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Title: National Being
Some Thoughts on an Irish Polity
Author: (A.E.)George William Russell
Release Date: May, 2005 [EBook #8104]
Posting Date: July 29, 2009
Language: English
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THE NATIONAL BEING
Some Thoughts on an Irish Polity
By "A.E." [George William Russell]
To The Right Hon. Sir Horace Plunkett
A good many years ago you grafted a slip of poetry on your economic
tree. I do not know if you expected a hybrid. This essay may not be
economics in your sense of the word. It certainly is not poetry in my
sense. The Marriage of Heaven and Earth was foretold by the ancient
prophets. I have seen no signs of that union taking place, but I have
been led to speculate how they might be brought within hailing distance
of each other. In my philosophy of life, we are all responsible for
the results of our actions and their effects on others. This book is
a consequence of your grafting operation, and so I dedicate it to
you.--A.E.
I.
In the year nineteen hundred and fourteen Anno Domini, amid a world
conflict, the birth of the infant State of Ireland was announced. Almost
unnoticed this birth, which in other times had been cried over the
earth with rejoicings or anger. Mars, the red planet of war, was in the
ascendant when it was born. Like other births famous in history, the
child had to be hidden away for a time, and could not with pride be
shown to the people as royal children were wont to be shown. Its enemies
were unforgiving, and its friends were distracted with mighty happenings
in the world. Hardly did they know whether it would not be deformed if
it survived: whether this was the Promised, or another child yet to
be conceived in the womb of the Mother of Parliaments. Battles were
threatened between two hosts, secular champions of two spiritual
traditions, to decide its fate. That such a conflict threatened showed
indeed that there was something of iron fibre in the infant, without
which in their make-up individuals or nations do nothing worthy of
remembrance. Hercules wrestled with twin serpents in his cradle, and
there were twin serpents of sectarianism ready to strangle this infant
State of ours if its guardians were not watchful, or if the infant was
not itself strong enough to destroy them.
It is about the State of Ireland, its character and future, I have here
written some kind of imaginative meditation. The State is a physical
body prepared for the incarnation of the soul of a race. The body of the
national soul may be spiritual or secular, aristocratic or democratic,
civil or militarist predominantly. One or other will be most powerful,
and the body of the race will by reflex action affect its soul, even
as through heredity the inherited tendencies and passions of the flesh
affect the indwelling spirit. Our brooding over the infant State must
be dual, concerned not only with the body but the soul. When we essay
self-government in Ireland our first ideas will, in all probability, be
borrowed from the Mother of Parliaments, just as children before they
grow to have a character of their own repeat the sentiments of their
parents. After a time, if there is anything in the theory of Irish
nationality, we will apply original principles as they are from time
to time discovered to be fundamental in Irish character. A child in the
same way makes discoveries about itself. The mood evoked by picture or
poem reveals a love of beauty; the harsh treatment of an animal provokes
an outburst of pity; some curiosity of nature draws forth the spirit of
scientific inquiry, and so, as the incidents of life reveal the innate
affinities of a child to itself, do the adventures of a nation gradually
reveal to it its own character and the will which is in it.
For all our passionate discussions over self-government we have
had little speculation over our own character or the nature of the
civilization we wished to create for ourselves. Nations rarely, if ever,
start with a complete ideal. Certainly we have no national ideals, no
principles of progress peculiar to ourselves in Ireland, which are a
common possession of our people. National ideals are the possession of a
few people only. Yet we must spread them in wide commonalty over Ireland
if we are to create a civilization worthy of our hopes and our ages of
struggle and sacrifice to attain the power to build. We must spread them
in wide commonalty because it is certain that democracy will prevail
in Ireland. The aristocratic classes with traditions of government, the
manufacturing classes with economic experience, will alike be secondary
in Ireland to the small farmers and the wage-earners in the towns. We
must rely on the ideas common among our people, and on their power
to discern among their countrymen the aristocracy of character and
intellect.
Civilizations are externalizations of the soul and character of
races. They are majestic or mean according to the treasure of beauty,
imagination, will, and thought laid up in the soul of the people. That
great mid-European State, which while I write is at bay surrounded by
enemies, did not arrive at that pitch of power which made it dominant in
Europe simply by militarism. That military power depended on and was
fed by a vigorous intellectual life, and the most generally diffused
education and science existing perhaps in the world. The national being
had been enriched by a long succession of mighty thinkers. A great
subjective life and centuries of dream preceded a great objective
manifestation of power and wealth. The stir in the German Empire which
has agitated Europe was, at its root, the necessity laid on a powerful
soul to surround itself with equal external circumstance. That necessity
is laid on all nations, on all individuals, to make their external life
correspond in some measure to their internal dream. A lover of beauty
will never contentedly live in a house where all things are devoid of
taste. An intellectual man will loathe a disordered society.
We may say with certainty that the external circumstances of people are
a measure of their inner life. Our mean and disordered little country
towns in Ireland, with their drink-shops, their disregard of cleanliness
or beauty, accord with the character of the civilians who inhabit them.
Whenever we develop an intellectual life these things will be altered,
but not in priority to the spiritual mood. House by house, village by
village, the character of a civilization changes as the character of the
individuals change. When we begin to build up a lofty world within the
national soul, soon the country becomes beautiful and worthy of respect
in its externals. That building up of the inner world we have neglected.
Our excited political controversies, our playing at militarism, have
tended to bring men's thoughts from central depths to surfaces. Life
is drawn to its frontiers away from its spiritual base, and behind the
surfaces we have little to fall back on. Few of our notorieties could
be trusted to think out any economic or social problem thoroughly
and efficiently. They have been engaged in passionate attempts at the
readjustment of the superficies of things. What we require more than
men of action at present are scholars, economists, scientists, thinkers,
educationalists, and litterateurs, who will populate the desert depths
of national consciousness with real thought and turn the void into a
fullness. We have few reserves of intellectual life to draw upon when
we come to the mighty labor of nation-building. It will be indignantly
denied, but I think it is true to say that the vast majority of people
in Ireland do not know the difference between good and bad thinking,
between the essential depths and the shallows in humanity. How could
people, who never read anything but the newspapers, have any genuine
knowledge of any subject on earth or much imagination of anything
beautiful in the heavens?
What too many people in Ireland mistake for thoughts are feelings. It
is enough to them to vent like or dislike, inherited prejudices or
passions, and they think when they have expressed feeling they have
given utterance to thought. The nature of our political controversies
provoked passion, and passion has become dominant in our politics.
Passion truly is a power in humanity, but it should never enter into
national policy. It is a dangerous element in human life, though it is
an essential part of our strangely compounded nature. But in national
life it is the most dangerous of all guides. There are springs of power
in ourselves which in passion we draw on and are amazed at their depth
and intensity, yet we do not make these the master light of our being,
but rather those divine laws which we have apprehended and brooded upon,
and which shine with clear and steady light in our souls. As creatures
rise in the scale of being the dominant factor in life changes. In
vegetation it may be appetite; instinct in bird and beast for man a life
at once passionate and intellectual; but the greater beings, the stars
and planets, must wheel in the heavens under the guidance of inexorable
and inflexible law. Now the State is higher in the scale of being
than the individual, and it should be dominated solely by moral and
intellectual principles. These are not the outcome of passion or
prejudice, but of arduous thought. National ideals must be built up
with the same conscious deliberation of purpose as the architect of the
Parthenon conceived its lofty harmony of shining marble lines, or as the
architect of Rheims Cathedral designed its intricate magnificence and
mystery. Nations which form their ideals and marry them in the hurry of
passion are likely to repent without leisure, and they will not be able
to divorce those ideals without prolonged domestic squabbles and public
cleansing of dirty linen. If we are to build a body for the soul
of Ireland it ought not to be a matter of reckless estimates or
jerry-building. We have been told, during my lifetime at least, not
to criticize leaders, to trust leaders, and so intellectual discussion
ceased and the high principles on which national action should be based
became less and less understood, less and less common possessions. The
nation was not conceived of as a democracy freely discussing its laws
but as a secret society with political chiefs meeting in the dark and
issuing orders. No doubt our political chieftains loved their country,
but love has many degrees of expression from the basest to the highest.
The basest love will wreck everything, even the life of the beloved, to
gratify ignoble desires. The highest love conspires with the imaginative
reason to bring about every beautiful circumstance around the beloved
which will permit of the highest development of its life. There is no
real love apart from this intellectual brooding. Men who love Ireland
ignobly brawl about her in their cups, quarrel about her with their
neighbor, allow no freedom of thought of her or service of her other
than their own, take to the cudgel and the rifle, and join sectarian
orders or lodges to ensure that Ireland will be made in their own
ignoble image. Those who love Ireland nobly desire for her the highest
of human destinies. They would ransack the ages and accumulate wisdom to
make Irish life seem as noble in men's eyes as any the world has known.
The better minds in every race, eliminating passion and prejudice, by
the exercise of the imaginative reason have revealed to their countrymen
ideals which they recognized were implicit in national character. It
is such discoveries we have yet to make about ourselves to unite us to
fulfill our destiny. We have to discover what is fundamental in Irish
character, the affections, leanings, tendencies towards one or more of
the eternal principles which have governed and inspired all great human
effort, all great civilizations from the dawn of history. A nation is
but a host of men united by some God-begotten mood, some hope of liberty
or dream of power or beauty or justice or brotherhood, and until that
master idea is manifested to us there is no shining star to guide the
ship of our destinies.
Our civilization must depend on the quality of thought engendered in
the national being. We have to do for Ireland--though we hope with
less arrogance--what the long and illustrious line of German thinkers,
scientists, poets, philosophers, and historians did for Germany, or what
the poets and artists of Greece did for the Athenians: and that is, to
create national ideals, which will dominate the policy of statesmen,
the actions of citizens, the universities, the social organizations, the
administration of State departments, and unite in one spirit urban and
rural life. Unless this is done Ireland will be like Portugal, or any
of the corrupt little penny-dreadful nationalities which so continually
disturb the peace of the world with internal revolutions and external
brawlings, and we shall only have achieved the mechanism of nationality,
but the spirit will have eluded us.
What I have written hereafter on the national being, my thoughts on an
Irish polity, are not to be taken as an attempt to deal with more than
a few essentials. I offer it to my countrymen, to start thought
and discussion upon the principles which should prevail in an Irish
civilization. If to readers in other countries the thought appears
primitive or elementary, I would like them to remember that we are at
the beginning of our activity as a nation, and we have yet to settle
fundamentals. Races hoary with political wisdom may look with disdain on
the attempts at political thinking by a new self-governing nationality,
or the theories of civilization discussed about the cradle of an infant
State. To childhood may be forgiven the elemental character of its
thought and its idealistic imaginations. They may not persist in
developed manhood; but if youth has never drawn heaven and earth
together in its imaginations, manhood will ever be undistinguished. This
book only begins a meditation in which, I hope, nobler imaginations and
finer intellects than mine will join hereafter, and help to raise the
soul of Ireland nigher to the ideal and its body nigher to its soul.
II.
The building up of a civilization is at once the noblest and the most
practical of all enterprises, in which human faculties are exalted to
their highest, and beauties and majesties are manifested in multitude as
they are never by solitary man or by disunited peoples. In the highest
civilizations the individual citizen is raised above himself and made
part of a greater life, which we may call the National Being. He enters
into it, and it becomes in oversoul to him, and gives to all his works
a character and grandeur and a relation to the works of his
fellow-citizens, so that all he does conspires with the labors of
others for unity and magnificence of effect. So ancient Egypt, with its
temples, sphinxes, pyramids, and symbolic decorations, seems to us as
if it had been created by one grandiose imagination; for even the lesser
craftsmen, working on the mummy case for the tomb, had much of the
mystery and solemnity in their work which is manifest in temple and
pyramid. So the city States in ancient Greece in their day were united
by ideals to a harmony of art and architecture and literature. Among the
Athenians at their highest the ideal of the State so wrought upon the
individual that its service became the overmastering passion of life,
and in that great oration of Pericles, where he told how the Athenian
ideal inspired the citizens so that they gave their bodies for the
commonwealth, it seems to have been conceived of as a kind of oversoul,
a being made up of immortal deeds and heroic spirits, influencing the
living, a life within their life, molding their spirits to its likeness.
It appears almost as if in some of these ancient famous communities the
national ideal became a kind of tribal deity, that began first with
some great hero who died and was immortalized by the poets, and whose
character, continually glorified by them, grew at last so great in song
that he could not be regarded as less than a demi-god. We can see in
ancient Ireland that Cuchulain, the dark sad man of the earlier tales,
was rapidly becoming a divinity, a being who summed up in himself all
that the bards thought noblest in the spirit of their race; and
if Ireland had a happier history no doubt one generation of bardic
chroniclers after another would have molded that half-mythical figure
into the Irish ideal of all that was chivalrous, tender, heroic, and
magnanimous, and it would have been a star to youth, and the thought of
it a staff to the very noblest. Even as Cuchulain alone at the ford held
it against a host, so the ideal would have upheld the national soul in
its darkest hours, and stood in many a lonely place in the heart. The
national soul in a theocratic State is a god; in an aristocratic age
it assumes the character of a hero; and in a democracy it becomes a
multitudinous being, definite in character if the democracy is a real
social organism. But where the democracy is only loosely held together
by the social order, the national being is vague in character, is a mood
too feeble to inspire large masses of men to high policies in times of
peace, and in times of war it communicates frenzy, panic, and delirium.
None of our modern States create in us such an impression of being
spiritually oversouled by an ideal as the great States of the ancient
world. The leaders of nations too have lost that divine air that many
leaders of men wore in the past, and which made the populace rumor them
as divine incarnations. It is difficult to know to what to attribute
this degeneration. Perhaps the artists who create ideals are to blame.
In ancient Ireland, in Greece, and in India, the poets wrote about great
kings and heroes, enlarging on their fortitude of spirit, their chivalry
and generosity, creating in the popular mind an ideal of what a great
man was like; and men were influenced by the ideal created, and strove
to win the praise of the bards and to be recrowned by them a second time
in great poetry. So we had Cuchulain and Oscar in Ireland; Hector of
Troy, Theseus in Greece; Yudisthira, Rama, and Arjuna in India, all
bard-created heroes molding the minds of men to their image. It is the
great defect of our modern literature that it creates few such types.
How hardly could one of our modern public men be made the hero of an
epic. It would be difficult to find one who could be the subject of a
genuine lyric. Whitman, himself the most democratic poet of the modern
world, felt this deficiency in the literature of the later democracies,
and lamented the absence of great heroic figures. The poets have dropped
out of the divine procession, and sing a solitary song. They inspire
nobody to be great, and failing any finger-post in literature pointing
to true greatness our democracies too often take the huckster from his
stall, the drunkard from his pot, the lawyer from his court, and
the company promoter from the director's chair, and elect them as
representative men. We certainly do this in Ireland. It is--how many
hundred years since greatness guided us? In Ireland our history begins
with the most ancient of any in a mythical era when earth mingled with
heaven. The gods departed, the half-gods also, hero and saint after
that, and we have dwindled down to a petty peasant nationality, rural
and urban life alike mean in their externals. Yet the cavalcade, for all
its tattered habiliments, has not lost spiritual dignity. There is still
some incorruptible spiritual atom in our people. We are still in some
relation to the divine order; and while that uncorrupted spiritual atom
still remains all things are possible if by some inspiration there could
be revealed to us a way back or forward to greatness, an Irish polity in
accord with national character.
III.
In formulating an Irish polity we have to take into account the change
in world conditions. A theocratic State we shall have no more. Every
nation, and our own along with them, is now made up of varied sects,
and the practical dominance of one religious idea would let loose
illimitable passions, the most intense the human spirit can feel. The
way out of the theocratic State was by the drawn sword and was lit by
the martyr's fires. The way back is unthinkable for all Protestant
fears or Catholic aspirations. Aristocracies, too, become impossible
as rulers. The aristocracy of character and intellect we may hope shall
finally lead us, but no aristocracy so by birth will renew its authority
over us. The character of great historic personages is gradually
reflected in the mass. The divine right of kings is followed by the
idea of the divine right of the people, and democracies finally become
ungovernable save by themselves. They have seen and heard too much
of pride and greatness not to have become, in some measure, proud and
defiant of all authority except their own. It may be said the history of
democracies is not one to fill us with confidence, but the truth is the
world has yet to see the democratic State, and of the yet untried we
may think with hope. Beneath the Athenian and other ancient democratic
States lay a substratum of humanity in slavery, and the culture, beauty,
and bravery of these extraordinary peoples were made possible by the
workers in an underworld who had no part in the bright civic life.
We have no more a real democracy in the world today. Democracy in
politics has in no country led to democracy in its economic life. We
still have autocracy in industry as firmly seated on its throne as
theocratic king ruling in the name of a god, or aristocracy ruling by
military power; and the forces represented by these twain, superseded
by the autocrats of industry, have become the allies of the power which
took their place of pride. Religion and rank, whether content or not
with the subsidiary place they now occupy, are most often courtiers of
Mammon and support him on his throne. For all the talk about democracy
our social order is truly little more democratic than Rome was under the
Caesars, and our new rulers have not, with all their wealth, created
a beauty which we could imagine after-generations brooding over with
uplifted heart.
The people in theocratic States like Egypt or Chaldea, ruled in the
name of gods, saw rising out of the plains in which they lived an
architecture so mysterious and awe-inspiring that they might well
believe the master-minds who designed the temples were inspired from the
Oversoul. The aristocratic States reflected the love of beauty which is
associated with aristocracies. The oligarchies of wealth in our time,
who have no divine sanction to give dignity to their rule nor traditions
of lordly life like the aristocracies, have not in our day created
beauty in the world. But whatever of worth the ancient systems produced
was not good enough to make permanent their social order. Their
civilizations, like ours, were built on the unstable basis of a vast
working-class with no real share in the wealth and grandeur it helped
to create. The character of his kingdom was revealed in dream to
Nebuchadnezzar by an image with a golden head and feet of clay, and that
image might stand as symbol of the empires the world has known. There is
in all a vast population living in an underworld of labor whose freedom
to vote confers on them no real power, and who are most often scorned
and neglected by those who profit by their labors. Indifference turns
to fear and hatred if labor organizes and gathers power, or makes one
motion of its myriad hands towards the sceptre held by the autocrats of
industry. When this class is maddened and revolts, civilization
shakes and totters like cities when the earthquake stirs beneath their
foundations. Can we master these arcane human forces? Can we, by any
device, draw this submerged humanity into the light and make them real
partners in the social order, not partners merely in the political life
of the nation, but, what is of more importance, in its economic life?
If we build our civilization without integrating labor into its economic
structure, it will wreck that civilization, and it will do that more
swiftly today than two thousand years ago, because there is no longer
the disparity of culture between high and low which existed in past
centuries. The son of the artisan, if he cares to read, may become
almost as fully master of the wisdom of Plato or Aristotle as if he
had been at a university. Emerson will speak to him of his divinity;
Whitman, drunken with the sun, will chant to him of his inheritance of
the earth. He is elevated by the poets and instructed by the economists.
But there are not thrones enough for all who are made wise in our social
order, and failing even to serve in the social heaven these men will
spread revolt and reign in the social hell. They are becoming too many
for higher places to be found for them in the national economy. They are
increasing to a multitude which must be considered, and the framers of
a national polity must devise a life for them where their new-found
dignity of spirit will not be abased. Men no more will be content under
rulers of industry they do not elect themselves than they were under
political rulers claiming their obedience in the name of God. They will
not for long labor in industries where they have no power to fix
the conditions of their employment, as they were not content with a
political system which allowed them no power to control legislation.
Ireland must begin its imaginative reconstruction of a civilization by
first considering that type which, in the earlier civilizations of the
world, has been slave, serf, or servile, working either on land or at
industry, and must construct with reference to it. These workers must be
the central figures, and how their material, intellectual, and spiritual
needs are met must be the test of value of the social order we evolve.
IV.
In Ireland we begin naturally our consideration of this problem with the
folk of the country, pondering all the time upon our ideal--the linking
up of individuals with each other and with the nation. Since the
destruction of the ancient clans in Ireland almost every economic factor
in rural life has tended to separate the farmers from each other and
from the nation, and to bring about an isolation of action; and that was
so until the movement for the organization of agriculture was initiated
by Sir Horace Plunkett and his colleagues in that patriotic association,
the Irish Agricultural Organization Society. Though its actual
achievement is great; though it may be said to be the pivot round which
Ireland has begun to swing back to its traditional and natural communism
in work, we still have over the larger part of Ireland conditions
prevailing which tend to isolate the individual from the community.
When we examine rural Ireland, outside this new movement, we find
everywhere isolated and individualistic agricultural production, served
with regard to purchase and sale by private traders and dealers, who are
independent of economic control from the consumers or producers, or the
State. The tendency in the modern world to conduct industry in the grand
manner is not observable here. The first thing which strikes one who
travels through rural Ireland is the immense number of little shops.
They are scattered along the highways and at the crossroads; and where
there are a few families together in what is called a village,
the number of little shops crowded round these consumers is almost
incredible. What are all these little shops doing? They are supplying
the farmers with domestic requirements: with tea, sugar, flour, oil,
implements, vessels, clothing, and generally with drink. Every one of
them almost is a little universal provider. Every one of them has its
own business organization, its relations with wholesale houses in the
greater towns. All of them procure separately from others their bags
of flour, their barrels of porter, their stocks of tea, sugar, raisins,
pots, pans, nails, twine, fertilizers, and what not, and all these
things come to them paying high rates to the carriers for little loads.
The trader's cart meets them at the station, and at great expense the
necessaries of life are brought together. In the world-wide amalgamation
of shoe-makers into boot factories, and smithies into ironworks,
which is going on in Europe and America, these little shops have been
overlooked. Nobody has tried to amalgamate them, or to economize human
effort or cheapen the distribution of the necessaries of life. This work
of distribution is carried on by all kinds of little traders competing
with each other, pulling the devil by the tail; doing the work
economically, so far as they themselves are concerned, because they
must, but doing it expensively for the district because they cannot
help it. They do not serve Ireland well. The genius of amalgamation and
organization cannot afford to pass by these shops, which spring up
in haphazard fashion, not because the country needs them, but because
farmers or traders have children to be provided for. To the ignorant
this is the easiest form of trade, and so many are started in life in
one of these little shops after an apprenticeship in another like it.
