attempt to dethrone, or rather to defeat in suc- 
 cession to the throne, Queen Victoria. This 
 is a chapter in their history with regard to which 
 they are far too modest and reticent. 
 
 But the leading case in recent years is of 
 course the attitude of the Lodges towards the 
 
HALLUCINATION OF " ULSTER " 107 
 
 Disestablishment of the Irish Episcopal Church 
 in 1869. The records are singularly rich in 
 what I may perhaps call Carsonese. Dukes 
 threatened to " fight as men alone can fight who 
 have the Bible in one hand and the sword in the 
 other." Learned counsel of the Queen cove- 
 nanted to " seal their protest with their blood in 
 martyrdom and battle." Ministers of the gospel 
 were all for kicking the Crown into the Boyne, 
 keeping their powder dry, shouldering Mini6 
 rifles, and finally joining the lawyers in the red 
 grave of martyrdom. 
 
 An Ulster poet (a satirist one fears) wrote a 
 famous invocation to the statue of Mr Walker 
 near Derry, beginning : 
 
 " Come down out o' that, Mr Walker, 
 There's work to be done by-and-by, 
 And this is no time to stand glowerin' 
 Betwixt the bog-side and the sky." 
 
 But Mr Walker did not come down: he re- 
 mained on his safe pinnacle of immortality. 
 And of course there was no civil war. That 
 period was wiser than our own in one respect: 
 nobody of any common sense thought of spoiling 
 such exquisite blague by taking it seriously. Its 
 motive was universally understood in Ireland. 
 The orators of the movement never for a moment 
 
io8 THE OPEN SECRET OF IRELAND 
 
 dreamed of levying war on Mr Gladstone, but 
 they were determined to levy blackmail. They 
 saw that they could bluff English opinion into 
 granting all manner of extravagant compensation 
 for the extinction of their privileges and their 
 ascendancy, if only the Orange drum was beaten 
 loudly enough. It was a case of the more cry 
 the more wool. And in point of fact they suc- 
 ceeded. They obtained financial arrangements 
 of the most generous character, and, thereafter, 
 the battle-flags were furled. Within five years of 
 Disestablishment the Episcopalian Synod was 
 praising it as the happiest event in the life of that 
 Church. The lawyers, being denied the martyr- 
 dom of the battlefield, stolidly accepted that of 
 promotion to the judicial bench, and a holy 
 silence descended on the divines. 
 
 This strategy having succeeded so admirably 
 in 1868 is repeated in 191 2. " Ulster " has not 
 the least intention of raising war or the sinews of 
 war; her interest is in the sinews of peace. 
 Although she does not hold a winning card in her 
 hand she hopes to scoop the pool by a superb 
 bluff. By menaces of rebellion she expects to be 
 able to insist that under Home Rule she shall 
 continue encased in an impenetrable armour 
 of privileges, preferences, and safeguards. She 
 is all the more likely to succeed because of the 
 
HALLUCINATION OF " ULSTER " 109 
 
 tenderness of Nationalist Ireland in her regard. 
 Short of the absolute surrender by the majority 
 of every shred of its rights (which is, of course, 
 what is demanded) there are very few safeguards 
 that we are not prepared to concede to the super- 
 stition, the egotism, or even the actual greed of 
 the Orangemen. But it may as well be under- 
 stood that we are not to be either duped or 
 bullied. 
 
 If the policy of Ulster Unionism is unreal 
 there is no word in any language that can 
 describe the phantasmal nature of the grounds 
 on which it professes to fear national freedom. 
 Home Rule, declare the orators, will obviously 
 mean Rome Rule. The Ne Temere decree will 
 de-legitimise every Protestant in the country. 
 The Dublin Parliament will tax every " Ulster " 
 industry out of existence. One is told that not 
 only do many people say, but that some people 
 even believe things of this kind. But then there 
 are people who believe that they are made of 
 Dresden china, and will break if they knock 
 against a chair. These latter are to be found in 
 lunatic asylums. It is indeed particularly worth 
 noting that when a man begins to see in the 
 whole movement of the world a conspiracy to 
 oppress and injure him our first step is to inquire 
 not into his grievance but into his sanity. One 
 
no THE OPEN SECRET OF IRELAND 
 
 finds the same difficulty in discussing Irish 
 politics in terms of the three hallucinations 
 specified that one finds in discussing, say, 
 Rugby football with a Dresden-china fellow- 
 citizen. It is better not to make the attempt, 
 but to substitute a plain statement of obvious 
 facts. 
 
 In the first place, even if any policy of oppres- 
 sion were in our minds, it is not in our power. 
 The overlordship of the Imperial Parliament 
 remains in any scheme of Home Rule unim- 
 paired, and any man damnified because of his 
 religion can appeal in last resort to the Imperial 
 Army and Navy. Shankhill Road is mathemati- 
 cally safe. After all there are in England some 
 forty millions of Protestants who, whatever their 
 religious temperature may be, will certainly 
 decline to see Protestantism penalised. The 
 Protestants in Ireland have a million and a quar- 
 ter, and they make noise enough for twice the 
 number. There are about three and a quarter 
 millions of Irish Catholics. History concedes to 
 Catholic Ireland the cleanest record in respect 
 of religious tolerance to be found anywhere in 
 Europe. We never martyred a saint, and amid 
 all the witch-hunting devilries of Scotland and 
 England we burned only one witch, a name- 
 sake of my own, Deny or suppress all this. 
 
HALLUCINATION OF " ULSTER " in 
 
 Imagine into the eyes of every Catholic neigh- 
 bour the slumbering but unquenched fires of 
 Smithfield. But be good enough to respect 
 mathematics. Do not suggest that the martial 
 qualities induced by the two religions are so dis- 
 similar that two Catholics are capable of impos- 
 ing Home Rule on twenty-five Protestants. 
 
 The suggestion that we shall overtax 
 " Ulster " is even more captivating. But how 
 are we to do it? Of course we might schedule 
 the sites given up to Protestant church build- 
 ings as undeveloped land. Or we might issue 
 income-tax forms with an assessment printed on 
 one side, and the decrees of the Council of Trent 
 on the other. Or we might insist on every 
 orator desirous of uttering that ennobling senti- 
 ment, " To Hell with the Pope ! " taking out a 
 licence, and charge him a small fee. Positive 
 treason, such as the proclamation of Provisional 
 Governments, would of course pay a higher rate. 
 All these would be most interesting experiments, 
 and would add a picturesque touch to the con- 
 ventionality of modern administration. But if 
 we were to overtax sugar or coffee, corn or 
 butter, flax or wool, beer or spirits, land or 
 houses, I fear that we should be beating our- 
 selves rather severely with our own sticks. Our 
 revenge on " Ulster " would be rather like that 
 
ii2 THE OPEN SECRET OF IRELAND 
 
 of Savage, the poet, who revenged himself on a 
 friend by sleeping out the whole of a December 
 night on a bridge. The whole suggestion is, 
 of course, futile and fantastic. It is a bubble 
 that has been pricked, and by no one so 
 thoroughly as by Lord Pirrie, the head of Har- 
 land and Wolff, that is to say the leader of the 
 industrial North. 
 
 The clamour of the exploiters of " Ulster " is 
 motived on this point by two considerations, 
 the one an illusion, the other a reality. The 
 illusion, or rather the pretence, consists in 
 representing the Unionists as the sole holders 
 of wealth in Ireland. It would be a sufficient 
 refutation of this view to quote those other 
 passages in which the same orators assert with 
 equal eloquence that the Tory policy of land 
 purchase and resolute government from West- 
 minster has brought enormous prosperity to the 
 rest of the country. On per capita valuation 
 the highest northern county ranks only twelfth 
 in Ireland. It is the reality, however, that 
 supplies the clue. While the masters of Oran- 
 geism do not represent the wealth of Ireland 
 they do certainly represent the largest, or, at 
 least, the most intense concentration of unearned 
 incomes. What they fear is not unjust but 
 democratic taxation. They cling to the Union 
 
HALLUCINATION OF " ULSTER " 113 
 
 as a bulwark against the reform movement 
 which in every modern state is resuming 
 for society a small part of certain vast fortunes 
 which in their essence have been socially 
 created. But even on the plane of their own 
 selfishness they are following a foolish line of 
 action. The Union did not save them from the 
 Land Tax Budget, nor, as regards the future, 
 is salvation of the English Tories. Should they 
 ever return to power they will repeat their 
 action respecting the Death Duties. Having 
 in Opposition denounced the land taxes with 
 indecent bitterness they will, when back in 
 office, confirm and extend them. " Ulster " 
 had far better cast in her lot with Ireland. She 
 will find an Irish Assembly not only strikingly 
 but, one might almost add, sinfully conservative 
 in matters of taxation. As to the conflict 
 between the agrarian and the manufacturing 
 interests, that also exists in every nation on the 
 earth. But neither has any greater temptation to 
 plan the destruction of the other than a merchant 
 has to murder his best customer. 
 
 There remains the weltering problem of 
 mixed marriages and the N e T enter e decree. 
 It is perhaps worth observing that marriages 
 get mixed in other countries as well as in 
 Ireland. It grieves one that men should differ 
 
 8 
 
ii 4 THE OPEN SECRET OF IRELAND 
 
 as to the true religious interpretation of life: 
 But they do in fact differ, and wherever two 
 human beings, holding strongly to different 
 faiths, fall in love there is tragic material. But 
 they do in fact fall in love. The theme recurs, 
 with a thousand reverberations, in the novel 
 literature of England, France, and Germany. 
 The situation occurs also in Ireland. But I 
 am bewildered to know in what way it is an 
 argument for or against Home Rule. Let us 
 appeal once more to colonial experience and 
 practice. There is a Catholic majority in 
 Canada and an overwhelming Catholic majority 
 in Quebec. The policy of the Catholic Church 
 towards mixed marriages is precisely the same 
 there as in Ireland. Does Protestantism demand 
 that the constitutions of the Dominion and the 
 Province respectively shall be withdrawn? 
 Since no such claim is made we must conclude 
 that the outcry on Orange platforms is designed 
 not to enforce a principle but to awaken all the 
 slumbering fires of prejudice. The N e Temere 
 decree introduces no new departure. Now, as 
 always, the Catholic Church requires simply 
 that her members shall consecrate the supreme 
 adventure of life with the Sacrament of their 
 fathers before the altar of their fathers. It is 
 strange that the Orangemen, believing as they 
 
HALLUCINATION OF " ULSTER " 115 
 
 do that the Pope is anti-Christ, should be so 
 annoyed at finding that the Pope teaches a 
 doctrine different from theirs on the subject of 
 marriage. The Pope can inflict no spiritual 
 penalties on them since they are outside his 
 flock. He can inflict no civil penalties on 
 anybody. There is undoubtedly in the matter 
 of divorce a sharp conflict between Catholic 
 ideas and the practice and opinion of Protestant 
 countries. That exists, and will continue, 
 under every variation of government. It is an 
 eternal antinomy. But whom does it aggrieve ? 
 We Catholics voluntarily abjure the blessings of 
 divorce, but we should never dream of using 
 the civil law to impose our abnegation on those 
 of another belief. If there is any doubt upon 
 that point it can very easily be removed. The 
 civil law of marriage can be conserved under 
 one of the " safeguards." 
 
 The truth is that in order to test our 
 tolerance Orangeism proposes to us a series of 
 exercises which are a very delirium of intoler- 
 ance. " Sever yourselves," it says in effect 
 to us, " from all allegiance to that Italian 
 Cardinal. Consign him, as Portadown does, to 
 hell. Bait your bishops. Deride the spiritual 
 authority of your priests. Then shall we know 
 that you are men and masters of your own 
 
n6 THE OPEN SECRET OF IRELAND 
 
 consciences. Elect a Unionist Council in every 
 county, a Unionist Corporation in Dublin, then 
 shall we know that you are brothers. ,Dis- 
 own your dead leaders. Spit on the grave 
 of Emmet. Teach your children that every 
 Fenian was a murderer. Erase from your 
 chronicles the name of Parnell. Then shall 
 we know that you are loyal." 
 
