The Gaelic State in the past & future : or, "The crown of a nation"

By Figgis

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Title: The Gaelic State in the past & future
        or, "The crown of a nation"

Author: Darrell Figgis

Release date: October 20, 2025 [eBook #77101]

Language: English

Original publication: Dublin: Maunsel & Co., Ltd, 1917

Credits: Jamie Brydone-Jack, Craig Kirkwood, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE GAELIC STATE IN THE PAST & FUTURE ***


Transcriber’s Notes:

Text enclosed by underscores is in italics (_italics_), and text
enclosed by equal signs is in bold (=bold=).

Additional Transcriber’s Notes are at the end.

       *       *       *       *       *

The Gaelic State in the Past & Future

OR “THE CROWN OF A NATION”

By Darrell Figgis

This book gives a careful historical analysis, in clear and simple
terms, of the Gaelic State, and shows exactly what that State was,
how it worked, and in what way it could be adapted for the modern
requirements of a Nation. On the basis of that analysis it outlines
a State for the future that claims to be a continuity of Ireland’s
historic past.

MAUNSEL & CO., LTD.

ONE SHILLING NET

       *       *       *       *       *

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The Gaelic State in the Past & Future


  or “THE CROWN OF A NATION”

  By DARRELL FIGGIS

  MAUNSEL & CO., LTD.
  50 Lower Baggot St., Dublin
  40 Museum Street,
  London
  1917

       *       *       *       *       *

BY THE SAME AUTHOR.

POETRY.

A Vision of Life (1909). The Crucibles of Time (1911). Queen Tara: A
Tragedy (1913). The Mount of Transfiguration (1915).

NOVELS.

Broken Arcs (1911). Jacob Elthorne (1914). Children of Earth. (In
preparation.)

GENERAL.

Shakespeare: A Study (1911). Studies and Appreciations (1912). “Æ”: A
Study of a Man and a Nation (1916). A Chronicle of Jails (1917).

Cahill & Co., Ltd., Printers, Dublin.

Irish Paper.




CONTENTS


  CHAPTER                              PAGE

     I. THE PURPOSE OF THE BOOK          1

    II. THE MAKINGS OF A POLITY          8

   III. THE POLITY AND THE STATE        15

    IV. THE WORKING OF THE STATE        27

     V. THE BROKEN STATE                36

    VI. THE RESURRECTION FROM THE DEAD  45

   VII. AT THE GATES OF THE FUTURE      55

  VIII. APPROACHING PROBLEMS            79

       *       *       *       *       *

The Gaelic State OR “THE CROWN OF A NATION”




I. THE PURPOSE OF THE BOOK.


A Nation is crowned when it exists in the world not only by virtue of a
continuing national life, sustained by history and limited by natural
frontiers, but also by reason of a State in which its intuitions and
desires are expressed in a form as flexible as its containing life. The
stubbornest national sense--and nowhere in the world has that sense
proved more stubborn than in Ireland--can only be said to exist as
a protest, rather than as a power, until it can take to itself that
eventful crown. No other nation, or combination of nations, or empires
or dominions, can give it that crown. It must beat it out of its own
sense of wisdom and equity and beauty. It can only be responsible to
its own soul and intellectual life for the manner of that crown, not
only because in no other sense can the word responsibility be said to
apply, but also because of a certain inevitable result. For when a
Nation does so crown itself the whole body of the Nation takes on a new
dignity and grace. It is inevitable; the wearing of the crown compels
a new comportment. But if a crown wrought in some other workshop and
made according to some other nation’s desires be pressed upon its brow
the whole result must necessarily be ungainly and disfiguring. If there
is no responsibility in the making there can be no responsibility in
the wearing, and there is no morality at the beginning or in the end.
Yet if a Nation can clothe itself in its own responsibility, and wear a
crown of its own devising, that Nation is no more only a Nation; it is
a Sovereign State.

Ireland is not a Sovereign State, but only a nation. Once she was
a Sovereign State, and the result was so comely and so full of
responsibility that when her sister states were ravaged by barbarian
inroads from the north and east she went out among them and rebuilt
their faith and culture. Nearly all modern European culture and
learning rest on what Ireland wrought during the sixth seventh and
eighth centuries, not on the earlier Roman and Greek cultures, for
the link with these things was only maintained through Ireland. It
was so maintained because Ireland was a Sovereign State, secure in
its sovereignty. That sovereignty was suppressed, that statehood was
broken, because of the lust of imperial conquest fashioned out of
military strength and resting always on that strength. Piece by piece
that state was taken and hammered into dust, with a malignancy and
hatred very hard to understand, until the people, driven forth into
the mountains and waste places of their own land, had no longer any
part of their own State in which to house themselves, had to rely
on a continuing national sense, fed partly by faith, enriched by old
memories, burnt by a suffering hardly to be paralleled in history, but
in itself something quite peculiar and indefinable.

The result was inevitable. Housed, on their own historic land, in
a State which was no State at all because it was not of their own
devising, the Irish people have repudiated all responsibility for it,
have misused and abused it, and have arisen in a continual series of
revolts against it. They were morally bound to do so, or become no
more a nation but a slave race. Continuing a Nation they were bound to
assert their protest; and they have habitually done so very remarkably
by the assertion of the laws, meanings and implications of their old
State, destroyed centuries ago, as against the forms, meanings and
implications of a system of government utterly alien to them. There are
few things in history more remarkable or arresting than this challenge
of an alien government with the laws and procedures of a State that
centuries before had been hewn asunder, had been trampled under foot,
but had continued in the instincts and intuitions of the Nation--the
instincts and intuitions that in the first instance, at the dawn of
history, had built that State.

Such a state of affairs, continued long enough, was bound to claim
the attention of the world. It has succeeded in doing so; and the
immediate result has been that all has become bustle and hurry to
mend the calamitous condition of Ireland. Men with anxious brows and
careworn faces have begun to emit constitutions for Ireland at the pace
of about one a week--with a facility hardly to be rivalled by the Abbé
Siéyès of old in his most fecund hour. Dusty tomes are turned down
from the top shelf, and every form of constitution and government is
studied in order that it may contribute some new beauty to the destined
scheme. Canada, Australia and South Africa have been laid under special
contribution, because these are held to be adornments of the English
Empire. The words Home Rule, Colonial Home Rule and Dominion Rule buzz
about the air like flies of a summer’s day, and nobody seems to be very
clear as to what they exactly mean, except that there is a deep-seated
suspicion that they are not being used very honestly. The air is racked
with precedents from China to Peru; and amid it all, with a patience
born of centuries, stands the Nation for whom all this pother is
supposed to be raised.

The strange thing about it is that all this bustle and stir should so
persistently neglect what is just the cause of the whole trouble. That
cause is not economic; it is not, in the modern abuse of the word,
political; it is historic. The economic and political troubles are
incidental to the historical. The constitutions of English colonies
such as Canada, Australia and South Africa may be good, bad or
indifferent, wise or unwise, discreet or indiscreet; but they are as
little applicable to the case of Ireland, and would eventually cause
as much irritation, as Dublin Castle. They were created (generally
as the result of menace) by Englishmen who went abroad as colonists,
singing sweet hymns about the White Man’s Burden and the Lord’s
Anointed. Earlier colonists in those lands, however, such as the French
in Canada and the Dutch in South Africa, give these constitutions no
fealty because they do not answer their instincts. For the same reason
Irishmen in these places, though less solid and unified from the nature
of their case, generally become subversive and revolutionary units,
introducing and desiring changes such as the constitutions never
contemplated. When these changes are examined they are generally found
to hark back to the laws and meanings of the old State of Ireland. But
in Ireland itself the Nation, reduced though it be in population, and
by oppression made unsure of itself, is entire and compact; racially
more compact than any nation in Europe, with little of the colonial
element remaining in it; and it draws almost wholly on its historic
past. And from that past the answer must be found for its future, for
the past has stored up instincts and intuitions, old memories of the
blood and desires of the national mind, that are waiting to burst into
the future. The answer therefore is not to be found in a study of the
constitutions of other peoples, but in a wise study of Irish history.

There is, outside of books, no such thing as Utopia. There is no such
thing as a State abstractly good or bad in itself. A State is only
good or bad in the degree in which it answers, or fails to answer, the
needs of the Nation for which it is devised. All the rest is words.
Similarly there is no such thing as ancient history--except in the case
of nations, such as Assyria, that have ceased to exist. All history
is new and living, because in it are to be discovered the urge and
impulse of national minds. Particularly is this so with Ireland, where
the right national development was suppressed by an alien military
conquest. The nineteenth century, for instance, was full of unrest,
of demands, of swift instinctive actions, that can only be understood
by turning back three hundred years of history. It is true that these
national intuitions have been frustrated so long that they are no
longer sure of themselves. It is true that, the development having been
hindered for so long, it is difficult to gauge what these intuitions
would mean in the light of wholly changed conditions. Yet, in spite of
all this, the principle remains sound, that it is only by searching
into a nation’s mind that its desires and impulses can be discovered,
and it is only by watching those desires and impulses when they were
free to exercise themselves creatively that a State can be guessed-at
that shall be that Nation’s crown.

It is this search that I purpose in this little Essay. I am aware
of the adventurous nature of the task--an adventure rendered doubly
difficult by the confined space of the Essay and by the fact that it
breaks new ground--but it is necessary that someone should undertake
it, however ill-equipped he be for the task. It has necessarily to be
compounded of research, criticism and speculation, each being based
upon the other in the order stated. It is always desirable that history
(especially Irish history, where the lying and depreciative tongue is
not unknown) should be fully documented; but the slender limits of this
Essay prohibit this. I make no statement, however, for which I have
not chapter and verse before me. I have tried to make the criticism
as direct and obvious as possible; but it is of course unavoidable,
even if it be desirable, that a man’s predilections should influence
the nature of his criticism. And as the speculation is based upon the
criticism it is equally unavoidable that the speculation should also
express the personal desire--though it does so happen that this is not
always the case. All constitution-building is speculation; but if that
speculation is based on history, and a just and critical search into
that history with a view to discovering what are its permanent and
what its impermanent, what its fundamental and what its incidental,
elements, then it will be a national uplifting and not an irritation, a
national hope and not an embarrassment and frustration. It is the hope
of this book to promote thought along these lines; and if it achieve
this it will have succeeded, even if it be finally cast aside by both
writer and reader. For certainly time so spent will be more profitably
spent than in the study of constitutions of alien peoples across the
seas, or by any sort of constitution-mongering that gives no heed to
the impulses of an old and historic Nation.




II. THE MAKINGS OF A POLITY.


The myth of Invasions, elaborated from the seventh century onwards,
shrouds the earliest Irish history from our view. Something authentic,
aged and significant passes behind that screen, but we cannot clearly
see what it is. Irish history only begins to emerge from that screen,
and to pass into the clearer light of knowledge, with the opening
centuries of our era. We then begin to get parts of information that
can more and more be checked with one another and with other known
facts, so building up a history that can be submitted to criticism; and
it is interesting to notice that the emergence into greater certitude
occurs at the very moment when the national life begins to be framed
into a distinct and recognisable polity, ever tending towards a central
authority.

The process begins with or about Tuathal Teachtmhair, Tuathal the
Arriver, about the middle of the second century. With him there
is still much twilight, but with him the daylight quickens. The
main outlines of his life and work, even of his personality, can
be checked with one another and take their place in a logical and
reliable whole. With him the makings of the new State begin; and
they continue, in spite of periods of disrepair, until at the end of
the first millenium the State was knit together by a fiscal system
that was put to writing. The work has much of the simplicity due to
the simpler conditions of the time, although in fact the result was
highly complex and elaborate; but, almost alone among the nations or
peoples of Europe, in Ireland the work of constructive State-building
went forward. Strife abounded (and modern times have lost what little
right they ever had to point an accusing finger at it); it abounded
throughout Europe, and Ireland had its share; but in Ireland the State
always held the national sense together, and it was always being
revised to meet new needs. It is interesting briefly to survey the
process.

Tuathal came at a strategic moment. The Ulster Cycle shows quite
clearly a struggle between Connacht and Uladh for the hegemony of the
five provinces of Ireland. The earlier parts of that cycle (though
written to exploit Uladh) show that hegemony claimed and won by
Connacht; the later parts show it passing to Uladh. Then there is a
dark period, in which we have no literature to guide us and for which
the records in the Annals of Tigernach give little help. During this
time occurs the mysterious episode known as the Revolt of the Vassals.
Whatever that episode meant, it appears that Tuathal’s mother had to
fly the country. He himself returned later to his province of Connacht
to resume the dynastic struggle with the kings of Uladh for the rule of
Ireland. Probably Tuathal was the Irish prince to whom Tacitus refers
as being for a time with the Roman legions in Britain. The dates are
approximate; and Tuathal’s first act on his return to Ireland suggests
that he had not misspent his time. Fighting in Ireland prior to this
time had mainly been that of contests between famous warriors, or from
chariots. Henceforward it becomes that of trained legions existing as
a standing militia. For Tuathal established the Fianna Eireann; and by
means of this new weapon he restored the hegemony to Connacht.