These numerous competitors of each other do not keep down prices. They
increase them rather by the unavoidable multiplication of expenses;
and many of them, taking advantage of the countryman's irregularity of
income and his need for credit, allow credit to a point where the small
farmer becomes a tied customer, who cannot pay all he owes, and who
therefore dares not deal elsewhere. These agencies for distribution do
not by their nature enlarge the farmer's economic knowledge. His vision
beyond them to their sources of supply is blocked, and in this respect
he is debarred from any unity with national producers other than his own
class.
Let us now for a little consider the small farmer around whom have
gathered these multitudinous little agencies of distribution. What kind
of a being is he? We must deal with averages, and the small farmer
is the typical Irish countryman. The average area of an Irish farm is
twenty-five acres or thereabouts. There are hundreds of thousands who
have more or less. But we can imagine to ourselves an Irish farmer with
twenty-five acres to till, lord of a herd of four or five cows, a drift
of sheep, a litter of pigs, perhaps a mare and foal: call him Patrick
Maloney and accept him as symbol of his class. We will view him outside
the operation of the new co-operative policy, trying to obey the command
to be fruitful and replenish the earth. He is fruitful enough. There is
no race suicide in Ireland. His agriculture is largely traditional. It
varied little in the nineteenth century from the eighteenth, and the
beginnings of the twentieth century show little change in spite of
a huge department of agriculture. His butter, his eggs, his cattle,
horses, pigs, and sheep are sold to local dealers. He rarely knows where
his produce goes to--whether it is devoured in the next county or is
sent across the Channel. It might be pitched into the void for all he
knows about its destiny. He might be described almost as the primitive
economic cave-man, the darkness of his cave unillumined by any ray of
general principles. As he is obstructed by the traders in a general
vision of production other than his own, so he is obstructed by these
dealers in a general vision of the final markets for his produce. His
reading is limited to the local papers, and these, following the example
of the modern press, carefully eliminate serious thought as likely to
deprive them of readers. But Patrick, for all his economic backwardness,
has a soul. The culture of the Gaelic poets and story-tellers, while
not often actually remembered, still lingers like a fragrance about his
mind. He lives and moves and has his being in the loveliest nature, the
skies over him ever cloudy like an opal; and the mountains flow
across his horizon in wave on wave of amethyst and pearl. He has the
unconscious depth of character of all who live and labor much in the
open air, in constant fellowship with the great companions--with the
earth and the sky and the fire in the sky. We ponder over Patrick, his
race and his country, brooding whether there is the seed of a Pericles
in Patrick's loins. Could we carve an Attica out of Ireland?
Before Patrick can become the father of a Pericles, before Ireland can
become an Attica, Patrick must be led out of his economic cave: his low
cunning in barter must be expanded into a knowledge of economic law--his
fanatical concentration on his family--begotten by the isolation and
individualism of his life--be sublimed into national affections; his
unconscious depths be sounded, his feeling for beauty be awakened by
contact with some of the great literature of the world. His mind is
virgin soil, and we may hope that, like all virgin soil, it will
be immensely fruitful when it is cultivated. How does the policy of
co-working make Patrick pass away from his old self? We can imagine him
as a member of a committee getting hints of a strange doctrine called
science from his creamery manager. He hears about bacteria, and these
dark invisibles replace, as the cause of bad butter-making, the wicked
fairies of his childhood. Watching this manager of his society he learns
a new respect for the man of special or expert knowledge. Discussing the
business of his association with other members he becomes something of a
practical economist. He knows now where his produce goes. He learns that
he has to compete with Americans, Europeans, and Colonials--indeed
with the farmers of the world, hitherto concealed from his view by a
mountainous mass of middle-men. He begins to be interested in these
countries and reads about them. He becomes a citizen of the world.
His horizon is no longer bounded by the wave of blue hills beyond his
village. The roar of the planet begins to sound in his ears. What
is more important is that he is becoming a better citizen of his
own country. He meets on his committee his religious and political
opponents, not now discussing differences out identities of interest. He
also meets the delegates from other societies in district conferences
or general congresses, and those who meet thus find their interests are
common, and a new friendliness springs up between North and South,
and local co-operation leads on to national co-operation. The best
intellects, the best business men in the societies, meet in the big
centres as directors of federations and wholesales, and they get an
all-Ireland view of their industry. They see the parish from the point
of view of the nation, and this vision does not desert them when they go
back to the parish. They realize that their interests are bound up with
national interests, and they discuss legislation and administration with
practical knowledge. Eyes getting keener every year, minds getting more
instructed, begin to concentrate on Irish public men. Presently Patrick
will begin to seek for men of special knowledge and administrative
ability to manage Irish affairs. Ireland has hitherto been to Patrick
a legend, a being mentioned in romantic poetry, a little dark Rose, a
mystic maiden, a vague but very simple creature of tears and aspirations
and revolts. He now knows what a multitudinous being a nation is, and in
contact with its complexities Patrick's politics take on a new gravity,
thoughtfulness, and intellectual character.
Under the influence of these associations and the ideas pervading them
our typical Irish farmer gets drawn out of his agricultural sleep of
the ages, developing rapidly as mummy-wheat brought out of the tomb and
exposed to the eternal forces which stimulate and bring to life. I have
taken an individual as a type, and described the original circumstance
and illustrated the playing of the new forces on his mind. It is the
only way we can create a social order which will fit our character as
the glove fits the hand. Reasoning solely from abstract principles about
justice, democracy, the rights of man and the like, often leads us into
futilities, if not into dangerous political experiments. We have to see
our typical citizen in clear light, realize his deficiencies, ignorance,
and incapacity, and his possibilities of development, before we can
wisely enlarge his boundaries. The centre of the citizen is the home.
His circumference ought to be the nation. The vast majority of Irish
citizens rarely depart from their centre, or establish those vital
relations with their circumference which alone entitle them to the
privileges of citizenship, and enable them to act with political wisdom.
An emotional relationship is not enough. Our poets sang of a united
Ireland, but the unity they sang of was only a metaphor. It mainly meant
separation from another country. In that imaginary unity men were really
separate from each other. Individualism, fanatically centering itself on
its family and family interests, interfered on public boards to do jobs
in the interests of its kith and kin. The co-operative movement connects
with living links the home, the centre of Patrick's being, to the
nation, the circumference of his being. It connects him with the
nation through membership of a national movement, not for the political
purposes which call on him for a vote once every few years, but
for economic purposes which affect him in the course of his daily
occupations. This organization of the most numerous section of the Irish
democracy into co-operative associations, as it develops and embraces
the majority, will tend to make the nation one and indivisible and
conscious of its unity. The individual, however meagre his natural
endowment of altruism, will be led to think of his community as himself;
because his income, his social pleasures even, depend on the success
of the local and national organizations with which he is connected. The
small farmers of former times pursued a petty business of barter and
haggle, fighting for their own hand against half the world about them.
The farmers of the new generation will grow up in a social order,
where all the transactions which narrowed their fathers' hearts will be
communal and national enterprises. How much that will mean in a change
of national character we can hardly realize, we who were born in an
Ireland where petty individualism was rampant, and where every child had
it borne in upon him that it had to fight its own corner in the world,
where the whole atmosphere about it tended to the hardening of the
personality.
We may hope and believe that this transformation of the social
order will make men truly citizens thinking in terms of the nation,
identifying national with personal interests. For those who believe
there is a divine seed in humanity, this atmosphere, if any, they may
hope will promote the swift blossoming of the divine seed which in the
past, in favorable airs, has made beauty or grandeur or spirituality
the characteristics of ancient civilizations in Greece, in Egypt, and in
India. No one can work for his race without the hope that the highest,
or more than the highest, humanity has reached will be within reach of
his race also. We are all laying foundations in dark places, putting the
rough-hewn stones together in our civilizations, hoping for the lofty
edifice which will arise later and make all the work glorious. And in
Ireland, for all its melancholy history, we may, knowing that we are
human, dream that there is the seed of a Pericles in Patrick's loins,
and that we might carve an Attica out of Ireland.
V.
In Ireland we must of necessity give special thought to the needs of the
countryman, because our main industry is agriculture. We have few big
cities. Our great cities are almost all outside our own borders. They
are across the Atlantic. The surplus population of the countryside
do not go to our own towns but emigrate. The exodus does not enrich
Limerick or Galway, but New York. The absorption of life in great
cities is really the danger which most threatens the modern State with a
decadence of its humanity. In the United States, even in Canada, hardly
has the pioneer made a home in the wilderness when his sons and his
daughters are allured by the distant gleam of cities beyond the plains.
In England the countryside has almost ceased to be the mother of men--at
least a fruitful mother. We are face to face in Ireland with this
problem, with no crowded and towering cities to disguise the emptiness
of the fields. It is not a problem which lends itself to legislative
solution. Whether there be fair rents or no rents at all, the child
of the peasant, yearning for a fuller life, goes where life is at
its fullest. We all desire life, and that we might have it more
abundantly,--the peasant as much as the mystic thirsting for infinite
being,--and in rural Ireland the needs of life have been neglected.
The chief problem of Ireland--the problem which every nation in greater
or lesser measure will have to solve--is how to enable the country-man,
without journeying, to satisfy to the full his economic, social,
intellectual, and spiritual needs. We have made some tentative efforts.
The long war over the land, which resulted in the transference of the
land from landlord to cultivator, has advanced us part of the way,
but the Land Acts offered no complete solution. We were assured by hot
enthusiasts of the magic of proprietorship, but Ireland has not tilled
a single acre more since the Land Acts were passed. Our rural exodus
continued without any Moses to lead us to Jerusalems of our own. At
every station boys and girls bade farewell to their friends; and hardly
had the train steamed out when the natural exultation of adventure made
the faces of the emigrants glow because the world lay before them, and
human appetites the country could not satisfy were to be appeased at the
end of the journey.
How can we make the countryside in Ireland a place which nobody would
willingly emigrate from? When we begin to discuss this problem we soon
make the discovery that neither in the new world nor the old has there
been much first-class thinking on the life of the countryman. This will
be apparent if we compare the quality of thought which has been devoted
to the problems of the city State, or the constitution of widespread
dominions, from the days of Solon and Aristotle down to the time of
Alexander Hamilton, and compare it with the quality of thought which has
been brought to bear on the problems of the rural community.
On the labors of the countryman depend the whole strength and health,
nay, the very existence of society, yet, in almost every country,
politics, economics, and social reform are urban products, and the
countryman gets only the crumbs which fall from the political table.
It seems to be so in Canada and the States even, countries which we in
Europe for long regarded as mainly agricultural. It seems only yesterday
to the imagination that they were colonized, and yet we find the
Minister of Agriculture in Canada announcing a decline in the rural
population in Eastern Canada. As children sprung from the loins of
diseased parents manifest at an early age the same defects in their
constitution, so Canada and the States, though in their national
childhood, seem already threatened by the same disease from which
classic Italy perished, and whose ravages today make Great Britain seem
to the acute diagnoser of political health to be like a fruit--ruddy
without, but eaten away within and rotten at the core. One expects
disease in old age, but not in youth. We expect young countries to sow
their wild oats, to have a few revolutions before they settle down
to national housekeeping; but we are not moved by these troubles--the
result of excessive energy--as we are by symptoms of premature decay. No
nation can be regarded as unhealthy when a virile peasantry, contented
with rural employments, however discontented with other things, exists
on its soil. The disease which has attacked our great populations here
and in America is a discontent with rural life. Nothing which has been
done hitherto seems able to promote content. It is true, indeed, that
science has gone out into the fields, but the labors of the chemist,
the bacteriologist, and the mechanical engineer are not enough to
ensure health. What is required is the art of the political thinker, the
imagination which creates a social order and adjusts it to human needs.
The physician who understands the general laws of human health is of
more importance to us here than the specialist. The genius of rural life
has not yet appeared. We have no fundamental philosophy concerning it,
but we have treasures of political wisdom dealing with humanity as a
social organism in the city States or as great nationalities. It might
be worth while inquiring to what extent the wisdom of a Solon, an
Aristotle, a Rousseau, or an Alexander Hamilton might be applied to the
problem of the rural community. After all, men are not so completely
changed in character by their rural environment that their social needs
do not, to a large extent, coincide with the needs of the townsman. They
cannot be considered as creatures of a different species. Yet statesmen
who have devoted so much thought to the constitution of empires and the
organization of great cities, who have studied their psychology, have
almost always treated the rural problem purely as an economic problem,
as if agriculture was a business only and not a life.
Our great nations and widespread empires arose in a haphazard fashion
out of city States and scattered tribal communities. The fusion of these
into larger entities, which could act jointly for offence or defense,
so much occupied the thoughts of their rulers that everything else was
subordinated to it. As a result, the details of our modern civilizations
are all wrong. There is an intensive life at a few great political or
industrial centres, and wide areas where there is stagnation and decay.
Stagnation is most obvious in rural districts. It is so general that it
has been often assumed that there was something inherent in rural life
which made the countryman slow in mind as his own cattle. But this is
not so, as I think can be shown. There is no reason why as intense,
intellectual, and progressive a life should not be possible in the
country as in the towns. The real reason for the stagnation is that the
country population is not organized. We often hear the expression, "the
rural community," but where do we find rural communities? There are
rural populations, but that is altogether a different thing. The word
"community" implies an association of people having common interests and
common possessions, bound together by laws and regulations which express
these common interests and ideals, and define the relation of the
individual to the community. Our rural populations are no more closely
connected, for the most part, than the shifting sands on the seashore.
Their life is almost entirely individualistic. There are personal
friendships, of course, but few economic or social partnerships.
Everybody pursues his own occupation without regard to the occupation of
his neighbors. If a man emigrates it does not affect the occupation of
those who farm the land all about him. They go on ploughing and digging,
buying and selling, just as before. They suffer no perceptible economic
loss by the departure of half-a-dozen men from the district. A true
community would, of course, be affected by the loss of its members. A
co-operative society, if it loses a dozen members, the milk of their
cows, their orders for fertilizers, seeds, and feeding-stuffs, receives
serious injury to its prosperity. There is a minimum of trade below
which its business cannot fall without bringing about a complete
stoppage of its work and an inability to pay its employees. That is the
difference between a community and an unorganized population. In the
first the interests of the community make a conscious and direct appeal
to the individual, and the community, in its turn, rapidly develops an
interest in the welfare of the member. In the second, the interest of
the individual in the community is only sentimental, and as there is no
organization the community lets its units slip away or disappear without
comment or action. We had true rural communities in ancient Ireland,
though the organization was rather military than economic. But the
members of a clan had common interests. They owned the land in common.
It was a common interest to preserve it intact. It was to their interest
to have a numerous membership of the clan, because it made it less
liable to attack. Men were drawn by the social order out of merely
personal interests into a larger life. In their organizations they were
unconsciously groping, as all human organizations are, towards the final
solidarity of humanity--the federation of the world.
Well, these old rural communities disappeared. The greater organizations
of nation or empire regarded the smaller communities jealously in the
past, and broke them up and gathered all the strings of power into
capital cities. The result was a growth of the State, with a local decay
of civic, patriotic, or public feeling, ending in bureaucracies and
State departments, where paid officials, devoid of intimacy with local
needs, replaced the services naturally and voluntarily rendered in an
earlier period. The rural population, no longer existing as a rural
community, sank into stagnation. There was no longer a common interest,
a social order turning their minds to larger than individual ends. Where
feudalism was preserved, the feudal chief, if the feeling of noblesse
oblige was strong, might act as a centre of progress, but where this was
lacking social decay set in. The difficulty of moving the countryman,
which has become traditional, is not due to the fact that he lives in
the country, but to the fact that he lives in an unorganized society.
If in a city people want an art gallery or public baths or recreation
grounds, there is a machinery which can be set in motion; there are
corporations and urban councils which can be approached. If public
opinion is evident--and it is easy to organize public opinion in a
town--the city representatives will consider the scheme, and if they
approve and it is within their power as a council, they are able to levy
rates to finance the art gallery, recreation grounds, public gardens,
or whatever else. Now let us go to a country district where there is no
organization. It may be obvious to one or two people that the place is
perishing and the intelligence of its humanity is decaying, lacking some
centre of life. They want a village hall, but how is it to be obtained?
They begin talking about it to this person or that. They ask these
people to talk to their friends, and the ripples go out weakening and
widening for months, perhaps for years. I know of districts where this
has happened. There are hundreds of parishes in Ireland where one or
two men want co-operative societies or village halls or rural libraries.
They discuss the matter with their neighbors, but find a complete
ignorance on the subject, and consequent lethargy. There is no social
organism with a central life to stir. Before enthusiasm can be kindled
there must be some knowledge. The countryman reads little, and it is a
long and tedious business before enough people are excited to bring them
to the point of appealing to some expert to come in and advise.
More changes often take place within a dozen years after a co-operative
society is first started than have taken place for a century previous. I
am familiar with a district--in the northwest of Ireland. It was a most
wretchedly poor district. The farmers were at the mercy of the gombeen
traders and the agricultural middlemen. Then a dozen years ago a
co-operative society was formed. I am sure that the oldest inhabitant
would agree with me that more changes for the better for farmers have
taken place since the co-operative society was started than he could
remember in all his previous life. The reign of the gombeen man is over.
The farmers control their own buying and selling. Their organization
markets for them the eggs and poultry. It procures seeds, fertilizers,
and domestic requirements. It turns the members' pigs into bacon. They
have a village hall and a woman's organization. They sell the products
of the women's industry. They have a co-operative band, social
gatherings, and concerts. They have spread out into half-a-dozen
parishes, going southward and westward with their propaganda, and
in half-a-dozen years, in all that district, previously without
organization, there will be well-organized farmers' guilds,
concentrating in themselves the trade of their district, having
meeting-places where the opinion of the members can be taken, having a
machinery, committees, and executive officers to carry out whatever may
be decided on: and having funds, or profits, the joint property of the
community, which can be drawn upon to finance their undertakings. It
ought to be evident what a tremendous advantage it is to farmers in
a district to have such organizations, what a lever they can pull
and control. I have tried to indicate the difference between a rural
population and a rural community, between a people loosely knit together
by the vague ties of a common latitude and longitude, and people who
are closely knit together in an association and who form a true social
organism, a true rural community, where the general will can find
expression and society is malleable to the general will. I assert
that there never can be any progress in rural districts or any real
prosperity without such farmers' organizations or guilds. Wherever rural
prosperity is reported of any country inquire into it, and it will be
found that it depends on rural organization. Wherever there is rural
decay, if it is inquired into, it will be found that there was a rural
population but no rural community, no organization, no guild to promote
common interests and unite the countrymen in defense of them.
VI.
It is the business of the rural reformer to create the rural community.
It is the antecedent to the creation of a rural civilization. We have to
organize the community so that it can act as one body. It is not enough
to organize farmers in a district for one purpose only--in a credit
society, a dairy society, a fruit society, a bacon factory, or in a
co-operative store. All these may be and must be beginnings; but if they
do not develop and absorb all rural business into their organization
they will have little effect on character. No true social organism will
have been created. If people unite as consumers to buy together they
only come into contact on this one point; there is no general identity
of interest. If co-operative societies are specialized for this purpose
or that--as in Great Britain or on the Continent--to a large extent the
limitation of objects prevents a true social organism from being formed.
The latter has a tremendous effect on human character. The specialized
society only develops economic efficiency. The evolution of humanity
beyond its present level depends absolutely on its power to unite and
create true social organisms. Life in its higher forms is only possible
because of the union of myriads of tiny lives to form a larger being,
which manifests will, intelligence, affection, and the spiritual powers.
The life of the amoeba or any other unicellular organism is low compared
with the life in more complex organisms, like the ant or bee. Man is
the most highly developed living organism on the globe; yet his body
is built up of innumerable cells, each of which might be described as
a tiny life in itself. But they are built up in man into such a close
association that what affects one part of the body affects all. The pain
which the whole being feels if a part is wounded, if one cell in the
human body is hurt, should prove that to the least intelligent. The
nervous system binds all the tiny cells together, and they form in this
totality a being infinitely higher, more powerful, than the cells which
compose it. They are able to act together and achieve things impossible
to the separated cells. Now humanity today is, to some extent, like
the individual cells. It is trying to unite together to form a real
organism, which will manifest higher qualities of life than the
individual can manifest. But very few of the organisms created by
society enable the individual to do this. The joint-stock companies or
capitalist concerns which bring men together at this work or that do
not yet make them feel their unity. Existence under a common government
effects this still less. Our modern states have not yet succeeded in
building up that true national life where all feel the identity of
interest; where the true civic or social feeling is engendered and the
individual bends all his efforts to the success of the community on
which his own depends; where, in fact, the ancient Greek conception
of citizenship is realized, and individuals are created who are ever
conscious of the identity of interest between themselves and their race.
In the old Greek civilizations this was possible because their States
were small, indeed their ideal State contained no more citizens than
could be affected by the voice of a single orator. Such small States,
though they produced the highest quality of life within themselves,
are no longer possible as political entities. We have to see whether we
could not, within our widespread nationalities, create communities
by economic means, where something of the same sense of solidarity of
interest might be engendered and the same quality of life maintained.
I am greatly ambitious for the rural community. But it is no use having
mean ambitions. Unless people believe the result of their labors will
result in their equaling or surpassing the best that has been done
elsewhere, they will never get very far. We in Ireland are in quest of
a civilization. It is a great adventure, the building up of a
civilization--the noblest which could be undertaken by any persons. It
is at once the noblest and the most practical of all enterprises, and
I can conceive of no greater exaltation for the spirit of man than
the feeling that his race is acting nobly; and that all together are
performing a service, not only to each other, but to humanity and those
who come after them, and that their deeds will be remembered. It may
seem a grotesque juxtaposition of things essentially different in
character, to talk of national idealism and then of farming, but it is
not so. They are inseparable. The national idealism which will not go
out into the fields and deal with the fortunes of the working farmers is
false dealism. Our conception of a civilization must include, nay, must
begin with the life of the humblest, the life of the average man
or manual worker, for if we neglect them we will build in sand. The
neglected classes will wreck our civilization. The pioneers of a new
social order must think first of the average man in field or factory,
and so unite these and so inspire them that the noblest life will be
possible through their companionship. If you will not offer people the
noblest and best they will go in search of it. Unless the countryside
can offer to young men and women some satisfactory food for soul as well
as body, it will fail to attract or hold its population, and they
will go to the already overcrowded towns; and the lessening of rural
production will affect production in the cities and factories, and the
problem of the unemployed will get still keener. The problem is not only
an economic problem. It is a human one. Man does not live by cash alone,
but by every gift of fellowship and brotherly feeling society offers
him. The final urgings of men and women are towards humanity. Their
desires are for the perfecting of their own life, and as Whitman says,
where the best men and women are there the great city stands, though it
is only a village. It is one of the illusions of modern materialistic
thought to suppose that as high a quality of life is not possible in a
village as in a great city, and it ought to be one of the aims of
rural reformers to dissipate this fallacy, and to show that it is
possible--not indeed to concentrate wealth in country communities as in
the cities--but that it is possible to bring comfort enough to satisfy
any reasonable person, and to create a society where there will be
intellectual life and human interests. We will hear little then of the
rural exodus. The country will retain and increase its population and
productiveness. Like attracts like. Life draws life to itself. Intellect
awakens intellect, and the country will hold its own tug for tug with
the towns.
