Читать книгу: «The Sacred Egoism of Sinn Féin», страница 2

That the present war is at bottom a struggle between two cultures, the Anglo-Saxon and the German, is indicated by the remarkable way in which the ideals of the former have permeated the Allied world, strengthening the natural preponderance, linguistic and material, of the element represented by the United States and the British Empire. The hands that are fighting may be the hands of France, Belgium, Italy, Roumania, Serbia, Japan, China, America, and San Marino, but the voice is the voice of Britain, whose most admirable mouthpiece is Dr. Woodrow Wilson. The result is the reaction of the world to the stimuli of recent history in the perfect British manner. When the Russian Revolution occurred there was but little response to the revolutionary contagion, which had, nevertheless, affected Europe on the previous occasions of similar social upheavals. England, of course, was the great buttress of reaction against the French Revolution, which could not recommend itself on religious and moral grounds to the great Empire of respectability. Yet, France did succeed in infecting Europe with revolutionary ideas. Russia, on the other hand, has evoked only the response of the strikes in Germany and Austria. Elsewhere the reception of this dramatic transition from official words of freedom to popular action has been mixed and lukewarm. Nobody who understood the fundamental abhorrence of real liberty in the English-speaking countries could have been surprised at England’s unconcealed chagrin, and the subsequent hostility of all but a handful of the people to the progress of revolutionary government and diplomacy. What a relief when Germany finally imposed silence – and her terms – on Russia!

The prevailing tone of sentimental idealism in international affairs is, therefore, unpropitious to those who, like the Russians and the Irish, insist upon interpreting au pied de la lettre, the pious phrases which adorn the discourses of altruistic statesmen. Be the victims of oppression only far enough away from immediate Allied control, then their wrongs bedim the eyes of the professors of Liberty, whose vision becomes too blurred to distinguish the close presence of political phenomena which demand attention. In consequence, Ireland’s movement of self-assertion did not receive the good press which the occasion might normally have warranted. America, though neutral at the time, denounced the “disloyalty” of Sinn Féin in the best Colonial style, leaving to the American-Irish the hyphenated distinction, shared with their American-German fellow-citizens, of displaying a very natural sympathy with their kin in “the old country.” The racial ties of these two sections of Americans were, until intervention replaced benevolent neutrality, the only evidence of resistance to that anglicization of Allied opinion which has already been noted. Once, however, Dr. Wilson had declared his intention of making the world safe for democracy, repressive measures soon eliminated those manifestations of opinion. They had been denounced, but tolerated, only so long as it was legally impossible to suppress freedom of speech without injuring the interests of the highly articulate Allies and their friends.

The unsophisticated Irishman in the United States had to reconcile himself to the paradox of the American denunciation of the Easter Week Rising, as if the analogous revolt of the founders of that great plutocratic Republic had not differed only in so far as it was successful. The American separatists were alike untroubled by the representations of the unionistic minority, and the preoccupation of England with the war against her commercial rival of the period. But the Irish separatists made not even a romantic appeal to a people whose appetite for uplifting sentiment may be gauged by their profound conviction that the “moral leadership of the world” had been thrust upon them, after the outbreak of war, by an appreciative Destiny. It is true that, during the two years when this particular megalomania possessed the soul of America, her energies were exclusively concentrated upon the supply of munitions of war, with occasional humanitarian homilies, addressed to the Hun, and emphatic protests against the Allied blockade, which was denounced as illegal and unjust, but has become much more stringent under Wilsonian auspices. It is hard to decide which of these two not wholly unrelated phenomena is the greater tribute to the triumph of Anglo-Saxon culture; America’s condemnation of the Irish Republicans as “traitors,” or her reinforcement, when a belligerent, of blockade measures previously described as indefensible.

II
REALISM IN IRISH POLITICS

In this most intellectually belligerent of neutral countries the political mind has become realistic and critical, just when the combatant nations have taken refuge in an uncritical and remote idealism from the sordid and dreadful realities of war. Amongst the belligerents, it is true, there is talk of imposing ideals which, if ill-defined, have nevertheless called forth generous sacrifices from the inarticulate, plain people, who accept the formulæ officially or officiously provided for their guidance. But the mere fact of mobilization tends to emphasize the abstract quality of the formulæ in which the combatants have summed up, in almost identical words, their allegedly conflicting purposes. The individual is obscured by the anonymity of the device emblazoned upon the banner under which he is engaged. The mind is mobilized no less than the body, so that it is difficult to discern the personal emotion which must lie behind the self-immolation of so much bravery. Indeed, when collectively expressed in official utterances, the motives seem so abstract that President Wilson once confessed his inability to distinguish between them. It was not until he ceased to be a spectator of the conflict that he himself coined a phrase almost cynical in its bland inhumanity, coming from a country where the rudiments of real democracy are scarcely perceptible.