It is right briefly to trace this dynastic struggle between Connacht
and Uladh, because out of it, and out of the needs it created and the
problems it raised, grew the national State. Tuathal, king of Connacht,
with his palace at Cruachan Ai, came east to Uisneach, and from there
exercised the hegemony of Ireland. It is said that he took the “necks”
of the four provinces where they touched one another, and in each
“neck” held a national festival for each quarter of the year. At Tara a
special festival was held, at which the Brehons discussed and collated
the laws, and at which the local rulers discussed and compared the
local administration of the country. In other words, a general tendency
towards uniformity was set up because of a direct central authority;
and it was undoubtedly because of this tendency that Tuathal’s son,
Fedhlimidh, who succeeded him, received the title of Reachtmhar, the
Law-giver.

Tuathal, however, did not come east to Tara, except to the festival.
Tara was the seat of the kings of Leinster, with an elder glory and
significance attaching to it that it is not easy to explain in any
critical use of the materials available. It was not for a century
after Tuathal that the Connacian dynasty, in the person of Cormac,
established itself at Tara and compelled the kings of Leinster to make
their headquarters elsewhere at Naas. Then the central authority took
a fresh accession of strength, and a definite and distinctive polity
began to emerge, with the looser system that till then had prevailed
tightened up and made uniform in all its parts.

The hegemony, for instance, passed, and Cormac became Ard-Ri, or
Monarch, of Ireland. The new province of Meath was created for
the maintenance of the new monarchy. The festivals at Tara became
more splendid and authoritative, deriving as they now did from the
administrative authority of the monarch. This was especially the case
as Cormac shines out quite clearly as a man of considerable force of
character and a statesman of a very high order. Under his supervision
the laws were reduced to writing. They might previously have existed
in writing, for there are indications to show that writing existed
from a very early time in Ireland; but they were now gathered in a
single authoritative book. The immediate result of this would be that
a stricter uniformity in their administration was created. To ensure
this, and to make more easy the general administration of the country,
he regrouped the administrative units of the nation. Until then the
nation had consisted of a number of separate stateships. Some were
quite small, some were of considerable size. Some had been bound under
heavy service, some had been comparatively free of service, to their
respective provincial kings. We do not often hear after this time of
these different obligations of service, nor do we find these great
differences of size; and it is significant that this disappearance
should occur at a time when we are told that Cormac created a new order
over Ireland. He made a number of new units, uniform in size, grouped
in the provinces, and leading up in ranks of authority through the
provincial kingships to the monarchy.

The old stateships were known as Tuatha; the new were called Triocha
Ced. The title Triocha Ced does not survive, while the older title of
Tuatha does. Therefore it seems likely that the new Triocha Ced became
known by the older and more familiar title of Tuatha; and, where an
old Tuath of considerable size had a number of Triocha Ced created
within it, that the new units became known as Tuatha, while the older
stateship maintained its authority over the new units and became known
by a new title that now comes into use, that of Mor-Thuath. That is
conjecture; but it is a conjecture that conforms to the facts as we
know them in the subsequent development of the system.

Such is the polity as it left Cormac’s hands. He also established
the Fianna Eireann as a standing militia in the provinces--except in
Ulster, where the dynastic war had not ceased, and was not to cease
till the burning of Emain Macha. The political system he created, with
its central code of laws, was one that could continue itself without
a central power; and it did so continue; for with his passing the
central power weakened, falling into less able hands.

With the coming of Christianity two centuries later the system received
a new strength and unity. Loeghaire, the Monarch at the time, was
himself a man of considerable strength and ability, and Patrick was an
administrator of power and insight. The fact that the laws were revised
in the general assembly at Tara, in order to bring them into conformity
with the teaching of Christianity, was in itself an impetus sufficient
to brace the system anew; and a further strength was given when Patrick
based his church system on the political system, making the units of
one identical with the units of the other.

Only two things remain to be mentioned in the making or unmaking of
the polity. After the battle of Ocha, in the year 482, the dynastic
family broke, the older line continuing as kings of Connacht, while
the younger line held the monarchy at Tara. While it continued at
Tara, with its central situation, it could hold its authority, though,
as with all monarchies, its authority depended upon the personality
of the monarch. But with the abandonment of Tara, after 1560, this
authority was at once weakened, having to be exerted sometimes from the
far north. The system, however, continued, because its device was such
that it could continue itself. The State existed, complete in all its
parts, at once simple and complex, sufficient for its own maintenance;
but the strong central directive was lacking; for the tendency
towards centralisation was suspended with the abeyance of the dynastic
struggle. It was supplied, however, when Brian Borumha sprang into the
field, and snatched the monarchy from a weakened line.

Brian rallied the nation, and knit and perfected the system that
Cormac had created. A simple, and indeed very modern, method existed
to his hand that was partly turned to his purpose. It is customary to
speak of the Leabhar na gCeart as the Book of Rights, or Tributes. The
modern word, however, is Taxes; for taxes remain taxes whether they
be paid in coin or in kind. Each of the seven great territories, into
which the provincial authorities had devolved, had some time prior to
Brian laid down a regular revenue to be contributed to them by the
stateships under their authority. This had been done as a national
system, and had been committed to writing in one book. Brian, having
transferred the Kingship of Thomond to his own line, revised the
contributions accordingly within his own particular territory. He also
took contributions from each of the other six Kingships as Monarch of
the Nation. It only therefore required the centralisation of what was
really a fiscal system to complete the unity and central function of
the State. For so statecraft has always been compelled to meet the same
difficulty that confronted Brian in A.D. 1002.

Had Brian lived, or had he been able to establish his dynasty, the
result would, without doubt, have been achieved. Unfortunately he fell
in the hour of his triumph, at the battle of Clontarf. He had broken
the O’Neill succession; and the elder branch of that dynasty were the
O’Conors of Connacht. Therefore for a century a triangular dynastic
dispute arose between the O’Briens, the O’Neills, and the O’Conors.




III. THE POLITY AND THE STATE.


The polity that thus emerged consisted of a number of stateships
throughout the country, each of which was a smaller reproduction of the
State in which it was comprised, and each of which was a unit in the
organisation of that State. Because it was a system that was competent
to continue itself independently of a central authority its natural
tendency was to dispense with that central authority; yet the device
was such that authority, once established, was distributed from the
centre down to all the branches, and was gathered from the branches up
towards the centre, in a well-concerted scheme. And this proved to be
the case even when the monarch was weak, independently of his personal
power.

A good deal of confusion has been introduced into the understanding
of old history by the way in which its records were written. Europe
at that time was full of wars; and Ireland was no exception. To
chroniclers in a day when personal prowess counted for much it was more
important to record a battle in which some famous man fell than to
record the continuous social life of a community. The result is that in
the records the battles seem to obliterate the social life, and plunge
it into chaos. To the modern mind particularly it seems so, for the
modern man knows nothing of wars save as great continental cataclysms,
in which whole nations are hurled against whole nations, and all life
is brought to a standstill, while death claims its daily thousands, and
chivalry is displaced by venom and hatred. The modern mind must not
judge of ancient days by the world’s decay. The “battles,” that the
belittlers of Ireland are so eager to emphasise, as little suspended
the general life of the country, seldom employed a larger hosting of
men on each side, and even used few weapons more destructive, than the
faction fights of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. We know,
for instance, that the eleventh century, when Ireland was involved in
a triangular dynastic dispute and more full of wars than at any other
time, is famous for its literary activity. Historians were busy, old
tales were re-written, and great books were compiled. All this, we are
told, came from a soil across which wars were surging; but the result
clearly shows that these wars did not suspend, or even greatly impede,
the artistic, social and economic life of the Nation. It is necessary
to see this, and to get a right perspective, in perceiving the life of
the nation in the polity it achieved.

Each separate stateship was at once two things. It was a political unit
in the State and a social and economic unit in itself. The people were
the stateship, and the stateship was the people, for with them the
power finally lay. They ruled their own affairs within the limits of
their stateship, but were held within the single purpose of the State
by the unified code of laws outside of which it was not within their
power to transgress. However weak the monarch might be, these laws,
and the trained and hereditary brehons who administered them, held the
stateships in a uniformity of practice that was remarkable long after
the invader’s foot had brought disruption. But within that uniformity
each stateship worked out its own destiny according to its own local
needs.

Originally, it would seem, the land held within the limits of the
stateship was divided out among all its people. But strangers entered,
outlaws from other stateships and men upon the world, who became
servitors to the original freemen. These held no land, and therefore
held no political rights in the stateship, inasmuch as they did not
belong to its staple life. These were, broadly, the two main divisions
of the social life: _saor_ and _daor_, words only approximately
rendered by free and unfree. There were sub-divisions within each of
these. The unfree could, with time and by steady conduct, enter the
ranks of the landowners. A number of them could as tradesmen form a
guild, and as a corporate body claim political rights. But the staple
life of the stateship being the life on the land, in the main only
those who held land could have a voice in the guidance of its political
destiny. These were the overwhelming majority; for the unfree classes
being accidental to the life of the stateship they, for the most part,
either passed on, or, remaining, in the course of time joined its
political life in some capacity.

This was inevitable. For no man held the land he occupied in his own
right. All the land occupied by the stateship was vested in it, and
each occupier only held its usage by his right as a freeman of the
stateship. The stateship had the power to take any man’s holding from
him, from the king down, if he defied the will of the whole or was
outlawed. The Noble classes held somewhat more securely, though it
is not easy to define in what their greater security consisted; and
in later times, owing to the unsettlement introduced by an invader’s
presence, they claimed a prerogative right. But the plain meaning of
the laws is that no man held any land from which the stateship could
not dispossess him. That is quite clear and explicit. Therefore the
land belonged not to its individual users, but to the stateship, though
each freeman of the stateship could, as a freeman, claim, and was bound
to receive, land for his use.

Nor could any man sell the usage of any land to anyone not in his own
stateship without permission. Within his own stateship he could do so
by obtaining permission from his own family. If he died his land was
resumed by the family--a process that was known as _gabhal-cine_, “the
seizure of the family,” in English corrupted to gavelkind--whereupon a
redistribution would occur. From which it would seem that the grants
were not made to individuals, but to the heads of families, the kindred
being a unit within the stateship as the stateship was a unit within
the State. But the right of the individual to the use of land none
could withhold; it was his title as a freeman, and was implanted in the
heritage of his thoughts and instincts.

Land, and its free possession by the people, were thus the foundation
on which the whole structure of the State was built. Power always
derived thence and always returned thither again, as surely as water
must find its own level.

The divisions of rank among the freemen were mainly ranks of
responsibility, with corresponding privileges attached to each rank.
The Nobles, for instance, were clearly executive officers of the
stateship. They held land from which they could not be dispossessed in
any re-distribution that might be necessary. That is to say, they could
not be dispossessed of land until they were first dispossessed of their
rank, and that would first involve a legal action; but on the other
hand they were responsible for the use of that land to the stateship,
and could not sell or hire that use to any member of another stateship
without permission.

The two chief executive officers were the King of the stateship and
(to employ a word that is not so modern as it appears) the mayors
of townships. The King was elected by all the freemen in assembly,
but their choice was limited to selection from a kingly household,
the _righ-damhna_. He had, sitting in court, the power of capital
punishment, with the approval of his brehons and the assent of the
people. This, it seems, was a power seldom exercised, for the ordinary
operation of the law went otherwise; but the Annals record instances of
its use. He led the stateship in war when a hosting was demanded; and
as, in the festivals at Tara, he met in assembly with the Kings of all
the other stateships, it would seem that some code existed among them
in order to bring the practice of their office into general uniformity.

The other executive officer held the alternative titles of
_Bruighin-Fer_ and _Baile Biatach_. He was primarily the Public
Hospitaller. The _Bruighin_, or Hostel, had mensal lands attached to
it by the stateship, and it was built with four doors to the four
quarters in order to welcome all travellers, to whom hospitality was
dispensed as a public dignity. Over this hospitality the _Bruighin-Fer_
was placed in charge as host for the stateship; but another function
attached to his office, and appeared in the second title he came to
wear. For the houses of the craftsmen and tradesmen collected about the
Hostel, and the whole became a township over which he ruled as mayor.
Indeed, the modern Scottish word for mayor, baily, displays this origin
quite clearly. The first intention of the Hostel was for the exercise
of public hospitality; but inasmuch as the stateship, when it met in
assembly to discuss and decide its internal affairs, or for that matter
to debate national affairs, met in the same building, the office of
the Hospitaller obviously became one of considerable importance in the
general conduct of the life of the stateship. He became, not only
Hospitaller, but mayor of the central township; and therefore the first
of his titles begins steadily to be displaced by the second.