Now it may be said I have talked a long while round and round the rural
community, but I have not suggested how it is to be created. I am coming
to that. It really cannot be created. It is a natural growth when
the right seed is planted. Co-operation is the seed. Let us consider
Ireland. Twenty-five years ago there was not a single co-operative
society in the country. Individualism was the mode of life. Every farmer
manufactured and sold as seemed best in his eyes. It was generally the
worst possible way he could have chosen. Then came Sir Horace Plunkett
and his colleagues, preaching co-operation. A creamery was established
here, an agricultural society there, and having planted the ideas it
was some time before the economic expert could decide whether they were
planted in fertile soil. But that question was decided many years ago.
The co-operative society, started for whatever purpose originally, is
an omnivorous feeder, and it exercises a magnetic influence on all
agricultural activities; so that we now have societies which buy milk,
manufacture and sell butter, deal in poultry and eggs, cure bacon,
provide fertilizers, feeding-stuffs, seeds, and machinery for their
members, and even cater for every requirement of the farmer's household.
This magnetic power of attracting and absorbing to themselves the
various rural activities which the properly constituted co-operative
societies have, makes them develop rapidly, until in the course of a
decade or a generation there is created a real social organism, where
the members buy together, manufacture together, market together, where
finally their entire interests are bound up with the interests of the
community. I believe in half a century the whole business of rural
Ireland will be done co-operatively. This is not a wild surmise, for we
see exactly the same process going on in Denmark, Germany, Italy, and
every country where the co-operative seed was planted. Let us suppose
that in a generation all the rural industries are organized on
co-operative lines, what kind of a community should we expect to find as
the result? How would its members live? What would be their relations
to one another and their community? The agricultural scientist is making
great discoveries. The mechanical engineer goes from one triumph to
another. The chemist already could work wonders in our fields if
there was a machinery for him to work through. We cannot foretell the
developments in each branch, but we can see clearly that the organized
community can lay hold of discoveries and inventions which the
individual farmer cannot. It is little for the co-operative society to
buy expensive threshing sets and let its members have the use of them,
but the individual farmer would have to save a long time before he could
raise several hundred pounds. The society is a better buyer than the
individual. It can buy things the individual cannot buy. It is a better
producer also. The plant for a creamery is beyond the individual farmer;
but our organized farmers in Ireland, small though they are, find it no
trouble to erect and equip a creamery with plant costing two thousand
pounds. The organized rural community of the future will generate its
own electricity at its central buildings, and run not only its factories
and other enterprises by this power, but will supply light to the houses
of its members and also mechanical power to run machinery on the farm.
One of our Irish societies already supplies electric light for the town
it works in. In the organized rural community the eggs, milk, poultry,
pigs, cattle, grain, and wheat produced on the farm and not consumed,
or required for further agricultural production, will automatically be
delivered to the co-operative business centre of the district, where the
manager of the dairy will turn the milk into butter or cheese, and the
skim milk will be returned to feed the community's pigs. The poultry and
egg department will pack and dispatch the fowl and eggs to market. The
mill will grind the corn and return it ground to the member, or there
may be a co-operative bakery to which some of it may go. The pigs will
be dealt with in the abattoir, sent as fresh pork to the market or
be turned into bacon to feed the members. We may be certain that any
intelligent rural community will try to feed itself first, and will only
sell the surplus. It will realize that it will be unable to buy any food
half as good as the food it produces. The community will hold in
common all the best machinery too expensive for the members to buy
individually. The agricultural laborers will gradually become skilled
mechanics, able to direct threshers, binders, diggers, cultivators, and
new implements we have no conception of now. They will be members of the
society, sharing in its profits in proportion to their wages, even as
the farmer will in proportion to his trade. The co-operative community
will have its own carpenters, smiths, mechanics, employed in its
workshop at repairs or in making those things which can profitably be
made locally. There may be a laundry where the washing--a heavy burden
for the women--will be done: for we may be sure that every scrap of
power generated will be utilized. One happy invention after another will
come to lighten the labor of life. There will be, of course, a village
hall with a library and gymnasium, where the boys and girls will be made
straight, athletic, and graceful. In the evenings, when the work of
the day is done, if we went into the village hall we would find a dance
going on or perhaps a concert. There might be a village choir or band.
There would be a committee-room where the council of the community
would meet once a week; for their enterprises would have grown, and the
business of such a parish community might easily be over one hundred
thousand pounds, and would require constant thought. There would be
no slackness on the part of the council in attending, because their
fortunes would depend on their communal enterprises, and they would
have to consider reports from the managers and officials of the various
departments. The co-operative community would be a busy place. In years
when the society was exceptionally prosperous, and earned larger profits
than usual on its trade, we should expect to find discussions in which
all the members would join as to the use to be made of these profits:
whether they should be altogether divided or what portion of them should
be devoted to some public purpose. We may be certain that there would
be animated discussions, because a real solidarity of feeling would have
arisen and a pride in the work of the community engendered, and they
would like to be able to outdo the good work done by the neighboring
communities.
One might like to endow the village school with a chemical laboratory,
another might want to decorate the village hall with reproductions
of famous pictures, another might suggest removing all the hedges and
planting the roadsides and lanes with gooseberry bushes, currant bushes,
and fruit trees, as they do in some German communes today. There would
be eloquent pleadings for this or that, for an intellectual heat would
be engendered in this human hive, and there would be no more illiterates
or ignoramuses. The teaching in the village school would be altered to
suit the new social order, and the children of the community would,
we may be certain, be instructed in everything necessary for the
intelligent conduct of the communal business. The spirit of rivalry
between one community and another, which exists today between
neighboring creameries, would excite the imagination of the members,
and the organized community would be as swift to act as the unorganized
community is slow to act. Intelligence would be organized as well
as business. The women would have their own associations, to promote
domestic economy, care of the sick and the children. The girls would
have their own industries of embroidery, crochet, lace, dress-making,
weaving, spinning, or whatever new industries the awakened intelligence
of women may devise and lay hold of as the peculiar labor of their
sex. The business of distribution of the produce and industries of the
community would be carried on by great federations, which would attend
to export and sale of the products of thousands of societies. Such
communities would be real social organisms. The individual would be free
to do as he willed, but he would find that communal activity would be
infinitely more profitable than individual activity. We would then
have a real democracy carrying on its own business, and bringing about
reforms without pleading to, or begging of, the State, or intriguing
with or imploring the aid of political middlemen to get this, that, or
the other done for them. They would be self-respecting, because they
would be self-helping above all things. The national councils and
meetings of national federations would finally become the real
Parliament of the nation; for wherever all the economic power is
centered, there also is centered all the political power. And no
politician would dare to interfere with the organized industry of a
nation.
There is nothing to prevent such communities being formed. They would
be a natural growth once the seed was planted. We see such communities
naturally growing up in Ireland, with perhaps a little stimulus from
outside from rural reformers and social enthusiasts. If this ideal of
the organized rural community is accepted there will be difficulties, of
course, and enemies to be encountered. The agricultural middleman is a
powerful person. He will rage furiously. He will organize all his forces
to keep the farmers in subjection, and to retain his peculiar functions
of fleecing the farmer as producer and the general public as consumer.
But unless we are determined to eliminate the middleman in agriculture
we will fall to effect anything worth while attempting. I would lay
down certain fundamental propositions which, I think, should be accepted
without reserve as a basis of reform. First, that the farmers must be
organized to have complete control over all the business connected with
their industry. Dual control is intolerable. Agriculture will never be
in a satisfactory condition if the farmer is relegated to the position
of a manual worker on his land; if he is denied the right of a
manufacturer to buy the raw materials of his industry on trade terms; if
other people are to deal with his raw materials, his milk, cream,
fruit, vegetables, live stock, grain, and other produce; and if these
capitalist middle agencies are to manufacture the farmers' raw material
into butter, bacon, or whatever else are to do all the marketing and
export, paying farmers what they please on the one hand, and charging
the public as much as they can on the other hand. The existence of these
middle agencies is responsible for a large proportion of the increased
cost of living, which is the most acute domestic problem of modern
industrial communities. They have too much power over the farmer,
and are too expensive a luxury for the consumer. It would be very
unbusinesslike for any country to contemplate the permanence in national
life of a class whose personal interests are always leading them to
fleece both producer and consumer alike. So the first fundamental idea
for reformers to get into their minds is that farmers, through their own
co-operative organizations, must control the entire business connected
with agriculture. There will not be so much objection to co-operative
sale as to co-operative purchase by the farmers. But one is as necessary
as the other. We must bear in mind, what is too often forgotten, that
farmers are manufacturers, and as such are entitled to buy the raw
materials for their industry at wholesale prices. Every other kind
of manufacturer in the world gets trade terms when he buys. Those
who buy--not to consume, but to manufacture and sell again--get their
requirements at wholesale terms in every country in the world. If
a publisher of books is approached by a bookseller he gives that
bookseller trade terms, because he buys to sell again. If I, as a
private individual, want one of those books I must pay the full retail
price. Even the cobbler, the carpenter, the solitary artist, get trade
terms. The farmer, who is as much a manufacturer as the shipbuilder, or
the factory proprietor, is as much entitled to trade terms when he buys
the raw materials for his industry. His seeds, fertilizers, ploughs,
implements, cake, feeding-stuffs are the raw materials of his industry,
which he uses to produce wheat, beef, mutton, pork, or whatever else;
and, in my opinion, there should be no differentiation between the
farmer when he buys and any other kind of manufacturer. Is it any wonder
that agriculture decays in countries where the farmers are expected to
buy at retail prices and sell at wholesale prices? We must not, to save
any friction, sell the rights of farmers. The second proposition I lay
down is that this necessary organization work among the farmers must be
carried on by an organizing body which is entirely controlled by those
interested in agriculture--farmers and their friends. To ask the State
or a State Department to undertake this work is to ask a body influenced
and often controlled by powerful capitalists, and middle agencies which
it should be the aim of the organization to eliminate. The State can,
without obstruction from any quarter, give farmers a technical education
in the science of farming; but let it once interfere with business,
and a horde of angry interests set to work to hamper and limit by
every possible means and compromises on matters of principle, where no
compromise ought to be permitted, are almost inevitable.
A voluntary organizing body like the Irish Agricultural Organization
Society, which was the first to attempt the co-operative organization of
farmers in these islands, is the only kind of body which can pursue its
work fearlessly, unhampered by alien interests. The moment such a body
declares its aims, its declaration automatically separates the sheep
from the goats, and its enemies are outside and not inside. The
organizing body should be the heart and centre of the farmers' movement,
and if the heart has its allegiance divided, its work will be poor and
ineffectual, and very soon the farmers will fall away from it to follow
more single-hearted leaders. No trades union would admit representatives
of capitalist employers on its committee, and no organization of farmers
should allow alien or opposing interest on their councils to clog
the machine or betray the cause. This is the best advice I can give
reformers. It is the result of many years' experience in this work.
An industry must have the same freedom of movement as an individual in
possession of all his powers. An industry divided against itself can
no more prosper than a household divided against itself. By the means
I have indicated the farmers can become the masters of their own
destinies, just as the urban workers can, I think, by steadfastly
applying the same principles, emancipate themselves. It is a battle in
which, as in all other battles, numbers and moral superiority united
are irresistible; and in the Irish struggle to create a true democracy
numbers and the power of moral ideas are with the insurgents.
VII.
It would be a bitter reproach on the household of our nation if there
were any unconsidered, who were left in poverty and without hope and
outside our brotherhood. We have not yet considered the agricultural
laborer--the proletarian of the countryside. His is, in a sense, the
most difficult problem of any. The basis of economic independence in
his industry is the possession of land, and that is not readily to be
obtained in Ireland. The earth does not upheave itself from beneath the
sea and add new land to that already above water in response to our
need for it. Yet I would not pass away from the rural laborer without,
however inadequately, indicating some curves in his future evolution.
These laborers are not in Ireland half so numerous as farmers, for it
is a country of small holdings, where the farmer and his family are
themselves laborers. Labor is badly paid, and, owing to the lack of
continuous cropping of the land, it is often left without employment at
seasons when employment is most needed. No class which is taken up today
and dropped tomorrow will in modern times remain long in a country.
Employers often act as if they thought labor could be taken up and laid
down again like a pipe and tobacco. None have contributed so to thicken
the horde of Irish exiles as the rural laborers. Three hundred thousand
of them in less than my lifetime have left the fields of Ireland for the
factories of the new world. Yet I can only rejoice if Irishmen, who are
badly dealt with in their motherland, find an ampler life and a more
prosperous career in another land. A wage of ten or eleven shillings a
week will bind none but the unaspiring lout to his country. But I would
like to make Ireland a land which, because of the human kindness in it,
few would willingly leave. The agricultural proletarian, like all other
labor, should be organized in a national union. That is bound to come.
But the agricultural laborer should, I think, no more than labor in the
cities, make the raising of wages his main or only object. He should
rather strive to make himself economically independent; or, in the
alternative, seek for status by integration into the co-operative
communities of farmers by becoming a member, and by pressing for
permanent employment by the community rather than casual employment by
the individual. Agricultural labor undoubtedly will have to struggle for
better remuneration. Yet it has to be remembered that agriculture is
a protean industry. It is not like mining, where the colliery produces
coal and nothing but coal, and where the miners have a practical
monopoly of supply. If miners are dissatisfied with wages and are well
organized they can enforce their terms, and the colliery owners may
almost be indifferent, because they can charge the increased cost
of working to the public. But agriculture, as I said, is protean and
changes its forms perpetually. If tillage does not pay this year, next
year the farmer may have his land in grass. He reverts to the cheapest
methods of farming when prices are low, or labor asks a wage which the
farmer believes it would be unprofitable to pay. In this way pressure
on the farmer for extra wages might result in two men being employed
to herd cows where a dozen men were previously employed at tillage.
The farmer cannot easily--as the mine-owner--unload his burden on the
general public by the increase of prices. There are many difficulties,
which seem almost insoluble, if we propose to ourselves to integrate the
rural laborer into the general economic life of the country by making
him a partner in the industry he works on. But what I hope for most
is first that the natural evolution of the rural community, and the
concentration of individual manufacture, purchase and sale, into
communal enterprises, will lead to a very large co-operative ownership
of expensive machinery, which will necessitate the communal employment
of labor. If this takes place, as I hope it will, the rural laborer,
instead of being a manual worker using primitive implements, will have
the status of a skilled mechanic employed permanently by a cooperative
community. He should be a member of the society which employs him, and
in the division of profits receive in proportion to his wage, as the
farmers in proportion to their trade.
A second policy open to agricultural labor when it becomes organized
is the policy of collective farming. This I believe will and ought to
receive attention in the future. Co-operative societies of agricultural
laborers in Italy, Roumania, and elsewhere have rented land from
landowners. They then reallotted the land among themselves for
individual cultivation, or else worked it as a true co-operative
enterprise with labor, purchase and sale all communal enterprises, with
considerable benefit to the members. We can well understand a landowner
not liking to divide his land into small holdings, with all the
attendant troubles which in Ireland beset a landlord with small farmers
on his estate. But I think landowners in Ireland could be found who
would rent land to a co-operative society of skilled laborers who
approached the owner with a well-thought-out scheme. The success of one
colony would lead to others being started, as happened in Italy.
This solution of the problem of agricultural labor will be forced on us
for many reasons. The economic effects of the great European War, the
burden of debt piled on the participating nations, will make Ministers
shun schemes of reform involving a large use of national credit, or
which would increase the sum of national obligations. Land purchase
on the old term I believe cannot be continued. Yet we will demand the
intensive cultivation of the national estate, and increased production
of wealth, especially of food-stuffs. The large area of agricultural
land laid down for pasture is not so productive as tilled land, does
not sustain so large a population, and there will be more reasons in the
future than in the past for changing the character of farming in these
areas. The policy of collective farming offers a solution, and whatever
Government is in power should facilitate the settlement of men in
cooperative colonies and provide expert instructors as managers for the
first year or two if necessary. Such a policy would not be so expensive
as land purchase, and with fair rent fixed, hundreds of thousands of
people could be planted comfortably on the land in Ireland and produce
more wealth from it than could ever be produced from grazing lands,
and agricultural workers and the sons of farmers who now emigrate could
become economically independent.
I hope, also, that farmers, becoming more brotherly as their own
enterprises flourish, will welcome laborers into their co-operative
stores, credit banks, poultry and bee-keeping societies, and allow them
the benefits of cheap purchase, cheap credit, and of efficient marketing
of whatever the laborer may produce on his allotment. The growth of
national conscience and the spirit of human brotherhood, and a
feeling of shame that any should be poor and neglected in the national
household, will be needed to bring the rural laborer into the circle of
national life, and make him a willing worker in the general scheme.
If farmers will not, on their part, advance towards their laborers and
bring them into the co-operative community, then labor will be organized
outside their community and will be hostile, and will be always brooding
and scheming to strike a blow when the farmer can least bear it,--when
the ground must be tilled or the harvest gathered. And this, if peace
cannot be made, will result in a still greater decline of tillage and
the continued flight of the rural laborers, and the increase of the area
in grass, and the impoverishing of human life and national well-being.
Some policy to bring contentment to small holders and rural workers must
be formulated and acted upon. Agriculture is of more importance to the
nation than industry. Our task is to truly democratize civilization
and its agencies; to spread in widest commonalty culture, comfort,
intelligence, and happiness, and to give to the average man those things
which in an earlier age were the privileges of a few. The country is the
fountain of the life and health of a race. And this organization of the
country people into co-operative communities will educate them and make
them citizens in the true sense of the word, that is, people continually
conscious of their identity of interest with those about them.
It is by this conscious sense of solidarity of interest, which only the
organized co-operative community can engender in modern times, that the
higher achievements of humanity become possible. Religion has created
this spirit at times--witness the majestic cathedrals the Middle Ages
raised to manifest their faith. Political organization engendered the
passion of citizenship in the Greek States, and the Parthenon and a host
of lordly buildings crowned the hills and uplifted and filled with
pride the heart of the citizen. Our big countries, our big empires, and
republics, for all their military strength and science, and the wealth
which science has made it possible for man to win, do not create
citizenship because of the loose organization of society; because
individualism is rampant, and men, failing to understand the intricacies
of the vast and complex life of their country, fall back on private
life and private ambitions, and leave the honor of their country and the
making of laws and the application of the national revenues to a class
of professional politicians, in their turn in servitude to the interests
which supply party funds, and so we find corruption in high places and
cynicism in the people. It is necessary for the creation of citizens,
for the building up of a noble national life, that the social order
should be so organized that this sense of interdependence will be
constantly felt. It is also necessary for the preservation of the
physical health and beauty of our race that our people should live
more in the country and less in the cities. I believe it would be an
excellent thing for humanity if its civilization could be based on rural
industry mainly and not on urban industry. More and more men and women
in our modern civilization drift out of Nature, out of sweet air,
health, strength, beauty, into the cities, where in the third generation
there is a rickety population, mean in stature, vulgar or depraved in
character, with the image of the devil in mind and matter more than the
image of Deity. Those who go like it at first; but city life is like the
roll spoken of by the prophet, which was sweet in the mouth but bitter
in the belly. The first generation are intoxicated by the new life,
but in the third generation the cord is cut which connected them with
Nature, the Great Mother, and life shrivels up, sundered from the source
of life. Is there any prophet, any statesman, any leader, who will--as
Moses once led the Israelites out of the Egyptian bondage--excite
the human imagination and lead humanity back to Nature, to sunlight,
starlight, earth-breath, sweet air, beauty, gaiety, and health? Is it
impossible now to move humanity by great ideas, as Mahomet fired his
dark hosts to forgetfulness of life; or as Peter the Hermit awakened
Europe to a frenzy, so that it hurried its hot chivalry across a
continent to the Holy Land? Is not the earth mother of us all? Are not
our spirits clothed round with the substance of earth? Is it not from
Nature we draw life? Do we not perish without sunlight and fresh air?
Let us have no breath of air and in five minutes life is extinct. Yet
in the cities there is a slow poisoning of life going on day by day. The
lover of beauty may walk the streets of London or any big city and may
look into ten thousand faces and see none that is lovely. Is not the
return of man to a natural life on the earth a great enough idea to
inspire humanity? Is not the idea of a civilization amid the green trees
and fields under the smokeless sky alluring? Yes, but men say there is
no intellectual life working on the land. No intellectual life when man
is surrounded by mystery and miracle! When the mysterious forces which
bring to birth and life are yet undiscovered; when the earth is teeming
with life, and the dumb brown lips of the ridges are breathing mystery!
Is not the growth of a tree from a tiny cell hidden in the earth as
provocative of thought as the things men learn at the schools? Is not
thought on these things more interesting than the sophistries of the
newspapers? It is only in Nature, and by thought on the problems of
Nature, that our intellect grows to any real truth and draws near to the
Mighty Mind which laid the foundations of the world.
Our civilizations are a nightmare, a bad dream. They have no longer the
grandeur of Babylon or Nineveh. They grow meaner and meaner as they
grow more urbanized. What could be more depressing than the miles of
poverty-stricken streets around the heart of our modern cities? The
memory lies on one "heavy as frost and deep almost as life." It
is terrible to think of the children playing on the pavements; the
depletion of vitality, with artificial stimulus supplied from the
flaring drink-shops. The spirit grows heavy as if death lay on it while
it moves amid such things. And outside these places the clouds are
flying overhead snowy and spiritual as of old, the sun is shining, the
winds are blowing, the fields are green, the forests are murmuring leaf
to leaf, but the magic that God made is unknown to these poor folk. The
creation of a rural civilization is the greatest need of our time.