 It has been occasionally urged by writers 
 who prefer phrases to actualities that Home 
 Rule must wait on the conversion of " Ulster." 
 Therein the patient must minister to himself. 
 Miracles of that order cannot be accomplished 
 from without. Great is Diana of the Ephesians, 
 and the servitude of tradition is at an end only 
 when the hands that fashioned the idols shatter 
 them on the altars of a new nobleness. Let 
 us distinguish. The Orangeism which is merely 
 an instrument of exploitation and domination 
 will not yield to reason. The Orangeism 
 which is an inherited hysteria will not yield to 
 reason. It Bourbonises too much. It lives in 
 the past, learning nothing and forgetting noth- 
 ing. Argument runs off it like rain off a duck's 
 back. These two types of thought we must 
 leave to the grace of God, and the education 
 of the accomplished fact. They represent a 
 declining cause, and a decaying party. The 
 
HALLUCINATION OF " ULSTER " 117 
 
 Lodges once mustered more than 200,000 
 members; they have now less than 10,000. 
 There is another kind of Orangeism, that which 
 has begun to think, and the Orangeism that 
 has begun to think is already converted. I 
 said that Protestant " Ulster " had never given 
 to its own democracy a leader, but to say that 
 is to forget John Mitchel. Master in prose of 
 a passion as intense as Carlyle's and far less 
 cloudy, of an irony not excelled by Swift, Mitchel 
 flung into the tabernacles of his own people 
 during the Great Famine a sentence that meant 
 not peace but a sword. He taught them, as 
 no one since, that Orangeism was merely a 
 weapon of exploitation. While the band played 
 " The Boyne Water " and the people cheered 
 it, the landlords were picking the pockets of the 
 ecstatic crowd. 
 
 " The Pope, we know, is the' man of sin,' "wrote 
 Mitchel, "and the ' Antichrist,' and also, if you 
 like, the ' mystery of iniquity,' and all that, but he 
 brings no ejectments in Ireland." 
 
 Mitchel travelled too fast for co-religionists 
 whose shoulders had not yet slipped the burden 
 of old superstitions. The elan of genius and 
 the call of freedom drew him out of the home 
 of his fathers to consort with Papists, rebels, 
 and transported convicts. But his failure was 
 
ii8 THE OPEN SECRET OF IRELAND 
 
 the seed of later success. In a few years the 
 League of North and South was able to unite 
 Protestant and Catholic on the plain economic 
 issue that landlordism must go. That too 
 failed, but the stream of democratic thought 
 had been merely driven underground to re- 
 appear further on in the century. In the 
 elections that shook the fortress of Toryism in 
 Ulster in the seventies Catholic priests marched 
 at the head of processions side by side with 
 Grand Masters of Orange Lodges. In the first 
 years of the Land League, Michael Davitt was 
 able to secure the enthusiastic support of 
 purely Orange meetings in Armagh. Still 
 later, Mr T. W. Russell, at the head of a 
 democratic coalition, smashed the old Ascen- 
 dancy on the question of compulsory purchase, 
 and Mr Lindsay Crawford founded his Inde- 
 pendent Order, a portent if not yet a power. 
 So much has been done in the country. But 
 it is in the cities, those workshops of the 
 society of the future, that the change is most 
 marked. The new movement finds an apt 
 epitome in the political career of Mr Joseph 
 Devlin. The workers of Belfast had been 
 accustomed to see labour problems treated by 
 the old type of Unionist member of parliament 
 either with cowardice or with contempt. En fin 
 
HALLUCINATION OF " ULSTER " 119 
 
 Maleskerbes vint. At last a man rose up out 
 of their own class, although a Catholic and a 
 Nationalist. He spoke with an awakening 
 eloquence, and he made good his words. In 
 every industrial struggle in that sweated city 
 he interposed his strong word to demand justice 
 for the wage-earner. This was a new sort of 
 politics. It bore fruit where Ulster Unionism 
 had been but a barren fig-tree. The democracy 
 of Belfast accepted their leader. They gave 
 him a majority of 16 is West Belfast in 1906 
 and in four years they had multiplied it by forty. 
 The Boyne was bridged, and everything that 
 has since happened has but added a new stay or 
 girder to the strength of the bridge. And not 
 only labour but capital has passed across that 
 estranging river to firm ground of patriotism and 
 national unity. Lord Pirrie, the head of the 
 greatest manufacturing enterprise in Belfast, is 
 an ardent Home Ruler. Business men, ministers 
 of religion, even lawyers, are thinking out things 
 quietly beneath the surface. The new " Ulster " 
 is breaking its shell. Parties are forming on 
 the basis of economic realities, not. on that of 
 " religious " phantasms. 
 
 As for the old " Ulster," it remains a problem 
 not for the War Office, but for the Department 
 of Education. 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 
 THE MECHANICS OF HOME RULE 
 
 The inevitableness of Home Rule resides in the 
 fact that it is, as one might say, a biped among 
 ideas. It marches to triumph on two feet, an 
 Irish and an Imperial foot. If there were in 
 Ireland no demand whatever for self-government 
 it would, nevertheless, be necessary in the 
 interests of the Empire to force it on her. The 
 human, or as some people may prefer to call it, 
 the sociological case for Home Rule, and the 
 historical case for it have already been outlined. 
 We now turn to consideration, of another order, 
 derived from Political Mechanics, or rather 
 bearing on the mere mechanism of politics. Let 
 us approach the problem first from the Imperial 
 side. 
 
 On the whole, the most remarkable thing about 
 the British Empire is that there is no British 
 Empire. We are in presence of the familiar 
 distinction between the raw material and the 
 
 120 
 
THE MECHANICS OF HOME RULE 121 
 
 finished article. There are, indeed, on the 
 surface of the globe a number of self-governing 
 colonies, founded and peopled by men of Irish 
 and English blood. In each of these the 
 United Kingdom is represented by a Governor 
 whose whole duty consists in being seen on formal 
 occasions, but never heard in counsel or rebuke. 
 The only other connecting links are those of law 
 and finance. The Privy Council acts as a Court 
 of Appeal in certain causes, and Colonial Govern- 
 ments borrow money in the London market. 
 These communities widely seperated in geo- 
 graphy and in temperament, have no common 
 fiscal policy, no common foreign policy, no 
 common scheme of defence, no common Council 
 to discuss and decide Imperial affairs. Now 
 this may be a very wise arrangement, but you 
 must not call it an Empire. From the point of 
 view of unity, if from no other, it presents an 
 unfavourable contrast to French Imperialism, 
 under which all the oversea colonies are repre- 
 sented in the Chamber of Deputies in Paris. In 
 the English plan the oversea colonies are 
 unrelated atoms. You may say that they afford 
 all the materials for a grandiose federation ; but 
 if you have flour in one bag, and raisins in 
 another, and candied peel in another, and suet 
 in another you must not call them a Christmas 
 
122 THE OPEN SECRET OF IRELAND 
 
 pudding until they have been mixed together and 
 cooked. Those areas of the globe, coloured red 
 on the maps, may have all the resources requisite 
 for a great, self-sufficing, economic unit of a 
 new order. Their peoples may desire that new 
 order. But until it is achieved you must remem- 
 ber that the British Empire belongs to the region 
 of dream and not to that of fact. 
 
 For many years now, apostles of reconstruc- 
 tion have been hammering out the details of a 
 scheme that shall unify the Empire on some sort 
 of Federal basis. For the new organism which 
 they desire to create they need a brain. Is this 
 to be found in the Westminster Assembly, some- 
 times loosely styled the " Imperial Parliament " ? 
 As things stand at present such a suggestion is 
 a mere counter-sense. That body has come to 
 such a pass as would seem to indicate the final 
 bankruptcy of the governing genius of England. 
 All the penalties of political gluttony have 
 accumulated on it. Parliament, to put the truth 
 a little brutally, has broken down under a long 
 debauch of over-feeding. Every day of every 
 session it bites off far more in the way of bills 
 and estimates than it even pretends to have time 
 to chew. Results follow which it would be indis- 
 creet to express in terms of physiology. Tens 
 of millions are shovelled out of the Treasury by 
 
THE MECHANICS OF HOME RULE 123 
 
 an offhand, undiscussed, perfunctory resolution. 
 The attempt to compress infinite issues in a 
 space too little has altered and, as some critics 
 think, degraded the whole tenor of public life. 
 Parliament is no longer the Grand Inquest of 
 the Nation, at least not in the ancient and proper 
 meaning of the words. The declaration of 
 Edmund Burke to the effect that a member has 
 no right to sacrifice his " unbiassed opinion, his 
 mature judgment, his enlightened conscience " 
 to any set of men living may be echoed by the 
 judges in our day, but to anyone who knows the 
 House of Commons it is a piece of pure irony. 
 Party discipline cracks every session a more 
 compelling whip ; and our shepherded, regi- 
 mented, and automatised representatives them- 
 selves realise that, whatever more desirable 
 status they may have attained, they have 
 certainly lost that of individual freedom. Out 
 of their own ranks a movement has arisen to 
 put an end altogether to Party government. 
 This proposal I myself believe to be futile, but 
 its very futility testifies to the existence of an 
 intolerable situation. All this turns on the inade- 
 quacy of the time of the House of Commons to 
 its business. But the distribution of such time as 
 there is, is a revel of ineptitudes. It resembles 
 the drawing of a schoolboy who has not yet 
 
124 THE OPEN SECRET OF IRELAND 
 
 learned perspective. A stranger dropping into 
 the Chamber will find it spending two hours in 
 helping to determine whether Russia is to have 
 a Czar, and the next four hours helping to deter- 
 mine whether Rathmines is to have, let us say, 
 a new sewer. The affairs of India, involving 
 the political welfare of three hundred millions 
 of human beings, get one day; Egypt, that 
 test case in international ethics, has to be 
 content with a few scattered hours. And, 
 despite all this, local questions are not con- 
 sidered at sufficient length or with sufficient 
 knowledge. The parish pump is close enough 
 to spoil St Stephen's as an Imperial Council, 
 and yet so far away as to destroy its effective- 
 ness as an organ of local government. 
 
 Such an assembly is clearly unfitted to func- 
 tion as the cerebrum of Empire. It must be 
 relieved of burdens which in the complexity of 
 modern politics it is no longer able to bear. 
 How is this to be done ? In one way and in one 
 way only, by leaving local business to local 
 bodies. But that is Home Rule, or, as the 
 learned, envisaging the idea from another point 
 of view, sometimes prefer to call it, Devolution. 
 Through the principle of autonomy, incompletely 
 applied, the British Possessions have so far 
 evolved. Through the principle of autonomy, 
 
THE MECHANICS OF HOME RULE 125 
 
 completely applied, and in no other wise, can 
 they evolve into an ordered system worthy of the 
 Imperial name. This is at first blush a singular 
 development. Here lie Ireland and England 
 separated by a mountain of misunderstanding. 
 We Irish Nationalists have for a century been 
 trying to bore a tunnel through from one side. 
 And suddenly we become aware of the tapping of 
 picks not our own, and encounter midway the 
 tunnel which the Party of Imperial Reconstruc- 
 tion have driven through from the other side. 
 Here are all the materials for a tableau. Justice 
 falls on the neck of expediency. Imperialism 
 recognises in nationality no rebel but a son of the 
 house. Toryism rubs its eyes, and finds that it 
 is Home Rule. 
 
 But, sounded to its depths, this new current 
 of thought appears not only not eccentric but 
 inevitable. Ample explanation is to be found 
 in the history of the Irish fight for self-govern- 
 ment. On this subject there has been in Ireland 
 a marked evolution of ideas. O'Connell began 
 by demanding simple Repeal of the Union and 
 the Restoration of Grattan's Parliament. But 
 by 1844 he had advanced towards a Federal 
 programme. 
 