Such men were strictly executive, and not legislative, officers, for
the legislation and general conduct of the stateship lay with its two
assemblies. The first was an assembly of its nobles, and the second the
assembly of all the freemen. They met to decide all internal affairs,
such as redistribution of land if a family died out, the admission
to political rank of an unfree man, or a guild of craftsmen, and the
outlawing of any man who defied the finding of the brehons. But they
had other decisions in their hands which linked them in with the whole
fabric of the National State. They decided who should be selected for
hostings that were demanded of them; and when at a later date Hebridean
mercenaries were scattered through the country as a kind of militia,
and were quartered upon the stateships, the quarterings would naturally
be decided in assembly. Yet the important decision that lay in their
hands dealt with the matter of taxes, or tributes. As we have seen,
such taxes were levied upon each stateship as a whole, not upon the
individuals of the nation; and each stateship was thus left free to
distribute such taxes upon its own individuals according to its local
circumstances.

In addition, however, to its executive officers the stateship also
provided for its professional men. It had its own poets, historians,
musicians and lawyers, all of whom were maintained out of the public
lands, and church lands were also apportioned for its bishop and
clergy. All of these, or at least the highest ranks of these, met
together in the national festivals, and debated their own affairs
in separate national assemblies with the purpose of bringing about
a uniform practice throughout the nation, and fixing rules and
regulations to that end. And even at a very late date, when the
presence of an invader frustrated the possibility of a central
authority, the closest uniformity can be seen throughout the country,
whether in poetry, music or law, so well did the system maintain itself
when the pivot on which it had swung was gone.

Naturally the brehons were the most important of these professional
classes, for in the body of law which they administered the whole
practice of the State was to be discovered. They were less judges
than civil arbitrators. They had no power of life and death, for that
belonged only to the King sitting in assembly. They could only affix
the compensations that were due for every offence that neighbour
committed against neighbour; and these were determined with the most
minute details with regard to every kind of offence in the general
body of the law. Some of the compensations can be seen to be such as
would ruin the offender; and they were apportioned to every man’s
wealth according to the rank of society in which he was found, the same
offence bringing a heavier penalty on a rich man than on a poor; but
the brehon had no means of compelling obedience to his judgment. He
could only give his judgment; the rest lay with the stateship.

An old text reads: “The feast of Tara ... the body of law which all
Ireland enacted then, during the interval between that and their next
convention at a year’s end, none dared to transgress; and he that
perchance did so was outlawed from the men of Ireland.” If any man,
therefore, resisted a judgment made against him, the stateship outlawed
him, and withdrew all association with him. Thrust out from all rights,
he could only become a wanderer on the earth. Little wonder that the
Chief Baron, Lord Finglas, could say, even so late as 1520, when the
central authority was gone, “Irishmen doth keep and observe such laws
which they make upon hills in their country firm and stable, without
breaking them for any favour or reward.” And even Attorney-General
Davies, of ill-fame, declared in 1607: “There is no nation of people
under the sun that doth equal and indifferent justice better than
the Irish, or will rest better satisfied with the execution thereof,
although it be against themselves, as they may have the protection
and benefit of the law when upon just cause they do desire it.” The
reason is not far to seek. Law in the old Irish State was not a mere
technical contrivance to be argued from black-letter, as now happens,
by a few men whom the people universally distrust; it was founded
on a whole nation’s sense of justice. Nor was it lawyers who put it
into execution; but a stateship of freemen, acting in community, who
enforced its obedience or expelled the offender by withdrawing all
dealings with him.

Such was the internal economy of the stateship. Within itself it was
a social and economic unit. But in the State it was a political unit,
for it was fitted in as part of an elaborate national economy. If
the stateship in question were part of a Mor-Thuath, then its ruler
would only have the title of underking, _ur-ri_. In that case the
stateship (_tuath_) would only come under the provincial king through
the territory (_mor-thuath_). Otherwise it would come under the
immediate jurisdiction of the province. And the provinces came under
the jurisdiction of the Monarch. In the later stages, the territories
displaced the provinces and came immediately under the Monarch. But
always the result was the same. The purpose of the State was to spread
out the administration in a number of diminishing authorities, resting
finally on a free people in possession of the land on which the whole
system was based; and to gather up that authority in tier after tier of
exactly similar organisations to the headpiece of the monarchy. Each
authority was exactly the same as the one beneath it, with its elected
king, bishop, brehons, poets, historians and full court, and with its
_Bruighin_ and _Baile Biatach_ in capital townships of increasing
importance. The Monarch’s court was comprised exactly the same as the
court of the king of a stateship, except that naturally his officers
had necessarily to win higher degrees in the schools. It would seem
that the schools themselves, of which the country was full and which
won such fame throughout Europe that scholars from far afield came
to them, were based upon the same organisation even as the Church
organisation had been.

How closely the system was interwoven appears from slight hints
cast through the body of the laws. There is, for instance, a law
tract dealing with the question of blood-guiltiness which throws an
interesting light on this point. It was a simple matter when a man had
an action against another of his own stateship: a brehon of their own
stateship could deal with the suit. But what happened when a man of
one stateship had an action against a man of a different stateship? By
what arrangement was the case heard, and in what court was it held?
From this tract it appears that an appeal was made up the line to a
king, whether of territory, province or the monarch, who had equal
jurisdiction over both stateships; and he either judged the case
himself, if it called for a death penalty, or appointed a brehon from
his own court to adjudicate in the matter. Clearly, then, the elaborate
pattern of the State was not merely an abstract perfection, but one
that was submitted to frequent service. And further, a hint such as
this also shows that, whatever wars may have troubled the State, its
ordinary administration was maintained, while the life it contained
raised problems that required to be answered.

Such was the Sovereign State of Ireland. Seen in the Europe of its
time the elaborate statesmanship with which it was created seems twice
remarkable. Yet the fact that Ireland was able to send the light of
learning over a blighted Europe, and the fact that the schools of
Ireland became so famous that scholars and students came from overseas
to learn in them, would require a national excellence in statecraft
commensurate with the national care of scholarship. Rare roses do not
usually grow on waste heaps: a truth that it is sometimes useful to
remember. Not the least excellence of the State was the equal dignity
it gave to women. Whether women exercised political rights or not it
is impossible to say; but in the social and economic spheres they took
their place as the equal of men. In marriage, for instance, whatever
a woman brought to the union remained hers. If the pair were divorced
each took his and her own share; whereas if either could prove that
by his or her labour the common estate had prospered more than by the
labour of the other, that proportion, as fixed by the brehon, was added
to the share. The same was true if either of them brought nothing to
the union. Never once do we find the law of the Irish State recognising
any inequality between the sexes; and that again was remarkable in the
Europe of the time. The whole conception of the Irish State--in the
ideals which it upheld, in the care with which it was wrought, in the
balance of its parts and its simple scheme yet intricate texture--both
in what it sought and in what it achieved, may well challenge
comparison with the labours of statecraft in any place and at any time.




IV. THE WORKING OF THE STATE.


There never yet was a State, however perfectly devised, whose
performance did not fall many leagues away from its intention. The
dusty tomes on the top shelf only record the perfect, or imperfect,
intention, for it is only by virtue of that intention that States exist
at all. They do not record the follies and fatuities, the intrigues
and trickeries, by which the best intentioned States are brought to
grief. In all vocabularies the word Polity signifies something noble,
and in all vocabularies the word Politics means something ignoble. It
is perhaps necessary to remember this, for a certain type of historian
(primed to depreciate everything Irish) has been very eager to
discover the motes in the eye of the early Irish State while carefully
neglecting the beams in the eye of its own modern wisdom.

Yet the intention of a State remains worthy for its own sake; and that
the Irish performance during the first millenium did not fall very
far away from the intention is clear, not only by what it achieved in
Ireland, but also by what it achieved in Europe. As we have said, roses
are not produced from waste heaps. The Irish State was actually in the
process of solving its gravest fault when the invasion of a militarist
system made that solution impossible. When Brian died in 1014 without
establishing his dynasty--when his son died in battle with him without
being able to claim the reversion of his father’s work--Ireland was
thrown into a dynastic war. Had Ireland remained without invasion
the Nation must have solved that difficulty by eventually winning
some system in which the executive stability would have been secured.
Unhappily the country was invaded by a militarist system, which, being
a militarist system, lived on no economic labour of its own but preyed
on the economic labour of the country and played off one part of the
dynastic dispute against another in order to secure the fruits of its
robbery. It so happened that the Nation had no means of resistance.
The Fianna Eireann had been disbanded because it had threatened the
State. The stateships could not be called upon for more than six weeks’
military service at a time, and then not during Spring or Harvest, for
the Nation had to continue its economic life or endure famine; while
the feudal Normans preying on the economic labour of others could make
war at all times and without cessation. And every year saw them making
good their hold, while the stateships weakened, until finally when
Hebridean mercenaries were introduced and quartered on the stateships
it was too late to eject the invader.[1]

It has sometimes been suggested that these dynastic wars arose because
the kingships, from the monarchy downwards, were elective. This is not
so. The trouble was that they were neither one thing nor the other.
Had they been frankly hereditary a certain kind of security would have
been won for the executive. On the other hand, had they been frankly
elective, basing the election on the necessary qualifications for
kingship demanded in the laws, a different kind of stability would
have been secured. The straightforward dependence on the people’s
choice would have compelled some protection for their choice when
made, especially as the defeated candidates would still have preserved
intact their chances for a subsequent election; and the monarchy
would have been drawn into closer relation with the stateships.
The system that actually prevailed, however, gave neither sort of
advantage, and was plainly a compromise from some earlier dispute. The
monarch was elected, it is true, but he could only be elected from
the _righ-damhna_. That _righ-damhna_ consisted of all within three
generations from a king. That is to say, if a king’s sons were not
chosen in the succession after him, and the grandsons were missed, and
the great-grandsons after them, then the whole line passed out from
the _righ-damhna_. Now, if Irish history be closely examined it will
be found that most of the disputes arose at this critical point. Men
were usually not willing to carry their failure to secure election to
the point of war unless they happened to be at the critical fourth
generation when that failure meant the extinction of their whole
line from royal rights. And when it so fell out that three separate
dynasties claimed those rights, it is fairly clear that the critical
moment would always be arising, or always be threatened.

It is speculation to suggest how this would have been remedied had the
State been left free to work out its own destiny. Clearly the executive
would either have become frankly hereditary or frankly elective.
Probably at that time it would have become hereditary, especially as
the son generally claimed to succeed from his father unless there
were special reasons why he should not or could not. But then, what
of the kings of stateships and territories? Had these also become
hereditary the State from top to bottom would have become impossibly
rigid; but there are reasons to suggest why this would not have been
so. For one thing, the kings of stateships were elected by the voice
of the freemen, whereas the kings of the higher executives were
elected by their own courts. Moreover, the stateships served immediate
and local needs that required the consent of the freemen for their
continual adjustment. The two operating together would undoubtedly
have compelled, without any of the complications of a _righ-damhna_,
the perfectly free election of the executive head and leader of a
stateship. Therefore had the monarchy become hereditary there would
have been two contradictory principles in the State; there would always
be a tendency to bring one into line with the other; and it is not very
difficult to see which principle would finally have prevailed.

Any arrogation of power by the monarch (and it is the first principle
of monarchs to arrogate power) would have struck athwart the rule of
the people in their most familiar and immediate life. A moment always
arises in history (always has arisen and always will arise) when a
monarch and a people front one another with the claim to real power. In
such issues the people always win in the end, even when their rights
in the State are most degraded. How much simpler would the issue be
when the people, as in the Irish State, held the land, the final source
of all wealth, in their own possession in corporate stateships? In
the crisis that later befell all States no nation could have faced
the future with greater assurance than Ireland, had Fate not thrown a
sterner destiny before it.