It may not come in our days, but we can lay the foundations of it,
preparing the way for the true prophet when he will come. The fight now
is not to bring people back to the land, but to keep those who are
on the land contented, happy, and prosperous. And we must begin by
organizing them to defend what is left to them; to take back, industry
by industry, what was stolen from them. We must organize the country
people into communities, for without some kind of communal life men hold
no more together than the drifting sands by the seashore. There is a
natural order in which men have instinctively grouped themselves from
the dawn of time. It is as natural to them to do so as it is for bees to
build their hexagonal cells. If we read the history of civilization
we will find people in every land forming little clans co-operating
together. Then the ambition of rulers or warriors breaks them up; the
greed of powerful men puts an end to them. But, whether broken or not,
the moment the rural dweller is left to himself he begins again, with
nature prompting him, to form little clans--or nations rather--with his
fellows, and it is there life has been happiest. We did this in ancient
Ireland. The baronies whose names are on Irish land today and the
counties are survivals of these old co-operative colonies, where the men
owned the land together and elected their own leaders, and formed their
own social order and engendered passionate loyalties and affections. It
was so in every land under the sun. It was so in ancient India and in
ancient Peru. The European farmers, and we in Ireland along with them,
are beginning again the eternal task of building up a civilization in
nature--the task so often disturbed, the labor so often destroyed. And
it is with the hope that we in Ireland will build truly and nobly that I
have put together these thoughts on the rural community.
VIII.
We may now consider the proletarian in our cities. The worker in our
modern world is the subject of innumerable unapplied doctrines. The
lordliest things are predicated of him, which do not affect in the least
the relationship with him of those who employ his labor. The ancient
wisdom, as it is recounted to him on God's day, assures him of his
immortality: that the divine signature is over all his being, that in
some way he is co-related with the Eternal, that he is fashioned in a
likeness to It. He is a symbol of God Himself. He is the child of Deity.
His life is Its very breath. The Habitations of Eternity await his
coming, and the divine event to which he moves is the dwelling within
him of the Divine Mind, so that Deity may become his very self. So proud
a tale is told of him, and when he wakens on the morrow after the day of
God he finds that none will pay him reverence. He, the destined comrade
of Seraphim and Cherubim, is herded with other Children of the King in
fetid slum and murky alleys, where the devil hath his many mansions,
where light and air, the great purifiers, are already dimmed and
corrupted before they do him service. He is insecure in the labor by
which he lives. He works today, and tomorrow he may be told there is no
further need for him, and his fate and the fate of those dependent on
him are not remembered by those who dismissed him. If he dies, leaving
wife or children, the social order makes but the most inhuman provision
for them. How ghastly is the brotherhood of the State for its poor the
workhouses declare, and our social decrees which turn loving-kindness
into official acts and make legal and formal what should be natural
impulse and the overflow of the heart. So great a disparity exists
between spiritual theory and the realities of the social order that it
might almost be said that spiritual theory has no effect at all on our
civilization, and its inhuman contours seem softened at no point where
we could say, "Here the Spirit has mastery. Here God possesses the
world."
The imagination, following the worker in our industrial system, sees
him laboring without security in his work, in despair, locked out, on
strike, living in slums, rarely with enough food for health, bringing
children into the world who suffer from malnutrition from their earliest
years, a pauper when his days of strength are passed. He dies in
charitable institutions. Though his labors are necessary he is yet not
integrated into the national economy. He has no share of his own in the
wealth of the nation. He cannot claim work as a right from the holders
of economic power, and this absolute dependence upon the autocrats of
industry for a livelihood is the greatest evil of any, for it puts a
spiritual curse on him and makes him in effect a slave. Instinctively he
adopts a servile attitude to those who can sentence him and his children
to poverty and hunger without trial or judgment by his peers. A hasty
word, and he may be told to draw his pay and begone. The spiritual wrong
done him by the social order is greater than the material ill, and that
spiritual wrong is no less a wrong because generation after generation
of workers have grown up and are habituated to it, and do not realize
the oppression; because in childhood circumstance and the black art of
education alike conspire to make the worker humble in heart and to take
the crown and sceptre from his spirit, and his elders are already tamed
and obsequious.
Yet the workers in the modern world have great qualities. This class
in great masses will continually make sacrifices for the sake of a
principle. They have lived so long in the depths: many of them have
reached the very end of all the pain which is the utmost life can bear
and have in their character that fearlessness which comes from long
endurance and familiarity with the worst hardships. I am a literary
man, a lover of ideas, and I have found few people in my life who would
sacrifice anything for a social principle; but I will never forget the
exultation with which I realized in a great labor trouble, when the
masters of industry issued a document asking men on peril of dismissal
to swear never to join a trades union, that there were thousands of men
in my own city who refused to obey, though they had no membership or
connection with the objectionable association. Nearly all the real
manhood of Dublin I found was among the obscure myriads who are paid
from twenty to thirty shillings a week. The men who will sacrifice
anything for brotherhood get rarer and rarer above that limit of wealth.
These men would not sign away their freedom, their right to choose their
own heroes and their own ideals. Most of them had no strike funds to
fall back on. They had wives and children depending on them. Quietly
and grimly they took through hunger the path to the Heavenly City, yet
nobody praised them, no one put a crown upon their brows. Beneath their
rags and poverty there was in these obscure men a nobility of spirit. It
is in these men and the men in the cabins in the country that the hope
of Ireland lies. The poor have always helped each other, and it is
they who listen eagerly to the preachers of a social order based on
brotherhood in industry. It is these workers, always necessary but never
yet integrated into the social order, who must be educated, who must
be provided for, who must be accepted fully as comrade in any scheme
of life to be devised and which would call itself Christian. That word,
expressing the noblest and most spiritual conception of humanity, has
been so degraded by misuse in the world that we could almost hate it
with the loathing we have for evil, if we did not know that Hell can as
disguise put on the outward garments of Heaven. Yet what is eternally
true remains pure and uncorrupted, and those who turn to it find it
there--as all finally must turn to it to fulfill their destiny of
inevitable beauty.
IX.
Often with sadness I hear people speak of industrial development in
Ireland, for I feel they contemplate no different system than that which
fills workers with despair in countries where it is more successfully
applied. All these energetic people are conspiring to build factories
and mills and to fill them with human labor, and they believe the more
they do this the better it will be for Ireland. They talk of Ireland
as if it was only admirable as a quantity rather than a quality. They
express delight at swelling statistics and increased trade, but where
do we hear any reflection on the quality of life engendered by this
industrial development? Our civilization is to differ in no way from any
other. No new ideal of life is suggested to differentiate us. We are to
go on exploiting human labor. Our working classes are to increase and
multiply and earn profits for an employing class, as labor has one from
time immemorial in Babylon, in Nineveh, in Rome, and in London
today. But a choice yet remains to us, because the character of our
civilization is not yet fixed. It is mainly germinal. It fills the
spirit with weariness to think of another nation following the old path,
without thought or imagination of other roads leading to new and more
beautiful life. Every now and then, when the world was still vast and
full of undiscovered wonders, some adventurers would leave the harbor,
and steer their galleys past the known coast and the familiar cities and
over unraveled seas, seeking some new land where life might be freer and
ampler than that they had known. Is the old daring gone? Are there
not such spirits among us ready to join in the noblest of all
adventures--the building up of a civilization--so that the human might
reflect the divine order? In the divine order there is both freedom and
solidarity. It is the virtue of the soul to be free and its nature to
love; and when it is free and acts by its own will it is most united
with all other life. Those planetary spirits who move in solemn motion
about the heavens I do not conceive as the slaves of Deity but as its
adorers. But that material nature in which the soul is embodied has the
dividing quality of the prism, which resolves pure light into distinct
rays; and so on earth we get the principle of freedom and the virtue of
solidarity as separated ideals continually at warfare with each other,
and the reconcilement on earth of these principles in man is the
conquest of matter by the spirit. This dramatic sundering on earth
of virtues in unison in the heavens explains the struggle between
Protestantism and Catholicism, between nationality and imperialism,
between individualist and socialist, between dynamic and static in
philosophy. Indeed in the last analysis all human conflicts are the
balancing on earth of the manifestation of divine principles which are
one in the unmanifest spirit.
The civilization we create, the social order we build up, must provide
for essential freedom for the individual and for solidarity of the
nation. Now essential freedom is denied to men if they are in their
condition servile. Can we contemplate the permanent existence of a
servile class in Ireland? For, disguise it how we will, our present
industrial system is practically a form of slavery for the workers,
differing in externals only from the ages when the serf had a collar
round his neck. He has now freedom to change from master to master, and
can even seek for a master in other countries; but he must, in any
case, accept the relation of servant to master. The old slave could be
whipped. In the new order the wage slave can be starved, and the fact
that many of the rulers of industry use their power benevolently does
not make the existing relation between employer and employed right, or
the social order one whose permanence can be justified. Men will gladly
labor if they feel that their labor conspires with that of all other
workers for the general good; but there is something loathsome to the
spirit in the condition of the labor market, where labor is regarded as
a commodity to be bought and sold like soap or candles. For that truly
describes how it is with labor in our industrial system: we can buy
labor, which means we can buy human life and thought, a portion of God's
being, and make a profit out of it. By so selling himself the worker is
enslaved and limited in a thousand ways. The power of dismissal of one
person by another at whim acts against independence of character, or the
free expression or opinion in thought, in politics, and in religion. The
soul is stunted in its growth, and spiritual life made subordinate
to material interests. To deny essential freedom to the soul is the
greatest of all crimes, and such denial has in all ages evoked the
deepest anger among men. When freedom has been threatened nations have
risen up maddened and exultant, and the clang of martial arms has been
heard and the stony kings of the past have been encountered in battle.
In Ireland we shall have our greatest fight of all to gain this freedom:
not alone material independence for man, but the freedom of the soul,
its right to choose its own heroes and its own ideals without let or
hindrance by other men.
We have many of the vices of a slave race, and we treat others as we
have been treated. Our national aspirations were overborne by material
power, and we in turn use cudgel and curse on our countrymen when they
differ from us in opinion and policy. Men, when they cannot match their
intellect against another's, suppress him and howl him down, putting
faith in their own brainlessness. I would make the most passionate plea
for freedom in Ireland: freedom for all to say the truth they feel or
know. What right have we to ask for ourselves what we deny to another?
The bludgeon at meetings is a blow struck against heaven. Those who will
not argue or reason are recreants against humanity, and are prowling
back again on all fours in their minds to the brute. It matters not in
what holy name men war with violence on freedom of thought, whether in
the name of God or nation they are enemies of both. We are only right
in controversy when we overcome by a superior beauty or truth. The
first fundamental idea inspiring an Irish polity should be this idea of
freedom in all spheres of thought, and it is most necessary to fight
for this because the devil and hell have organized their forces in this
unfortunate land in sectarian and secret societies, of which it might
be written they love darkness rather than light for the old God-given
reasons.
X.
Whenever in Ireland there has been a revolt of labor it too often finds
arrayed against it the press, the law, and the police. All the great
powers are in entente. The press, without inquiry, begins a detestable
cant about labor agitators misleading ignorant men. Every wild phrase
uttered by an exasperated worker is quoted against the cause of labor,
and its grievances are suppressed. We are told nothing about how
the worker lives: what homes, what food, his wage will provide. The
journalist holds up a moral umbrella, protecting society from the fiery
hail of conscience. The baser sort of clergyman will take up the parable
and begin advocating a servile peace, glibly misinterpreting the divine
teaching of love to prove that the lamb should lie down inside the lion,
and only so can it be saved soul and body, forgetful that the peace
which was Christ's gift to humanity was the peace of God which passes
all understanding, and that it was a spiritual quietude, and that on
earth--the underworld--the gospel in realization was to bring not peace
but a sword.
The law, assured of public opinion, then deals sternly with whatever
unfortunate life is driven into its pens. I am putting very mildly the
devilish reality, for society is so constituted that the public, kept in
ignorance of the real facts, believes that it is acting rightly, and so
the devil has conscience on his side and that divine power is turned
to infernal uses. What can labor oppose to this federation of State and
Church, of press and law, of capital and physical force to back capital,
when it sets about its own liberation and to institute a new social
order to replace autocracy in industry? Its allies are few. A rare
thinker, scientist, literary man, artist or clergyman, impelled by
hatred of what is ugly in life, will speak on its behalf, and may render
some aid and help to tear holes in that moral shield held up by the
press, and may here and there give to that blinded public a vision of
the Hosts of the Lord arrayed against it. But the only real power
the workers can truly rely on is their own. Nothing but a spiritual
revolution or an economic revolution will bring other classes into
comradeship with them. The ideal labor should set before itself is not
a transitory improvement in its wage, because a wage war never truly or
permanently improves the position of labor. This section or that may,
relatively to its own past or the position of other workers, improve
itself; but capital is like a ship which, however the tide rises or
falls, floats upon it, and is not sunken more deeply in the water at
high tide than at low tide. Whenever any burden is placed upon capital
it immediately sets about unloading that burden on the public. Wages
might be doubled by Act of Parliament, and the net result would be
to double prices, if not to increase them still more. The more the
autocrats of industry are federated the more easily can they unload on
others any burden placed on them.
The value of money is simply what it will purchase at any time. If
the rulers of industry can halve the purchasing power of money while
doubling wages at the command of the State, logic leads us to assume
that wages boards, arbitration boards and the like can only be
transitory in their meliorating effect; and to pursue the attack on the
autocrats of industry by the road of wages alone is to attack them where
they are impregnable, and where, seeming to give way, they are all the
while really losing nothing, and are only fixing the wage system more
permanently on those who attack them. There are fiery spirits among the
proletarians who hope that militant labor will at last bring about the
social revolution, taking the earthly paradise by violence. They believe
that if every worker dropped his tools and absolutely refused to work
under the old system, it would be impossible to continue it. That is
true, but those who advocate this policy slur over many difficulties,
and the relative power of endurance of both parties. They do not, I
think, take into account the immense power in the hands of those who
uphold the present system. Those who might be expected to strike are
not--at least in Ireland--a majority of the population. They would have
far fewer material resources to fall back on than those others whose
interests would lead them to preserve the present social order. It
is clear, too, when we analyze the forces at the command of labor
and capital, that the latter has attached to itself by the bonds of
self-interest the scientific men--engineers, inventors, chemists,
bacteriologists, designers, organizers, all the intellect of
industry--without which, in alliance with itself, revolting labor would
be unable to continue production as before. Labor so revolting might
indeed for a time bring the work of the nation to a standstill; but
unless it could by some means attract to itself men of the class
described, it would not be able to take the helm of the ship of industry
and guide it with knowledge as the holders of economic power have done
in the past. A policy of emancipation should provide labor with a
means of attracting to itself that kind of knowledge which is gained in
universities, laboratories, colleges of science, and, above all, in
the actual guidance of great industrial enterprises. In any trial of
endurance those who start with the greatest intellectual, moral, and
material resources will win.
I do not deny that the strike is a powerful weapon in the hand of labor,
but it is one with which it is difficult to imagine labor dealing a
knock-out blow to the present social order. I believe in an orderly
evolution of society, at least in Ireland, and doubt whether by
revolution people can be raised to an intelligence, a humanity, or a
nobility of nature greater than they formerly possessed. Nobody can
remain standing on tiptoe. After a little time disorder subsides and
some strong man leads the inevitable reaction. In France people revolted
against a decadent monarchy, and in a dozen years they had a new
emperor. In England they beheaded a king as a protest against tyranny,
and they got a dictator in his place who took little or no account of
parliaments; and finally a second Charles, rather worse than the first,
came to the throne. The everlasting battle between light and darkness
goes on stubbornly all the time, and the gain of the Hosts of Light is
inch by inch. Extraordinary efforts, impetuous charges, which seem
to win for a moment, too often leave the attacking force tired and
exhausted, and the forces of reaction set in and overwhelm them. I am
the friend of revolt if people cannot stand the conditions they live
under, and if they can see no other way. It is better to be men than
slaves. The French Revolution was a tragic episode in history, but
when people suffer intolerably and are insulted in their despair it is
inevitable blood will be shed. One can only say with Whitman:
Pale, silent, stern, what could I say to that long-accrued retribution?
Could I wish humanity different Could I wish the people made of wood and
stone, or that there be no justice in destiny or time?
There is danger in revolution if the revolutionary spirit is much more
advanced than the intellectual, and moral qualities which alone
can secure the success of a revolt. These intellectual and moral
qualities--the skill to organize, the wisdom to control large
undertakings, are not natural gifts but the results of experience. They
are evolutionary products. The emancipation of labor, I believe, will
not be gained by revolution but by prolonged effort, continued month by
month and year by year, in which first this thing is adventured, then
that: each enterprise brings its own gifts of wisdom and experience,
and there is no reaction, because, instead of the violent use of certain
powers, the whole being is braced: experience, intellect, desire, all
strong and working harmoniously, press forward and support each other,
and no enterprise is undertaken where the intellect to carry it out is
not present together with the desire. It requires great intellectual
and moral qualities to bring about a revolution. A rage at present
conditions is not enough.
XI.
Our farmers are already free. The problem with them is not now concerned
with freedom, but how they may be brought into a solidarity with each
other and the nation. To make our proletarians free and masters of their
own energies, in unison with each other and the national being, is the
most pressing labor of the many before us. Unless there be economic
freedom there can be no other freedom. The right of no individual to
subsistence should be at the good will of any other individual. More
than mere comfort depends on it. There are eternal and august rights of
the soul to be safeguarded, and the economic position of men should be
protected by organization and democratic law. I have already discussed
some of the avenues through which workers in our time have looked with
hope. I have little belief that these roads lead anywhere but back to
the old City of Slavery, however they may seem to curve away at the
outset. The strike, on whatever scale, is no way to freedom, though
the strike--or the threat of it--may bring wages nearer to subsistence
level. The art of warfare is too much in the hands of specialists for
trust to be placed in revolution. A machine-gun with a few experts
behind it is worth a thousand revolutionary workers, however maddened
they may be. Does political action, on which so many rely, promise more?
I do not believe it does. I believe that to appeal to legislatures is
to appeal to bodies dominated by those interested in maintaining the
present social order, although they may act so as to redress the worst
evils created by it. In Ireland, for this generation at least, it
would be impossible to secure in a legislative assembly majorities
representative of the class we wish to see emancipated. It may seem as
if I had closed all the paths out of the social labyrinth; but the
way to emancipation has, I think, already been surveyed by pioneers.
A policy of social reconstruction is practical, and needs but steady
persistence for its realization. That policy--I refer to co-operative
action--has been adopted in various forms by workers in many countries;
and what is needed here is to study and coordinate these applications of
co-working, and to form a general staff of labor who will, on behalf of
the workers, examine the weapons fashioned by their class elsewhere, and
who will draw up a plan of campaign as the staff of an army do previous
to military operations. It will be found that economic action along
co-operative lines has, in one country, barriers placed before its
expansion which could be set aside by supplementing this action by
methods elaborated by the genius of workers elsewhere.
It is not my purpose here to repeat in detail methods of organization,
partly technical, which can be found fully described in many admirable
books, but rather to indicate the order of advance, the methods of
coordination of these, and their final absorption and transformation
in the national being. There is a great deal of ignorance about things
essential to safe action. When men are filled with enthusiasm they are
apt to apply their new principles rashly in schemes which are bound to
fall, just as over-confident soldiers will in battle sometimes rush a
position prematurely which they cannot hold, because the general line of
their army has not advanced sufficiently to support them. Sacrifices are
made with no permanent result, and the morale of the army is injured.
In the rural districts the advance must, in the nature of things, be
from production to consumption, and with urban workers inversely from
a control over distribution to a mastery over production. I have often
wondered over the blindness of workers in towns in Ireland, who have
made so little use in the economic struggle of the freedom they have to
spend their wage where they choose. They speak of this struggle as the
class war; but they carry on the conflict most energetically where it is
most difficult for them to succeed, and hardly at all where it would
be comparatively easy for them to weaken the resources of their
antagonists. In warfare much use is made of flanking movements, which
aim at cutting the enemy's communication with his base of supply.
Frontal attacks are dangerous. It is equally true in economic warfare.
The strike is a frontal attack, and those they fight are entrenched
deeply with all the artillery of the State, the press, science, and
wealth on their side. What would we think of an army which, at the
close of each week's fighting, voluntarily surrendered to the enemy the
ground, guns, ammunition, and prisoners captured through the previous
six days? Yet this is what our workers do. The power opposed to them is
mainly economic, though there is an intellectual basis for it also. But
the wages of the workers, little for the individual, yet a large part of
the national income if taken for the mass, goes back to strengthen the
system they protest against through purchases of domestic requirements.
The creation of co-operative stores ought to be the first constructive
policy adopted by Irish labor. It ought to be as much a matter of class
honor with them to be members of stores as to be in the trade union of
their craft. The store may be regarded as the commissariat department
of the army of labor. Many a strike has failed of its object, and
the workers have gone back defeated, because their neglect of the
commissariat made them unable to hold out for that last week when both
sides are desperate and at the end of their resources. But it is
not mainly as an aid to the strike that I advocate democratizing the
distributive trade, but because control over distribution gives a
large measure of control over production. The history of co-operative
workshops indicates that these have rarely been successful unless
worked in conjunction with distributive stores. The retail trader is
not sympathetic with co-operative production. As the cat is akin to the
tiger, so is the individual trader--no matter on how small a scale he
operates--a kinsman of the great autocrats of industry, and he will
sympathize with his economic kinsmen and will retail their goods in
preference to those produced in co-operative workshops.
The control of agencies of distribution by the workers at a certain
stage in their development enables them to start productive enterprises
with more safety and less expense in regard to advertisement than the
capitalist can. In fact the co-operative store, properly organized,
creates a tied trade for the output of co-operative workshops. It is
a source of financial aid to these, and will invest funds in them and
assist trades unions gradually to transform themselves into co-operative
guilds of producers which should be their ultimate ideal. As I shall
show later on, the store will enable the urban worker to enter into
intimate alliance with the rural producer. Their interests are
really identical. In every town in Ireland efforts should be made to
democratize the distributive agencies, and the workers will have many
allies in this, driven by the increased cost of living to search out the
most economical agencies of purchase. If the proletarians are not in a
majority in Ireland--a nation where the farmers are the most numerous
single class--they certainly form the majority in the cities; and the
co-operative store, while admitting to membership all who will apply,
ought to be and would be sympathetic with the efforts of labor to
emancipate itself, and would be a powerful lever in its hands. As the
stores increase in number, an analysis of their trade will reveal
year by year in what directions co-operative production of particular
articles may safely be attempted. More and more by this means the
producing power and the capital at the disposal of the worker will
be placed at the service of democracy. The first steps are the most
difficult. In due time the workers will have educated a number of their
members, and will have attached to themselves men of proved capacity
to be the leaders in fresh enterprises, manufactures of one kind or
another, democratic banking institutions, all supporting each other and
leaning on each other and playing into each other's hands.