 " Beside the local Parliament in Ireland having 
 
126 THE OPEN SECRET OF IRELAND 
 
 full and perfect local authority," he writes in that 
 year, " there should be, for questions of Imperial 
 concern, colonial, military, and naval, and of 
 foreign alliance and policy, a Congressional or 
 Federal Parliament, in which Ireland should have 
 a fair share and proportion of representation and 
 power.' * 
 
 The proposed change of programme came in 
 a questionable shape to a suspicious time. It 
 was not received with universal favour, and, to 
 avert dissension, it was represented as a mere 
 ballon d'essai and was abandoned. O'Connell 
 died, and Repeal and Federation alike were 
 swallowed up in the Great Famine. But time 
 was to renew its urgency. The essential facts, 
 and the logic of the facts, remained unaltered. 
 When Isaac Butt came to formulate his scheme 
 at the Home Rule Conference in 1873 he 
 renewed the Federal proposal in terms almost 
 verbally the same. The Conference resolved: 
 
 "That, in claiming these rights and privileges 
 for our country, we adopt the principle of a Federal 
 arrangement, which would secure to the Irish Par- 
 liament the right of legislating for and regulating 
 all matters relating to the internal affairs of Ireland, 
 while leaving to the Imperial Parliament the power 
 of dealing with all questions affecting the Imperial 
 Crown and Government^ legislation regarding the 
 
THE MECHANICS OF HOME RULE 127 
 
 colonies and other dependencies of the Crown , the 
 relations of the Empire with Foreign States, and 
 all matters appertaining to the defence and stability 
 of the Empire at large; as well as the power of 
 granting and providing the supplies necessary for 
 Imperial purposes.^ 
 
 Parnell, who was a supreme master of the art 
 of doing one thing at a time, naturally laid the 
 emphasis on Ireland. But when he was asked 
 by Mr Cecil Rhodes to agree to the retention of 
 Irish representatives at Westminster in the in- 
 terests of Imperial Federation, he declared him- 
 self in very definite terms : 
 
 " It does not come so much within my province 
 to express a full opinion upon the larger question 
 of Imperial federation, but I agree with you that 
 the continued Irish representation at Westminster 
 immensely facilitates such a step, while the con- 
 trary provision in the Bill of 1886 would have been 
 a bar. Undoubtedly this is a matter which should 
 be dealt with largely in accordance with the opinion 
 of the Colonies themselves, and if they should 
 desire to share in the cost of Imperial matters, as 
 undoubtedly they now do in the responsibility, and 
 should express a wish for representation at West- 
 minster, I certainly think it should be accorded to 
 them, and that public opinion in these islands 
 would unanimously concur in the necessary con- 
 stitutional modifications." 
 
128 THE OPEN SECRET OF IRELAND 
 
 That is, if you will, thinking Imperially. Mr 
 Redmond stands where Parnell stood. He 
 claims for the Irish people " the legislative and 
 executive control of all purely Irish affairs." 
 But he is altogether friendly to a later and larger 
 application of the principle of autonomy. 
 
 But where, asks the triumphant critic not quite 
 ingenuously, is the line to be drawn between 
 local and Imperial affairs? Problems far more 
 perplexed than this have been solved by the wit 
 of man. The line was drawn by O'Connell and 
 Butt, by Parnell and Gladstone. It can be 
 drawn to meet the circumstances of to-day by 
 men of goodwill, after discussion and mutual 
 adjustment. But why not postpone the case of 
 Ireland until a scheme of Home Rule all round 
 either for the United Kingdom or for the whole 
 Empire has been worked out ? We answer that 
 Ireland comes first on grounds both of ethics 
 and of expediency. Through all the blackness 
 of dismal years we have laboured to preserve the 
 twin ideas of nationality and autonomy, and the 
 labourer is worthy of his hire. But a Home 
 Rule assembly, functioning in Dublin, may well 
 furnish the germ of a reorganisation of the 
 Empire. If so, let it be remembered that it was 
 not Mr Chamberlain but Daniel O'Connell who 
 first in these countries gave to Imperialism a 
 
THE MECHANICS OF HOME RULE 129 
 
 definite and articulate form. In any event 
 Home Rule is the only remedy for the present 
 congestion of St Stephen's. It is the only tonic 
 that can restore to English public life its old 
 vigour of independence. 
 
 Such are the necessities and such is the future 
 of the Empire merely as a problem in what has 
 been called Political Mechanics. We have now, 
 from the same point of view, to examine very 
 cursorily the present government of Ireland. 
 The phrasing, let me interpose, is inaccurate. 
 Ireland, in our day, is not governed ; it is only 
 administered. A modern government, if it 
 wishes to be real, must above all else explain 
 itself. For such luxuries, so far as Ireland is 
 concerned, there is no time in the House of 
 Commons. A modern government must exer- 
 cise active control over every department of 
 public business. For such an effort there is, so 
 far as Ireland is concerned, no energy in the 
 House of Commons. Once in a blue moon it 
 does of course become necessary to pass an 
 Irish Bill, a University or a Land Bill. The 
 Party shepherds round up their flocks, and, for 
 a reluctant day or two, they have to feed sparely 
 in unaccustomed pastures. Or again, as in 
 1886, 1893, or i 9 I2 j Ireland dominates British 
 politics, and the English members descend on 
 
 I 
 
i 3 o THE OPEN SECRET OF IRELAND 
 
 her with a heavy flop of hatred or sympathy as 
 it may happen. But at all other times the Union 
 Parliament abdicates, or at least it " governs " 
 Ireland as men are said sometimes to drive 
 motor-cars, in a drowse. Three days — or is it 
 two? — are given to Irish Estimates, and on each 
 of these occasions the Chamber is as desolate as 
 a grazing ranch in Meath. Honourable mem- 
 bers snatch at the opportunity of cultivating 
 their souls in the theatres, clubs, restaurants, 
 and other centres of culture in which London 
 abounds. The Irish Party is compelled by the 
 elemental necessities of the situation to speak 
 with one voice on matters regarding which there 
 would properly be at least two voices in an Irish 
 Parliament, precisely identical in personnel. 
 Ulster Unionism presents a similar solidarity. 
 
 Whenever a point of any novelty is made, the 
 Chief Secretary's secretary slips over to one of 
 the Irish Officials who on these occasions lie 
 ambushed at the back of the Speaker's chair, 
 and returns with all the elation of a honey-laden 
 bee. His little burden of wisdom is gratefully 
 noted on the margin of the typewritten brief 
 which has been already prepared in Dublin by 
 the Board under discussion, and, entrenched 
 behind this, the Right Honourable gentleman 
 winds up the debate. Sometimes his solemnity 
 
THE MECHANICS OF HOME RULE 131 
 
 wrings laughter from men, sometimes his flip- 
 pancy wrings tears from the gods, but it does 
 not in the least matter what he says. The 
 division bells ring ; the absentees come trooping 
 in, learn at the door of the lobby, each from his 
 respective Whip, whether his spontaneous, in- 
 dependent judgment has made him a Yes! or 
 a No! and vote accordingly in the light of an 
 unsullied conscience. The Irish officials, with 
 a sigh of relief or a shrug of contempt, collect 
 their hats and umbrellas, and retire to their 
 hotels to erase from their minds by slumber the 
 babblings of a mis-spent evening. And the 
 course of administration in Ireland is as much 
 affected by the whole proceedings as the course 
 of an 80 h.p. Mercedes is affected by a cab- 
 man's oath. 
 
 So much for exclusively Irish affairs. When 
 Ireland comes into some " general " scheme of 
 legislation the parody of government becomes 
 if possible more fantastic in character. Let me 
 take just three instances — Old Age Pensions, 
 Insurance, and the Budget. In regard to the 
 first it was perhaps a matter of course that no 
 attempt should be made to allow for the differ- 
 ence in economic levels between Great Britain 
 and Ireland. This is the very principle of 
 Unionism : to apply like methods to things which 
 
i 3 2 THE OPEN SECRET OF IRELAND 
 
 are unlike. But in the calculation of details 
 an ignorance was exhibited which passed the 
 bounds of decency. Mistakes of five or six per 
 cent are, in these complex affairs, not only to be 
 expected but almost to be desired ; they help to 
 depress ministerial cocksureness. But in this 
 case there was an error of 200 per cent, a cir- 
 cumstance which incidentally established in the 
 English mind a pleasing legend of Irish dis- 
 honesty. The Insurance Bill was ushered in 
 with greater prudence. The " government," 
 recognising its own inability to lead opinion, 
 had the grace to refrain from misleading it. No 
 special Irish memorandum was issued, and no 
 attempt was made to adjust the scheme to Irish 
 social and economic conditions. But Budgets 
 afford on the whole the capital instance of what 
 we may call legislation by accident. The Act 
 of Union solemnly prescribes the principles on 
 which these measures are to be framed, and 
 points to the Chancellor of the Exchequer as the 
 trustee of Irish interests. But nobody of this 
 generation ever knew a Chancellor of the Ex- 
 chequer who had even read the Act of Union ; 
 Mr Lloyd George, on his own admission, had 
 certainly not read it in 1909. What has hap- 
 pened is very simple. The fulfilment of treaty 
 obligations required differential taxation, but 
 
THE MECHANICS OF HOME RULE 133 
 
 administrative convenience was best served by 
 a uniform system of taxation. In the struggle 
 between the two, conscience was as usual de- 
 feated. The Chancellor, according to the 
 practice which has overridden the Act of Union 
 budgets for Great Britain, drags the schedule of 
 taxes so fixed through Ireland like a net, and 
 counts the take. That, in the process, the 
 pledge of England should be broken, and her 
 honour betrayed, is not regarded by the best 
 authorities as an objection or even as a relevant 
 fact. In the more sacred name of uniformity 
 Ireland is swamped in the Westminster Parlia- 
 ment like a fishing-smack in the wash of a great 
 merchantman. 
 
 But let one illusion be buried. If Ireland 
 does not govern herself it is quite certain that 
 the British Parliament does not govern her. 
 Changing the venue of inquiry from London to 
 Dublin we find ourselves still in regions of the 
 fantastic. From the sober and unemotional 
 pages of " Whitaker's Almanack " one learns, to 
 begin with, that "the government of Ireland is 
 semi-independent." The separatism of geog- 
 raphy has in this case triumphed. The de 
 facto rulers of Ireland in ordinary slack times, 
 and in the daily round of business, are the heads 
 of the great Departments. Some of these are 
 
134 THE OPEN SECRET OF IRELAND 
 
 not even nominally responsible to Parliament. 
 The Intermediate Board, for instance, has for 
 thirty years controlled secondary education, but 
 it has never explained itself to Parliament and, 
 because of the source from which its funds are 
 derived, it is not open to criticism in Parliament. 
 But none of the heads are really responsible 
 to any authority except their own iron-clad 
 consciences and the officials of the Treasury, 
 with whom, for the sake of appearances, they 
 wage an unreal war. In theory, the Chief Secre- 
 tary answers to Parliament for the misdeeds of 
 them all. In practice, this fines itself down to 
 reading typewritten sophistications in reply to 
 original questions, and improvising jokes, of a 
 well-recognised pattern, to turn the point of 
 supplementary questions for forty minutes on 
 one day in the week during session. In its own 
 internal economy the government of Ireland is 
 a form of Pantheism, with the Chief Secretary 
 as underlying principle. He is the source of 
 everything, good and evil, light and darkness, 
 benignity and malignity, with the unfortunate 
 result that he is in perpetual contradiction with 
 himself. As we know, the equilibrium of modern 
 governments is maintained by mutual strain 
 between the various ministers. Sometimes, as 
 in the case of Lord Randolph Churchill, a 
 
THE MECHANICS OF HOME RULE 135 
 
 strong personality, moved by a new idea, tears 
 the structure to pieces. But the Chief Secre- 
 tary knows no such limitations from without. 
 Theoretically, he may be produced to infinity in 
 any direction ; he is all in every part. But, as 
 a matter of fact, through the mere necessity of 
 filling so much space his control becomes rarefied 
 to an invisible vapour ; he ends by becoming 
 nothing in any part. With its ultimate prin- 
 ciple reduced to the status of a Dieu faineant, 
 political Pantheism is transformed into political 
 Atheism. Responsible government is perceived 
 not to exist in Ireland. Mr Barry O'Brien in 
 his admirable book, " Dublin Castle and the 
 Irish People," confesses himself unable to find 
 a better characterisation of the whole system 
 than is contained in a well-known passage from 
 " The Mikado." I make no apology for con- 
 veying it from him. 
 
