The National Being: Some Thoughts on an Irish Polity






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.

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