The extent to which this may be carried, and the opportunities for
making Ireland a co-operative democracy, I shall presently explain. I do
not regard any of these forms of co-operative organization as ideal or
permanent. The co-operative movement must be regarded rather as a
great turning movement on the part of humanity towards the ideal. The
co-operative organizations now being formed in Ireland and over the
world will, I am certain, persist and outlast this generation and the
next, and will grow into vaster things than we dream of; but the really
important change they will bring about in the minds of men will be
psychological. Men will become habituated to the thought of common
action for the common good. To get so far in civil life is a great
step. Today our civil life is a tangle of petty personal interests
and competitions. The co-operative movement is, as I have said, a vast
turning movement of humanity heavenwards, or, at least, to bring them
face round to the Delectable City. When this psychological change takes
place the democratic associations--which have grown up haphazard as the
workers found it easiest to create them--will be changed and remodeled
by men who will have the mass of people behind them in their efforts
to make a more majestic structure of society for the enlargement of the
lives and spirits of men.
XII.
We have descended from the national soul to the material plane, and we
must still continue here for a time, because the doctrine that a sane
mind can only manifest through a sane body is as true in reference
to the State as to the individual, and necessitates a study of social
fabrics. The soul creates tendencies and habits in the body, and the
body repeats these vibrations automatically and infects the soul
again with its old desires. Our religious hatreds created sectarian
organizations, and these react again in the national soul, which
would, I believe, willingly pass away from that mood, but finds itself
incarnated in organizations habituated to sectarian action, and its
energies are turned into these hateful channels unwillingly. So a
drunkard who now realizes that intemperance is rotting his nature is
conquered by the appetites he set up in the past, and with his soul in
rebellion he yet satisfies the craving in the body. The individualism in
our economic life reacts on the national being, and prevents concerted
action for the general good. We have yet to create harmony of purpose
in our economic life, and to bring together interests long separated and
unmindful of each other, and make them realize that their interests are
identical. It is one of the commonplaces of economics that urban
and rural interests are identical: but in truth the townsman and the
countryman have always acted as if their interests were opposed,
and they know very little of each other. I never like to let these
commonplaces of economics pass my frontiers unless they give the
countersign to the challenge for truth. People declare in the same way
that the interests of labor and capital are identical, and implore them
not to fight with one another. But the truth of that statement seems
to me to depend largely on whether capital owns labor or labor owns
capital. As an abstract proposition it is one of the economic formulae I
would leave instructions at my frontiers to have detained until further
inquiry as to its antecedents. All these statements may be true, but
to make them operative, to give them a dynamic rather than a static
character, we must convince people they are true by close argument and
still more so by realistic illustration.
To bring about a high nobility in the national soul we must make harmony
in its economic life, and the two main currents of economic energy--the
agricultural and urban--must be made to flow so that their action will
not defeat each other. Let us take the farmer first. How ought he to
wish to see life in the towns develop? Should he wish for the triumph of
labor or capital: the success of the co-operative movement, the triumph
of the multiple shop or the private trader, of guilds of workers or
autocrats of industry? Economic desires generally depend on the nature
of the industry men are engaged in. The jeweler would probably desire
the permanence of the social order which created most wealthy people who
could afford to buy his wares. The farmer's industry, if we consider it
closely, is the most democratic of any in its application to society.
The produce of the farm, in its final distribution, is divided into
portions more or less equal and conditioned in quantity by the digestive
powers of an individual. The wealthiest millionaire cannot eat more
bread, butter, meat, vegetables, or fruit than the manual laborer would
eat if the latter could afford to get such things. In fact he would
eat rather less, because the manual worker has a much better appetite,
indeed requires more food. It appears to be the interest of the farmer
to support any urban movement whose object it is to see that every
worker in the towns is remunerated so that he, his wife, and his
children can procure as much food as they require. Any underpaid worker
in the towns is a wrong to the farmer--a willing customer who yet cannot
buy. If there is, let us say, a sum of fifteen hundred pounds a week to
be paid away in a town, it is to the interest of farmers that that sum
should be paid to a thousand men at the rate of thirty shillings a week
rather than to fifty men at thirty pounds a week. In the case of the
workers a greater part of the money will be spent on food. But if fifty
men have thirty pounds a week each, it will be spent to satisfy the
appetites of a much smaller number of people. A larger proportion will
be spent on furniture, pictures, motor-cars and what not. It may be
spent so as to give some kind of employment, but it will not be a
division of the money so much to the interests of the farmer. However
we analyze the problem it appears to be to the farmer's interests to
support democratic movements in the cities, certainly up to the point
where every worker in the towns has a wage which enables himself and his
family to eat all they require for health. It is also to the interests
of farmers to support any system of distribution of goods which
eliminates the element of profit in the sale. After the farmer gets his
price it is to his interests that food should be increased in cost as
little as possible when the article is transferred to the consumer,
because if farm produce has to bear too many profits it will be
expensive for the consumer, and there will be a lessened demand. So
associations like the co-operative stores, which aim at the elimination
of the element of profit in distribution, should be approved of by the
farmers.
Now we come to the townsman again. Is it his interest to support the
farmers in his own country or to regard the world as his farm? The
argument on the economic side is not so clear, but it is, I think,
just as sound. If agriculture is neglected in any country the rural
population pour into the towns. The country becomes a fountain of
blackleg labor. Rural labor has no traditions of trade unionism, and
takes any work at any price. There are fewer people engaged in producing
food, and its cost rises. Food must be imported from abroad; and there
is national insecurity, as in times of war their is always the danger of
the trade routes overseas being blocked by an enemy, and this again has
to be provided against by heavy expenditure for militarist purposes. The
farther away an army is from its base the more insecure is its
position, and the same thing is true in the industrial life of nations.
International trade there must always be. It is one of the means by
which the larger solidarity of humanity is to be achieved; but that will
never come about until there is a nobler and more human life within the
states, and we must begin by perfecting national life before we consider
empires and world federations. So in this essay only the national being
is considered.
I desire to unite countryman and townsman in one movement, and to make
the co-operative principle the basis of a national civilization. How
are we to prevent them fighting the old battle between producer and
consumer? I think that this can best be brought about by co-operative
federations, which will act for both in manufacture, purchase, and sale,
and with which both rural and urban associations will find it to their
interest to be affiliated. Now the townsman cannot to any extent supply
food for his stores by buying farms. To control agricultural production
in that way would necessitate a financial operation which the
State would shrink from, and which it would be impossible for urban
cooperators to finance. We had better make up our minds to let farmers
be syndicalists, controlling entirely the processes of agricultural
production themselves. They will do it better than the townsman could,
more efficiently and more economically. They will never be able, with
the world in competition, to put up prices artificially. How can the
two main divisions of national life be brought together in a national
solidarity? We can find an answer if we remember that farmers are not
only producers but consumers. They do not go about naked in the fields.
They require clothes, furniture, tea, coffee, sugar, oil, soap, candles,
pots and pans--in fact the farmer's wife needs nearly all the things the
townsman's wife needs, except that she purchases a little less food. But
even here modern conditions are driving the farmer to buy food in the
shops rather than to produce it for himself on the farm. Country bread
is made in the bakery more and more. Butter, cheese, and bacon are made
in factories, and the farmer's tendency is to buy what bread, bacon,
and butter he requires, selling the milk to be made into butter to a
creamery, the grain to make the bread to a miller, and the pigs to
a factory. Co-operative distribution would be as advantageous to the
country as in the town. Already in Ireland a considerable number of
farmers' societies are enlarging their objects, and are turning what
originally were purely agricultural associations into general
purposes societies, where the farmer's wife can purchase her
domestic requirements as well as her man his machinery, fertilizers,
feeding-stuffs, and seeds. It would be to the interest of rural
societies to deal with co-operative wholesales just as much as it is in
the interest of urban stores to do so. It would be to their interest to
take shares in these wholesales and productive federations, and see that
they cater for the farmer's interests as much as for the townsman's.
The urban co-operators, on their side, will see the opportunities for
productive co-operation the union of rural and urban movements would
create. They naturally will desire to employ as many people as possible
in co-operative production. Farmers are surrounded by rings of all
kinds: machinery manufacturers who will not sell to their societies,
manure manufacturers' alliances who keep up prices. It is a great
industry, this of supplying the farmer with his fertilizers,
feeding-stuffs, cake, machinery. These rural co-operative societies
are increasing in number year by year. Farmers want clothes, hats, and
boots: and the necessary machinery for their industry is almost entirely
of urban manufacture--ploughs, binders, separators, harrows, and many
other implements of tillage. It is an immense industry and yet to be
co-operatively exploited. In the towns some progress has been made in
distribution. But a nation depends upon its wealth producers and not
upon its consumers. Co-operators might double, treble, or quadruple the
distributive trade, and still occupy only a very secondary position in
national life unless they enter more largely upon production. We will
never make the co-operative idea the fundamental one in the civilization
of Ireland until we employ a very large part of the population in
production. Now we have at present, thanks to the energy of the pioneers
of agricultural co-operation, a new market opening in the country
for things which the townsman can produce. Does not this suggest
new productive urban enterprises? Does it not favor an evolution of
manufacturing industry, so that democratic control may finally replace
the autocratic control of the capitalist? The trades unions cannot
do this alone by following up any of their traditional policies. They
cannot go into trade on their own account with any guarantee of success
unless they are associated with agencies of distribution. But if
co-operators--urban and rural--through their federations invade more and
more the field of production they will draw to themselves the hearts and
hopes of the workers and idealists in the nation. People are really more
concerned about the making of an income than about the spending of it.
It is a necessity of our policy if it is to bring about the co-operative
commonwealth, that co-operators must adventure much more largely into
production than they have hitherto done.
Now let us see what we have come to. There is a country movement which
is not merely one for agricultural production. It is rapidly taking
up the distribution of goods. There is an urban movement not merely
concerned with distribution but entering upon production. They can be
brought into harmony if the same federations act for both branches of
the movement. The meeting-place of the two armies should be there.
If this policy is adopted there will gradually grow-up that unity of
purpose between country and urban workers which is the psychological
basis and necessary precedent for national action for the common good.
The policy of identity of interest must be real, and it can only be
real when the identity of interest is obvious, and it can only be made
obvious when the symbols of that unity and identity are visible day by
day in buildings and manufactures, things which are handled and seen,
and in transactions which daily bring that unity to mind. The old
poetic ideal of a United Ireland was and could only be a geographical
expression, and not a human reality, so long as men were individualist
in economics and were competing and struggling with each other for
mastery.
By the co-operative commonwealth more is meant than a series of
organizations for economic purposes. We hope to create finally, by the
close texture of our organizations, that vivid sense of the identity of
interest of the people in this island which is the basis of citizenship,
and without which there can be no noble national life. Our great
nation-states have grown so large, so myriad are their populations, so
complicated are their interests, that most people in them really feel no
sense of brotherhood with each other. We have yet to create inside our
great nation-states social and economic organizations, which will
make this identity of interest real and evident, and not seem merely
a metaphor, as it does to most people today. The more the co-operative
movement does this for its members, the more points of contact they find
in it, the more will we tend to make out of it and its branches real
social organisms, which will become as closely knit psychically as
physically the cells in a human body are knit together. Our Irish
diversities of interest have made us world-famous; but such industrial
and agricultural organizations would swallow up these antagonisms, as
the serpents created by the black art of the Egyptian magicians were
swallowed up by the rod Aaron cast on the floor, and which was made
animate by the white magic of the Lord.
XIII.
It will appear to the idealist who has contemplated the heavens more
closely than the earth that the policy I advocate is one which only
tardily could be put into operation, and would be paltry and inadequate
as a basis for society. The idealist with the Golden Age already in his
heart believes he has only to erect the Golden Banner and display it for
multitudes to array themselves beneath its folds; therefore he advocates
not, as I do, a way to the life, but the life itself. I am sympathetic
with idealists in a hurry, but I do not think the world can be changed
suddenly by some heavenly alchemy, as St. Paul was smitten by a light
from the overworld. Such light from heaven is vouchsafed to individuals,
but never to nations, who progress by an orderly evolution in society.
Though the heart in us cries out continually, "Oh, hurry, hurry to the
Golden Age," though we think of revolutions, we know that the patient
marshalling of human forces is wisdom. We have to devise ways and means
and light every step clearly before the nation will leave its footing
in some safe if unattractive locality to plant itself elsewhere. The
individual may be reckless. The race never can be so, for it carries too
great a burden and too high destinies, and it is only when the gods
wish to destroy or chastise a race that they first make it mad. Not by
revolutions can humanity be perfected. I might quote from an old oracle,
"The gods are never so turned away from man as when he ascends to them
by disorderly methods." Our spirits may live in the Golden Age, but our
bodily life moves on slow feet, and needs the lantern on the path and
the staff struck carefully into the darkness before us to see that the
path beyond is not a morass, and the light not a will o' the wisp.
Other critics may say I would destroy the variety of civilization by the
inflexible application of a single idea. Well, I realize that the net
which is spread for Leviathan will not capture all the creatures of the
deep; and the complexity of human nature is such that it is impossible
to imagine a policy, however fitting in certain spheres of human
activity, which could be applied to the whole of life. What I think we
should aim at is making the co-operative idea fundamental in Irish life.
But to say fundamental is not to say absolute. Always there will be
enter rising persons--men of creative minds--who will break away from
the mass and who will insist, perhaps rightly, on an autocratic control
of the enterprises they found, which were made possible alone by
their genius, and which would not succeed unless every worker in the
enterprise was malleable by their will. It is unlikely that State action
will cease, or that any Government we may have will not respond to the
appeal of the people to do this, that, or the other for them which they
are too indolent to do for themselves, or which by the nature of things
only governments can undertake. For a principle to be fundamental in
a country does not mean that it must be absolute. I hope society in
Ireland will be organized that the idea of democratic control of its
economic life will so pervade Irish thought that it will be in the body
politic what the spinal column is to the body--the pillar on which it
rests, the strongest single factor in the body. Another illustration
may make still clearer my meaning. In a red sunsetting the glow is so
powerful that green hills, white houses, and blue waters, touched by
its light, assume a ruddy color, partly a local color, and partly a
reflected light from the sun. Now in the same way, what is most powerful
in society multiplies images and shadows of itself, and produces
harmonies with itself which are yet not identities. It is by a
predominating idea that nations achieve the practical unity of their
citizens, and national progress becomes possible. In the future
structure of society I have no doubt there will be elements to which the
socialist, the syndicalist, the capitalist, and the individualist will
have contributed. By degrees it will be discovered what enterprises
are best directed by the State, by municipalities, by groups, or by
individuals. But if the idea of democratic control is predominant, those
enterprises which are otherwise directed will yet meet the prevalent
mood by adopting the ideas of the treatment of the workers enforced in
democratically controlled enterprises, and will in every respect, except
control, make their standards equal. All the needles of being point to
the centres where power is most manifested. The effects of the French
revolution--a democratic upheaval--invaded men's minds everywhere. Even
the autocratically ruled States, hitherto careless about the people in
their underworlds, had to make advances to democracy, and give it some
measure of the justice democracy threatened to deal to itself. Without
demanding absolutism I do desire a predominant democratic character in
our national enterprises, rather than a confused muddle or struggle of
interests where nothing really emerges except the egoism of those who
struggle.
It will be noticed that in all that has preceded I have referred little
to action by government, though it is on governments that democracies
over the world are now fixing all their hopes. They believe the State
is the right agency to bring about reforms and changes in society. And
I must here explain why I do not share their hopes. My distrust of the
State in economic reform is based on the belief that governments in
great nation-states, even representative governments, are not malleable
by the general will. They are too easily dominated by the holders of
economic power, are, in fact, always dominated by aristocracies with
land or by the aristocracies of wealth. It is the hand at the helm
guides the ship. The larger the State is the more easily do the holders
of economic power gain political power. The theory of representative
government held good in practice, I think, so long as parliaments were
engaged in formulating general rights, the right, for example, of the
individual to think or profess any religion he pleased; his right not
to be deprived of liberty or life without open trial by his
fellow-citizens. So long as legislatures were affirming or maintaining
these rights, which rich and poor equally desired, they were justified.
But when legislatures began to intervene in economic matters, in the
struggles between rich and poor, between capital and labor, it became
at once apparent the holders of economic power had also political power;
and that the institution which operated fairly where universal rights
were considered did not operate fairly when there was a conflict between
particular interests.
The jury of the nation was found to be packed. At least nine-tenths of
the population in Great Britain, for example, belong to the wage-earning
class. At least nine-tenths of the members of legislatures belong to
the classes possessing land or capital. Now, why any member of the
wage-earning class should look with hope to such assemblies I cannot
understand. Their ideal is, or should be, economic freedom, together
with democratic control of industries, an ideal in every way opposed
to the ideal of the majority of the members of the legislatures. The
fiction that representative assemblies will work for the general good is
proclaimed with enthusiasm; but the moment we examine their actions
we see it is not so, and we discover the cause. Where the nation is
capitalist and capitalism is the dominant economic factor, legislatures
invariably act to uphold it, and legislation tends to fix the system
more securely. We see in Great Britain that wage-earners are now openly
regarded by the legislatures as a class who must not be allowed the same
freedom in life as the wealthy. They must be registered, inspected,
and controlled in a way which the wealthy would bitterly resent if the
legislation referred to themselves. After economic inferiority has been
enforced on them by capital, the stigma of human inferiority is attached
to the wage-earners by the legislature. But I must not be led away from
my theme by the bitter reflections which arise in one who lives in the
Iron Age and knows it is Iron, who feels at times like the lost wanderer
on trackless fields of ice, which never melt and will not until earth
turns from its axis.
I wish to see society organized so that it shall be malleable to the
general will. But political and economic progress are obstructed because
existing political and economic organizations are almost entirely
unmalleable by the general will. Public opinion does not control the
press. The press, capitalistically controlled, creates public opinion.
Our legislators have grown so secure that they confess openly they have
passed measures which they knew would be hateful to the majority of
citizens, and which, if they had been voted on, would never have been
passed. The theory of representative government has broken down. To tell
the truth, the life of the nation is so complicated that it is difficult
for the private citizen to have any intelligent opinion about national
policies, and we can hardly blame the politician for despising the
judgment of the private citizen. Government departments are still less
malleable by public opinion than the legislature. For an individual to
attack the policy of a Government department is almost as hopeless a
proceeding as if a laborer were to take pickaxe and shovel and
determine to level a mountain which obstructed his view. Yet Government
departments are supposed to be under popular control. The Castle in
Ireland, theoretically, was under popular control, but it was adamantine
in policy. If the cant about popular control of legislation and
Government departments is obviously untrue, how much more is it
in regard to public services like railways, gas works, mines, the
distribution of goods, manufacture, purchase and sale, which are almost
entirely under private control and where public interference is bitterly
resented and effectively opposed. What chance has the individual who is
aggrieved against the great carrying companies? To come lower down,
let us take the farmer in the fairs. What way has he of influencing the
jobbers and dealers to act honestly by him--they who have formed rings
to keep down the prices of cattle? Are they malleable to public opinion?
The farmers who have waited all day through a fair know they are not.
When we consider the agencies through which people buy we find the same
thing. The increase of multiple shops, combines, and rings makes the use
of the limited power a man had to affect a dealer by transferring his
custom to another merchant to dwindle yearly. Everywhere we turn we
find this adamantine front presented by the legislature, the State
departments, by the agencies of production, distribution, or credit, and
it is the undemocratic organization of society which is responsible for
nine-tenths of our social troubles. All the vested interests backed up
by economic and political power conflict with the public welfare, and
the general will, which intends the good of all, can act no more than
a paralyzed cripple can walk. We would all choose the physique of the
athlete, with his swift, unfettered, easy movements, rather than the
body of the cripple if we could, and we have this choice before us in
Ireland.
If we concentrate our efforts mainly on voluntary action, striving
to make the co-operative spirit predominant, the general will would
manifest itself through organizations malleable to that will, flexible
and readily adjusting themselves to the desires of the community.
To effect reforms we have not first to labor at the gigantic task of
affecting national opinion and securing the majorities necessary for
national action. In any district a hundred or two hundred men can at
any time form co-operative societies for production, purchase, sale, or
credit, and can link themselves by federation with other organizations
like their own to secure greater strength and economic efficiency. By
following this policy steadily we simplify our economic system, and
reduce to fewer factors the forces in conflict in society. We beget the
predominance of one principle, and enable that general will for good,
which Rousseau theorized about, to find agencies through which it can
manifest freely, so changing society from the static condition begot
by conflict and obstruction to a dynamic condition where energies and
desires manifest freely.
The general will, as Rousseau demonstrated, always intends the good, and
if permitted to act would act in a large and noble way. The change from
static to dynamic, from fixed forms to fluid forms, has been coming
swiftly over the world owing to the liberation of thought, and this in
spite of the obstruction of a society organized, I might almost say,
with egomania as the predominant psychological factor. The ancient
conception of Nature as a manifestation of spirit is incarnating anew
in the minds of modern thinkers, and Nature is not conceived of as
material, but as force and continual motion; and they are trying to
identify human will with this arcane energy, and let the forces of
Nature have freer play in humanity. We begin to catch glimpses of
civilizations as far exceeding ours as ours surpasses society in the
Stone Age. In all our democratic movements, in these efforts towards
the harmonious fusion of human forces, humanity is obscurely intent
on mightier collective exploits than anything conceived of before. The
nature of these energies manifesting in humanity I shall try to indicate
later on. But to let the general will have free play ought to be the
aim of those who wish to build up national organizations for whatever
purpose; and to let the general will have free play we require something
better than the English invention of representative government, which,
as it exists at present, is simply a device to enable all kinds of
compromises to be made on matters where there should be no compromise,
as if right and wrong could come to an agreement honestly to let things
be partly right and partly wrong. We are importing into Ireland some
political machinery of this antiquated pattern. I have written the
foregoing because I dread Irish people becoming slaves of this machine.
I fear the importers of this machinery will desire to make it do things
it can only do badly, and will set it to work with the ferocity of the
new broom and will make it an obstruction, so that the real genius of
the Irish people will be unable freely to manifest itself. The less we
rely on this machinery at present, and the more we desire a machinery of
progress, at once flexible and efficient, the better will it be for us
later on. What must be embodied in State action is the national will
and the national soul, and until that giant being is manifested it is
dangerous to let the pygmies set powers in motion which may enchain us
for centuries to come.
XIV.