In so far, however, as it is possible to read any intelligible meaning into the word “democracy,” as currently employed, it must be prefixed by “political.” The world must be made safe for the political democracies, that is to say, those countries which have provided themselves with the “democratic institution” of parliamentary government. A couple of centuries ago the blessings of political freedom preoccupied the minds of those countries which have ever since accepted the attainment of that end as a substitute for the liberty of which it seemed the simulacrum. Those were the happy days when the discovery had not yet been made that political power is determined and conditioned by economic power, the former being useless without the latter. The gradual realization of this has been accompanied by a widespread disillusionment with party politics, popularly summed up by Mr. Belloc in his book, The Party System, which put before the general reader criticisms heretofore confined to Socialist literature. The domination of politics by capitalism became an accepted truism, and it was no longer possible for intelligent men to consider their “representative assemblies” with that seriousness so necessary to the dignity and comfort of the political mountebanks. In short, without prejudice to the theoretical virtues of parliamentary government, the conviction was established that, under the régime of profiteering industrialism, political democracy is an impolite fiction, and that the politics of capitalism must be party politics, with all its inherent corruption and dishonesty.

This process of disillusionment was not without its counterpart in Ireland, since Irish politicians were part of precisely that political machinery whose workings were being exposed in England. Moreover, within the past quarter of a century Irishmen had begun to perceive that, by relying upon themselves rather than upon their representatives at Westminster, they could get things done instead of being talked about. They also observed that the most flourishing industrial and intellectual movement in the country advanced amidst the indifference, when so fortunate as not to arouse the active hostility, of the politicians. It required very little, then, to arouse the suspicion that nothing more could be obtained for Ireland by political action in England, and the ignominious fate of the Home Rule Bill came as the final confirmation of a slowly accumulated scepticism. There was, of course, much of the inevitable ingratitude of the mob in this revulsion of feeling against a system which had been accepted by the Irish people, and had, within its limits, procured them undeniable advantages. Ireland, being eighteenth century in its retarded political mentality, believed, and still believes, in the marvels of political liberty, so that the Parliamentary Party was naturally outraged by the ficklessness of the anti-parliamentarian campaign. Electors and elected equally believed in party politics, and the Irish Party could show, with reasonable pride, a record of definite parliamentary achievement, unequalled by any other minority party in the British House of Commons.

The truth is, the Nationalist Party was accused of the vices inseparable from the parliamentary system by those who very humanly imagined that such vices were not inherent in the system itself, but were peculiar to British parliamentarianism. In all criticism there was lacking any suggestion of the possibility of similar defects in a purely Irish parliament. That is natural for two reasons. First, because the political development of Ireland makes it as premature for her to doubt the wisdom of her own elected assemblies, as it would have been for revolutionary France to question the practical value of the Declaration of the Rights of Man. Second, because the immediate cause of dissatisfaction with constitutional nationalism was the evident impossibility of its ever realizing the true aims of nationalism. Consequently, it is in vain that the Nationalist Party appeals for recognition of its actual services. A generation has arisen which accepts as a matter of course the fruits of a hard struggle, and insists upon the one vital and essential fact, namely, that the Irish members at Westminster have not brought Ireland a step nearer independence, and in the very nature of things, they cannot do so. Meanwhile, the burdens of over-taxation and misgovernment press every year more heavily on the country. Party achievements are dismissed as of slight importance by impatient and perhaps ungenerous critics, who assert – and rightly – that the Nationalist Party did not represent merely a section of public opinion in the House of Commons, but represented the Irish nation. Therefore, the test of party politics cannot be allowed. To which it is open to the apologist of constitutionalism to reply: you cannot participate in the game of party politics and then refuse to recognize the rules of that game. It is no more reasonable to believe that the Irish nation can be represented in the British Parliament, than to believe that the British nation is represented there. In both cases the elected persons vaguely correspond to actual phases of popular opinion, elicited, as a rule, under conditions which would make it difficult for a crowd of philosophers to express their judgment, not to mention a semi-educated, newspaper-fed mob.

We can observe over the same period a gradual disintegration of confidence in elected representatives both in England and Ireland, though the operative causes have not been the same, to the superficial glance. Intelligent Englishmen have been driven to doubt the efficacy of parliamentary government by the exposure of party corruption, and by the realization of the fact that political power is the shadow of which economic power is the substance. Irishmen, on the other hand, having being baulked of the opportunity of arriving at the same conclusion as a result of actual political experience in Ireland, found themselves, by force of national circumstances, confronted with evidence of the futility of Westminster politics. They have reached the stage of disillusion, but are unable to see clearly the intervening stages, owing to the thwarted and abnormal political evolution of the country. If it seems a paradox to claim that a country which has demanded a parliament of its own is dissatisfied with the parliamentary system, it should be recalled that there is no necessary obligation upon the Irish people to set up in Dublin a legislature upon the English model. The national political institutions of Ireland, as competent authorities have pointed out, are susceptible of meeting the needs of a community, whose social and intellectual conditions are quite unlike those of England. Moreover, as our national economists, Molyneux, Berkeley, Swift, Lalor, and Connolly have shown, the Irish case against government from Westminster has been based, from the beginning of modern history, upon this fundamental necessity for a combination of political and economic power, without which there can be no freedom. If one aspect of the question has been over-emphasized, the fault is common to more countries than Ireland, and is peculiarly comprehensible in a people whose political development has been interrupted and delayed.