VIII THE NATIONAL LEGACY WHY NATIONALISM? IT is not because one is infatuated with the Irish people that their nationalistic struggle is seen primarily as a human cause. The disabilities of Catholic Irishmen are important not because they are Irish or because they are Catholic but because they have disabilities. It is this that gives democratic sanction to the emphasis on their nationhood. There is another emphasis on nationhood, the cultural, which intrudes patent difficulties into the sphere of the state. This is so much the case that disabilities take the attention of many nationalists only because their culture and their peculiarity are affected. With such partisans there is frequently no middle way. Their differentiation becomes as sacred, exclusive and imperious as it dares. Such arrogance, however, inheres in all differentiation. It is often necessary to penalize it, and a pleasure to do so, but you cannot get rid of it by crushing it, only by directing it. Most of statecraft, indeed, unless it be leviathan or stone-age statecraft, consists in harnessing these barbarous and obnoxious varieties of the will to power. When you think of nationalism merely as group particularism it seems wholly unworthy of political science; and political scientists as a rule shy away from sanctioning nationalism. In some respects, I am afraid, the modern political scientist is not unlike the political economist of fifty years ago. He much prefers to deal with issues uncontaminated by human nature. The war has changed many things and the war may have changed this, but throughout discussions of government and the state one is still constantly aware of intense willingness to see good systematic thinking deranged by unmalleable conglomerates of fact. I have in mind, as I write, the kind of federalist who simply closes his eyes to existing social and economic partitions, partitions which need to be removed, which nationalism proposes to remove, which federalism blandly and inhumanly accepts. If there were no established class to monopolize government, nationalism would be a wild political incursion. But nationalism fairly enters politics as a protestant if not a constructive factor. At least to the degree that government bears upon members of a national group they are bound, united by their particularism, to assert themselves in regard to government. If one opposes this tendency, while failing to liberate government itself from the undue influence of an established class, the result is to create that very injustice which it is the pretension of political science to cancel. Hence political science really begins, or ought to begin, with bringing government to a nationalistic state of grace. THE NATIONAL LEADERS The main difficulty in accommodating Irish government to Irish nationalism has been the fallen estate of the nationalist claimants. There has been at once no greater proof of this statement and no greater testimonial to human nature than the constituence of Irish leadership. One of the greatest leaders was a Catholic, O'Connell, but with his exception the vast majority of political leaders have been Protestants. The luminaries of Grattan's parliament were necessarily Protestant. It was not till 1793 that a Catholic was permitted to be a citizen or to aspire to education at an Irish university. But it was not merely Flood and Grattan who fought for Ireland, or, in earlier days, Swift and Molyneux. Wolfe Tone was a Protestant, so were Robert Emmet and Lord Edward Fitzgerald. After Catholic emancipation and the tithe war and the repeal movement came Young Ireland, with Protestants like Thomas Davis and Smith O'Brien and Ulster Presbyterians like John Mitchel to take up the fight for the people. Fenianism was largely Catholic, but the home rule movement was half Protestant and Orange to begin with, led by an Ulster Protestant, Isaac Butt. Parnell was a Protestant landlord. One may make the inference, if one likes, that Catholic Irishmen need a Protestant chieftain. Or one may make the inference that between Catholic and Protestant there is no such invincible prejudice as Ulster supposes. What really stands proved, it seems to me, is the inexorable claim on common humanity that was made on these Protestants by the lamentable state of Ireland. With their own eyes these men saw the violation of democratic principle at every turn, and, whatever their heredity, they revolted, as Englishmen. in England had similarly revolted, against English misrule. Gladstone and Morley, in this sense, were Irish leaders too; but the poignancy of Ireland, the tragic import of her claims, could only be felt by men who had dipped their bread in the salt of ostracism. Parnell's hatred of England was unintelligible to John Bright. Bright repudiated home rule because of it. But Parnell had seen death in the eyes of landlorded peasants. The empire he beheld was not the great institution that Bright criticized as an engineer might criticize a beloved engine. Parnell saw the empire as juggernaut, huge, self-considering, beyond appeal. When Gladstone unjustly imprisoned him he was not surprised. He was not surprised when Mr. Balfour denigrated Irish political prisoners, forced them to clean out water-closets. The zebra clothes with which the nationalist convicts were clad symbolized to Parnell the thing he hated in the union, England's impunity. That impunity was only too actual when he himself was 66 thrown to the wolves." His Protestantism was his inheritance, Ireland his experience. His experience convinced him that between strong and weak the weak must suspect the strong, must pursue Goliath relentlessly. Only heroism can save David. England's comfortable righteousness he ridiculed, and the righteousness was not a myth. It could jail him in 1880 for agitating a reform that the Unionists unctuously adopted in 1903. A GIANT'S TASK If Parnell was feared by England, O'Connell was loathed and despised. It is amusing now to recall the note of the London Times on O'Connell's consultation with the lord lieutenant Mulgrave. "It has been proved beyond a doubt that Lord Mulgrave has actually invited to dinner that rancorous and foul-mouthed ruffian, O'Connell." But this truculence of the strong to the weak was more than calculated political insult. Lord Morley has included in his life of Richard Cobden a letter that sadly illustrates the division of the two peoples. "I found the populace of Ireland represented in the House by a body of men, with O'Connell at their head, with whom I could feel no more sympathy or identity than with people whose language I did not understand." So he wrote in 1848, looking back seven years. “In fact," he continued, "morally I felt a complete antagonism and repulsion toward them. O'Connell always treated me with friendly attention, but I never shook hands with him or faced his smile without a feeling of insecurity; and as for trusting him on any public question where his vanity or passions might interpose, I should have as soon thought of an alliance with an Ashantee chief." It is interesting to turn from this to Morley's own opinion, fifty years after. "Goldwin Smith," he says, "hints that I am for home rule because I am ignorant of Ireland. His own personal knowledge of Ireland seems to have been acquired in a very short visit to a Unionist circle here thirty years ago! What can be more shallow and ill-considered than to dismiss O'Connell as an agitator, not a statesman.' O'Connell's noble resolution, insight, persistency in lifting up his Catholic countrymen, in giving them some confidence in themselves, in preaching the grand doctrine of union among Irishmen, and of toleration between the two creeds, in extorting justice from England and the English almost at the |