 " One cannot help recalling the memory of 
 Pooh-Bah, ' Lord High-Everything-Else ' of the 
 Mikado of Japan. Who forgets the memorable 
 scene between him and Ko-Ko, the Lord High 
 Executioner, on an occasion of supreme impor- 
 tance ? 
 
 Ko-Ko. Pooh-Bah, it seems that the festivities 
 in connection with my approaching marriage must 
 last a week. I should like to do it handsomely, 
 
136 THE OPEN SECRET OF IRELAND 
 
 and I want to consult you as to the amount I ought 
 to spend upon them. 
 
 Pooh-Bah. Certainly. In which of my capaci- 
 ties? As First Lord of the Treasury, Lord 
 Chamberlain, Attorney-General, Chancellor of the 
 Exchequer, Privy Purse, or Private Secretary? 
 
 Ko-Ko. Suppose we say as Private Secretary. 
 
 Pooh-Bah. Speaking as your Private Secre- 
 tary, I should say that as the city will have to 
 pay for it, don't stint yourself; do it well. 
 
 Ko-Ko. Exactly — as the city will have to pay 
 for it. That is your advice ? 
 
 Pooh-Bah. As Private Secretary. Of course 
 you will understand that, as Chancellor of the Ex- 
 chequer, I am bound to see that due economy is 
 observed. 
 
 Ko-Ko. Oh, but you said just now, ' Don't 
 stint yourself; do it well.' 
 
 Pooh-Bah. As Private Secretary. 
 
 Ko-Ko. And now you say that due economy 
 must be observed. 
 
 Pooh-Bah. As Chancellor of the Exchequer. 
 
 Ko-Ko. I see. Come over here where the 
 Chancellor can't hear us. (They cross stage.) 
 Now, as my Solicitor, how do you advise me to 
 deal with this difficulty? 
 
 Pooh-Bah. Oh, as your Solicitor, I should 
 have no hesitation in saying chance it. 
 
 Ko-Ko. Thank you (shaking his head); I 
 will. 
 
 Pooh-Bah. If it were not that, as Lord Chief 
 
THE MECHANICS OF HOME RULE 137 
 
 Justice, I am bound to see that the law isn't 
 violated. 
 
 Ko-Ko. I see. Come over here where the 
 Chief Justice can't hear us. (They cross the stage.) 
 Now, then, as First Lord of the Treasury? 
 
 Pooh-Bah. Of course, as First Lord of the 
 Treasury, I could propose a special vote that 
 would cover all expenses if it were not that, as 
 leader of the Opposition, it would be my duty to 
 resist it, tooth and nail. Or, as Paymaster-General, 
 I could so cook the accounts that, as Lord High 
 Auditor, I should never discover the fraud. But 
 then, as Archbishop of Jitipu, it would be my duty 
 to denounce my dishonesty, and give myself into 
 my own custody as Commissioner of Police." 
 
 Under such arrangements as these the in- 
 evitable happens. The Chief Secretary accepts 
 his role. He is, no doubt, consoled to discover 
 that in one sphere, namely in that of patron- 
 age, his supremacy is effective. He discovers 
 further that he can hamstring certain obnoxious 
 Acts, as Mr Walter Long hamstrung the Land 
 Act, by the issue of Regulations. The rest of 
 his official career depends on his politics. If a 
 Tory, he learns that the Irish Civil Service is a 
 whispering gallery along which his lightest word 
 is carried to approving ears, and loyally acted 
 upon. Further " Ulster " expects law and order 
 to be vindicated by the occasional proclamation 
 
138 THE OPEN SECRET OF IRELAND 
 
 of Nationalist meetings, and batoning of Nation- 
 alist skulls. And he absolutely must say from 
 time to time in public that the Irish Question 
 in essence is not political but economic. This 
 is the whole duty of a Tory Chief Secretary. A 
 Liberal Chief Secretary functions on somewhat 
 different lines. Administration presents itself to 
 him as a colossal heap of recalcitrant, wet sand 
 out of which he has to fashion a statue of fair- 
 play. Having, with great labour, left his personal 
 impress on two or three handfuls, the weary 
 Titan abandons his impossible task. He falls 
 back in good order on the House of Commons, 
 where his party majority enables him to pass an 
 Irish Bill from time to time. His spare time he 
 divides between commending Dublin Castle to 
 the seven devils that made it, and praying for 
 the advent of Home Rule. 
 
 In either case the sovereignty of Ireland 
 relapses into the hands of the permanent 
 officials, that camarilla of Olympians. To the 
 official lives of these gentlemen, regarded as 
 works of art, I raise my hat in respectful envy. 
 They have realised the vision of Lucretius. 
 From the secure remoteness of their ivory 
 towers they look down unmoved on the stormy 
 and drifting tides below, and they enjoy the 
 privilege, so rare in Ireland, of knowing the 
 
THE MECHANICS OF HOME RULE 139 
 
 causes of things. To the ordinary man their 
 political origins are shrouded in twilight. They 
 seem to him to have come like water, but 
 unhappily it cannot be said that they go like 
 wind. While they are with us they are absolute, 
 seen by nobody, felt by all the world, the 
 Manchu mandarins of the West. They have 
 been attacked on many foolish counts ; let us 
 in justice to them and ourselves be quite clear 
 as to what is wrong with them. Some people 
 say that there are too many Boards, but it is to 
 be remembered that for every new function with 
 which we endow the State it must have a new 
 organ. Others say that they are over-staffed ; but 
 all government departments in the world are 
 over-staffed. Still others say that they are stupid 
 and corrupt. As for corruption, it certainly does 
 exist under many discreet veils, but its old glory 
 is fading. Incompetent the great officials never 
 were. A poet tells us that there are only two 
 people in the world who ever understand a man 
 — the woman who loves him, and the enemy who 
 hates him best. In one of these ways, if not in the 
 other, Dublin Castle understands Ireland. Did 
 it not know what the people of Ireland want, 
 it could not so infallibly have maintained its 
 tradition of giving them the opposite. Other 
 critics again find the deadly disease of the 
 
140 THE OPEN SECRET OF IRELAND 
 
 Boards to reside in the fact that they are a 
 bureaucracy. This diagnosis comes closer to 
 the truth, but it is not yet the truth. Bureau- 
 cracies of trained experts are becoming more 
 and not less necessary. What is really wrong 
 with the Castle is that it is a bureaucracy which 
 has usurped the throne of the nation. " In 
 England," declared Mr Gladstone, " when the 
 nation attends, it can prevail." In Ireland, 
 though it should attend seven days in the week, 
 it could never under present arrangements stamp 
 the image of its will on public policy. The real 
 sin of the Castle regime is that it is a sham, a 
 rococo, a despotism painted to look like repre- 
 sentative government. To quote a radiant 
 commonplace, the rich significance of which few 
 of us adequately grasp, it does not rest on the 
 consent of the governed. 
 
 11 From whatever point of view we envisage the 
 English Government in Ireland," writes Mr Paul- 
 Dubois, " we are confronted with the same appear- 
 ance of constitutional forms masking a state of 
 things which is a compound of autocracy, oppres- 
 sion, and corruption." 
 
 Such a system does not possess within itself 
 the seed of continuance. Disraeli announced, 
 somewhat prematurely, the advent of an age in 
 
THE MECHANICS OF HOME RULE 141 
 
 which institutions that could not bear discussion 
 would have to go. Matthew Arnold yearned for 
 a time in which the manifestly absurd would be 
 abandoned. In the flame of either dictum the 
 present " government " of Ireland shrivels to 
 ashes, and affairs are ripe for the application of 
 both. Here, as in the Colonies, the people must 
 enter into its heritage. The days are for ever 
 dead in which a nation could be ruled in daily 
 disregard of its history, its ideals, its definite 
 programme. 
 
 On the minutiae of administration I do not 
 mean to touch. When the whole spirit, atmos- 
 phere, and ethos are anti-moral it is idle to 
 chronicle any chance rectitude of detail. If a 
 man is a murderer it is not much to his credit 
 to observe that he has triumphed over the 
 primitive temptation to eat peas with his knife. 
 If a government is based on contempt for public 
 opinion, as its fundamental principle, no useful 
 purpose is served by a record of the occasions 
 on which a policeman has been known to pass a 
 citizen in the street without beating him. But 
 there is one further confirmation of the view, 
 here advanced, to omit which would be to ignore 
 the most significant fact of our time. Certain 
 departments such as the Congested Districts 
 Board and the Department of Agriculture, 
 
i 4 a THE OPEN SECRET OF IRELAND 
 
 recent creations, have been freshened by the 
 introduction of a representative, non-official ele- 
 ment. Others such as the Estates Commission 
 have been under the control of officials of a new 
 type, able men who do not conceal the fact that 
 they believe in Ireland. All of these new Boards 
 have struck root in the national life to a depth 
 never reached by any of their predecessors. The 
 lesson of this change is the lesson of freedom. In 
 the precise degree in v/hich government trusts 
 the people will the people trust government. It 
 remains to complete the process by a scheme of 
 autonomy that shall make every administrator 
 a trustee and executant of the will of the nation. 
 There are other organs of " government " in 
 Ireland of which the reader may reasonably 
 expect to hear something. He will permit me 
 to discharge my obligations by copying out cer- 
 tain paragraphs from an old note-book : 
 
 " Judges. — It is a mistake to suppose that none 
 of the Irish Judges know any law. Our judiciary 
 includes many masterly lawyers, and many adroit 
 men of the world. But all of them are political 
 appointments. Hence in ordinary cases a man will 
 get clean justice. But the moment politics flutter 
 on the breeze, the masked battery on the Bench is 
 uncurtained to bellow forth anti-Nationalist shrap- 
 nel. Irish Judges, in fact, are very like the horse 
 
THE MECHANICS OF HOME RULE 143 
 
 in the schoolboy's essay: ' The horse is a noble 
 and useful quadruped, but, when irritated, he ceases 
 to do so." 
 
 " Police. — The Royal Irish Constabulary was 
 formerly an Army of occupation. Now, owing to 
 the all but complete disappearance of crime, it is an 
 Army of no occupation." 
 
 " Dublin Castle in general. — Must be seen to be 
 disbelieved." 
 
 Since there does not exist a British Empire, it 
 is necessary to invent one. Since there does not 
 exist an Irish government, in any modern and 
 intelligible sense of the word, it is necessary to 
 invent one. The common creative mould out of 
 which both must be struck is the principle of 
 Home Rule. 
 
CHAPTER IX 
 
 AFTER HOME RULE 
 
 The advocates of Home Rule are invited to 
 many ordeals by way of verifying their good 
 faith; perhaps the heaviest ordeal is that of 
 prophecy. Very well, people say, what are you 
 going to do with Home Rule when you get it? 
 What will Irish politics be like in, say, 1920? 
 If we show embarrassment or offer conflicting 
 answers, the querist is persuaded that we are, as 
 indeed he thought, vapouring sentimentalists, 
 not at all accustomed to live in a world of clear 
 ideas and unyielding facts. The demand, like 
 many others made upon us, is unreal and un- 
 reasonable. What are the English going to do 
 with Home Rule when they get it? What will 
 German or Japanese or American politics be 
 like in 1920? These are all what Matthew 
 Arnold calls " undiscovered things." The future 
 resolutely declines to speak out of her turn. 
 She has a trick of keeping her secrets well, 
 
 144 
 
AFTER HOME RULE 145 
 
 better than she keeps her promises. Professor 
 Dicey wrote a Unionist tract, very vehement and 
 thunderous, in which he sought to injure Home 
 Rule by styling it a leap in the dark. But the 
 whole conduct of life, in its gravest and its 
 lightest issues alike, is a perpetual leap in the 
 dark. Every change of public policy is a raid 
 across the frontiers of the unknown; or rather, 
 as I prefer to put it, every fundamental reform 
 is essentially an Act of Faith in to-morrow, and 
 so it is with Home Rule. 
 