It may seem I have spoken lightly of that infant whose birth I referred
to with more solemnity in the opening pages of this book, and indeed I
am a little dubious about that infant. The signature of the Irish mind
is nowhere present in it, and I look upon it with something of the
hesitating loyalty the inhabitant of a new Balkan State night feel for
his imported prince, doubtful whether that sovereign will reflect
the will of his new subjects or whether his policy will not constrain
national character into an alien mould. The signature of the Irish mind
is not apparent anywhere in this new machinery for self-government. Our
politicians seem to have been unaware that they had any wisdom to learn
from the more obvious failures of representative government as they knew
it. So far, as I have knowledge, no Irishman during the past century
of effort for political freedom took the trouble to think out a form
of government befitting Irish circumstance and character. We left it
absolutely to those whom we declared incapable of understanding us
or governing us to devise for us a system by which we might govern
ourselves. I do not criticize those who devised the new machinery of
self-government, but those who did not devise it, and who discouraged
the exercise of political imagination in Ireland. It is said of an
artist that it was his fantasy first to paint his ideal of womanly
beauty, and, when this was done, to approximate it touch by touch to
the sitter, and when the sitter cried, "Ah, now it is growing like!" the
artist ceased, combining the maximum of ideal beauty possible with the
minimum of likeness. Now if we had thought out the ideal structure of
Irish government we might have offered it for criticism by those in
whose power it was to accept or reject, and have gradually approximated
it until a point was reached where the compromise left at least
something of our making and imagination in it. There is nothing of us
in the Act which is in abeyance as I write. I am less concerned with
it than with the creation of a social order, for the social order in
a country is the strong and fast fortress where national character
is created and preserved. A legislature may theoretically allow
self-government, but by its constitution may operate against national
character and its expression in a civilization. We have accepted the
principle of representative government, and that, I readily concede, is
the ideal principle, but the method by which a representative character
is to be given to State institutions we have not thought out at all. We
have committed the error our neighbors have committed of assuming that
the representative assembly which can legislate for general interests
can deal equally with particular interests; that the body of men who
will act unitedly so as to secure the liberty of person or liberty of
thought, which all desire for themselves, will also act wisely where
class problems and the development of particular industries are
concerned. The whole history of representative assemblies shows that
the machinery adequate for the furtherance and protection of general
interests operates unjustly or stupidly in practice against particular
interests. The long neglect of agriculture and the actual condition of
the sweated are instances. I agree that representative government is
the ideal, but how is it to operate in the legislature and still more
in administration? Are government departments to be controlled by
Parliament or by the representatives of the particular class to promote
whose interests special departments were created. I hold that the
continuous efficiency of State departments can only be maintained when
they are controlled in respect of policy, not by the casual politician
whom the fluctuations of popular emotion places at their head, but by
the class or industry the State institution was created to serve. A
department of State can conceivably be preserved from stagnation by
a minister of strong will, who has a more profound knowledge of
the problems connected with his department than even his permanent
officials. He might vitalize them from above. But does the party system
yield us such Ministers? In practice is not high position the reward of
service to party? Is special knowledge demanded of the controller of a
Board of Trade or a Board of Agriculture? Do we not all know that the
vast majority of Ministers are controlled by the permanent officials
of their department. Failing great Ministers, the operations of a
department may be vitalized by control over its policy exercised, not
by a general assembly like Parliament, but by a board elected from the
class or industry the department ostensibly was created to serve. An
agricultural department controlled by a council or board composed solely
of those making their livelihood out of agriculture and elected solely
by their own class, would, we may be certain, be practical in its
methods. It would receive perpetual stimulus from those engaged in
making their living by the industry. Parliaments or senates should
confine themselves to matters of general interest, leaving particular or
special interests to those who understand them, to the specialists, and
only intervene when national interests are involved by a clashing of
particular interests. Our State institutions will never fulfill their
functions efficiently until they are subject in respect of policy not
to general control, but the control of the class they were created to
serve.
That ideal can only be realized fully when all industries are organized.
But we should work towards it. Parliament may act as a kind of guardian
of the unorganized, but, once an industry is organized, once it has
come of age, it must resent domination by bodies without the special
knowledge of which it has the monopoly within itself. It should not
tolerate domination by the unexpert outsider, whatever may be his repute
in other spheres. It is only when industries are organized that
the democratic system of election can justify itself by results
in administration. When a county, let us say, chooses a member of
Parliament to represent every interest, only too often it chooses a
man who can represent few interests except his own. The greatest common
denominator of the constituents is as a rule some fluent utterer of
platitudes. But if the farmers in a county, or the manufacturers in
a county, or the workers in a county, had each to choose a man to
represent them, we may be certain the farmers would choose one whom they
regarded as competent to interpret their needs, the manufacturers a man
of real ability, and labor would select its best intelligence. Persons
engaged in special work rarely fall to recognize the best men in their
own industry. Then they judge somewhat as experts, whereas they are
by no means experts when they are asked to select a representative
to represent everybody in every industry. To secure good government I
conceive we must have two kinds of representative assemblies running
concurrently with their spheres of influence well defined. One, the
supreme body, should be elected by counties or cities to deal with
general interests, taxation, justice, education, the duties and rights
of individual citizens as citizens. The other bodies should be elected
by the people engaged in particular occupations to control the policy
of the State institutions created to foster particular interests. The
average man will elect people to his mind whose deliberations will be in
a sphere where the ideas of the average man ought to be heard and must
be respected. The specialists in their department of industry will elect
experts to work in a sphere where their knowledge will be invaluable,
and where, if it is not present, there will be muddle.
The machinery of government ought never to be complicated, and ought
to be easily understood by the citizens. In Ireland, where we have
at present no thought of foreign policy, no question of army or
navy, departments of State should fall naturally into a few divisions
concerned with agriculture, education, local government, justice,
police, and taxation. The administration of some of these are matters
of national concern, and they should and must be under parliamentary
control, and that control should be jealously protected. Others are
sectional, and these should be controlled in respect of policy by
persons representative of these sections, and elected solely by them. I
think there should also be a department of Labor. I am not sure that the
main work of the Minister in charge ought not to be the organization of
labor in its proper unions or guilds. It is a work as important to the
State as the organization of agriculture, and indeed from a humanitarian
point of view more urgent. Nothing is more lamentable, nothing fills
the heart more with despair, than the multitude of isolated workers,
sweated, unable to fix a price for their work, ignorant of its true
economic value; connected with no union, unable to find any body to fall
back on for help or advice in trouble, neglected altogether by society,
which yet has to pay a heavy price in disease, charity, poor rates,
and in social disorder for its neglect. Was not the last Irish rising
largely composed of those who were economically neglected and oppressed?
Society bears a heavier burden for its indifference than it would bear
if it accepted responsibility for the organization of labor in its own
defense. The State in these islands recommends farmers to organize for
the protection of their interests and assists in the organization, and
leaves the organized farmers free to use their organizations as
they will. As good a case could be made for the State aiding in the
organization of labor for the protection of its own interests. A
ministry of labor should seek out all wage-earners; where there is no
trade union one should be organized, and, where one exists, all workers
should be pressed to join it. Such a ministry ought to be the city of
refuge for the proletarian, and the Minister be the Father of Labor,
fighting its battles for an entry into humanity and its rightful place
in civilization.
If we consider the problem of representation, it should not be
impossible to devise a system of which the foundation might be the
County Councils, where there would be as sub-divisions, committees for
local government, agriculture, and technical instruction or trade to
deal with local administration in these matters. These committees
should send representatives to general councils of local government,
agriculture, and trade. The election should not be by the County Council
as a body, but by the committees, so that traders would have no voice
in choosing a representative for farmers, nor farmers interfere in
the choice of manufacturers or traders selecting a representative on a
general Council of Trade, and it should be regarded as ridiculous any
such intervention as for a War Office to claim it should have a voice
along with the Admiralty in the selection of captains and commanders of
vessels of war. At these general councils, which might meet twice a year
for whatever number of days may be expedient, general policies would be
decided and boards elected to ensure the carrying out by the officials
of the policies decided upon. By this process of selection men who had
to control Boards of Agriculture, Trade, or Local Government would be
three times elected, each time by a gradually decreasing electorate,
with a gradually increasing special knowledge of the matters to be
dealt with. A really useless person may contrive to be chosen as
representative by a thousand electors. It requires an able man
to convince a committee of ten persons, themselves more or less
specialists, that his is the best brain among them. Where national
education, a thorny subject in Ireland, is concerned, I think the
educationalists in provinces might be asked to elect representatives
from their own profession on a Council of Education to act as an
advisory body to the Minister of Education. County Council elections are
not exactly means by which miracles of culture are discovered. A man who
came to be member of a board of control would at least have proved
his ability to others engaged on work like his own who have special
knowledge of it and of his capacity to deal with it. If this system
was accepted, we would not have traders on our Council of Agriculture
protesting against the farmers organizing their industry, because none
but persons concerned with agriculture would be a owed to be members
of agricultural committees, and this would, of course, involve the
concentration of merchants and manufacturers upon the work of a Board of
Trade and the control of a policy of technical instruction suitable for
industrial workers, where agricultural advisers in their turn would be
out of place. Control so exercised over the policy of State institutions
would vitalize them, and tend to make them enter more intimately into
the department of national effort they were created to foster. The
stagnation which falls on most Government departments is due to this,
that the responsible heads rarely have a knowledge great enough to
enable them to inaugurate new methods, that parliamentary control is
never adequate, is rarely exercised with knowledge, and there is always
a party in power to defend the policy of their Minister, for if one
Minister is successfully attacked a whole party goes out of power. We,
in Ireland, should desire above all things efficiency in our public
servants. They will stagnate in their offices unless they are
continually stimulated by intimate connection with the class they work
for and who have a power of control. This system would also, I believe,
lead to less jobbery. Men in an assembly, where theoretically every
class and interest are represented, often conspire to make bad
appointments, because only a minority have knowledge of what
qualifications the official ought to have, and they are outvoted by
representatives who do their friends such good turns often in sheer
ignorance that they are betraying their constituents. Where specialists
have power, and where the well-being of their own industry is concerned,
they never willingly appoint the inefficient. Such an organization
of our County Council system would operate also to break up sectarian
cliques. The feeling of organized classes, farmers, or industrialists,
concerned about their own well-being, would oppose itself to sectarian
sentiment where its application was unfitting.
In the system of representative government I have outlined, we would
have one supreme or national assembly concerned with general interests,
justice, taxation, education, the apportioning of revenue to its
various uses, reserving to itself direct control over the policy of
the departments of treasury, police, judiciary, all that affects the
citizens equally; and, beneath it, other councils, representative of
classes and special interests, controlling the policy and administration
of the State departments concerned with their work. Where everybody
was concerned everybody would have that measure of control which a vote
confers; where particular interests were concerned these interests would
not be hampered in their development by the intervention of busybodies
from outside. Of course on matters where particular interests clashed
with general interests, or were unable to adjust themselves to other
interests, the supreme Assembly would have to decide. The more sectional
interests are removed from discussion in the National Assembly, and
the more it confines itself to general interests the more will it
approximate to the ideal sense, be less the haunt of greed, and more the
vehicle of the national will and the national being.
By the application of the principle of representative government now in
force, one is reminded of nothing so much as the palette of an artist
who had squeezed out the primary colors and mixed them into a greasy
drab tint, where the purity of every color was lost, or the most
powerful pigment was in dull domination. If the modification of the
representative principle I have outlined was in operation, with each
interest or industry organized, and freed from alien interference, the
effect might be likened to a disc with the seven primary colors raying
from a centre, and made to whirl where the motion produced rather the
effect of pure light. We must not mix the colors of national life
until conflicting interests muddle themselves into a gray drab of human
futility, but strive, so far as possible, to keep them pure and unmixed,
each retaining its own peculiar lustre, so that in their conjunction
with others they will harmonize, as do the pure primary colors, and
in their motion make a light of true intelligence to prevail in the
national being.
XV.
No policy can succeed if it be not in accord with national character.
If I have misjudged that, what is written here is vain. It may be asked,
can any one abstract from the chaos which is Irish history a prevailing
mood or tendency recurring again and again, and assert these are
fundamental? It is difficult to define national character, even in
long-established States whose history lies open to the world; but it is
most difficult in Ireland, which for centuries has not acted by its own
will from its own centre, where national activity was mainly by way
of protest against external domination, or a readjustment of itself to
external power. We can no more deduce the political character of the
Irish from the history of the past seven hundred years than we can
estimate the quality of genius in an artist whom we have only seen when
grappling with a burglar. The political character of a people emerges
only when they are shaping in freedom their own civilization. To get a
clue in Ireland we must slip by those seven centuries of struggle and
study national origins, as the lexicographer, to get the exact meaning
of a word, traces it to its derivation. The greatest value our early
history and literature has for us is the value of a clue to character,
to be returned to again and again in the maze of our infinitely more
complicated life and era.
In every nation which has been allowed free development, while it has
the qualities common to all humanity, it will be found that some one
idea was predominant, and in its predominance regrouped about itself
other ideas. With our neighbors I believe the idea of personal liberty
has been the inspiring motive of all that is best in its political
development, whatever the reactions and oppressions may have been. In
ancient Attica the idea of beauty, proportion, or harmony in life so
pervaded the minds of the citizens that the surplus revenues of the
State were devoted to the beautifying of the city. We find that love for
beauty in its art, its literature, its architecture; and to Plato, the
highest mind in the Athenian State, Deity itself appeared as Beauty in
its very essence. That mighty mid-European State, whose ambitions have
upset the world, seems to conceive of the State as power. Other races
have had a passion for justice, and have left codes of law which have
profoundly affected the life of nations which grew up long after they
were dead. The cry of ancient Israel for righteousness rings out above
all other passions, and its laws are essentially the laws of a people
who desired that morality should prevail. We have to discover for
ourselves the ideas which lie at the root of national character, and so
inculcate these principles that they will pervade the nation and make it
a spiritual solidarity, and unite the best minds in their service, and
so control those passionate and turbulent elements which are the cause
of the downfall and wreckage of nations by internal dissensions. I
desire as much as any one to preserve our national identity, and to make
it worthy of preservation, and this can only be done by the domination
of some inspiring ideal which will draw all hearts to it; which may at
first have that element of strangeness in it which Ben Jonson said was
in all excellent beauty, and which will later become--as all high things
we love do finally become--familiar to us, and nearer and closer to us
than the beatings of our own hearts.
When ideals which really lie at the root of our being are first
proclaimed, all that is external in life protests. So were many great
reformers martyred, but they left their ideals behind them in the
air, and men breathed them and they became part of their very being.
Nationality is a state of consciousness, a mood of definite character in
our intellectual being, and it is not perceived first except in profound
meditation; it does not become apparent from superficial activities any
more than we could, by looking at the world and the tragic history
of mankind, discover that the Kingdom of Heaven is within us. That
knowledge comes to those who go within themselves, and not to those who
seek without for the way, the truth, and the life. But, once proclaimed,
the incorruptible spiritual element in man intuitively recognizes it
as truth, and it has a profound effect on human action. There is, I
believe, a powerful Irish character which has begun to reassert itself
in modern times, and this character is in essentials what it was two
thousand years ago. We discover its first manifestation in the ancient
clans. The clan was at once aristocratic and democratic. It was
aristocratic in leadership and democratic in its economic basis. The
most powerful character was elected as chief, while the land was the
property of the clan. That social order indicates the true political
character of the Irish. Races which last for thousands of years do not
change in essentials. They change in circumstance. They may grow better
or worse, but throughout their history the same fundamentals appear and
reassert themselves. We can see later in Irish literature or politics,
as powerful personalities emerged and expressed themselves, how the
ancient character persisted. Swift, Goldsmith, Berkeley, O'Grady, Shaw,
Wilde, Parnell, Davitt, Plunkett, and many others, however they differed
from each other, in so far as they betrayed a political character, were
intensely democratic in economic theory, adding that to an aristocratic
freedom of thought. That peculiar character, I believe, still persists
among our people in the mass, and it is by adopting a policy which
will enable it to manifest once more that we will create an Irish
civilization, which will fit our character as the glove fits the hand.
During the last quarter of a century of comparatively peaceful life the
co-operative principle has once more laid hold on the imagination of the
Irish townsman and the Irish countryman. The communal character is still
preserved. It still wills to express itself in its external aspects in
a communal civilization, in an economic brotherhood. That movement alone
provides in Ireland for the aristocratic and democratic elements in
Irish character. It brings into prominence the aristocracy of character
and intelligence which it is really the Irish nature to love, and its
economic basis is democratic. A large part of our failure to achieve
anything memorable in Ireland is due to the fact that, influenced by the
example of our great neighbors, we reversed the natural position of the
aristocratic and democratic elements in the national being. Instead of
being democratic in our economic life, with the aristocracy of character
and intelligence to lead us, we became meanly individualistic in our
economics and meanly democratic in leadership. That is, we allowed
individualism--the devilish doctrine of every man for himself--to be the
keynote of our economic life; where, above all things, the general good
and not the enrichment of the individual should be considered. For our
leaders we chose energetic, common-place types, and made them represent
us in the legislature; though it is in leadership above all that we
need, not the aristocracy of birth, but the aristocracy of character,
intellect, and will. We had not that aristocracy to lead us. We chose
instead persons whose ideas were in no respect nobler than the
average to be our guides, or rather to be guided by us. Yet when the
aristocratic character appeared, however imperfect, how it was adored!
Ireland gave to Parnell--an aristocratic character--the love which
springs from the deeps of its being, a love which it gave to none other
in our time.
With our great neighbors what are our national characteristics were
reversed. They are an individualistic race. This individualism has
expressed itself in history and society in a thousand ways. Being
individualistic in economics, they were naturally democratic in
politics. They have a genius for choosing forcible average men as
leaders. They mistrust genius in high places, Intensely individualistic
themselves, they feared the aristocratic character in politics. They
desired rather that general principles should be asserted to encircle
and keep safe their own national eccentricity. They have gradually
infected us with something of their ways, and as they were not truly our
ways we never made a success of them. It is best for us to fall back on
what is natural with us, what is innate in character, what was visible
among us in the earliest times, and what, I still believe, persists
among us--a respect for the aristocratic intellect, for freedom of
thought, ideals, poetry, and imagination, as the qualities to be looked
for in leaders, and a bias for democracy in our economic life. We were
more Irish truly in the heroic ages. We would not then have taken, as we
do today, the huckster or the publican and make them our representative
men, and allow them to corrupt the national soul. Did not the whole
vulgar mob of our politicians lately unite to declare to the world
that Irish nationality was impossible except it was floated on a sea of
liquor? The image of Kathleen ni Houlihan anciently was beauty in the
hearts of poets and dreamers. We often thought her unwise, but never did
we find her ignoble; never was she without a flame of idealism in her
eyes, until this ignoble crew declared alcohol to be the only possible
basis of Irish nationality.
In the remote past we find the national instincts of our people fully
manifested. We find in this early literature a love for the truth-teller
and for the hero. Indeed they did not choose as chieftains of their
clans men whom the bards could not sing. They reverenced wisdom, whether
in king, bard, or ollav, and at the same time there was a communal basis
for economic life. This heroic literature is, as our Standish O'Grady
declared, rather prophecy than history. It reveals what the highest
spirits deemed the highest, and what was said lay so close to the
heart of the race that it is still remembered and read. That literature
discloses the character of the national being, still to be manifested in
a civilization, and it must flame out before the tale which began among
the gods is closed. Whatever brings this communal character into our
social order, and at the same time desires the independent aristocratic
intellect, is in accord with the national tradition. The co-operative
movement is the modern expression of that mood. It is already making a
conquest of the Irish mind, and in its application to life predisposing
our people to respect for the man of special attainments, independent
character, and intellect. A social order which has made its economics
democratic in character needs such men above all things. It needs
aristocratic thinkers to save the social order from stagnation, the
disease which eats into all harmonious life. We shall succeed or fail in
Ireland as we succeed or fail to make democracy prevail in our
economic life, and aristocratic ideals to prevail in our political and
intellectual life.
In all things it is best for a people to obey the law of their own
being. The lion can never become the ox, and "one law for the lion and
the ox is oppression."
Now that the hammer of Thor is wrecking our civilizations, is destroying
the body of European nationalities, the spirit is freer to reshape the
world nearer to the heart's desire. Necessity will drive us along with
the rest to recast our social order and to fix our ideals. Necessity and
our own hearts should lead us to a brotherhood in industry. It should
be horrible to us the thought of the greedy profiteer, the pursuit of
wealth for oneself rather than the union of forces for the good of all
and the creation of a brotherly society. The efforts of individuals to
amass for themselves great personal wealth should be regarded as ignoble
by society, and as contrary to the national spirit, as it is indeed
contrary to all divine teaching. Our ideal should be economic harmony
and intellectual diversity. We should regard as alien to the national
spirit all who would make us think in flocks, and discipline us to an
unintellectual commonalty of belief. The life of the soul is a personal
adventure, a quest for the way and the truth and the life. It may be we
shall find the ancient ways to be the true ways, but if we are led to
the truth blindfolded and without personal effort, we are like those
whom the Scripture condemns for entering into Paradise, not by the
straight gate, but over the wall, like thieves and robbers. If we seek
it for ourselves and come to it, we shall be true initiates and masters
in the guild.
No people seem to have greater natural intelligence than the Irish. No
people have been so unfortunately cursed with organizations which led
them to abnegate personal thought, and Ireland is an intellectual
desert where people read nothing and think nothing; where not fifty in a
hundred thousand could discern the quality of thought in the Politics
of Aristotle or the Republic of Plato as being in any way deeper than
a leading article in one of their daily papers. And we, whose external
life is so mean, whose ignorance of literature is so great, are yet
flattered by the suggestion that we have treasures of spiritual and
intellectual life which should not be debased by external influences,
and so it comes about that good literature is a thing unpurchasable
except in some half-dozen of the larger towns. Any system which would
suppress the aristocratic, fearless, independent intellect should be
regarded as contrary to the Irish genius and inimical to the national
being.
XVI.
Among the many ways men have sought to create a national consciousness,
a fountain of pride to the individual citizen, is to build a strong body
for the great soul, and it would be an error to overlook--among other
modern uprisings of ancient Irish character--the revival of the military
spirit and its possible development in relation to the national being.
National solidarity may be brought about by pressure from without, or by
the fusion of the diverse elements in a nation by a heat engendered
from within. But to Create national solidarity by war is to attain but
a temporary and unreal unity, a gain like theirs who climb into the
Kingdom not by the straight gate, but over the wall like a robber. When
one nation is threatened by another, great national sacrifices will be
made, and the latent solidarity of its humanity be kindled. But when the
war is over, when the circumstances uniting the people for a time are
past, that spirit rapidly dies, and people begin their old antagonisms
because the social order, in its normal working, does not constantly
promote a consciousness of identity of interest.