In the same dispute another fault of the State was involved--in fact,
was one of the causes that led to the invasion of the foreigner. For
the dynastic war was really the struggle of the provinces for the
hegemony. The O’Neills of Meath and Ulster, the O’Conors of Connacht
and the O’Briens of Munster contended together in the names of their
provinces; and the Mac Murchadhas of Leinster, having no part in the
war, were driven into a false isolation. This was only possible because
the provinces had interposed an authority between the executive of
the State and the stateships that had no real function. They could
materially hinder, and could not materially help, the smooth working
of the State. Had the provincial or territorial courts not existed
the result would have been as deft a balance between a centralised
and decentralised State as can well be imagined. The interposition
of the provincial courts reduced the central authority almost to a
futility except when a masterful personality held the monarchy. They
broke the balance between the centre and parts of the whole, and in
the result snapped the connection that existed between them. The only
real link they needed they possessed in the Councils that met under the
presidency of the Monarch in national assembly to adjust and continue
the government of the country: the Council of Brehons, the Council of
Rulers, the Council of Historians, and so forth. Each Council decided
its own affairs, and the Monarch and his higher officials held the
whole in co-ordination. That was a real and a vital connection. No
other was needed. The provincial courts could only--possessing as they
did, for the most part, powers almost equal to the monarchy--break that
connection, and so disturb the balance of the whole. They did so in
the outcome of things, occupying the place that they did; and they did
so deliberately, creating local loyalties in order to increase their
power. They were, and could not help but be, a disruptive element in
the State.

Undoubtedly the dynastic war of the eleventh century, pressed to its
logical consummation, would have ended this false value. The dynastic
war of the first centuries between Connacht and Ulster had ended in the
elimination of Ulster as a rival; and, however the later war would have
ended, a strong central authority must eventually have emerged and the
provincial kingships have been reduced to a merely nominal position in
the economy of the State, without possessing the power to dispute the
monarchy or its executive hold on the Nation. This in its turn would
have required a national army; and would have answered another defect.
For when in the fifth century Ireland disbanded her national militia,
the Fianna Eireann, she lay a prey to any invader at a time when armies
had become national necessities.

Such criticisms are, it is true, speculative. Even as such, however,
an attempt has been made to keep them close to the development that
the events themselves suggest--to the development that, as history
proves, all nations must finally obey. In the eleventh century, it
must be remembered, Ireland was almost the only country in Europe with
a national State. Other nations were not to achieve their States for
centuries; and even then many of them now famous did not create States
so careful in its parts and so concerted as a whole. It is not at
all likely that Ireland, had she been left alone to work out her own
destiny, would have continued with a broken State without correcting
the causes of its disruption. She would have proved a startling
exception to the course of history had she done so. Yet the main value
of such criticisms is that they permit an examination of the Irish
State at a moment when its inherent weaknesses had worked themselves
out to the surface. At the height of Brian’s power those weaknesses
existed, but they were held in submission by his personal strength.
After his death they at once rose to the surface, just because of the
strength with which he had held them in submission and the manner by
which he had risen to power. They then demanded a remedy contained in
the State itself, and not dependent on the strength of a master mind.
And in looking to the old Irish State for instruction it is important
to note its weaknesses once they revealed themselves, and to perceive
the development by which they would have been corrected.

Yet, while criticism is good, it is proper to look on the other side of
the coin. In the light of its own day the Irish State was a remarkable
achievement, but in the light of any other day it would be hard to find
a statecraft so complete, so wise and so soundly based on a people’s
will while compact in itself. It was at once both aristocratic and
democratic: in fact, it makes these modern expressions to seem, what
they are, false entities, for it shows them to be parts of one whole,
obverse and reverse of the same thing. The Normans when they came
commented on the familiarity that existed between the members of a
stateship and its king. The king, in fact, was generally required to
foster his children with some freeman’s family. Yet to be a king a man
had to be pure of birth, perfect of body, without physical blemish,
and of considerable training in the laws and arts; while the oath he
took, even though it were not always kept, is sufficient to show the
moral qualities expected of his office. The arts did not exist at the
whim of a lordly patron, but were maintained at the people’s charges.
Each stateship conceived it an honour that Poetry, Music and History
should be accorded the highest rank in its economy. Their professors
were furnished land for their maintenance, and sat as equals at the
king’s table. The same was true of the Doctors of Medicine. These
were all public servants, serving the public and maintained at the
public charge. Those that came overseas to learn in the schools were,
apparently, not charged for their tuition, but had only to conform to
the legal responsibility laid on such schools, for they came in such
numbers that the Council of Brehons had to make special regulations for
them. And the _Baile Biatach_, as we have seen, had land apportioned
him for the maintenance of public hospitality. These things were not
then, any more than they are now, precisely familiar virtues among the
nations.

So for the State itself, as an organisation. Its faults we have seen;
but, even so, it found as wise a balance as any nation has yet found
between a centralised and a decentralised system. Authority, to be
sure, depended a good deal from the personality of whoever exercised
it; but then history has shewn that this was not an attribute
exclusively monopolised by the Irish State. In the last resort, not
only in the theory but in the practice and working of the State, that
authority was based on a free people. The State’s only property,
and the final source of all its wealth, the land, was owned by the
people in corporate stateships; and those corporate stateships had its
assemblies of freemen which discussed and adjudicated its affairs. The
national life was one of high ideals--of Art; of physical and mental
aristocracy; it held in high esteem its intellectual leaders; it prized
its scholarship--but these ideals were rooted in the possession and
husbandry of the soil. The student will need to search well before he
betters the Irish State; and the more truly he search the more deeply
he will wonder at the strange tragedy that it should have been hindered
at a critical hour of its development.


FOOTNOTE:

[1] A parallel instance may serve to show how the working of the State,
taken at a moment of indecision, was turned against itself. In the
fifteenth century England was plunged into a dynastic war. Those who
have read the documents of the time will know with what perfidy that
war was marked. The English barons openly sold their swords to the
highest bidder as a natural thing. Treachery and insecurity were rife
on every hand. Now, if an enemy had invaded England at that moment,
and had been willing to pay the extra prices that would have been
demanded of a foreigner, and, where this was not possible, had turned
passion and party strength against passion and party strength, taking
care to balance the contending forces evenly, such an enemy could have
entrenched himself in the country, and in the course of time have
defied ejectment. England was spared this misfortune; Ireland was not.




V. THE BROKEN STATE.


Henry of Anjou and England when he came to Ireland, with a somewhat
munificent gesture made grants of large tracts of territory to his
underlings. It was nobly done; to make gifts of other people’s property
to one’s own friends requires a noble mind. Therefore the lordly
underlings settled along the waterways of the territory allotted to
them, built castles, and from these castles raided the economic life
of the country around them. At first the stateships received the
newcomers as strangers coming into the country, who would in time
become part of its life. They did not conceive of such a thing as an
attempted national conquest. Then when they rose to resist, they were
handicapped. They had no national army; and, though the freemen could
be called upon for military service, they could not be called for
more than six weeks at a time, and then not during Spring or Harvest,
whereas the Normans lived only by the sword in the close militarist
organisation known as feudalism. The eleventh century in Ireland had
seen a long dynastic war, but it had also seen a full scholarly and
artistic activity. With the coming of the Normans all this activity was
stilled and hushed for two centuries. And that was the sign-manual of
the new era that had dawned.

After a while, preoccupied as they necessarily were with their economic
life, the people invited their Hebridean cousins to come over as a
paid militia. They came, at first into the north, and were quartered
on the stateships; and from the time of their coming the Normans began
to be pressed back toward Dublin, and the annals record the taking
one by one of the Norman castles. That was the first attempt to throw
off the national danger that was now appreciated. The second was to
restore the executive authority. O’Neill, O’Brien and O’Conor had
contended in rivalry, but the Ui Niall dynasty held the more ancient
claim; therefore in 1258 Aodh O’Conor and Tadhg O’Brien made a hosting
together to Brian O’Neill to offer their submission to him if he would
lead them against the foreigner. He did so, but was overthrown and
slain. Therefore an offer of the monarchy was sent to Hakon of Norway
five years later. He was on his way over when he died at sea. Finally
an invitation was sent to Edward Bruce by Domhnaill O’Neill in the
name of Ireland. Bruce came in 1315, was crowned Monarch of Ireland,
and carried a war throughout the country that wasted the land. When he
fell three years later at the battle of Faughert, the country was in a
desperate condition; but the invader was thrown back to a small tract
of country around Dublin that became known as the Pale.

Such were the attempts, made too late, to restore the State and eject
the invader. One was dependent on the other. It was clearly impossible
to restore the State until the invader had first been cast out. His
presence in the country necessarily acted like an obstruction in the
blood, and made it impossible for the body of the State to resume its
health and perfect its functions until the poison had been expelled.
This was so in the natural law of things; but, in addition to this
natural and inevitable result, the invaders, in order to maintain
their position in the country, set to work to create division between
the scattered portions of the broken State. That was easy to do.
The leaders in the different parts of the country have been blamed
(by none more than by their nation) for serving their own sectional
interests instead of the national unity. But how were they to discover
the national unity, and how were they to distinguish, as we now can
distinguish, between sectional and national interests? The history of
mankind proves that in a broken State it is a simple task to create
discord, and a giant’s task to create unity. The invaders acted at
first from a common centre; and the nature of the case robbed the Irish
Nation of any common centre from which to act. That was the first
difficulty. Secondly, there are always men in every Nation who are
willing to sell their honour. So long as Nations can repel invasion
that fact does not become an active danger within the security of its
State; but directly an invader enters a country, with gold and honours
in his gift, it becomes almost impossible to overtake the poison that
runs in every direction. Men grow suspicious of the most honest purpose
if that purpose is not at once apparent; and if it is at once apparent
it is thereby at once revealed to the enemy. Finally, most men are
near-sighted; they judge of large issues by their immediate effects,
and so mistake those immediate effects for the large issues, making it
easy for an enemy to drive divisions in between sectional interests.
These things are so, not necessarily because men are corrupt, but by
the nature of things; and their combined result was the broken State of
Ireland.

A further difficulty was the fact that the Nation had new elements cast
into it that it had to digest; and in some places it had those new
elements cast into it in large numbers. The Normans were mostly driven
out of the north; but others had settled and made their positions
secure in other parts, the De Burgos in the west, for instance, and
the FitzGeralds and Butlers in the south. The old State was broken
by their forcible seizure of land; but then we find it automatically
setting to work to mend the broken fabric, to restore the stateships,
and to include the stranger within its ancient constitution. In that it
was successful. The De Burgos and FitzGeralds became, as the English
declared, more Irish than the Irish themselves. The former publicly
repudiated their very names, and took Irish names, as Mac William
Uachtar and Mac William Iachtar. They simply displaced, or depressed,
the kingly households of earlier territories. The same was true of
the FitzGeralds, though with them, as far as we can judge, there were
certain changes introduced, not into the stateships, but into the
larger territories in which these were comprised. The chief of these
changes seems to have been that the FitzGeralds held their kingships by
right of primogeniture and not by election. Yet in the main the changes
were not many or fundamental. Irish was spoken as the native language;
Irish courts were kept, of brehons, poets and historians, exactly as
the older Irish kingships had maintained them; and by force of marriage
in a few generations the intermixture of the new blood was hardly to be
discovered beside the permanence of the old. Only the Butlers in the
south-east kept their connection with England. The others broke away
from the common centre of the invader, and became included in the elder
national continuity.

Nevertheless the State was scattered. The stateships continued their
life; the parts, that is to say, were complete, except for a portion
of country around Dublin and another about Waterford; but they were
only parts, for the whole was in disrepair. And now a definite war
between State and State was declared, the end of which has not yet
been seen. By the Statutes of Kilkenny in 1367 every sign of national
life in Ireland was penalised by English law. It was forbidden to hear
an Irish poet, to take judgment from a brehon, to foster children in
the Irish way, to speak the Irish language, and even to wear a beard
as the Irish did, or ride a horse barebacked. It is true these things
were only forbidden within the Pale, because only within the Pale
had the invader any authority; but they were in fact, and afterwards
became, a declaration in Ireland of a war between an English State and
an Irish State. They were an intimation that the old Irish culture and
State were marked for extinction. It is interesting to remember that
at the moment this declaration was made England had little culture,
no literature, only the beginnings of law, and a very rudimentary
State. The Statutes of Kilkenny were very like a young vulgarian raging
against an elder’s manners that made his own lack of courtesy apparent.

