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.
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