 But while none of us can prophesy all of us 
 can conjecture, and in this case with a great deal 
 of confidence. On the one hand, Ireland is a 
 country of very definite habits of thought; on 
 the other, her immediate problems are obvious. 
 These two circumstances facilitate the process 
 which the learned describe as an attempt to 
 produce the present curve of evolution into the 
 future. First, then, as to the temper of mind 
 in which an autonomous Ireland will face the 
 world. The one clear certainty is that it will not 
 be rhetorical or Utopian. Of all the libels with 
 which we are pelted the most injurious to our 
 repute is a kindly libel, that which represents us 
 as a nation of orators. To the primitive Tory 
 the Nationalist " agitator " appears in the guise 
 of a stormy and intractable fiend, with futility in 
 
i 4 6 THE OPEN SECRET OF IRELAND 
 
 his soul, and a College Green peroration on his 
 lips. The sources of this superstition are easily 
 traced. The English have created the noblest 
 literature in the world, and are candidly ashamed 
 of the fact. In their view anybody who suc- 
 ceeds in words must necessarily fail in business. 
 The Irishman on the contrary luxuriates, like 
 the artist that he is, in that splendor verborum 
 celebrated by Dante. If a speech has to be 
 made he thinks that it should be well made, and 
 refuses altogether to accept hums and haws as 
 a token of genius. He expects an orator not 
 merely to expound facts, but to stimulate the 
 vital forces of his audience. These contrary 
 conceptions of the relation of art to life have, 
 throughout the Home Rule campaign, clashed 
 in the English mind much to our disadvantage. 
 And there has been another agent of confusion, 
 more widely human in character. Every idea 
 strongly held and, on the other side, strongly 
 challenged, kindles spontaneously into passion, 
 and every great cause has its poetry as well as 
 its dialetics. Men, forced to concentrate all their 
 thought on one reform, come to see it edged 
 with strange, mystical colours. Let justice only 
 triumph in this one regard, and our keel will 
 grate on the shore of the Fortunate Islands, the 
 Earthly Paradise. All the harshness of life will 
 
AFTER HOME RULE 147 
 
 be dulcified; we shall lie dreaming on golden 
 sands, dipping full goblets out of a sea that 
 has been transmuted into lemonade. This, the 
 Utopian mood of humanity, is inextinguishable, 
 and it has embroidered the Home Rule idea in 
 common with all others. Before the complexity 
 of modern economic organisation was as well 
 understood as is now the case, there is no doubt 
 that certain sections of opinion in Ireland did 
 regard self-government as a sort of Aladdin's 
 Lamp, capable of any miracle. The necessity 
 of pressing all the energy of the nation into one 
 channel had the effect of imposing on political 
 life a simplicity which does not belong to it. 
 But all that is over and past. The Ireland of 
 to-day does not pay herself with words. She is 
 safe from that reaction and disillusionment 
 which some prophets have discerned as the first 
 harvest of Home Rule, because she is already 
 disillusioned. Looking into the future we see 
 no hope for rhetoricians ; what we do see is a 
 strong, shrewd, indomitable people, at once 
 clear-sighted and idealistic, going about its busi- 
 ness " in the light of day in the domain of 
 reality." No signs or wonders blaze out a trail 
 for them. The past sags on their shoulders and 
 in their veins, a grievous burden and a grievous 
 malady. They make mistakes during their 
 
148 THE OPEN SECRET OF IRELAND 
 
 apprenticeship to freedom, for, as Flaubert 
 says, men have got to learn everything from 
 eating to dying. But a few years farther on we 
 see the recuperative powers of the nation once 
 more triumphant. The past is at last dead 
 enough to be buried, the virus of oppression 
 has been expelled. The creative impulse in in- 
 dustry, literature, social habit, working in an 
 atmosphere of freedom, has added to the wealth 
 of humanity not only an old nation renascent, 
 but a new and kindlier civilisation. In other 
 words, political autonomy is to us not the epi- 
 logue but the prologue to our national drama. 
 It rings the curtain up on that task to which all 
 politics are merely instrumental, namely the 
 vindication of justice and the betterment of 
 human life. 
 
 From the first, the economic note will pre- 
 dominate in a Home Rule assembly, not only 
 in the sense in which so much can be said of 
 every country in the world, but in a very special 
 sense. For the past decade Ireland has been 
 thinking in terms of woollens and linens, tur- 
 nips and fat cattle, eggs and butter, banks and 
 railways. The conviction that the country is 
 under-developed, and in consequence under- 
 populated, has been growing both in area and 
 in depth. With it there has been growing the 
 
AFTER HOME RULE 149 
 
 further conviction that poverty, in the midst of 
 untapped resources, is a national crime. The 
 propagation of these two beliefs by journals of 
 the newer school such as The Leader, Sinn 
 Fein, and The Irish Homestead has leavened 
 the whole mass of Irish life in our time. The 
 Industrial Development Associations, founded 
 on them as basis, have long ago " bridged the 
 Boyne." At their annual Conferences Belfast 
 sits side by side with Cork, Derry with Dublin. 
 It is not merely that the manufacturers and 
 traders have joined hands to advance a move- 
 ment beneficial to themselves ; the best thought 
 of every class in the country has given enthusi- 
 astic support to the programme on grounds not 
 of personal interest but of national duty. We 
 may therefore take it that the watchword of the 
 Second Empire, Enrichissez-vous, will be the 
 watchword of a self-governing Ireland. What 
 Parliament and the State can do to forward that 
 aim will naturally be a subject of controversy. 
 To Free Traders and Tariff Reformers, alike, 
 the power that controls the Customs' tariff of a 
 country controls its economic destiny. Both 
 would seem bound to apply the logic of their 
 respective gospels to Ireland. But as it is not 
 the aim of this book to anticipate the debates of 
 next year, but rather to explain the foundations 
 
150 THE OPEN SECRET OF IRELAND 
 
 of the Home Rule idea, we may leave that 
 burning question for the present untouched. 
 Apart from it we can anticipate the trend of 
 policy in Ireland. The first great task of a 
 Home Rule Parliament would be above con- 
 troversy ; it would be neither more nor less than 
 a scientific exploration of the country. No such 
 Economic Survey has ever been made, and the 
 results are lamentable. There has been no 
 mapping out of the soil areas from the point of 
 view of Agricultural Economics, and, for the 
 lack of such impartial information, the funda- 
 mental conflict between tillage and grazing goes 
 on in the dark. We know where coal is to be 
 found in Ireland ; we do not know with any 
 assurance where it is and where it is not profi- 
 tably workable. The same is true of granite, 
 marble, and indeed all our mineral resources. 
 
 The woollen industry flourishes in one dis- 
 trict and fails in another, to all appearance as 
 favourably situated; it seems capable of great 
 expansion and yet it does not expand greatly. 
 What then are the conditions of success ? Here 
 is a typical case that calls for scientific analysis. 
 One can pick at random a dozen such instances. 
 Ireland, admirably adapted to the production of 
 meat, does not produce meat, but only the raw 
 material of it, store cattle. Is this state of things 
 
AFTER HOME RULE 151 
 
 immutable? Or is a remedy for it to be found, 
 say, in a redistribution of the incidence of local 
 taxation so as to favour well-used land as against 
 ill-used land? Is the decline in the area under 
 flax to be applauded or deplored? Can Irish- 
 grown wool be improved up to the fineness of 
 the Australian article? And so on, and so on. 
 It is to be noted that of the statistics which we 
 do possess many of the most important are, to 
 say the least, involved in doubt. The Export 
 and Import figures are little better than 
 volunteer estimates; there is no compulsion to 
 accuracy. As to the yield of crops, all that can 
 be said is that our present information is not as 
 bad as it used to be. But above all we have 
 no comprehensive notion of the condition of the 
 people. Whenever there has been an inquiry 
 into wages, cost of living, or any other funda- 
 mental fact, Ireland has come in as a mere tail- 
 piece to a British volume. All this we must 
 change. The first business of an Irish Parlia- 
 ment will be to take stock; and this will be 
 effected by the establishment of a Commission 
 of a new kind, representative of science, in- 
 dustry, agriculture, and finance, acceptable and 
 authoritative in the eyes of the whole nation, 
 and charged with the duty of ascertaining the 
 actual state of things in Ireland and the 
 
152 THE OPEN SECRET OF IRELAND 
 
 wisest line of economic development. Such an 
 undertaking will amount to a unification of Irish 
 life altogether without precedent. It will draw 
 the great personalities of industry for the first 
 time into the central current of public affairs. 
 It will furnish them with a platform upon which 
 they will have to talk in terms of the plough, 
 the loom, and the ledger, and not in terms of 
 the wolf-dog and the orange-lily, and will render 
 fruitful for the service of the country innumer- 
 able talents, now unknown or estranged by 
 political superstitions. It will do all that State 
 action can do to generate a boom in Irish enter- 
 prises, and to tempt Irish capital into them in a 
 more abundant stream. And the proceedings 
 and conclusions of such a body, circulated 
 broadcast somewhat after the Washington plan, 
 will provide for all classes in the community a 
 liberal education in Economics. Will " Ulster " 
 fight against such an attempt to increase its 
 prosperity ? Will the shipbuilders, the spinners, 
 and the weavers close down their works in order 
 to patronise Sir Edward Carson's performance 
 on a pop-gun ? It is not probable. 
 
 Work is the best remedy against such vapours, 
 and an Ireland, occupied in this fashion with 
 wealth-producing labour, will have no time for 
 civil war or " religious " riots. 
 
AFTER HOME RULE 153 
 
 As for concrete projects, the Irish Parliament 
 will not be able to begin on a very ambitious 
 scale. But there are two or three matters which 
 it must at once put in hand. There is, for 
 instance, the drainage of the Barrow and the 
 Bann. These two rivers are in a remarkable 
 degree non-political and non-sectarian. Just as 
 the rain falls on the just and the unjust, so do 
 their rain-swollen floods spoil with serene impar- 
 tiality Nationalist hay and Orange hay, Catholic 
 oats and Presbyterian oats. Will " Ulster " fight 
 against an effort to check the mischief? Then 
 there is re-afforestation. As the result mainly of 
 the waste of war, Ireland, which ought to be a 
 richly wooded country, is very poor in that re- 
 gard. In consequence of this, a climate, moister 
 than need be, distributes colds and consumption 
 among the population, without any religious test, 
 and unchecked winds lodge the corn of all 
 denominations. Re-afforestation, as offering a 
 profit certain but a little remote, and promising a 
 climatic advantage diffused over the whole area 
 of the country, is eminently a matter for public 
 enterprise. Are we to be denied the hope that 
 fir, and spruce, and Austrian pine may conceiv- 
 ably be lifted out of the plane of Party politics ? 
 Further, to take instances at haphazard, the 
 State, whatever else its economic functions may 
 
154 THE OPEN SECRET OF IRELAND 
 
 be, will be one of the largest purchasers of com- 
 modities in the country. It is thinkable that the 
 Irish State may give its civil servants Irish-made 
 paper to write on in their offices. It may even 
 so arrange things that when Captain Craig comes 
 to the House of Commons at College Green he 
 shall sit on an Irish-made bench, dine off a cloth 
 of Belfast linen, and be ruthlessly compelled to 
 eat Meath beef, Dublin potatoes, and Tipperary 
 butter. In such horrible manifestations of 
 Home Rule I do not discern the material for a 
 revolution. Again, it may be proposed that in 
 order to develop manufactures, municipalities 
 and county councils may be given power to 
 remit local rates on newly established factories 
 for an initial period of, say, ten years. It may 
 occur to evil-minded people to increase the pro- 
 vision for technical instruction in certain centres 
 for the same end. The Irish State may think it 
 well to maintain agents in London, New York, 
 and some of the continental capitals with a view 
 to widening the external market for Irish pro- 
 ducts. I do not say that a Home Rule Parlia- 
 ment will do all these things, but they are the 
 sort of thing that it will do. And the mere naked 
 enumeration of them is sufficient to show that 
 such an Assembly will have ample matter of 
 economic development upon which to keep its 
 
AFTER HOME RULE 155 
 
 teeth polished without devouring either priests 
 or Protestants. 
 