Fortunately at this time England herself was plunged into a bitter
dynastic war. The immediate result on Ireland was that, relieved from
the pressure of her neighbour, a great period of prosperity began.
The beginnings were slow, for the land was wasted after the Bruce
campaign; but the progress quickened with each decade. It began with
the integration of the Normans in the middle of the fourteenth century;
and it continued till the end of the English Wars of the Roses. The
poet took up his song again; the historian his pen; and the scholar
his books. Great convocations of learned men were held; and new law
tracts were written, drafted for changed conditions. The stateships
became the centres of new activity. Corn was exported in considerable
quantities. The guilds of artisans became busy again, to judge from
the exports of woollen, linen, leather and metal wares. The literary
activity--or at least such of it as escaped the soldiers’ burning--has
remained to us. The other activity can only be discovered by the trade
books of other countries; for Ireland, having no organised State of her
own, could keep no record of her commerce. But these books reveal the
considerable trade Ireland conducted with the continent of Europe. The
Irish ports, chiefly on the western and southern coasts, with their own
corporate stateships, became the avenue through which the industry of
the internal stateships supplied the demand of Europe. And since there
was no Irish State to create a medium of exchange, at least one of the
territories, that of the O’Reillys, had to mint its own coinage for the
conduct of its trade.

It seemed as though once again the Irish State was about to complete
itself. But once again an invading soldiery brought ruin. This time
it was the final ruin. England had settled her dynastic war, and
turned her attention to Ireland. The old methods were renewed with a
new perfection of craft. The Statutes of Kilkenny became an active
weapon of offence; and with each new monarch of the Tudor dynasty the
war between State and State was carried to a closer issue. The Irish
language was interdicted; the Irish manner of dress was forbidden;
and finally every attempt was made to blot out every memory of the
Irish stateships and to create English counties in their stead. Kings
of territories were offered pompous English titles if they pledged
to abstain from the use of their simple Irish titles. To help them
to a decision they were offered the land over which they ruled, to
be held by feudal knight’s service and to descend by feudal right
of primogeniture. Those who accepted this offer at once found the
stateships in rebellion against them, for that land did not lie in
the gift of any man but belonged only to the freemen. They rose in
protection of their rights since time immemorial; and they rose to
repudiate their elected officer; with the result that a soldiery was
sent against them that burned their crops and left their land a waste.

Such was the last phase of the war by which the State was to be broken,
not only as a whole, but in its several parts. The country far and wide
became acquainted with a soldiery whose business it was to tear out
all memory of the National State. At the end of that war there arose
a figure who saw clearly all that was involved. That was Hugh, the
descendant by Irish election of the O’Neill monarchy. He had worked
long to link all parts of the country together under his leadership;
and, knowing the power against which he was opposed, he had entered
into treaty with the Spanish Crown to assist him. Feeling that these
Spanish promises were not sincerely given, so often had they been made
and as often broken, he thought to save what he could from the wreckage.

When in 1598 the Earl of Essex was sent against him he met him in
parley and made him an offer to bear to Elizabeth. Whether that offer
was sincerely made, or only put out to save time, does not matter here;
but it contained one article that is very significant. It runs thus:
“That all nations in Ireland shall enjoy their living as they did two
hundred years ago.” Now it is clear that he uses the word “nations”
in some special sense--that he is, in fact, rendering some word from
Irish. Nor is it difficult to discover what that word is. He can only
be referring to the _tuatha_, or stateships, on which the State was
based that was now threatened with extinction; and his demand was that
they should remain intact and unmolested as they had been “two hundred
years ago,” when England was busy with civil war. The demand was
rejected. He could hardly have expected anything else. And when he was
finally defeated five years afterwards, those “nations,” or stateships,
were doomed to a final and terrible ruin.




VI. THE RESURRECTION FROM THE DEAD.


The horror of the Plantations and Confiscations was not due simply to
the land-avarice of a conqueror. In some measure they sprang from that
simple and immediate lust, but really they arose from a much remoter
necessity. They were logically inevitable from the invader’s point of
view. The war of State against State, from that point of view, was
always finally helpless because the Irish State, dismembered though
it was, took strangers coming into the country and enveloped them in
its own polity. And it was indestructible so long as it was based on
the free ownership of land. Therefore to destroy the State it was
necessary to root it out of the land; and as the State was composed of
the people, and could not be composed otherwise, it was necessary to
root them out of the land. What happened to them afterwards was but
an incident in the campaign. They were to be replaced by a new set
of proprietors who would come with the intuitions and desires of the
foreign State, and who would be provided with very good reasons to see
that the new shire-land with themselves as lords thereof did not revert
to stateships in the possession of the people.

Cromwell’s gentle watchword “To Hell or to Connacht,” therefore,
was the logical consummation of that policy. It was the full peal
of bells of which the Statutes of Kilkenny were the first brazen
intimation. And when he had finished his righteous labours for the
Lord God of Hosts the wildest dreamer in the world in his wildest of
dreams would not have thought that his work could be undone. But a
strange thing happened. Official documents indicate that his work was
completely done. The Nation was first decimated--“nits will be lice”
was the playful phrase of his soldiers as they caught babes on their
pike-heads. Then it was swept west of the Shannon; and thoroughly
swept, to judge by the procedure adopted. But within thirty years it
is found back upon the land--O’Neills where O’Neill stateships had
been, Maguires where Maguire stateships had been, and so forth. The
Roll of the Parliament of 1689 as clearly indicates the countries from
which the members came from the names they wore as those names would
have indicated two centuries before. Historians have therefore thought
that, in spite of the effectiveness of Cromwell’s procedure, his work
had not been very completely done. But what is more likely is that,
with hopes raised by the Restoration, the people began steadily to
stream back across the country to the places they knew, where their
fathers had lived in free stateships, in order to be ready for any
change that might come. There is no record of their journey. There is
no place where such a journey could have been recorded. All that is
sure is that, whereas Cromwell intended to sweep the Nation west of
the Shannon, and adopted a procedure well-drafted to achieve his end,
at the end of the century the Nation is found back upon its lands
in the very groupings in which it had held them in old times in free
possession.

The change was that the freemen were a rent-paying tenantry. In other
words, there were, as it were, two layers through the country, and
each layer represented its own State-idea. The topmost layer was the
landlordry, which, being in power, had enforced its own State-idea.
When it became, as it finally did, an absentee landlordry, that
State-idea did not voice any of the desires, expectations or intuitions
of the resident population. In fact, it outraged them at every point.
The more truly was this the case when, under the Penal code, the
submerged layer of the rent-paying tenantry was denied every right
in the existent State. In the words of the Lord Chancellor of that
State, “The law” (that is to say, the law of the imported State)
“did not suppose any such person to exist as an Irish Catholic.” The
two State-ideas were not only mutually contradictory, but they were
deliberately kept apart; and there is no indication to show that those
who carried in their instincts or memories the old State-idea took any
interest in the foreign State except the interest of sufferers.

Such was the position during the eighteenth century. The Nation seemed
dead and buried, with a stone rolled across its sepulchre. Any thought
of its resurrection would have been treated by its jailers as a proper
subject for comedy. Certainly its Polity seemed to have passed into
history--indeed, to have passed beyond history, for those jailers did
not intend to let intellectual curiosity, their’s or others’, stray
into that neglected field. But at this moment, when the Nation lived on
sorrel boiled up with blood let from cattle while the tillage of their
land went to rents, a strange parenthesis in the history of Ireland
occurred. The jailers themselves arose and demanded the liberty for
which the ancient Nation had fought over whom they had been placed in
guard. They demanded it with cannon, musket and pike; and with these
persuasive arguments they won a great measure of that liberty. They
established a Sovereign Parliament under a Dual Monarchy, but with
an utterly unworkable constitution. It was unworkable because they
remembered the source from which they sprang; and would not, and indeed
could not, carry victory to its logical conclusion. If they severed
themselves from the source of their power, they were thrown into the
arms of the Nation over whom they were in guard, and who formed the
overwhelming majority of the population of the country. It was also
unworkable in itself. In the Regency debate they asserted their right
to appoint their own Regent; and that logically meant the right to
appoint their own king; but, as FitzGibbon pointed out, the Seal was
in the care of the English Chancellor, and that gave England the final
word in all matters. It was an independence that needed force at every
moment to make it of any avail; but it was independence, nevertheless,
and therefore by the Act of Union England struck down her own jailers
and abolished their little hour of liberty.

The parenthesis was concluded, and history was able to take its
course again. The liberty that Grattan had won had been the liberty
of the English State in Ireland; the liberty, that is to say, of
the State-idea of the uppermost layer. The overwhelming mass of the
population was comprised of the old Nation with its own and separate
State-idea. It had no part in, and no interest in, the liberty their
jailers had won for themselves; and the State in which that liberty
had been held (if State it may be called that represented nothing of
the population) voiced none of its instincts or desires. But when the
watcher at the gate had been struck down the Nation arose, feebly at
first, and marched into the nineteenth century to claim satisfaction
for those desires and instincts.

The course of the nineteenth century in Ireland is like a resurrection
from the dead. It is full of memories--memories prior to 1603 and the
destruction of the Irish State. The very order is significant. The
Nation had lost certain things in a certain order; in its resurrection
it set about to regain them in the inverse order. It had lost, first,
its State; then its language and culture, the flowers of that State,
had been penalised; then its land, on which the State had been based,
was taken; and finally its liberty of faith. It won back, first, its
liberty to faith; then its land; then its separate culture; and now it
seeks its State.

Literally and precisely the nineteenth century in Ireland is one of
the most remarkable movements in history. It is like a great hall
full of ghostly memories, but ghosts that bewilderingly become flesh
and blood before our very eyes. It is a haunted hall where memories
become realities again, instead of realities passing into memories.
The struggle for Catholic Emancipation, it is true, was not of this
order. It was part of a larger world movement into which the Nation
was compelled by the leadership of one man. It may or may not have
been the best beginning to have made; its fruits were unreal; and the
victory was soon lost sight of by the Nation. But the land-war arose
spontaneously from the people in a form that suggested an ancient
memory. Before it found expression the compiler of the Devon Commission
Digest remarked “that the tenant claims what he calls a tenant-right
in the land, irrespective of any legal claim vested in him, or of any
improvement effected by him.” He mentions it as a curious thing; and to
him, with his foreign State-idea, it was indeed a curious thing; yet it
was only the first re-assertion of a very old memory. For the Nation
was not asserting a tenant’s right, but re-asserting a freeman’s right.
And inasmuch as the landlordry was now mainly absentee it was making
that re-assertion in a solid national formation.

It was for this moment it had clung to the land with such fidelity.
During the first forty years of the century rents were increased by
thirty, forty, and in some cases fifty per cent. On an average it took
a man 250 days of the year to clear his rent; and this meant that the
people could only live on the dregs of the land and on sorrel and
cattle-blood. Yet still they clung. When Pestilence and Starvation
stalked through the land, and the young men and girls had to fly
over-seas, the families still clung to their holdings. Those young
men and girls lived in penury in America in order that their earnings
should be sent home to maintain the grip on the land. The Nation was
holding its old property, and meant to win it back. They arose in war
and shot the usurpers on their ancient property. And then at the height
of that war they suddenly, in a new awakening of memory, put their old
law into operation--the very law by which the land had been ensured
to them as a freeman’s possession. “The body of the law which all
Ireland enacted none dared to transgress; and he that perchance did so
was outlawed from the men of Ireland.” The landlord transgressed that
law, so the people outlawed him. Boycotting according to the foreign
State-idea was lawlessness, yet it was truly the assertion of the law
of one State against the usurpation of another State. Not being the
enactment of its own central authority it was naturally subject to
local abuse; yet it was not lawlessness but the revival of a legal
procedure. And finally the land was won back, though the people were
compelled to pay for the property that had been robbed from them. So
potent a thing was the old expectation.

So deep a national stirring was not without its effects far and wide,
especially as it was less an event in itself than part of a greater
whole. The century was continually shaken by a series of revolutions,
the pulsations of its re-awakening life, each of which struck its
roots down deeper into the past, and brought forth memories like
blossoms that became completer and more perfect with the years. After
the broken attempt for freedom in 1848 a new impetus was given to the
cultural movement that had begun with the Young Irelanders, but this
now took the form of a search into the forgotten manuscripts in the
Irish language, in which the elder culture was stored. After 1867 the
active publication of these records began by a number of societies, and
the Society for the Preservation of the Irish Language was started.
Irishmen’s minds turned to the annals of their own elder history, and
viewed with alarm the perishing, under tense economic strain, of their
national speech, the only adequate vehicle of their distinctive thought
and intuitions. After the Land War the Gaelic League was started as an
organised attempt, not only to save the national language and to compel
its study and use, but to revive all that was distinctively national
by means of that language. It became a shame among Irishmen not to
speak their own language, not to delight in their own music, not to
dance their own dances, and not to make their national past, especially
the past of the days of glory, their intellectual possession. For, as
was inevitable, the awakening had passed out of spontaneity into an
organised intellectual effort, as the spontaneous hours of youth pass
into the discipline of intellectual manhood. Yet neither is artificial,
for both partake of the growth that is part of life.

