The National Being: Some Thoughts on an Irish Polity






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.

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