Almost all the great European states have fortified their national
being by militarism. Everything almost in their development has been
subordinated to the necessities of national defense, and hence it is
only in times of war there is any real manifestation of national spirit.
It is only then that the citizens of the Iron Age feel a transitory
brotherhood. It is a paradoxical phenomenon, possible only in the Iron
Age, that the highest instances of national sacrifice are evoked by
warfare--the most barbarous of human enterprises. To make normal that
spirit of unity which is now only manifested in abnormal moments in
history should be our aim; and as it is the Iron Age, and material
forces are more powerful than spiritual, we must consider how these
fierce energies can be put in relation with the national being with
least debasement of that being. If the body of the national soul is too
martial in character, it will by reflex action communicate its character
to the spirit, and make it harsh and domineering, and unite against it
in hatred all other nations. We have seen that in Europe but yesterday.
The predominance in the body of militarist practice will finally drive
out from the soul those unfathomable spiritual elements which are the
body's last source power in conflict, and it will in the end defeat its
own object, which is power. When nations at war call up their reserves
of humanity to the last man capable of bearing arms, their leaders begin
also to summon up those bodiless moods and national sentiments which
are the souls of races, and their last and most profound sources of
inspiration and deathless courage. The war then becomes a conflict of
civilizations and of spiritual ideals, the aspirations and memories
which constitute the fundamental basis of those civilizations. Without
the inspiration of great memories or of great hopes, men are incapable
of great sacrifices. They are rationalists, and the preservation of the
life they know grows to be a desire greater than the immortality of the
spiritual life of their race. A famous Japanese general once said it was
the power to hold out for the last desperate quarter of an hour which
won victories, and it is there spiritual stamina reinforces physical
power. It is a mood akin to the ecstasy of the martyr through his
burning. Though in these mad moments neither spiritual nor material is
consciously differentiated, the spiritual is there in a fiery fusion
with all other forces. If it is absent, the body unsupported may take
to its heels or will yield. It has played its only card, and has not
eternity to fling upon the table in a last gamble for victory.
A military organization may strengthen the national being, but if it
dominates it, it will impoverish its life. How little Sparta has given
to the world compared with Attica. Yet when national ideals have been
created they assume an immeasurably greater dignity when the citizens
organize themselves for the defense of their ideals, and are prepared to
yield up life itself as a sacrifice if by this the national being may
be preserved. A creed always gains respect through its martyrs. We may
grant all this, yet be doubtful whether a militarist organization should
be the main support of the national being in Ireland. The character of
the ideal should, I believe, be otherwise created, and I am not
certain that it could not be as well preserved and defended by a
civil organization, such as I have indicated, as by armed power. Our
geographical position and the slender population of our country also
make it evident that the utmost force Ireland could organize would make
but a feeble barrier against assault by any of the greater States. We
have seen how Belgium, a country with a population larger than that of
Ireland, was thrust aside, crushed and bleeding, by one stroke from the
paw of its mighty neighbor.* The military and political institutions of
a small country are comparatively easy to displace, but it would be
a task infinitely more difficult to destroy ideals or to extinguish a
national being based on a social order, democratic and co-operative in
character, the soul of the country being continually fed by institutions
which, by their very nature, would be almost impossible to alter unless
destruction of the whole humanity of the country was aimed at. National
ideals, based on a co-operative social order, would have the same
power of resistance almost as a religion, which is, of all things, most
unconquerable by physical force, and, when it is itself militant, the
most powerful ally of military power. The aim of all nations is to
preserve their immortality. I do not oppose the creation of a national
army for this purpose. There are occasions when the manhood of a nation
must be prepared to yield life rather than submit to oppression, when
it must perish in self-contempt or resist by force what wrong would be
imposed by force. But I would like to point out that for a country in
the position of Ireland the surest means of preserving the national
being by the sacrifice and devotion of the people are economic and
spiritual.
* Since this book was written Ireland has had a tragic
illustration of the truth of what is urged in these pages.
Our political life in the past has been sordid and unstable because we
were uncultured as a nation. National ideals have been the possession of
the few in Ireland, and have not been diffused. That is the cause of our
comparative failure as a nation. If we would create an Irish culture,
and spread it widely among our people, we would have the same
unfathomable sources of inspiration and sacrifice to draw upon in our
acts as a nation as the individual has who believes he is immortal, and
that his life here is but a temporary foray into time out of eternity.
Yet we have much to learn from the study of military organization. The
great problem of all civilizations is the creation of citizens: that
is, of people who are dominated by the ideal of the general welfare,
who will sink private desire and work harmoniously with their
fellow-citizens for the highest good of their race. While we may all
agree that war brings about an eruption of the arcane and elemental
forces which lie normally in the pit of human life, as the forces which
cause earthquakes lie normally asleep in the womb of the world, none the
less we must admit that military genius has discovered and applied
with mastery a law of life which is of the highest importance to
civilization--far more important to civil even than to military
development--and that is the means by which the individual will forget
his personal danger and sacrifice life itself for the general welfare.
In no other organization will men in great masses so entirely forget
themselves as men will in battle under military discipline. What is the
cause of this? Can we discover how it is done and apply the law to civil
life?
The military discipline works miracles. The problem before the captains
of armies is to take the body of man, the most naturally egoistic of
all things, which hates pain and which will normally take to its legs in
danger and try to save itself, and to dominate it so that the body and
the soul inhabiting it will stand still and face all it loathes. And the
problem is solved in the vast majority of cases. After military training
the civilians who formerly would fly before a few policemen will
manfully and heroically stand, not the blows of a baton, but a whole
hail of bullets, a cannonade lasting through a day; nay, they will for
weeks and months, day by day, risk and lose life for a cause, for an
idea, at a word of command. They may not have half as good a cause to
lose life for as they had as a mob of angry civilians, but they will
face death now, and the chances of mutilation and agony worse
than death. Can we inspire civilians with the same passionate
self-forgetfulness in the pursuit of the higher ideals of peace? Men in
a regiment have to a large extent the personal interests abolished. The
organization they now belong to supports them and becomes their life. By
their union with it a new being is created. Exercise, drill, maneuver,
accentuate that unity, and esprit de corps arises, so that they feel
their highest life is the corporate one; and that feeling is fostered
continually, until at last all the units, by some law of the soul, are
as it were in spite of themselves, in spite of the legs which want to
run, in spite of the body which trembles with fear, constrained to
move in obedience to the purpose of the whole organism expressed by its
controlling will; and so we get these devoted masses of men who advance
again and again under a hail more terrible than Dante imagined falling
in his vision of the fiery world.
There is nothing like it in civilian life, but yet the aim of the higher
minds in all civilizations is to create a similar devotion to civic
ideals, so that men will not only, as Pericles said, "give their bodies
for the commonwealth," but will devote mind, will, and imagination with
equal assiduity and self-surrender to the creation of a civilization
which will be the inheritance of all and a cause of pride to every one,
and which will bring to the individual a greater beauty and richness of
life than he could finally reach by the utmost private efforts of which
he was capable.
I believe that an organization of society, such as I have indicated,
would evolve gradually a similar passion for the general zeal, having,
without the stern restraint militarism imposes on its units, a like
power of turning the thoughts to the general good.
I may say also that to create a militarist organization, before the
natural principles to be safe-guarded are well understood and a common
possession of all the people in the country, would be a danger akin to
the peril of allowing children to play with firearms. We may find it a
bad business to create natural ideals as they are required, just as it
is a perilous business to try to create an army when a country is in a
state of war. If we do not rapidly create a national culture embodying
the fundamental ideas we wish to see prevailing in society our volunteer
armies will be subject to influences from the baser sort of politicians
who would force party aims on the country. We shall have a wretched
future unless the soul of the country can dominate the physical forces
in it, unless ideals of national conduct, liberty of speech and thought,
of justice and brotherhood, exist to inspire and guide it, and are
recognized by all and appealed to by all parties equally.
We are standing on the threshold of nationhood, and it is problems like
these we should be setting ourselves to solve, unless we are to be an
unimportant province of the world, a mere administrative area inhabited
by a quite undistinguished people.
XVII.
But there are other methods of devotion to the national being possible
to us through collective action, and I was moved to imagine one, having
once received a letter from a bloodthirsty correspondent--one of that
rather numerous class whose minds are always loaded with ball cartridge,
whose fingers are always on the trigger, and who are always calling
on the authorities not to hesitate to shoot. He wrote to me during a
railway strike, advocating military conscription in order that
railway men who went out on strike could be called up by the military
authorities, as the French railway strikers were, and who were subject
to martial law if they disobeyed. I do not think with those who believe
the venerable remedy of blood-letting is the best cure for social
maladies; and I would have thought no more about that stern
disciplinarian, but my mind went playing about the idea of conscription,
and there came to me some thoughts which I wish to put on record in the
hope that our people in some future, when the social order will create
public spirit and the passion for the State more plentifully than it
does today, may recur to the idea and apply it. Nearly every State in
the world demands from youth a couple of years' service in the army.
There they are trained to defend their country--even, if necessary,
to slay their own countrymen. There is much that is abhorrent to the
imagination in the idea of war, and I am altogether with that noble
body of men who are trying, by means of arbitration treaties, to
solve national differences by reason rather than by force. But we
all recognize something noble in the spirit of the nation where the
community agrees that every man shall give up some years of his life to
the State for the preservation of the State, and may be called upon to
surrender life absolutely in that service. While the manhood of a race
does this on the whole with cheerfulness, there must be something of
high character in the manhood of that nation. A certain gravity attaches
to national decisions which are made, as it were, upon the slopes of
death, because none are exempt from service, and there is no delirious
mob ready to yell for a war in which it does not run the risk of having
its own dirty skin perforated by bullets. In Ireland we have never had
military conscription, for reasons which are well known to all, and
upon which I need not enter. I am well satisfied it should be so, for
it leaves open to us the possibility of a much nobler service, one which
has never yet been attempted by any modern nation, and that is civil
conscription.
I throw out this suggestion, which may hold the imagination of those who
have noble conceptions of what national life should be and what a nation
should work for, in the hope that some time it may fructify. There is a
prohibition laid on the people in this island against conscription
for military purposes. Is there any reason why we should not have
conscription for civil purposes? Why should not every young man in
Ireland give up two years of his life in a comradeship of labor with
other young men, and be employed under skilled direction in great works
of public utility, in the erection of public buildings, the beautifying
of our cities, reclamation of waste lands, afforestation, and other
desirable objects? The principle of service for the State for
military purposes is admitted in every country, even at last by the
English-speaking peoples. It is easy to be seen how this principle of
conscription could be applied to infinitely nobler ends--to the building
up of a beautiful civilization--and might make the country adopting it
in less than half a century as beautiful as ancient Attica or majestic
as ancient Egypt. While other nations take part of the life of young men
for instruction in war, why should not the State in Ireland, more nobly
inspired, ask of its young men that they should give equally of their
lives to the State, not for the destruction of life, but for the
conservation of life? This service might be asked from all--high and
low, well and humbly born--except from those who can plead the reasons
which exempt people abroad from military service. As things stand today,
if the State undertakes any public work, it does it more expensively by
far than it would be if undertaken by private enterprise. Every person
puts up prices for the State or for municipalities. Labor, land, and
materials are all charged at the highest possible rates, whereas if
there was any really high conception of citizenship and of the functions
of the State, the citizens would agree so that works of public utility,
or those which conspired to add to national dignity, should be done at
least cost to the community. Where there is no national sacrifice there
is no national pride. Because there is no national pride our modern
civilizations show meanly compared with the titanic architecture of the
cities and majestic civilizations of the past. We know from the ruins of
these proud cities that he who walked into ancient Rome, Athens, Thebes,
Memphis and Babylon, walked amid grandeurs which must have exalted the
spirit. To walk into Manchester, Sheffield, or Liverpool is to feel a
weight upon the soul. There is no national feeling for beauty in our
industrial civilizations.
Let us suppose Ireland had through industrial conscription about fifty
thousand young men every year at its disposal under a national works
department. What could be done? First of all it would mean that every
young man in the country would have received an industrial training of
some kind. The work of technical instruction could be largely carried on
in connection with this industrial army. People talk of the benefit of
discipline and obedience secured by military service. This and much more
could be secured by a labor conscription. Every man in the island would
have got into the habit of work at a period of life when it is most
necessary, and when too many young men have no serious occupation.
Parents should welcome the training and discipline for their children,
and certificates of character and intelligence given by the department
of national works should open up prospects of rapid employment in
the ordinary industrial life of the country when the period of public
service was closed. For those engaged there would be a true comradeship
in labor, and the phrase, "the dignity of labor," about which so much
cant has been written, would have a real significance where young men
were working together for the public benefit with the knowledge that any
completed work would add to the health, beauty, dignity, and prosperity
of the State. In return for this labor the State should feed and clothe
its industrial army, educate them, and familiarize them with some branch
of employment, and make them more competent after this period of service
was over to engage in private enterprise. Two years of such training
would dissipate all the slackness, lack of precision, and laziness
which are so often apparent in young men who have never had any strict
discipline in their homes, and whom parental weakness has rendered unfit
for the hard business of life.
The benefit to those undergoing such a training would of itself justify
civil conscription; but when we come to think of the nation--what might
not be done by a State with a national labor army under its control?
Public works might be undertaken at a cost greatly below that which
would otherwise be incurred, and the estimates which now paralyze the
State, when it considers this really needed service or that, would
assume a different appearance, as it would be embracing in one
enterprise technical education and the accomplishment of beneficial
works. With such an army under skilled control the big cities could
have playgrounds for the children of the cities; public gardens, baths,
gymnasiums, recreation rooms, hospitals, and sanatoriums might be built;
waste land reclaimed and afforested, and the roadsides might be planted
with fruit trees. National schools, picture-galleries, public halls,
libraries, and a thousand enterprises which now hang fire because at
present labor for public service is the most expensive labor, all could
be undertaken. If the State becomes very poor, as indeed it is certain
to be, it may be forced into some such method of fulfilling its
functions. Are we, with enormous burdens of debt, to hang up every
useful public work because of the expense, and spend our lives in paying
State debts while the body for whom we work is unable, on account of the
expense, to do anything for us in return? If the State is to continue
its functions we shall have to commandeer people for its service in
times of peace as is done in times of war. There is hardly an argument
which could be used to defend military conscription which could not be
equaled with as powerful an argument for civil conscription. I am not
at all sure that if the State in Ireland decided to utilize two years of
every young man's life for State purposes that we could not disband
most of our expensive constabulary and make certain squads of our civil
recruits responsible for the keeping of public law and order, leaving
only the officers as permanent professionals, for of course there must
be expert control of the conscripts. The postal service might also be
carried on largely by conscripted civilians.
This may appear a fantastic programme, but I would like to see it
argued out. It would create a real brotherhood in work, just as the army
creates in its own way a brotherhood between men in the same regiments.
The nation adopting civil conscription could clean itself up in a
couple of generations, so that in respect of public services it would be
incomparable. The alternative to this is to starve all public services,
to make the State simply the tax-collector, to pay the interest on a
huge debt, and so get it hated because it can do nothing except collect
money to pay the interest on a colossal national debt. Obviously the
State as an agency to bring about civilization cannot perform both
services--pay interest on huge public loans, and continue an expensive
service. It must find out some way in which public services can be
continued, and if possible improved, and the open way to that is civil
conscription and the assertion of a claim to two or three years of the
work of every citizen for civil purposes, just as it now asserts a claim
on the services of citizens for the defense of the State. As national
debts are more and more piled up, it has seemed to many that here must
be an end to what was called social reform, that we were entering on a
black era, and no dawn would show over Europe for another century. There
is always a way out of troubles if people are imaginative enough and
brotherly enough to conceive of it and bold enough to take action when
they have found the way. The real danger for society is that it may
become spiritless and hidebound and tamed, and have none of those high
qualities necessary in face of peril, and the more people get accustomed
to thinking of bold schemes the better. They will get over the first
shock, and may be ready when the time comes to put them into action.
When a country is poor like Ireland and yet is ambitious of greatness;
when the aspect of its civilization is mean and when it yet aspires to
beauty; when its people are living under unsanitary conditions and yet
the longing is there to give health to all; when Ireland is like this,
its public men and its citizens might do much worse than brood over the
possibilities of industrial conscription, and of revising the character
of the purposes for which nations have hitherto claimed service from
their young citizens on behalf of the State. Debarred by a fate not
altogether unkind from training every citizen in the arts of war Ireland
might--if the love of country and the desire for service are really so
strong as we are told--suddenly become eminent among the nations of the
world by adopting a policy which in half a century would make our mean
cities and our backward countryside the most beautiful in the modern
world.
XVIII.
I have not in all this written anything about the relations of Ireland
with other countries, or even with our neighbors, in whose political
household we have lived for so many centuries in intimate hostility.
I have considered this indeed, but did not wish, nor do I now wish,
in anything I may write, to say one word which would add to that old
hostility. Race hatred is the cheapest and basest of all national
passions, and it is the nature of hatred, as it is the nature of love,
to change us into the likeness of that which we contemplate. We grow
nobly like what we adore, and ignobly like what we hate; and no people
in Ireland became so anglicized in intellect and temperament, and even
in the manner of expression, as those who hated our neighbors most. All
hatreds long persisted in bring us to every baseness for which we hated
others. The only laws which we cannot break with impunity are divine
laws, and no law is more eternally sure in its workings than that which
condemns us to be even as that we condemned. Hate is the high commander
of so many armies that an inquiry into the origin of this passion is
at least as needful as histories of other contemporary notorieties. Not
emperors or parliaments alone raise armies, but this passion also. It
will sustain nations in defeat. When everything seems lost this wild
captain will appear and the scattered forces are reunited. They will be
as oblivious of danger as if they were divinely inspired, but if they
win their battle it is to become like the conquered foe. All great
wars in history, all conquests, all national antagonisms, result in an
exchange of characteristics. It is because I wish Ireland to be itself,
to act from its own will and its own centre, that I deprecate hatred as
a force in national life. It is always possible to win a cause without
the aid of this base helper, who betrays us ever in the hour of victory.
When a man finds the feeling of hate for another rising vehemently in
himself, he should take it as a warning that conscience is battling
in his own being with that very thing he loathes. Nations hate other
nations for the evil which is in themselves; but they are as little
given to self-analysis as individuals, and while they are right to
overcome evil, they should first try to understand the genesis of the
passion in their own nature. If we understand this, many of the ironies
of history will be intelligible. We will understand why it was that our
countrymen in Ulster and our countrymen in the rest of Ireland, who
have denounced each other so vehemently, should at last appear to
have exchanged characteristics: why in the North, having passionately
protested against physical force movements, no-rent manifestos, and
contempt for Imperial Parliament, they should have come themselves at
last to organize a physical force movement, should threaten to pay no
taxes, and should refuse obedience to an Act of Parliament. We will
understand also why it was their opponents came themselves to address to
Ulster all the arguments and denunciations Ulster had addressed to them.
I do not point this out with intent to annoy, but to illustrate by late
history a law in national as well as human psychology. If this unpopular
psychology I have explained was adopted everywhere as true, we would
never hear expressions of hate. People would realize they were first
revealing and then stabbing their own characters before the world.
Nations act towards other nations as their own citizens act towards each
other. When slavery existed in a State, if that nation attacked
another it was with intent to enslave. Where there is a fierce economic
competition between citizen and citizen then in war with another nation,
the object of the war is to destroy the trade of the enemy. If the
citizens in any country could develop harmonious life among themselves
they would manifest the friendliest feelings towards the people of other
countries. We find that it is just among groups of people who aim
at harmonious life, co-operators and socialists, that the strongest
national impulses to international brotherhood arise; and wars of
domination are brought about by the will of those who within a State are
dominant over the fortunes of the rest. Ireland, a small country,
can only maintain its national identity by moral and economic forces.
Physically it must be overmastered by most other European nations. Moral
forces are really more powerful than physical forces. One Christ changed
the spiritual life of Europe; one Buddha affected more myriads in Asia.
The co-operative ideal of brotherhood in industry has helped to make
stronger the ideal of the brotherhood of humanity, and no body of men in
any of the countries in the great War of our time regarded it with more
genuine sorrow than those who were already beginning to promote schemes
for international co-operation. It must be mainly in movements inspired
with the ideal of the brotherhood of man, that the spirit will be
generated which, in the future, shall make the idea of war so detestable
that statesmen will find it is impossible to think of that solution
of their disputes as they would think now of resorting to private
assassination of political opponents. The great tragedy of Europe was
brought about, not by the German Emperor, nor by Sir Edward Grey, nor by
the Czar, nor by any of the other chiefs ostensibly controlling foreign
policy, but by the nations themselves. These men may have been agents,
but their action would have been impossible if they did not realize that
there was a vast body of national feeling behind them not opposed to
war. Their citizens were in conflict with each other already, generating
the moods which lead on to war. Emperors, foreign secretaries,
ambassadors, cabinet ministers are not really powerful to move nations
against their will. On the whole, they act with the will of the nations,
which they understand. Let any one ruler try, for example, to change by
edict the religion of his subjects, and a week would see him bereft of
place and power. They could not do this, because the will of the nation
would be against it. They resort to war and prepare for it because the
will of the nation is with them, and this throws us back on the private
citizens, who finally are individually and collectively responsible for
the actions of the State. In the everlasting battle between good and
evil, private soldiers are called upon to fight as well as the captains,
and it is only through the intensive cultivation by individuals and
races of the higher moral and intellectual qualities, until in intensity
they outweigh the mood and passion of the rest, that war will finally
become obsolete as the court of appeal. When there is a panic of fire
in a crowded building men are suddenly tested as to character. Some will
become frenzied madmen, fighting and trampling their way out. Others
will act nobly, forgetting themselves. They have no time to think. What
they are in their total make up as human beings, overbalanced either for
good or evil, appears in an instant. Even so, some time in the heroic
future, some nation in a crisis will be weighed and will act nobly
rather than passionately, and will be prepared to risk national
extinction rather than continue existence at the price of killing
myriads of other human beings, and it will oppose moral and spiritual
forces to material forces, and it will overcome the world by making
gentleness its might, as all great spiritual teachers have done. It
comes to this, we cannot overcome hatred by hatred or war by war, but
by the opposites of these. Evil is not overcome by evil but by good; and
any race like the Irish, eager for national life, ought to learn this
truth--that humanity will act towards their race as their race acts
towards humanity. The noble and the base alike beget their kin.