Both instinct and intellect were present, and each was part of the
other. When an Irishman threw the co-operative idea among farmers as
a means by which they could combat the great organised farming of the
Americas, the people took slowly to the idea as a foreign economic
theory. Then they seized it, and turned their co-operative societies
into rural communities that were a re-birth in modern conditions of
their old stateships. Most of them, as the fruit of the Land War, were
now beginning to own their farms, and that gave them the foundation
of which the stateships had been built. In the central hall of the
co-operative society the economic business of the community was
discussed, and around it its artisans and artificers collected. That
was done naturally, as the result of instinct, but then intellect
saw the natural drift, and (not too bravely perhaps, through fear
of “political” consequences) sought to guide it definitely in the
direction indicated by history.

If there were greater courage and clearer thought, together with the
freedom within which thought and courage could act, such communities,
instead of being, as they now are, only economic and social units of
the national life, could also become the recognised political units of
that life. In other words, they could become stateships awaiting their
final integration into a State that would equally be a translation
into modern conditions of the old Irish State. Though they are social
units their social life is stagnant, because (again for what are called
“political” reasons) those who control their guidance are afraid to
guide it into the only cultural life any nation can know and within
which can find liberty: its own. Were the enthusiasm of the Gaelic
League--that is to say, the national enthusiasm--linked to the economic
life of such communities, were Irish music, Irish dance, Irish history
and Irish tale-telling provided in its halls of a winter’s evening,
the flowing together of both streams would make these communities,
not only stateships, but centres of national life as they were in
the days of old. They would maintain their own musicians and their
own historians and professors, would vie with one another in their
excellence and exchange them with one another. They would maintain
their own physicians as the older stateships did. They would elect
their own administrative heads, and, under their presidency, would meet
in their own assemblies to order and control, not only their business
transactions, but all the life contained within them. In their own
arbitration courts they could control all their internal litigation,
and compel recognition of the findings of such courts by the force of
the whole community as the old stateships did.

To such a point has the national resurrection come in the awakening of
its distinctive State, that these things could be brought to pass by
the smallest manipulation and arrangement. Yet in the early centuries
their completion and organisation required the function of a State with
its central authority. Not only did the parts make the State but the
State also made the parts. Each acted together, and flowed together.
So it will be again; and the Nation has come to a point when it only
awaits its State.




VII. AT THE GATES OF THE FUTURE.


If there is one thing sure for the future of an Ireland free to
develop its own State it is this, that one by one the moulds shaped
by England for its governance will be thrown back into the cauldron
and new moulds made to accord with the Nation’s own sense of wisdom
and economy. Urban Councils, District Councils, Poor Law Guardians,
and County Councils, all that they are and all that they represent are
destined for the cauldron in the forms in which they at present are
known. The whole English political configuration of Ireland is destined
to rejection (it never really existed otherwise than in a partial
state of rejection) simply because it expresses little that is real in
the life of the people. No organisation is good or bad in itself as a
scheme; it is only good or bad in the degree in which it does, or does
not, effectively and economically organise a flexible life for some
definite end which it has to serve. In fact, the better it is the less
will it be in evidence as a thing in itself, apart from the elements
comprising it. The old Irish State was a good organisation, because
it is almost impossible to think of it apart from the life which it
contained and conveyed, so nearly identical were the two things. The
stateships were the people and the people were the stateships; and
that is why the conqueror found plantations necessary; for it was
impossible to break one without removing the other. The modern state
of Ireland is not, in that sense, an organisation at all; it is simply
a configuration imposed upon its life, not fitting that life at all,
neither expressing, containing nor conveying that life, and therefore
used or abused by it according as occasion offers.

Even the very counties, those results of the breaking up of the
stateships and the making of English shire-lands, are unreal things
that express little of the life of the people. Their long continuance
has made them familiar, and so has given them a fictitious reality;
but they again are a configuration and not an organisation. They may
persist for awhile with that fictitious life, chiefly because they have
become themes of local partisanship; but in the degree in which the
Nation sets about to displace its configuration by a real organisation,
they must inevitably pass into a historical memory, and not a very
pleasing historical memory at that.

Everything that has been introduced by England into Ireland is destined
to rejection, and not as a matter of prejudice, but as an inevitable
fact in statesmanship. Suits cut for other people, or demanded by other
people’s necessities, are the proper wear for clowns. At best these
things were wrung as concessions given with poor grace after long and
bitter war; at worst they were anticipations of further war and the
spontaneous creation of an alien thought. The first was better than the
second because it did spring from the initiative of the people, and
partially and ineffectually answered that demand, while the second
sprang from the same alien intention that has created three centuries
of almost unremitting warfare. And whether that intention stalk as an
undisguised foe, or prank about with the antics of a philanthropist,
the result in statesmanship is the same. Instead of effecting an
organisation it creates a configuration; instead of producing human
contentment, comfort and ease it produces irritation, exasperation
and enmity; instead of being as flexible as the life it contains it
is as rigid as the thought that made it; instead of being capable of
development it is only capable of being broken or abused; instead of
being a National State it is a national despair and futility. Therefore
statesmanship must neglect its achievements (though continuity of
government may compel their continuance for awhile) and must make a
direct approach to the national life, and its needs and necessities,
human and economic, in order to build again, however slowly to build,
from the foundations the structure that those foundations decree and
suggest.

It is in the discovery of those foundations that history becomes a
matter of first importance. Not a portion of that history; not the
history of the eighteenth century, which did not express the life of
the people but the life of a small colony the proportion of which to
the whole is even smaller now than it was then, besides being under the
influence of the awakening of the nineteenth century; but the whole of
that history, from the beginnings to the present, for in Irish history
probably more than in any other the end is in the beginning and the
beginning in the end. That we have already seen. We have seen, first,
the National State as it existed, and we saw that it was indeed a
National State although it was not finally centralised before it was
assaulted. We have seen the assault that suspended its completion, and
we saw that that assault meant for some centuries the war of a State
against a State, a Polity against a Polity, a foreign and alien polity
seeking to break and displace the polity of the Nation. We have seen
that polity broken and displaced, and we saw the ideas that went to
the building of that polity lying resident in the people and creating
a continual warfare with the alien polity that had been imposed upon
the country from without. We have seen that those ideas maintained the
warfare unceasingly, it being the first principle of life to find an
outlet for the ideas of the mind and the impulses of the blood, and to
war for them when they are thwarted; and we saw that warfare successful
in winning back much of what had been lost, and especially winning
back the land on which the old polity had been based. We have seen
those ideas breaking out in some remarkable acts reminiscent of the old
process of law; and we saw that when some scheme was advocated to the
people that could be worked independently of the alien polity it was
taken and bent into the form of the stateships in which the old polity
had been expressed. In a word, we have seen the end in the beginning,
and the beginning in the end, with a persistent continuity throughout.
The question is, how may that continuity be carried forward, and some
State be devised that shall express the National intuition and desire,
and be the old State re-born into modern conditions while perfectly
fitting and conveying the requirements of a new and intricate life?

Manifestly in the first place the incompleted work of the nineteenth
century, where the nation clearly asserted its desire, must be brought
as speedily as possible to an end. That is to say, Land Purchase
must be completed. This is necessary for several reasons, all of
which vitally affect each part of the country, since nations are not
tissues of separate interests, nor even an entanglement of separate
interests, but co-ordinated wholes. It is economically necessary.
Industrial centres, such as Belfast, depend for their enterprise on
capital accumulated, not primarily from their own reserves, but from
other sources. In Ireland those other sources are mainly derived from
farmers’ deposits. The sooner, therefore, farmers can be relieved from
the uneconomical drain on their industry known as rent the sooner
will they be able to accumulate balances that will be available for
industrial enterprise. Sound economy suggests that the main source of
a nation’s wealth, its land, should be freed from the burden of rents,
especially as these rents are usually spent to the advantage of other
countries. It is also politically necessary. It is not at all likely
that an agitation that convulsed the nineteenth century will die away
with its work incompleted; and no nation can afford to let its path
be encumbered by a continual agitation the justice of which has been
admitted. The necessity in statesmanship follows closely upon this.
The nation has clearly indicated that, just as the old State was built
on the free possession of the land, so must the new State be built.
It being the task of statesmanship to give expression to the desires
of a nation while preserving the unity and balance of the whole, this
particular desire must be satisfied, and built into the Polity, if the
work of statesmanship is not to fall into ruin in its hands.

Yet in order that Land Purchase should be completed the Nation must be
financially free, without burdens placed upon it by any considerations
outside its shores. Needless to say, Land Purchase under an Irish State
will be a different matter from the same purchase as devised by foreign
governments. The Nation will pay a single-minded attention to its own
interests. Its good faith will be an essential part of those interests;
but it will not be easily embarrassed by fictitious prices and delaying
methods to inflate values. Nevertheless, much of the world’s wealth
having somehow escaped in gas and shell-splinters, and Ireland being
as the result of long oppression a poor nation, the completion of Land
Purchase will require a nation absolutely unencumbered by any other
demands on its wealth than the demand of its own problems.

That is to say, before any building can proceed its foundation must
be assured, the foundation being the same as preceded the building in
the old State. That building, it will be remembered, was not possible,
and the State could not be said to have begun, till there was a
central authority strong enough to make the parts out of earlier, more
independent units, and frame them into a national whole. That central
authority will again be necessary; and in asking the question, of what
sort shall it be, it will be well to suppose nothing but to begin from
the beginnings.

Never in the history of the Irish Nation (if we except the Parliament
of 1689, which was framed on earlier models drawn from other than Irish
sources) has any body ever sat at all similar to a modern Parliament.
In the old Irish State the elected monarch convened great councils
charged with special functions and duties. There was a council of
brehons, a council of administrative rulers, a council of historians,
or public recorders, and a council of poets--all of them public
officials, with their parts to play in their various stateships. Each
council decided in its own affairs, and where necessary, for instance
as between rulers and brehons, or brehons and recorders, the monarch
wrought harmony between their decisions for the smooth working of the
State. But that is not to say that, if the Nation had been left free
to develop and augment its own polity, something in the nature of an
assembly drawn from popular sources would not have been found necessary
to assist or displace the monarch and his personal council. Had it
been possible to create such an assembly early a central stability
would have existed, drawn from all the parts of the State and therefore
holding all the parts together, that would have provided the State
with just that central authority that it needed. However that be,
parliaments, or assemblies of popular representatives, have become an
essential part of the modern mind, as providers and correctives of a
central government. They have proved to be corrupt servers of special
interests; but that is because they have been too much trusted without
supplementing them with councils each representing its own interest,
as the monarch in the Irish State supplemented his executive authority
with councils each having power, subject to the national unity of
administration, over its special concerns.

No student of the recent action of parliaments is at all likely to
be weighed to the earth by his overpowering admiration for them as
effective instruments for the will of peoples. They are, it is true,
the displacement of one kind of arbitrary power by another kind of
arbitrary power. They are, in the form in which we best know them, the
substitution of a king and his chosen advisers by a government and
an assembly of popular representatives to which it is responsible.
Accepting that substitution as the central authority by which a State
may be created, is it possible to carry into the change the spirit
of the old State? The answer to that question is that the spirit
of the old State not only may be so conveyed, but that it actually
corrects, in great measure, the modern weakness of parliaments, by
bringing them into closer relation with the differing and special
interests of the Nation. The translation of the old State, that now
lives in the intuitions and expectations of the Nation, into the
modern conditions that are now part of the Nation’s surface-thinking,
corrects the weakness of modern ideas while providing just the kind of
centralisation that the old State lacked.

The essential part of the working of the old State was clearly the
convocation of its great councils. While these met at regular periods
the State continued its central function, and existed as a whole. When
they were discontinued, as they sometimes were, the State fell into
disarray, and existed only in its parts. Now in modern times, as it so
happens, Irishmen meeting in their own concerns and acting at their own
initiative created just such another council. The work of the Recess
Committee resulted in the formation of the Department of Agriculture,
the working of which was intended to lie at the instance and in the
power of a Council of Farmers elected through the country to manage
their own concerns. Perhaps no better instance could be given of the
tragic futility of trying to work the conceptions of one Polity through
the conditions of its alien rival. For the President of the Council
became Minister of an alien bureaucratic government. He took his orders
from that government, even though every farmer in Ireland was outraged
by the effect of those orders. He took his salary from that government,
and existed at the will of that government, with the result that the
Council that was supposed to express and control the interest of
farming in Ireland was itself controlled by the interests of farmers in
somebody else’s country, and so was brought to a nullity. Moreover,
while the farmers met in council to study their exclusive interests
their President openly expressed his intention to study the interests
of traders, even when the two interests were opposed to one another;
and as the Council of Farmers had no means of enforcing its will, and
no court to which to appeal, it fell into decay, and by neglect came in
the end to be largely an echo of its President’s will.