 There are other urgent questions upon which 
 unanimity exists even at present, for example 
 Poor Law Reform. I have outlined in an earlier 
 chapter the honourable record of Ireland in this 
 regard. We were agreed in 1836 that the work- 
 house should never have come ; we are now 
 agreed that it must go. Whether in Antrim or 
 in Clare, the same vicious system has produced 
 the same vicious results. Uniform experience 
 has issued in unanimous agreement as to the 
 lines upon which reform ought to proceed. At 
 the same time there are differences as to detail, 
 and the task of fusing together various views and 
 hammering out of them a workable Bill will be 
 an ideal task for a representative assembly. 
 But it is difficult to believe that the discussion 
 will be, in all particulars, governed either by 
 the Council of Trent, or by the Westminster 
 Confession. 
 
 Then there is education. English public men 
 have been brought up to assume that in Ireland 
 education must be a battleground inevitably, 
 and from the first. It would be a mere paradox 
 to say that this question, which sunders parties 
 the world over as with a sword, will leave opinion 
 in Ireland inviolately unanimous. But our 
 
156 THE OPEN SECRET OF IRELAND 
 
 march to the field of controversy will be over a 
 non-controversial road. Union policy has left 
 us a rich inheritance of obvious evils. The posi- 
 tion of the primary teachers is unsatisfactory, 
 that of the secondary teachers is impossible. 
 When we attempt improvement of both will 
 "Ulster" fight? And there is something even 
 more human and poignant. The National 
 Schools of this country are in many cases no 
 better than ramshackle barns. Unless the teacher 
 and the manager, out of their own pockets, 
 mend the broken glass, put plaster on the walls, 
 and a fire in the grate, the children have got 
 to shiver and cough for it. Winter in Ireland, 
 like the King in constitutional theory, is above 
 politics. When its frosts get at the noses, and 
 fingers, and sometimes the bare toes, of the chil- 
 dren it leaves them neither green nor orange but 
 simply blue. Then again other schools, especi- 
 ally in Belfast, are shamefully over-crowded. 
 Classes are held on the stairs, in the cloak-room, 
 the hall, or the yard. For the more fortunate, 
 class-rooms are provided with an air-space per 
 individual only slightly less than that available 
 in the Black Hole of Calcutta. All over the 
 country, children go to school breakfastless and 
 stupid with hunger, and the local authorities 
 have no power to feed them as in England, 
 
AFTER HOME RULE 157 
 
 and in most European countries. Then again, 
 even where the physical conditions are reason- 
 able, the programme lacks actuality. It is 
 unpractical, out of touch with the facts of life 
 and locality, a veritable castle hung absurdly in 
 the air and not based on any solid foundation. 
 The view still lingers in high places that the 
 business of education is to break the spirit of a 
 people, to put them down and not to lift them 
 up. In token of this, the teachers are denied 
 the civil rights of freemen. Now all these in- 
 eptitudes are contrary to the humane tradition 
 of Ireland. Go they must, but, when an Irish 
 Parliament starts to remove them, I cannot 
 imagine Captain Craig, with a Union Jack 
 wrapped around his bosom, straddling like 
 Apollyon across the path. The Captain has 
 far too much sense, and too much feeling in 
 him. 
 
 It will be observed that we are getting on. A 
 nation so busy with realities will have no time to 
 waste on civil war. Inter leges arma silent. 
 But this is a mere outline sketch of the pre- 
 liminary task of the initial sessions of an Irish 
 Parliament. Problems with a far heavier fist 
 will thunder at its doors, the problems of labour. 
 The democratic group in Ireland, that group 
 which everywhere holds the commission of the 
 
158 THE OPEN SECRET OF IRELAND 
 
 future, has long since declared that, to it, Home 
 Rule would be a barren counter-sense unless it 
 meant the redemption of the back streets. The 
 Titanic conflict between what is called capital 
 and what is called labour, shaking the pillars 
 of our modern Society, has not passed Ireland 
 by like the unregarded wind. We can no longer 
 think of ourselves as insulated from the world, 
 immune from strikes, Socialists, and Syndi- 
 calism. The problems of labour have got to be 
 faced. But will they be solved by a grapple 
 between the Orange Lodges and the Ancient 
 Order of Hibernians ? It is obvious that under 
 their pressure the old order must change, 
 yielding place to a new. Every Trade Union 
 has already bridged the Boyne. Every strike 
 has already torn the Orange Flag and the 
 Green Flag into two pieces, and stitched them 
 together again after a new and portentous 
 pattern. 
 
 What does it all come to? Simply this, that 
 Ireland under Home Rule will be most painfully 
 like every other modern country of western 
 civilisation. Some Unionists think that, if they 
 could only get rid of the Irish Party, all would 
 be for the best in the best of all possible worlds. 
 Why then are they not Home Rulers? For 
 Home Rule will most assuredly get rid of the 
 
AFTER HOME RULE 159 
 
 Irish Party. It will shatter the old political 
 combinations like a waggon-load of dynamite. 
 New groups will crystallise about new principles. 
 The future in Ireland belongs to no old fidelity : 
 it may belong to any new courage. 
 
 Assuredly we must not seem to suggest that, in 
 an autonomous Ireland, public life will be all 
 nougat, velvet, and soft music. There will be 
 conflicts, and vehement conflicts, for that is the 
 way of the twentieth century, and they will no 
 doubt centre, for the most part, about taxation 
 and education. But the political forces of the 
 country will have moved into totally new forma- 
 tions. One foresees plainly a vertical section of 
 parties into Agrarian and Urban, a cross section 
 into Labour and Capitalistic. Each of these 
 economic groupings is indefinitely criss-crossed 
 by an indefinite number of antagonisms, spiritual 
 and material. In a situation so complicated it 
 is idle to speculate as to the conditions of the 
 future. A box of bricks so large, and so multi- 
 coloured, may be arranged and re-arranged in 
 an infinity of architectures. The one thing quite 
 certain is that all the arrangements will be new. 
 In taxation, as I have suggested, a highly con- 
 servative policy will prevail. In education the 
 secularist programme, if advanced at all, will 
 be overwhelmed by a junction of Catholic and 
 
160 THE OPEN SECRET OF IRELAND 
 
 Protestant. For religion, to the anima natura- 
 liter Christiana, of Ireland is not an argument 
 but an intuition. It seems to us as reasonable 
 to prepare children for their moral life by 
 excluding religion as to prepare them for their 
 physical life by removing the most important 
 lobe of their brains. 
 
 The only other prognostication that appears 
 to emerge is the probable predominance in a 
 Home Rule Ireland of the present Ulster Union- 
 ist party. That group is likely, for many reasons, 
 to retain its solidarity after ours has been dis- 
 sipated. Should that prove to be the case, self- 
 government will put the balance of power on 
 almost all great conflicts of opinion into the 
 hands of Sir Edward Carson and his successors. 
 The "minority," adroitly handled, will exploit 
 the majority almost as effectively after Home 
 Rule as before it. Captain Craig will dictate 
 terms to us not from the last ditch, but from a 
 far more agreeable and powerful position, the 
 Treasury Bench. And we undertake not to 
 grumble, for these are the chances of freedom. 
 
CHAPTER X 
 
 AN EPILOGUE ON " LOYALTY " 
 
 According to precedent, well-established if not 
 wise, no discussion of political Ireland must end 
 without some observations on " loyalty." The 
 passion of the English people for assurances on 
 this point is in curious contrast with their own 
 record. It is not rhetoric, but crude history, to 
 say that the title-deeds of English freedom are 
 in great part written in blood, and that the seal 
 which gave validity to all the capital documents 
 was the seal of " treason." No other nation in 
 the world has so clearly recognised and so stoutly 
 insisted that, in the ritual game of loyalty, the first 
 move is with governments. With that premised, 
 the difference between the two countries is very 
 simple. England has developed from within 
 the type of government that her people want. 
 She expresses satisfaction with the fact. This 
 is loyalty. Ireland, on the contrary, has had 
 forced on her from without a type of government 
 
 161 k 
 
162 THE OPEN SECRET OF IRELAND 
 
 which her people emphatically do not want. She 
 expresses dissatisfaction with the fact. This is 
 disloyalty. Loyalty, in brief, is the bloom on 
 the face of freedom, just as beauty is the bloom 
 on the face of health. 
 
 If we examine the methods by which England 
 attained her very desirable position we are 
 further enlightened. It is a study admirably 
 adapted to inculcate liberty, not at all so well 
 adapted to inculcate " loyalty." The whole 
 burden of English history is that, whenever these 
 two principles came in conflict, every man in 
 England worth his salt was disloyal even to 
 the point of war. Whenever the old bottle was 
 recalcitrant to the new wine of freedom it was 
 ignominiously scrapped. A long effort has been 
 made to keep Irish history out of our schools in 
 the interests of " loyalty." But it is English 
 history that ought to be kept out, for it is full 
 of stuff much more perilous. You teach Irish 
 children the tale of Runnymede, covering with 
 contempt the king of that day, and heaping 
 praise on the barons who shook their fists under 
 his nose. This is dangerous doctrine. It is 
 doubly dangerous seeing that these children will 
 soon grow up to learn that the Great Charter, 
 which is held to justify all these tumultuous pro- 
 ceedings, has never even to our own day been 
 
AN EPILOGUE ON " LOYALTY " 163 
 
 current law in Ireland. You introduce theffi to 
 the Wars of the Roses as a model of peaceful, 
 constitutional development; to the slaying of 
 Edward II., Richard II., and I know not how 
 many more as object-lessons in the reverence 
 which angry Englishmen accord to an anointed 
 king when they really dislike him. Later cen- 
 turies show them one Stuart beheaded outside 
 his own palace, another dethroned and banished 
 in favour of a Dutch prince. Of romantic 
 loyalty to the person of a sovereign they find no 
 trace or hint in the modern period. Lost causes 
 and setting suns, whatever appeal they may have 
 made to Ireland, do but rarely fire with their 
 magical glimmer the raw daylight of the English 
 political mind. As for that more facile, after- 
 dinner attachment, in which it is charged that we 
 do not join with sufficient fervour, it seems to us 
 always fulsome, and often mere hyprocrisy. In 
 the development of English ceremonial, " God 
 Save the King ! " gets to the head of the toast- 
 list only when the king has been thoroughly 
 saved from all the perils and temptations inci- 
 dental to the possession of power. So long as 
 he claims any shred of initiative his English 
 subjects continue in a perpetual chafe and 
 grumble of disloyalty; as soon as the Crown 
 has been rasped and sand-papered down to 
 
164 THE OPEN SECRET OF IRELAND 
 
 a decorative zero their loyalty knows no 
 bounds. 
 
 The simple and honourable truth is that 
 all through her history England strove after 
 national freedom, and declined to be quiet until 
 she got it. There could not be a better state- 
 ment of the methods which she employed than 
 Mr Rudyard Kipling's : 
 
 " Axe and torch and tumult, steel and gray- 
 goose wing, 
 
 Wrung it, inch and ell, and all, slowly from the 
 King." 
 