Empires, ere they disappear, see their own mirrored majesty arise in the
looking-glass of time. Opposed to the pride and pomp of Egypt were the
pride and pomp of Chaldaea. Echoing the beauty of the Greek city state
were many lovely cities made in their image. Carthage evoked Rome. The
British Empire, by the natural balance and opposition of things, called
into being another empire with a civilization of coal and steel, and
with ambitions for colonies and for naval power, and with that image
of itself it must wrestle for empire. The great armadas that throng the
seas, the armed millions upon the earth betray the fear in the minds of
races, nay, the inner spiritual certitude the soul has, that pride and
lust of power must yet be humbled by their kind. They must at last meet
their equals face to face, called to them as steel to magnet by some
inner affinity. This is a law of life both for individuals and races,
and, when this is realized, we know nothing will put an end to race
conflicts except the equally determined and heroic development of the
spiritual, moral, and intellectual forces which disdain to use the force
and fury of material powers.
We may be assured that the divine law is not mocked, and it cannot be
deceived. As men sow so do they reap. The anger we create will rend us;
the love we give will return to us. Biologically, everything breeds true
to its type: moods and thoughts just as much as birds and beasts and
fishes. When I hear people raging against England or Germany or Russia I
know that rage will beget rage, and go on begetting it, and so the whole
devilish generation of passions will be continued. There are no nations
to whom the entire and loyal allegiance of man's spirit could be given.
It can only go out to the ideal empires and nationalities in the womb
of time, for whose coming we pray. Those countries of the future we must
carve out of the humanity of today, and we can begin building them up
within our present empires and nationalities just as we are building
up the co-operative movement in a social order antagonistic to it.
The people who are trying to create these new ideals in the world are
outposts, sentinels, and frontiersmen thrown out before the armies of
the intellectual and spiritual races yet to come into being. We can all
enlist in these armies and be comrades to the pioneers. I hope many
will enlist in Ireland. I would cry to our idealists to come out of this
present-day Irish Babylon, so filled with sectarian, political, and race
hatreds, and to work for the future. I believe profoundly, with the most
extreme of Nationalists, in the future of Ireland, and in the vision
of light seen by Bridget which she saw and confessed between hopes and
tears to Patrick, and that this is the Isle of Destiny and the destiny
will be glorious and not ignoble, and when our hour is come we will have
something to give to the world, and we will be proud to give rather than
to grasp. Throughout their history Irishmen have always wrought better
for others than for themselves, and when they unite in Ireland to
work for each other, they will direct into the right channel all that
national capacity for devotion to causes for which they are famed. We
ought not only to desire to be at peace with each other, but with
the whole world, and this can only be brought about by the individual
citizen at all times protesting against sectarian and national passions,
and taking no part in them, coming out of such angry parties altogether,
as the people of the Lord were called by the divine voice to come out of
Babylon. It may seem a long way to set things right, but it is the swift
way and the royal road, and there is no other; and nobody, no prophet
crying before his time, will be listened to until the people are ready
for him. The congregation must gather before the preacher can deliver
what is in him to say. The economic brotherhood which I have put forward
as an Irish ideal would, in its realization, make us at peace with
ourselves, and if we are at peace with ourselves we will be at peace
with our neighbors and all other nations, and will wish them the
goodwill we have among ourselves, and will receive from them the same
goodwill. I do not believe in legal and formal solutions of national
antagonisms. While we generate animosities among ourselves we will
always display them to other nations, and I prefer to search out how it
is national hatreds are begotten, and to show how that cancer can be cut
out of the body politic.
XIX.
It seems inevitable that the domination of the individual by the
State must become ever greater. It is in the evolutionary process. The
amalgamation of individuals into nationalities and empires is as much
in the cosmic plan as the development of highly organized beings out
of unicellular organisms. I believe this process will continue until
humanity itself is so psychically knit together that, as a being, it
will manifest some form of cosmic consciousness in which the individual
will share. Our spiritual intuitions and the great religions of the
world alike indicate some such goal as that to which this turbulent
cavalcade of humanity is wending. A knowledge of this must be in our
subconscious being, or we would find the sacrifices men make for the
State otherwise inexplicable. The State, though now ostensibly secular,
makes more imperious claims on man than the ancient gods did. It lays
hold of life. It asserts its right to take father, brother, and son, and
to send them to meet death in its own defense. It denies them a choice
or judgment as to whether its action is right or wrong. Right or wrong,
the individual must be prepared to give his body for the commonwealth,
and when one gives the body unresistingly, one gives the soul also.
The marvelous thing about the authority of the State is that it is
recognized by the vast majority of citizens. During eras of peace the
citizen may be always in conflict with the policy of the State. He may
call it a tyranny, but yet when it is in peril he will die to preserve
for it an immortal life. The hold the State establishes over the spirit
of man is the more wonderful when we look rearward on history, and see
with what labor and sacrifice the State was established. But we see
also how readily, once the union has been brought about, men will die
to preserve it, even although it is a tyranny, a bad State. For what
do they die unless the spirit in man has some inner certitude that the
divine event to which humanity tends is a unity of its multitudinous
life, and that a State--even a bad State--must be preserved by its
citizens, because it is at least an attempt at organic unity? It is a
simulacrum of the ideal; it contains the germ or possibility of that to
which the spirit of man is traveling. It disciplines the individual in
service to that greater being in which it will find its fulfillment, and
a bad State is better than no State at all. To be without a State is to
prowl backwards from the divinity before us to the beast behind us.
The power the State exerts is a spiritual power, acting on or through
the will of man. The volunteer armies do not really march to die with
more readiness than the conscript armies. The sacrifice is not readily
explicable by material causes. There is no material reason why the
proletarian--who has no property to defend, who is more or less sure
as a skilled craftsman of employment under any ruler--should concern
himself whether his ruler be King, Kaiser, or President. But not one in
a hundred proletarians really thinks like that. It is not the hope
of personal profit works upon men to risk life. Let some exploiter of
industry desire to employ a thousand men at dangerous work, with the
risks of death or disablement equal to those of war; let it be known
that one in six will be killed and another be disabled, and what sum
will purchase the service of workers? They will risk life for the State,
though given a bare subsistence or a pay which they would describe as
inhuman if offered by one of the autocrats of industry. Men working for
the State will make the most extraordinary sacrifices; but they stand
stubbornly and sullenly as disturbers and blockers of all industry which
is run for private profit. Is it not clear of the two policies for the
State to adopt, to promote personal interests among its citizens or to
unite men for the general good, that the first path is full of danger to
the State, while through the other men will march cheerfully, though it
be to death, in defense of the State. Something, a real life above the
individual, acts through the national being, and would almost suggest
to us that Heaven cannot fully manifest its will to humanity through the
individual, but must utter itself through multitudes. There must be an
orchestration of humanity ere it can echo divine melodies. In real truth
we are all seeking in the majesties we create for union with a greater
Majesty.
I wrote in an earlier page that the ancient conception of Nature as
a manifestation of spirit was incarnating anew in the minds of modern
thinkers; that Nature was no longer conceived of as material or static
in condition, but as force and continual motion; that they were trying
to identify human will with this arcane energy, and let the forces of
Nature manifest with more power in society. The real nature of these
energies manifesting in humanity I do not know, but they have been
hinted at in the Scriptures, the oracles of the Oversoul, which speak of
the whole creation laboring upwards and the entry of humanity into the
Divine Mind, and of the re-introcession of That Itself with all Its
myriad unity into Deity, so that God might be all in all. I believe
profoundly that men do not hold the ideas of liberty or solidarity,
which have moved them so powerfully, merely as phantasies which are
pleasant to the soul or make ease for the body; but because, whether
they struggle passionately for liberty or to achieve a solidarity, in
working for these two ideals, which seem in conflict, they are divinely
supported, in unison with the divine nature, and energies as real as
those the scientist studies--as electricity, as magnetism, heat or
light--do descend into the soul and reinforce it with elemental energy.
We are here for the purposes of soul, and there can be no purpose in
individualizing the soul if essential freedom is denied to it and there
is only a destiny. Wherever essential freedom, the right of the spirit
to choose its own heroes and its own ideals, is denied, nations rise
in rebellion. But the spirit in man is wrought in a likeness to Deity,
which is that harmony and unity of Being which upholds the universe;
and by the very nature of the spirit, while it asserts its freedom,
its impulses lead it to a harmony with all life, to a solidarity or
brotherhood with it.
All these ideals of freedom, of brotherhood, of power, of justice, of
beauty, which have been at one time or another the fundamental idea in
civilizations, are heaven-born, and descended from the divine world,
incarnating first in the highest minds in each race, perceived by them
and transmitted to their fellow-citizens; and it is the emergence or
manifestation of one or other of these ideals in a group which is the
beginning of a nation; and the more strongly the ideal is held the more
powerful becomes the national being, because the synchronous vibration
of many minds in harmony brings about almost unconsciously a psychic
unity, a coalescing of the subconscious being of many. It is that inner
unity which constitutes the national being.
The idea of the national being emerged at no recognizable point in
our history in Ireland. It is older than any name we know. It is not
earth-born, but the synthesis of many heroic and beautiful moments, and
these, it must be remembered, are divine in their origin. Every heroic
deed is an act of the spirit, and every perception of beauty is vision
with the divine eye, and not with the mortal sense. The spirit was
subtly intermingled with the shining of old romance, and it is no mere
phantasy which shows Ireland at its dawn in a misty light thronged with
divine figures, and beneath and nearer to us demi-gods and heroes
fading into recognizable men. The bards took cognizance only of the
most notable personalities who preceded them, and of these only the acts
which had a symbolic or spiritual significance; and these grew thrice
refined as generations of poets in enraptured musings along by the
mountains or in the woods brooded upon their heritage of story, until,
as it passed from age to age, the accumulated beauty grew greater than
the beauty of the hour. The dream began to enter into the children of
our race, and turn their thoughts from earth to that world in which it
had its inception.
It was a common belief among the ancient peoples that each had a
national genius or deity who presided over them, in whose all-embracing
mind they were contained, and who was the shepherd of their destinies.
We can conceive of the national spirit in Ireland as first manifesting
itself through individual heroes or kings, and as the history of famous
warriors laid hold of the people, extending its influence until it
created therein the germs of a kindred nature.
An aristocracy of lordly and chivalrous heroes is bound in time to
create a great democracy by the reflection of their character in the
mass, and the idea of the divine right of kings is succeeded by the idea
of the divine right of the people. If this sequence cannot be traced
in any one respect with historical regularity, it is because of the
complexity of national life, its varied needs, the vicissitudes of
history, and its infinite changes of sentiment. But the threads are all
taken up in the end; and ideals which were forgotten and absent from the
voices of men will be found, when recurred to, to have grown to a rarer
and more spiritual beauty in their quiet abode in the heart. The seeds
which were sown at the beginning of a race bear their flowers and fruits
towards its close, and already antique names begin to stir us again with
their power, and the antique ideals to reincarnate in us and renew their
dominion over us.
They may not be recognized at first as a re-emergence of ancient moods.
The democratic economics of the ancient clans have vanished almost out
of memory, but the mood in which they were established reappears in
those who would create a communal or co-operative life in the nation
into which those ancient clans long since have melted. The instinct in
the clans to waive aside the weak and to seek for an aristocratic and
powerful character in their leaders reappears in the rising generation,
who turn from the utterer of platitudes to men of real intellect and
strong will. The object of democratic organization is to bring out the
aristocratic character in leadership, the vivid original personalities
who act and think from their own will and their own centres, who bring
down fire from the heaven of their spirits and quicken and vivify the
mass, and make democracies also to be great and fearless and free. A
nation is dead where men acknowledge only conventions. We must find out
truth for ourselves, becoming first initiates and finally masters in the
guild of life. The intellect of Ireland is in chains where it ought to
be free, and we have individualism in our economics which ought to
be co-ordinated and sternly disciplined out of the iniquity of free
profiteering. To quicken the intellect and imagination of Ireland,
to co-ordinate our economic life for the general good, should be the
objects of national policy, and will subserve the evolutionary purpose.
The free imagination and the aspiring mind alone climb into the higher
spheres and deflect for us the ethereal currents. It is the multitude
of aristocratic thinkers who give glory to a people and make them of
service to other nations, and it is by the character of the social
order and the quality of brotherhood in it our civilization will endure.
Without love we are nothing.
XX.
I beseech audience from the churches for these thoughts on our Irish
polity, and would recall to them their early history, how when the
fiery spirit of their Lord first manifested on earth, life, near to It,
reflected It as in a glowing glass, and impulses of true living arose.
Material possessions were held in common. There was no fierce talk of
Thine and Mine. His ancient law counseled poverty to the spirit, lest
the gates of Paradise should grow narrow before it like the eye of a
needle. I believe the fading hold the heavens have over the world is due
to the neglect of the economic basis of spiritual life. What profound
spiritual life can there be when the social order almost forces men to
battle with each other for the means of existence? I know well that no
political mechanics, nothing which is an economic device only, will of
themselves be able to affect the transfiguration of society and bring
it under the dominion of the spirit. For that, a far higher quality of
thought and action than is here indicated is necessary. The economist
can provide the daily bread, but that bread of the coming day which
Christ wished his followers to aspire to must come otherwise. That
should be the labor of the poets, artists, musicians, and of the heroic
and aristocratic characters who provide by their life an image to
which life can be modeled. Therefore I beseech audience not only of the
churches, but of the poets, writers, and thinkers of Ireland for their
aid in this labor. They alone can create in wide commonalty the ideals
which can dominate society. It is the work of the artist to create for
us images of desirable life, to manifest to us the ideal humanity, and
to prefigure that vaster entity which I have called the national being.
I said in an earlier page that part of the failure of Ireland must be
laid to the poets who had dropped out of the divine procession and sang
a solitary song; to the writers who had turned from contemplating
the great to the portrayal of the little in human nature. I know how
difficult it is to constrain the spirit, and how futile it is to ask
artists or poets to create what they are not inspired to create. But
we can ask all men--artists, poets, litterateurs, and scientists--to be
citizens, and if they realize imaginatively the spiritual conception of
the State, we may assume that this imaginative realization of the
State will influence the labors of the mind, and what is done will,
consciously or unconsciously, have reference to that collective being
which must dominate society more and more, which will dominate it as a
tyranny if we fail in our labors, or liberate and make more majestical
the spirit of man if we imagine rightly. All greatness is brought
about by a conspiracy of the imagination and the will. Our literature
certainly manifests beauty, but not greatness or majesty, for majesty
only arises where there is an orchestration of humanity by some mighty
conductor; and as a people we shall never manifest the highest qualities
in literature or life until we are under the dominion of one, at least,
of the great fundamental ideas which have been the inspiration of races.
Our feebleness arises from our economic individualism. We continually
neutralize each other's efforts. Yet there is no less power in humanity
today than there ever was. We see now clearly what untamed elemental
fires lay underneath the seeming placidity of the world. There was a
feeling in society that, just as the earth itself had settled down to
be a habitable globe, and was forgetting its ancient ferocities of
earthquake that opened up gulfs between land and land and rended sea
from sea, so, too, humanity was losing those wilder energies we surmised
in the cave-dweller or the hunters of mastodon, mammoth, and cave-tiger.
But it was all a dream--a dream, we suspect, about the earth as well
as about humanity. While we indulged in these pleasing speculations on
society, the scientists of our generation were placing beyond question
or argument the doctrine of the indestructibility of energy and matter
and we may be sure that while there is immortal life there must be
immortal energies as its companions through time, and they will never be
less powerful than they are today or were in the morning of the world.
There will be no weakening of that mighty God-begotten brotherhood of
elemental powers; and, while we cannot hope that by the wastage of time
these powers will be feebler, we may hope that by an understanding of
them we may get mastery over them. The wild elephant of the woods, with
a greater strength than man's, has yet been trained to be his servant,
and that arcane power we call electricity, which, if it shoots out of
its channel, shrivels up the body of man, is now our servant. So we may
hope, too, that the elemental energies in humanity itself, which break
out in wars and Armageddons, will come under control. We should not hope
that man will ever be a less powerful being. To hope that would be to
wish for his degradation. We should wish him to become ever more
and more powerful by understanding himself, and by the unity of
the spiritual faculties and the elemental energies in him into one
harmonious whole. At present he is feeble because he is, to use the
scriptural illustration, a house divided against itself.
Our feebleness is due to the conflict of powers in us and our conflict
with each other. Get the two mightiest bulls in a herd, put them
opposing each other in a narrow passage, and they, being of equal
strength, will reduce each other to feebleness. Neither will make
headway. Let them unite together in their charge, and what will oppose
them? Men at conflict in their own hearts, opposing each other in the
world, reduce themselves and each other to wretchedness. The race which
could eliminate the factors which promote internal conflict in society
and could organize human energies in harmony, would be powerful beyond
our wildest dreams. Every now and then in world-history we come across
instances of what organized humanity could accomplish. There are
fragments of an architecture so majestic that they awe us as the high
rocks of nature do, and they seem almost like portions of nature itself,
and truly they are so, being portions of nature remade by man, who is
also a nature energy of divine origin. Europe by its conflicts today
is reducing itself to barbarism and powerlessness, and these conflicts
arose out of the internal conflicts in society, for individuals and
nations act outside themselves as they act inside themselves. The
problem for Europe is to create a harmonious life, and it is the problem
for us in Ireland, and we will have to work this out for ourselves. The
creation of a harmonious life among a people must come from within. It
can never come by the imposition of an external law imposed by another
people: Never did master and slave work in true unison, no matter how
benevolent the master or how yielding the slave, for there is in every
man, no matter what his condition, a spark of divine life, and it
will always be ready to stir him out of subjection, as the fires of
earthquake lie below the cultivated plain. Man is a creature who has
free will, and it is by self-devised and self-checked efforts he will
attain his full human stature. So the problem of creating an organic
life in Ireland, a harmony of our people, a union of their efforts for
the common good and for the manifestation of whatever beauty, majesty,
and spirituality is in us, must be one we ourselves must solve for
ourselves.
To be indifferent to the possibilities of human life, to ignore the
problem, is to turn our back on heaven, which fashioned the spirit of
man in its image. If the spirit of man has likeness to Deity, it means
that if it manifests itself fully in the world, the world too becomes
a shadowy likeness of the heavens, and our civilizations will make a
harmony with the diviner spheres. We give still a service of lip belief
to the Scriptures, yet active faith we have not. But they are true,
yesterday, today, and for ever; and we have still the root of the matter
in us, for when any one utters out of profound conviction his faith,
there are always multitudes ready to respond. What really prevents an
organic unity in Ireland is the economic individualism of our lives. The
science of economics deals with the efforts of men to mine out of nature
the food, minerals, and materials necessary to preserve life. There is
nothing more certain than that where men work alone or only with the
aid of their families they are little higher than the animals. When they
tend to unite civilization begins. Then arise the towers, the temples,
the cities, the achievements of the architect and engineer. The earth is
tapped of its arcane energies, the very air yields to us its mysterious
powers. We control the etheric waves and send the message of our deeds
across the ocean. Yet in the midst of these vast external manifestations
of power, multitudes of men and women live in squalor, isolated in their
labors, living in the slums of cities; and this, if we examine it, comes
about because the organization of human energies into a harmonious unity
is not complete. There is really no lack of food, clothing, building
material, land. Nature has provided bountifully for more myriads than we
are likely to see peopling the earth. But people compete with each other
and undersell each other, and those who labor are mulcted of their
due, and instead of turning to the earth--the inexhaustible mother--and
working unitedly for the common weal, they continue that fierce
competition and stultify each other's efforts and reduce each other to
wretchedness. Humanity is a house divided against itself. Those who feel
this to be true must gather round any movement which gives a hope for
the future, which indicates a policy by which the organic unity of
society in Ireland might be attained, and our people work harmoniously
to make beauty and health prevail in our civilization. What each
gives up to society in the making of a civilization he gets back a
thousandfold. Now, the co-operative movement alone of all movements in
Ireland has aspired to make an economic solidarity in Ireland. Whatever
the aims of other movements may be--and many of them have high ideals
and are necessary for the spiritual and intellectual development of our
people--there is none of them which has for aim the unity of economic
life. They all leave untouched this problem--how are we to organize
society so that people will not be in conflict with each other, will not
nullify each other's efforts, but all will conspire together for
unity, so that none shall be forgotten or oppressed or left out of our
brotherhood? The policy I put forward is incomplete and imperfect, and
it must necessarily be so, being mainly the work of one mind, and to
complete it and perfect it there must be many minds and many workers
fired by the ideal. But I have indicated in some completeness how the
rural population could be co-operatively organized, federated together,
and how the urban population could be organized and brought into a
harmony of economic purpose with the folk of the country. Within the
limits of object these suggestions amount to a policy for the nation.
If the tragic condition of the world leaves us unstirred, if we draw
no lessons from it, if there is no fiery stirring of will in Ireland to
make it a better place to live in, then indeed we may lose hope for our
country. Let us remember the most scornful condemnation in Scripture was
not given to the evil but to the indifferent: "Because thou art neither
hot nor cold I will spew thee out of my mouth." Let us not be the
Laodiceans of Europe, listless and indifferent to human needs,
swallowing our whisky and our porter, stupefying our souls, while our
poor are sweated; letting the children of our cities die with more
carelessness about life than the people of any other European country,
with sectarian organization's crawling in secrecy like poisonous
serpents through the undergrowth of swamps and forests. The co-operative
movement is at least open and ideal in its aims and objects. It is
national and not sectional. It seeks the triumph of no section but the
unity of our people, where unity alone is possible. Our intransigents
and extremists of all parties are not hurt or wounded by their adhesion
to the co-operative ideal. We may make up our minds that the stubborn
Irish temperament will never be overcome, but it may be won, and the
movement which invites all parties and creeds into its ranks and gives
them the largest opportunities of working together and understanding
each other, gives also the largest hope of the gradual melting of old
bitterness into a common tolerance where what is best essentially wins;
for all true triumphs are triumphs not of force, but the conquest by a
superior beauty of what is less beautiful. We should aim at a society
where people will be at harmony in their economic life, will readily
listen to different opinions from their own, will not turn sour faces
on those who do not think as they do, but will, by reason and sympathy,
comprehend each other and come at last, through sympathy and affection,
to a balancing of their diversities, as in that multitudinous diversity,
which is the universe, powers and dominions and elements are balanced,
and are guided harmoniously by the Shepherd of the Ages.
THE END
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