Yet, though the Department of Agriculture is an eloquent example of how
things ought not to be done, it does in fact contain a striking idea,
evolved by consultation of Irishmen on Irish soil, that carries the
conception of the old Irish State. If an Irish Assembly, or Parliament,
were surrounded by a number of such councils, representing each of the
special interests or concerns of the Nation, the elder State would be
translated into modern conditions and transfigure those conditions by
drawing the arbitrary and purely theoretical business of parliaments
into a definite relation to the life of a nation. Instead of the
monarch and his court would appear a government and the representative
assembly from which it is drawn and to which it is responsible. Instead
of three or four special councils representing the comparatively simple
texture of the life in the first millenium would appear a number
of such special councils representing the proportionately greater
complexity of the life of to-day. And just as in the old State each
council held authority in its own concerns leaving to the monarch the
co-ordination of the whole, so the modern councils would each rule
their own affairs subject to the control of the assembly of the Nation.

There would thus be two different kinds of representation gathered
together. There would be the direct representation of the Nation, and
there would be the representation of the special interests the union
and pattern of which create the national life. Both would meet in the
Government.

The councils would include every sort of interest, but they would not
be of equal size or of the same formation. Both size and formation
would correspond to the internal requirements of each interest, or
concern. Those representing Farming and Labour, for instance, would
necessarily be large, not only because of the size of the interests
they would represent, but also because the nature of those interests
would demand a wide expression of opinion. Those representing Law,
Capital and Education would be smaller, because of the narrower and
more special nature of their interests. Those representing the Army and
Naval Defence would not only be smaller yet, but would necessarily be
formed in other ways. Each council would be formed by the direct vote
of all those in the country engaged in that branch of work. The Council
of Local Administration would naturally consist of the elected heads
of stateships, and would thus exactly correspond to the Council of
Rulers in the old State. But the Council of the Army, Naval Defence and
the Police would either consist of heads of departments, by promotion
or appointment, or partly of such heads and partly of men chosen by
the direct vote of officers and rank and file. The details, for the
moment, are immaterial. They would require closer attention at the
moment of creation. The main matter is that each council would control
its own affairs by the direct representation of all the people in the
country engaged in its practical conduct. And these special interests
would meet the direct representation of the Nation by Assembly in the
Government of the day.

The Government would, by necessity, depending as it would on the will
of the Assembly, be found from and always be responsible to that
Assembly. That is to say, the largest party, or combination of parties,
just as in the present clumsy theory of government, would create
the Government of the day. But the Ministers of Government would be
presidents of various councils, and would reflect their desire. Instead
of evolving theories from consultation with the permanent officials
of departments, as happens in England and most other countries, they
would be directly in touch with the interests over whose destinies
they preside, and their attention would be occupied with the immediate
practical questions raised from time to time. If some scheme suggested
itself to them as desirable they would first have to win the consent
and approval of their respective councils before coming to the Assembly
with them; and when they came, they would come not only as Ministers of
the Government but as spokesmen of their councils. Thus the clumsiness
and constant injustice of majority government would continually be
refined by contact with living issues. Within the body of the existing
law each special interest would be the arbiter of its own affairs.
When fresh legislation became necessary by changed conditions, or
through other causes, its council would discuss it, formulate it, and
be responsible through its president for the initiative of bringing it
before the Assembly of the Nation.

A system such as this, as has been said, would bring into joint
operation two kinds of representation: the representation of special
interests and the representation of the whole people. Clearly they
would require a solvent and a corrective. New legislation might be
initiated by a council and be considerably altered by the Assembly.
This would naturally only be the case in extreme cases, for the will
of such councils would naturally have a far higher authority than the
sole will of one man in consultation with permanent officials. Yet
the contingency would have to be provided for. For the council might
reject the amended form of its wish, as it would have the right to do.
Or the Assembly might reject the suggestion altogether, or compel its
withdrawal, with the result that the initiative might be repeated.
Very properly the final decision would rest with the Assembly, for it
would be responsible not to special interests, but to the whole Nation.
Yet the councils would equally require some further court to which to
appeal on the argument that no Assembly at all times and in all cases
represents a nation’s will, however frequently it be elected. They
would therefore demand some court in which they themselves had a direct
voice.

This could be created by a Senate half as large as the Assembly. A
third of the Senate could be created by large electoral areas, say the
provinces, voting by proportional representation. By that method men
would be chosen who commanded general respect but did not wear a party
colour or control a local following pronounced enough to win favour
at the hustings, and who, on the other hand, could not be said to
represent any special interest. But two-thirds of the Senate would be
chosen in equal proportions by the various councils acting as electoral
colleges. Electoral colleges, that act simply and only as electoral
colleges, as in America, have generally proved to be failures. They
dilute the popular will to no particular purpose, and lend themselves
to intrigue. But the councils would not be primarily elected as
electoral colleges. They would be elected to control and direct their
own special interests. Only in a secondary capacity would they act as
electoral colleges. Nor would their appointments to the Senate have
the right to sit both in the Councils and in the Senate. Men or women
chosen for the Senate by the various councils would sit and act only in
the Senate.

Legislation initiated in the Assembly would proceed automatically to
the Senate, before which body, if a council felt aggrieved, its case
would be argued by its representatives. If Assembly and Senate agreed
no further could be said in the matter. If they disagreed, after a
given length of time (during which time the subject of dispute would
be laid aside) both Assembly and Senate would sit, debate and vote on
the matter as one body, and the decision so taken would be final during
the life of that Assembly.

It is claimed that a system such as this reflects the spirit of the
old Irish State as translated into modern conditions, answering at
one time the instincts that have persisted in the Nation and the
surface-thinking it has since acquired. It gives no undue obeisance to
the modern invention of parliaments, but draws the Government created
by an Assembly of Representatives into definite relation with the
interests it is supposed to study while making those interests the
deciders of their own affairs within the limits of national agreement.
It could not help but reflect the instincts and thoughts of the
Nation. Being brought so closely into touch with its life it would at
once react to the changes of that life. Yet the stability and central
function of government would be assured. The utmost liberty would be
given to the parts while ensuring the central action of the whole, as
the limbs of the body have an independent liberty while obeying the
rhythm created and disciplined by the mind.

Certain parts of government belong so essentially to the business of
the whole that they would not come under the review of any special
council. The Minister, or Ministers, in charge of these would be
responsible to none but the Nation, for they would directly concern the
Nation as a whole and not in any one of its parts. The chief of these
of course is finance. The only council which the Minister of Finance
could consult or advise would be the Assembly of Representatives, as
drawn directly, well or ill, from the people’s choice. All direct
money arrangements, such as taxes, the creation of debt or credit,
the purchase of properties or monopolies, and so forth, would lie in
his care, would arise at his initiative and would be solved by the
Assembly. The Senate could claim the right to debate any such measure,
and to suggest alterations, but whether the Assembly accepted or
rejected these alterations would lie at its own discretion.

There would be other matters of the same nature. The creation of
new forms or units of government, for example, or changes in the
constitution, where rendered necessary by changing conditions, or
any matter outside the range of the councils, or transcending their
capacity, or any new legislation at the initiative of one council that
would demand some independent measure to bring it into co-ordination
with the working of some other council, would all be of this kind, and
would lie at the initiative of the Chief Minister of State, who would
be responsible for the State to its elected President and would be
chosen by him to create the Ministry.

Such business would naturally be more frequent at the beginning of
the working of the State than when it was in complete movement.
For example, the first work of the State would inevitably be the
re-creation of its local government in order to bring it into
conformity with practical necessities on the lines of the stateships
of the old State. Nothing more unwieldy and uneconomical than the
present system, or lack of system, could very well have been devised.
It is a patchwork quilt of foreign ideas, that express no realities in
Ireland, that are alternately the theme of the mirth and the tears,
but always the derision, of Irishmen, and that even in the country of
their invention have not proved to be a conspicuous success. Urban
Councils, District Councils, Poor Law Guardians, Town Commissioners
and County Councils all have their independent lives without being
fitted in as parts of a co-related whole. Seen in contrast with the
compactness and completeness of the old stateships nothing could seem
more haphazard and accidental. So long as they exist, as they now do,
it will be impossible to speak of an Irish State, for a State does not
exist only by reason of the larger, more central forms of government,
but in the degree in which those larger forms are drawn into relation
with smaller and local units of government. They neither correspond
to any efficiency in the State nor to any efficiency in relation to
their own needs. They divide up a given area into a number of separate
and even opposed units, whereas the life of that area is generally
itself a unit, however variously its activities may be expressed. A
small township and the country lying about it, for example, can only
artificially be broken up into two units, one the town and the other
the country, for their life is woven of one piece. Even the industries
of the towns depend on the country lying round about. Any weakening of
the whole weakens each one of its parts, and the whole is weakened by
being broken into irresponsible parts. For the life of the whole exists
as a community not as a patchwork.

Moreover, the present councils are neither large enough nor small
enough for efficiency. A very small council would create great rivalry
in its election and would cause a fierce light to beat on all its
actions. Under such circumstances corruption would be difficult.
But a council of this sort would not be representative of the life
it governed. A large council, on the other hand, would have its own
kind of efficiency, and would be representative of all the life
it expressed. It would naturally have to create its officers of
government, from whom it could withdraw the power it gave when they
ceased to express its will. Expressing itself by way of debate it
would create an interest in local government, and a feeling of general
responsibility, that cannot now be said to exist. The subjects debated
in the local Assembly would be discussed by the hearthside; the life
of the people would be quickened; and they would not reserve all their
thought for the larger national questions, but would expend it also
on their immediate local interests. Thus again corruption would be
made difficult. A field would be offered for the discussion of new
ideas of local government, local improvement or trade economy and
efficiency, whereas at the present moment local councils are sealed
chambers that by their construction can never admit fresh air and are
the natural breeding places for corruption. It is easy, and just, to
censure corruption in these local bodies, but it is yet more necessary
to see that their constitution simply invites corruption, just as it
invites their capture by one or two interests that rule them to the
exclusion of all other interests. Not only because they purport to
represent unreal and arbitrarily distinguished parts of a life that is
a fellowship (without even doing that much well), but also because of
their very form and constitution, such bodies have reduced the local
life of Ireland to a tangle of conflicting and corrupt interests.

These two criticisms suggest an obvious remedy. The first need is
to restore the life of the community, in a fellowship of town and
country, urban and rural, within a given area. The second need is
to let that community express its life, and assume control of all
its local affairs, in a legislative assembly of not less than fifty
and not more than a hundred. The satisfaction of these two needs
suggests difficulties that are incidental to each of them in turn as
new enterprises in statesmanship. Fortunately, as we are following a
historical continuity in the life of a Nation, answers are suggested
to both of these difficulties out of the old State, and only require
adaptation and re-framing to make them suit modern conditions.

The first difficulty is to find the natural area within which the
life of a community would be comprised. Here, manifestly, the past
would supply a very helpful answer, if it could be found. The area
comprised by the old stateships would naturally finally be decreed
by their internal needs and their external play and interplay upon
one another--that is to say, partly by certain obvious geographical
necessities and partly by economic conditions. Rivers, lakes, mountain
ranges and the sea would impose natural boundaries; and equal
accessibility to both mountain pasture and tillage, or alternatively
different stateships taking up different kinds of life, would suggest
other boundaries. These things can in many cases be traced in the
boundaries of the old stateships where they are discoverable--as in
many cases they are. Clearly since then the life of the people has
changed in many ways, and the statesman thinking of modern conditions
would find other boundaries naturally suggested to him. The transition
from the modern artificial limits of local life to the proper
communities, or fellowships, of the future would not be easy. Yet if
certain boundaries, drawn from a comparison of the old stateships with
the new requirements, were decreed, subsequent experience would soon
suggest a revision of working areas where these were found necessary.
At the present time these areas in many cases have already been found
in great measure by the co-operative societies that have created
petty stateships of their own. Such societies have been grouped round
an economic idea that, embodying as it does the sense of unity and
fellowship about which the new communities would be grouped, would
probably be adopted in some form by the stateships of the future;
but that would be for themselves to decide by debate in assembly.
And when it is remembered that some of these societies have already
undertaken from the power used for their factories to supply light to
neighbouring townships it is obvious that a larger relation for the
life of a stateship is at once indicated.