 It is, of course, a pity that the liberty thus estab- 
 lished was better fitted for the home market than 
 for export. But this does not affect the fact that, 
 at the end of the process, the English people were 
 in the saddle. But the Irish people are not in 
 the saddle, they are under it. Indeed, the capital 
 sin of Dublin Castle is that it is a bureaucracy 
 which has seized upon the estate of the people. 
 In Ireland, under its regime, the nation has had 
 as much to say to its own public policy as a 
 Durbar-elephant has to say to the future of 
 India. There is just this difference in favour of 
 the elephant : at least he has not to pay for the 
 embroidered palanquins, and the prodding-poles, 
 of his riders. We are all agreed that loyalty is 
 a duty. It is the duty of every government to 
 
AN EPILOGUE ON " LOYALTY M 165 
 
 be loyal to the welfare, the nobler traditions, the 
 deep-rooted ideals, the habit of thought of its 
 people. It is the duty of every government to 
 be loyal to the idea of duty, and to that austere 
 justice through which the most ancient heavens 
 abide fresh and strong. And until these prime 
 duties have been faithfully performed, no govern- 
 ment need expect and none can exact " loyalty " 
 from its subjects. 
 
 But it seems that we are compromised on 
 other grounds. The inscription on the Parnell 
 Memorial is trumpeted about the constituencies 
 with equal energy by opponents wise and other- 
 wise: 
 
 <l No man has a right to fix the boundary to the 
 march of a nation. No man has a right to say to 
 his country, ' Thus far shalt thou go and no 
 farther.' We have never attempted to fix the ne 
 plus ultra to the progress of Ireland's nationhood, 
 and we never shall." 
 
 What the precise matter of offence may be 
 one finds it difficult to discover. Mr Balfour 
 very properly characterises as the utterance of a 
 statesman, this passage in which Parnell declines 
 to usurp the throne and sceptre of Providence. 
 But Mr Smith complains that it deprives Home 
 Rule of the note of " finality." With the sugges- 
 
166 THE OPEN SECRET OF IRELAND 
 
 tion that Home Rule is not at all events the 
 end of the world we are, of course, in warm 
 agreement. But if Mr Smith has entered 
 public affairs in pursuit of static formulae for 
 dynamic realities, if he wants things fixed and 
 frozen and final, he has come to the wrong world 
 to gratify such desires. And even if he were 
 to go to the next, he would have to be very 
 careful in choosing his destination, for all the 
 theologians tell us that, in Heaven, personalities 
 continue to grow and develop. In fact, if any- 
 body wants " finality," I am afraid that we can 
 only recommend him to go to Hell. As for the 
 world, in which we live, it is a world of flux. 
 Physicists allow the earth a long road to travel 
 before it tumbles into dissolution, and seers and 
 prophets of various kinds foretell an equally 
 long cycle of development for human nature, as 
 we now know it. The fate of all our present 
 political combinations is doubtful, and no nation 
 has received absolute guarantees for its future. 
 An All-Europe State with its capital at Lon- 
 don, a Federation of the World with its capital 
 at Dublin, a Chinese Empire with its capital at 
 Paris — these are all possibilities. Australia 
 may be annexed by Japan, Canada by the 
 United States, or vice versa; South Africa may 
 spread northwards until it absorbs the Continent, 
 
AN EPILOGUE ON " LOYALTY " 167 
 
 or shrink southwards until it expires on the point 
 of the Cape. The Superman may, as I am in- 
 formed, appear on the stage of history at any 
 moment, and make pie of everything. And not 
 one of these appalling possibilities disturbs Mr 
 Smith in the least. But he is going to vote 
 against justice for Ireland unless we can promise 
 him that throughout all the aeons, as yet un- 
 vouchsafed, and to the last syllable of recorded 
 time, her political destiny is going to be in all 
 details regulated by the Home Rule Bill of 
 191 2. This is not an intelligent attitude. 
 
 Of course the real innuendo is that we in Ire- 
 land are burning to levy war on Great Britain, 
 and would welcome any foreign invasion to that 
 end. On these two points one is happy to be 
 able to give assurances, or rather to state inten- 
 tions. As for foreign invasion, we have had 
 quite enough of it. It is easier to get invaders 
 in than to get them out again, and we have not 
 spent seven hundred years in recovering Ireland 
 for ourselves in order to make a present of it 
 to the Germans, or the Russians, or the Man in 
 the Moon, or any other foreign power whatever. 
 The present plan of governing Ireland in oppo- 
 sition to the will of her people does indeed in- 
 evitably make that country the weak spot in the 
 defences of these islands, for such misgovern- 
 
168 THE OPEN SECRET OF IRELAND 
 
 ment produces discontent, and discontent is the 
 best ally of the invader. Alter that by Home 
 Rule, and your cause instantly becomes ours. 
 Give the Irish nation an Irish State to defend, 
 and the task of an invader becomes very unenvi- 
 able. As for levying war on Great Britain, we 
 have no inclination in that direction. The best 
 thought in Ireland has always preferred civilisa- 
 tion to war, and we have no wealth to waste on 
 expensive stupidities of any kind. In addition 
 we are handicapped on sea by the smallness of 
 our official navy which, so far as I can gather, 
 consists of the Granuaile, a. pleasure-boat owned 
 by the Congested Districts Board. In land 
 operations, we are still more seriously hampered 
 by the non-existence of our army. And al- 
 though, in point of population, our numerical 
 inferiority is so trivial as one to ten, even this 
 slight disproportion may be regarded by an 
 Irish Parliament as a fact not unworthy of 
 consideration. 
 
 But we must not suffer ourselves to be de- 
 tained any longer among these unrealities. A 
 Home Rule government will be loyal to the 
 interests of its people, and actual circumstances 
 demand, for the behoof of Great Britain and 
 Ireland alike, an era of peace with honour, and 
 friendship founded on justice. The magnitude 
 
AN EPILOGUE ON " LOYALTY M 169 
 
 of the commercial relations between the two 
 countries is inadequately appreciated. Not 
 merely is Great Britain our best customer, but 
 we are her best customer. The trade of Great 
 Britain with Ireland is larger than her trade 
 with India, and nearly twice as large as that with 
 Canada or Australia. And while these surpris- 
 ing figures are far from indicating the existence 
 of a sound economic structure in Ireland, none 
 the less, the industrial expansion that will follow 
 Home Rule may be expected to alter the charac- 
 ter rather than to diminish the value of the goods 
 interchanged. For if the development of tex- 
 tile, leather, shipbuilding, and other manufac- 
 tures lessens the British import under these 
 heads into Ireland, it will increase that of coal, 
 iron, steel, and machinery. And Ireland, with- 
 out trenching on the needs of her home market, 
 is capable of much more intensive exploitation 
 as a food-exporting country. Economically the 
 two nations are joined in relations that ought 
 to be relations of mutual profit, were they 
 not eternally poisoned by political oppression. 
 With this virus removed, the natural balance of 
 the facts of nature will spontaneously establish 
 itself between the two countries. 
 
 The true desire of all the loud trumpeters 
 of " loyalty " is, as it appears to me, of a very 
 
170 THE OPEN SECRET OF IRELAND 
 
 different order. What they really ask is that 
 Ireland should begin her career of autonomy 
 with a formal act of self-humiliation. She may 
 enter the Council of Empire provided that she 
 enters on her knees, and leaves her history out- 
 side the door as a shameful burden. This is not 
 a demand that can be conceded, or that men 
 make on men. The open secret of Ireland is 
 that Ireland is a nation. In days rougher than 
 ours, when a blind and tyrannous England 
 sought to drown the national faith of Ireland in 
 her own blood as in a sea, there arose among our 
 fathers men who annulled that design. We can- 
 not undertake to cancel the names of these men 
 from our calendar. We are no more ashamed 
 of them than the constitutional England of 
 modern times is ashamed of her Langtons 
 and De Montforts, her Sidneys and Hamp- 
 dens. Our attitude in their regard goes beyond 
 the reach of prose, and no adequate poetry 
 comes to my mind. The Irish poets have 
 recently been so busy compiling catalogues of 
 crime, profanity, and mania for the Abbey 
 Theatre that they have not had time to attend to 
 politics ; and in attempting to suggest the spirit 
 that must inform the settlement between Ireland 
 and England, if out of it is to spring the authen- 
 tic flower of loyalty, I am reluctantly compelled 
 
AN EPILOGUE ON " LOYALTY " 171 
 
 to fall back on a weaker brother, not of the 
 craft : 
 
 Bond, from the toil of hate we may not cease : 
 
 Free, we are free to be your friend. 
 
 But when you make your banquet, and we come, 
 
 Soldier with equal soldier must we sit, 
 
 Closing a battle, not forgetting it. 
 
 This mate and mother of valiant rebels dead 
 
 Must come with all her history or her head. 
 
 We keep the past for pride. 
 
 Nor war nor peace shall strike our poets dumb : 
 
 No rawest squad of all Death's volunteers, 
 
 No simplest man who died 
 
 To tear your flag down, in the bitter years, 
 
 But shall have praise, and three times thrice 
 
 again, 
 When, at that table, men shall drink with men. 
 
 As political poetry, this may be open to 
 amendment; as poetic politics, it is sound, 
 decisive, and answerable. 
 
 THE END 
 
 THE NORTHUMBERLAND PRESS, THORNTON STREET, NEWCASTLE-UPON-TYNE 
 
Nights at the Play 
 
 By 
 
 H. M. WALBROOK 
 
 With portraits of Henry James, Bernard Shaw, John 
 Galsworthy and J. M. Synge. Crown $vo, cloth, 5/- net. 
 
 Playgoers will welcome this volume of notable dramatic 
 criticism of the following London theatrical productions and 
 performances of 1907 to 19 10 by the Dramatic Critic of The 
 Pall Mall Gazette, from which they are now reprinted with 
 some slight alterations. 
 
 Mr. Bernard Shaw's "Fanny's First Play," "Misalliance," "The 
 Showing up of Blanco Posnet," and "The Dark Lady of the Son- 
 nets." Sir Arthur Pinero's "The Thunderbolt," "Mid-Channel," 
 and "Preserving Mr. Panmure." Mr. Alfred Sutro's "John 
 Glayde's Honour." Mr. John Galwsorthy's "Strife" and "Justice." 
 "The Sentimentalists" by George Meredith. Major Du Maurier's 
 "An Englishman's Home." Mr. J. K.Jerome's "ThePassingof the 
 Third Floor Back." "King Lear," and "Don" at the Haymarket. 
 "Henry VIII.," "The Merchant of Venice," and "The School for 
 Scandal" at His Majesty's. Mr. Lewis Waller in "Henry V." 
 Miss Genevieve Ward as Lady Macbeth. Mr. Louis Calvert as 
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 Full" at the Aldwych. Miss Rose Stahl in "The Chorus Lady." 
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 "Nan." Sir Charles Wyndham in "The Mollusc." Miss Lena 
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 Marie Lohr's London debut. Mr. H. B. Irving in "The Lyons 
 Mail." A play on "Don Quixote." Mr. J. M. Barrie's "What 
 Every Woman Knows." Gerhardt Hauptmann's "Hannele." 
 Maurice Maeterlinck's "The Blue Bird." Miss Julia Marlowe and 
 Mr. E. H. Sothern in "The Sunken Bell," "Jeanne d'Arc," 
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 Sicilian Actors in "Cavalleria Rusticana," "La Zolfara," "La 
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 Albert Heine in "Die Condottieri." 
 Mr. Walbrook is known as a fearless critic and an en- 
 thusiastic lover of the stage, and these records are well 
 worth a permanent place in dramatic literature. 
 
 London; W.J. Ham-Smith, 6 John Street, Adelphi 
 
Hither and Thither 
 
 By R. BROOKS POPHAM 
 
 Crown SvOy cloth, 3/6 net. 
 
 The author of "Hither and Thither" has been a 
 veritable wanderer over the face of the globe, has 
 mixed with all sorts and conditions of men, and has 
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 of humanity to whom he briefly refers in the pages of 
 this interesting book. 
 
 Like most travellers, he has seen many strange 
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 by the author during his many travels. Altogether, 
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 from the bare bones of fact to the blending of a little 
 humour and pathos thrown in here and there, the 
 whole bearing the hall mark of a man who has un- 
 doubtedly seen and thoroughly understands life in all 
 its varied phases. 
 