Clearly the past is equally full of suggestion in answering the second
difficulty. To ask, what officers would the assemblies of the new
stateships create for the conduct of its government, is at once to
think of the past. In the degree in which the life of these stateships
became more various its officers, or ministers, would become more
numerous, while if it remained simple they would be few. The first
would be the President of the Assembly, who would take his place in the
Council of Local Administration. The stateship would take control of
its own internal litigation under its own law officer, and the lawyers
beneath him would not merely be advocates in criminal actions, but
would serve as arbitrators in actions for tort. It would have its own
Finance Minister, its own Minister of Public Health, and if necessary
its own ministers of trade and agriculture, for local life in these
questions will not remain as stagnant as it is now, especially in the
wider areas that the stateships would include. Such ministers would
hold their power from the Assembly, and could work with committees
appointed by the Assembly. Offices, such as that of the recorder,
the surveyor, the doctors and the nurses would be filled by public
examination, but the actions of those who filled them would come
under the departments of government under the constant review of the
Assembly, which could terminate appointments at its will.

Stateships such as these would be the recognised units of the State.
That is to say, they would be political units, and would thus be the
constituencies for the return of one or more members, according to
population, to the Assembly of the Nation. From them that Assembly
would be constituted, just as the Councils would each be constituted
by the vote of all those in the Nation engaged in its own branch of
the national life. They would also be economic units, both for raising
and expending its own local taxation and for meeting the levies of the
State. Some of those levies would be for moneys now chargeable at the
discretion of local bodies. Any wise State will at once take within its
own control all the main arteries of communication through the country,
such as railways, canals and roads. It could re-imburse itself for the
maintenance of some or all of these by levies on the stateships through
which they pass; and the amount of these levies could come under the
review of the Council of Local Administration before being passed to
the decision of the Assembly of the Nation.

City Corporations are already such stateships, though with a more
compact life. As such they would remain; and the different nature of
their life would require corresponding changes in their constitution.
They would necessarily have to keep the same control that they now
possess. For instance, they now bear the responsibility for their own
streets and roadways; and so it would remain; for their roads are
not arteries of the country, intersecting many stateships, but only
arteries of themselves intersecting themselves. So, in most matters
corporations, having already become stateships, would remain as they
now are. The only change they would require to bring them into line
with their fellow stateships would be that their councils would need
to be enlarged. In most cases this enlargement would not need to be
considerable, for it is extremely probable that in the course of time
the country stateships would outrival the city stateships in wealth,
responsibility and the size of their respective corporate undertakings.
Thus alone can the life of the country maintain its own against the
life of the cities.

This corporate wealth and responsibility of the country stateships
would be the greater, and they would better preserve their social and
economic unity, if they decided to use the wealth of the whole for the
equal advantage of each of their members, regarding themselves, as
the old stateships apparently did in the fifteenth century, as great
trading units for export. That is to say, their members would not, if
they constituted themselves in this form, trade upon one another in an
uneconomical and wasteful warfare; they would create great communal
stores under the control of their assemblies, they would purchase
all their materials, domestic, farming and industrial, at the lowest
possible cost by the purchasing power of the whole stateship, and
they would bend all their efforts, together with the other stateships
under the Council of Trade, to capturing the markets of the world for
their produce. Competition, instead of being a destructive element
within the State, would become a fighting quality of the State itself
in its rivalry with other States, every man’s effort within the Nation
being bent to this end. The technical education of the schools, in
the application of the highest science to the Nation’s business,
would be drafted to this end under the control of the State and the
administration of the stateships.

Nor would the life of culture be neglected. The stateship so
constituted would employ, for example, its own chemist, not only for
its technical work, but for lectures. So would it also employ its own
historian and its own body of musicians. For when men are relieved
from the necessity of competition among themselves, and realise the
dignity of a life fellowship, they realise also the other dignities and
beauties of life. The finer flowers of life cannot bloom over a soil
choked by mutual rapacity, but when the soil is cleared by a cleaner
and more economical order those flowers, being a purer output of the
spirit of man, would find their natural life possible again. The old
stateships are the best indication of this. Men were neither more nor
less naturally corrupt then than they are now. Yet they were proud of
their poets; they esteemed the possession of a poet whose fame was wide
to be a high honour; poets coming from other stateships were received
with distinction and hospitality; and when in the Contention of the
Bards in the seventeenth century poets all over the country conducted
a controversy, it was not only they who rivalled one another, but the
stateships whom they represented who were pitted against one another.
That was when the stranger was warring through the land, and if such a
condition did not still the Nation’s culture, how much purer would be
the opportunity if a State order created a condition of life in which
the human desire for rivalry became the asset of a community instead of
the destruction of a community? It is the first function of a State to
create such an order; but in the case of Ireland that order lies ready
to her hand in her past Statehood that only requires to be adapted to
the needs and necessities of her new life.




VIII. APPROACHING PROBLEMS.


The purpose of this little book has been to examine the working of the
old Irish State, to show how that State was affected by the attempt
at military conquest, to see how, when that conquest succeeded in
overthrowing the form of the State and uprooting it out of the soil,
its memory persisted in the instincts and expectations of the Nation,
and made all the uprisings of the Nation malleable to its ancient will,
and finally to see how far those instincts could be translated into the
new conditions and experiences of the national life in a re-birth of
the old State. It is no part of its business to examine the problems
that will beset the future State of Ireland. It has a sufficiently
hardy task to carry out, however inefficiently, its declared purpose
without undertaking expeditions not proper to that purpose. Yet certain
problems lie within the automatic function of such a State, and some of
these may be briefly indicated.

There is, for example, the question of taxation. In most countries of
late movements have arisen demanding that taxation should be charged
upon wealth and not upon the heads of the population. This has,
necessarily perhaps, taken the form of a class-war in these other
countries; but it is at bottom not a class question at all, but a
question of a sound and a fairly obvious economic principle. A State
can only levy taxation in proportion to its wealth, and therefore
can only levy taxation upon that wealth, wherever that wealth be
held. To attempt to discover that wealth by a mere counting of heads
is a procedure the falsity of which could be exposed by a class of
school-children. That means that any taxation by heads of population,
direct or indirect, however it be scaled, graded or disguised, is bad
national economy, and therefore bad national finance. How otherwise,
then, can taxation be levied? Here again the old State comes with a
suggestion. We have seen that, though there is no direct proof that
the system was completed, its taxation was levied on the stateships,
presumably with some regard to their capacities. That taxation was
redistributed by them in their own assemblies according to their local
circumstances. If that method were adopted again the State would derive
its revenues from its stateships, and would levy it in proportion
to their abilities. That proportion would at least be more easy to
estimate in their case than in the case of individuals; whereas if the
stateships became not merely economic units but trading units their
balance-sheets would at once reveal the proportion of their capacities,
and the State would thus be enabled to charge its taxation directly
upon its wealth in an equitable ratio.

At first the incidence of this system would be light, but it would
gather importance with time. It is agreed that Ireland will need to
protect, and in some cases heavily protect, her young industries. But
in the degree in which such protection succeeded in its intention it
would cease to be profitable from the point of view of taxation. Then
the Nation would need to claim a levy on the wealth it had created for
itself, for the purposes of government and security.

Such a system would in great measure answer the question of the unused
mineral resources of the country. These are, as is well-known, very
considerable, and one of the first tasks of an Irish State would be
to see that they were used--though it would be an equally important
task to see that they were not mined so that they rendered whole
tracts of countryside foul and filthy as in other countries. Such
mineral deposits in the soil of a country are part of the national
wealth. Its State cannot grant monopolies of them to individuals or
companies, especially in a country where the soil of old was held and
of late was won back by its people. They would naturally, in such a
State as has been outlined, be held and worked by the stateships in
whose territories they lay, under the direction of the State. But then
the question arises, what royalties would the State charge for the
working of what truly is the wealth of the whole Nation and not the
sole possession of any of its stateships? And the answer is that if
taxation were levied on stateships according to their capacities this
would automatically adjust itself without the necessity of adopting any
direct device.

Then there is the question of the promotion of industry. No State
can leave this to hazard. It must be made part of a disciplined
effort. Nations must be made as far as is possible self-subsistent.
No government can stand idly by and say that its people are either
naturally industrial or agricultural, or declare piously that the whims
and hazards of private enterprise are the workings of wisdom. Attitudes
of this kind are the abrogation of all government. Governments, in the
degree in which they are governments, must set out to create what,
after careful thought, they conceive to be a living and liveable
balance of the activities of the national life, and to create it by
and in an order that ensures dignity, decency and subsistence to all
its people. The task may not be easy, but any neglect of it is treason
to the State. In an Ireland organised by responsible stateships the
task would be simplified. Ireland possesses, possibly in as great a
measure as any nation, what is known as White-Power. By harnessing the
manifold rivers that intersect her soil electricity can be directed to
each of these stateships for their use in order that they might as
communities create industries within their territories. It would be to
their interest to do so, if only to keep their population within their
fellowships, and to the general wealth of the fellowships, instead of
letting them drift to the stateships of the cities. But the general
direction of such efforts would lie with the State, which would seek
so to order things that there be in the national life a balance of all
the parts that are necessary to a self-subsistent and thriving nation.
Ireland would remain mainly agricultural, because of the richness of
the soil and because the neglect of agriculture is national suicide;
but she will cease to repeat the words of her enemies that her destiny
is agricultural only. Her destiny is what she will make it by an
organised and disciplined endeavour.

Finally there is the question of the language. This does not truly lie
within the scope of the book, but only because without it the book
would not be possible. Firstly, because it was in the language of the
Irish Nation that the Irish State was created; secondly, because it
was only when the language was recovered as an intellectual possession
and passion that the outlines of that State could be seen clearly, the
memories of which at that time were struggling in the acts and deeds
of a resurgent people. We have been tracing a historical continuity,
but the key of that continuity is the language. The State of the
future might be built on the foundations of the past, but the Nation
inhabiting it would not be the same Nation if it spoke by the tongue
of a foreigner; and then it is probable that the State would not
fully answer its expectations, because the change of a nation’s speech
implies a weakening of its surety of intuition. The recovery of the
language in daily use is not a sentimentalism but a national necessity
if the Nation is to act with the full certainty of its hereditary mind.
It is also necessary to its dignity among the nations--which also is
not merely an honourable emotion but actually an estimable quality in
commerce. Ireland will utter her State aright when she utters her own
speech aright, and when she does both other nations will look at her,
think separately of her and deal directly with her. Her dignity will
be a national beauty, and will aid her prosperity. For it is not when
a Nation is crowned that its dignity is completed, but when it speaks;
and not when it lisps with a stranger’s tongue but when it speaks with
its own.

       *       *       *       *       *

PADRAIC PEARSE

COLLECTED WORKS

=Vol. I--PLAYS, POEMS AND STORIES.= Demy 8vo. 7s. 6d. net.

He was an out-and-out rebel ... a rebel who was a poet, a visionary who
worked not for prosperity, or even for political freedom, but for an
idea.--_Times Literary Supplement._

Probably no more selfless spirit ever broke itself against the might
of the Iron Age than this man’s spirit, which was lit up by love of
children and country, a dreamer with his heart in the Golden Age.--_The
Irish Homestead._

The publication ... of the literary works of the leaders of
the Irish Insurrection has helped us more than might have been
expected to understand the motives and hopes which lay behind their
action.--_Westminister Gazette._

=Vol. II--SONGS OF THE IRISH REBELS=, and Specimens from an Irish
Anthology. Gaelic Poems collected and translated by PADRAIC PEARSE.
Demy 8vo. 5s. net.

=THE STORY OF A SUCCESS.= An account of St. Enda’s School by PADRAIC
PEARSE, edited and completed by DESMOND RYAN. Illustrated. 3s. 6d. net.

=THE NATIONAL BEING.= Some Thoughts on an Irish Polity. By Æ. Crown 8vo
5s. net.

“Commands respect as an expression of the aspirations of a true friend
of Ireland, and an indefatigable worker in the one field in which a
constructive and reconciling policy has been carried to a successful
issue in that country.”--_The Spectator._

“A great book for Ireland, and for the socialist movement.”--_Labour
Leader._

A HISTORY OF THE IRISH REBELLION OF 1916

By WARRE B. WELLS and N. MARLOWE. Cloth, 7s. 6d. net. Cheap edition,
Wrappers, 1s. 6d. net. Contains Casement’s Speech from the Dock.

=THE INSURRECTION IN DUBLIN.= By JAMES STEPHENS. 2s. 6d. net. Wrappers,
1s. net.

=MY LITTLE FARM.= By “PAT,” Author of “Economics for Irishmen,” and the
“Sorrows of Ireland.” Wrappers, 1s. net.

       *       *       *       *       *

Transcriber’s Notes:

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