 Contents : — Behind the Scenes in China — Hong Kong — On 
 the Malabar Coast — The Sea hath its Worries — A Few of God's 
 Creatures — The Horns of a Dilemma — The Turbulent Sea of 
 Jealousy — A By-path — A Strange Delusion — Away from Life's 
 Turmoil — Idle Gossip and Random Recollections. 
 
 London: W.J. Ham-Smith, 6 John Street, Adelphi 
 
Algiers, The Sahara and 
 The Nile 
 
 By RACHEL HUMPHREYS 
 
 With thirty-six full page Illustrations from Original Photographs 
 Grown 8vo. Cloth. Price 5/- net. 
 
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 This little book gives the impressions and experiences of 
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 a pleasant companion for the traveller. The thirty-six 
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 Guide to Rome 
 
 By LINA DUFF GORDON (Mrs Aubrey Waterfield) 
 
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 LONDON: W. J. HAM-SMITH, 6 JOHN STREET, ADELPHI. 
 
The Hunting Year 
 
 By W. SCARTH DIXON 
 
 Crown 8vo, illustrated, 6/- net. 
 
 The author's life-long connection with sport and 
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 the end of the year. 
 
 It is a very interesting book for all lovers of sport, 
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 field. 
 
 London: W.J. Ham-Smith, 6 John Street, Adelphi 
 
A CALL TO WORKERS 
 
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 LONDON: W. J. HAM-SMITH, 6 JOHN STREET, ADELPHI. 
 
A MESSAGE TO THINKERS 
 
 THE AGE OF FOLLY 
 
 A Study of Imperial Needs, Duties and Warnings 
 
 By CHARLES J. ROLLESTON 
 
 Demy 8vo. Cloth. 5s.net. 
 
 The Writing on the Wall 
 
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 LONDON: W. J. HAM-SMITH, 6 JOHN STREET, ADELPHI. 
 
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A REAL BOOK FOR REAL BOYS 
 
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 sports, and its heroic narrative of the great fire. The 
 pictures are uncommonly good. . . . Altogether this is 
 a book to be heartily commended, fresh, clean-witted and 
 vigorous." — Daily Telegraph. 
 
 " One of the best books of the kind . . . their hap- 
 penings make bright reading, teach manliness and 
 resource." — Daily Graphic. 
 
 " Guaranteed to please the Chief Scout's youthful 
 followers. "—Truth. 
 
 " The author takes his readers out of England to a 
 camp on an Island in the Connecticut river, where some 
 American Scouts have no end of a good time." — The Times. 
 
 " Right through the tale the reader is swept along a 
 current of never-failing adventure." — Irish Independent. 
 
 " Full of information, interest and excitement from 
 beginning to end. . . . No Boy Scout, or any other 
 boy should be without it." — Croydon Advertiser. 
 
 11 Written with great spirit and vivacity, and is full of 
 living incident." — Liverpool Courier. 
 
 " A first-rate book for boys, well written, healthy and 
 manly in tone." — Dublin Express. 
 
 " The island lay shining in the morning sun. The 
 Scouts looked back at the beach and the ring of trees. 
 Skeeter took off his hat and waved it. ' Good-bye, 
 Birch-bark Island!' he cried; 'we've had a mighty 
 fine time ! ' " 
 
 LONDON: W. J. HAM-SMITH, 6 JOHN STREET, ADELPHI. 
 
TWO GOOD STORIES 
 
 EZEKIEL 
 
 By LUCY PRATT, Illustrated by Frederic Dorr 
 Steele* 
 
 Crown 8vo. Cloth. 2s. net. 
 
 " An entertaining study of a small black child. The 
 book contains many clever illustrations." — Westminster 
 Gazette. 
 
 " This pleasant little tale . . . Ezekiel 's stories, told ' out 
 of his own head, ' . . . will certainly grip the attention . . . 
 He is very real." — Saturday Review. 
 
 " A very charming story, quaint and interesting, full of 
 humour and convincing characterisation. Ezekiel is a 
 delightful little person." — Liverpool Post. 
 
 " This is a book for people who love humour and love 
 children, and the story is so cleverly, so prettily told, and 
 has such moving touches that it will not be put down till 
 read." — Croydon Advertiser. 
 
 " A beautiful story. If you like a good study of child 
 life buy ' Ezekiel ' you will not regret it. . . . Dear 
 little Ezekiel ! one minute we laugh at him, then there 
 comes a big lump in the throat and a dewdrop in the 
 eye." — Dewsbury News. 
 
 The Atlantic Monthly says: " It is masterly in its interpretative power, not only 
 of the little black hero, but of his race. A reserve and control, a withholding of 
 comment, letting the child in word and deed betray his own imaginative, sensitive 
 personality, show great artistic skill, while the human sympathy underlying the 
 artistic appreciation gives a large quality to the work. " 
 
 A WIFE BY PURCHASE 
 
 By PAUL TRENT. Author of " The Vow." 
 Popular Edition. Crown 8vo. Cloth, ls.net. 
 
 " Developed with skill and dramatic force. . . . The question is no new one in 
 fiction, but it has seldom been presented with such power." — Scotsman. 
 
 "Akole is very well done, a life-like and pathetic little figure." — Daily Chronicle. 
 
 "There is plenty to stimulate interest and throw a light on dark places." — 
 Manchester Courier. 
 
 " A timely story of West African life. . . . The book is admirably written." — 
 Yorkshire Observer. 
 
 " The simple, passionate, and impetuous native girl is skilfully drawn, and the book 
 is in the main lively and readable." — Glasgow News. 
 
 LONDON: W. J. HAM-SMITH, 6 JOHN STREET, ADELPHI. 
 
NEW NOVELS IN 
 PREPARATION 
 
 FOR EARLY PUBLICATION 
 THE RICH MAN'S WIFE 
 
 By DICK DONOVAN and E. WAY ELKINGTON 
 Crown 8vo, cloth, 6s. 
 
 DR BROWN'S PARTNER 
 
 By IANTHE CAVENDISH 
 Crown 8vo, cloth, 6s. 
 
 ROGER'S LUCK 
 
 By ROSAMUND SOUTHEY 
 Crown 8vo, cloth, 6s, 
 
 THE TEMPLE OF DREAMS 
 
 By PAUL BOLD 
 Crown 8vo, cloth, 6s. 
 
 THE SECRET BOOK 
 
 By GEORGE WEMYSS 
 Crown 8vo, cloth, 6s. 
 
 LONDON: W. J. HAM-SMITH, 6 JOHN STREET, ADELPHI. 
 
THREE NEW NOVELS- * * 
 
 THE SACRIFICE 
 
 By WILMOT KAYE 
 
 Author of "The Home Secretary," etc. 
 
 " Good measure of exciting incidents. The tale moves 
 briskly and is full of life and movement." — Globe. 
 
 " Full of clever character-drawing and thrilling situa- 
 tions. M — Scotsman. 
 
 11 A charming novel with a splendid plot ... an 
 excellent story that can be heartily recommended." — Free- 
 man's Journal. 
 
 " The plot is strong and the writing undeniably clever. 
 It is a stirring, thrilling story. Lady Joan is a delightful 
 and fascinating study." — Western Mail. 
 
 DAISY THE MINX 
 
 By MARY L. PENDERED 
 
 Author of " The Secret of the Dragon," etc. 
 
 11 Amusing, and told with a vivacity which holds the 
 reader captive whether he will or 'no. . . . Daisy the 
 Minx is a very happy creation full of wit and joie de vivre." 
 — World. 
 
 11 A most readable tale, brightly written with many a 
 smart dig at the foolish restrictions of social life. Daisy 
 certainly has a charm of her own." — Glasgow Herald. 
 
 " A lovable and appealing little minx. We have thor- 
 oughly enjoyed the book." — Academy. 
 
 "Bright and vivacious . . . excellent fun." — Sunday 
 Times. 
 
 LOVE'S ARTIST 
 
 By Mrs A. MARTYN BRIGSTOCKE 
 
 'Well and strongly handled." — Times. 
 
 1 A lively interest well sustained from first to last. Agre^- 
 f written 
 cotsman. 
 
 ably written and high-spirited, the story cannot but please. 
 — Sc 
 
 LONDON: W. J. HAM-SMITH, 
 
At all Libraries and Booksellers 
 
 The Path of Glory 
 
 By Paul Leland Haworth. 
 
 Crown Svo, cloth, illustrated, 6/- 
 
 " It is a good, rousing story, well told, and the historical 
 events which form the basis of it can never become stale 
 to British patriots. ' The Path of Glory ' is a book that 
 can be cordially recommended as a gift book for boys." — 
 Morning Post. 
 
 " An historical novel which relies neither on excitements 
 nor on affectations, but which arranges its events (true, 
 many of them) with coherence and effect, taking us to the 
 glorious days when Canada was won for the British Em- 
 pire, and closing with the capture of Quebec. . . . 
 And Mr Haworth 's literary skill is such that even now it 
 moves us to read the incident." — The Times. 
 
 " The tale holds the reader from beginning to end, and 
 in perusing it he gathers much solid information concern- 
 ing one of the greatest episodes in American annals." — 
 Scotsman. 
 
 " A vivid picture of the last days of the French dominion. 
 . . . The story is well constructed and its telling much 
 above the average with a sense of humour all too rare in 
 historical romance." — Daily Graphic. 
 
 " Told with a spirit which hurries you breathless through 
 the novel."— Truth. 
 
 " The whole story is well conceived and written in a 
 style that is both easy and picturesque." — World. 
 
 11 So well worth reading that it will need no recommen- 
 dation after it is once begun. From first page to last it 
 grips the reader, and not with specious excitement but 
 with soundly conceived incidents, and a clever historical 
 plot." — Manchester Courier. 
 
 "A story which will give pleasure to everyone." — York- 
 shire Daily Observer. 
 
 LONDON; W« J. {JAM-SMITH, 6 JOHN STREET, ADELPHI. 
 
At all Libraries and Booksellers 
 
 THE MODEL MILLIONAIRE 
 
 By CORA MINNETT 
 Crown 8vo. Cloth, 6s. 
 
 "Should be very popular, because it is full of humanity, 
 and has a plot which will appeal to the fairy-tale instinct 
 which there is in most of us. There is a pleasant, 
 ' Dickensy ' air about it all which warms the heart. . . _. 
 It is, as the reader will see, an unsophisticated tale, and it 
 is also one which pleases and interests, just the sort of book 
 to charm all sorts of readers, in spite of, or perhaps because 
 of, coincidences and a naivete which one seldom meets with 
 in a writer who has really something to say, and who has put 
 her whole heart into the sayitag of it. It is worth more, 
 and should have more success, than many an ambitious 
 novel, for its keynote is humanity." — The Daily Telegraph. 
 
 "Interesting and well worth consideration." — Morning 
 Post. 
 
 " Should be diligentlv studied by millionaires." — Western 
 Mail. 
 
 "... This brief recital of the story does not tell 
 you half its charm nor half the bright and pretty incidents." 
 — Tatler. 
 
 " The author's style is direct and pleasing. We can 
 heartily recommend ' The Model Millionaire ' to readers." 
 — Jewish World. 
 
 "A pleasing, simple tale full of good feeling." — Times. 
 
 " The idea is a good one, and Miss Minnett uses it to 
 advantage and makes us thoroughly interested." — Newcastle 
 Chronicle. 
 
 " The author has a light touch and excellent instincts." — 
 Votes for Women. 
 
 "A delightful little piece of fiction." — Financial Times. 
 
 "A pleasant, kindly story." — Daily Graphic. 
 
 "It is a novel that deserves to be read." — Westminster 
 Gazette. 
 
 LONDON: W, J. HAM-SMITH, 6 JOHN STREET, ADELPHI 
 
Date Due 
 
 AUG - 7 
 
 KXK 
 
3 9031 01o4Dooi 
 
 oo 
 
 f 
 
 ke tt u * i 
 
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 UNIVERSITY HEIGHTS 
 
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