CHAPTER 1 Two Stones in a Square When I had for the first time crossed St. George's Channel, and for the first time stepped out of a Dublin Hotel onto St. Stephen's Green, the first of all my impressions was that of a particular statue, or rather portion of a statue. I left many traditional mysteries already on my track, but they did not trouble me as did this random glimpse or vision. I have never understood why the channel is called St. George's Channel. It would seem more natural to call it St. Patrick's Channel, since the Great Missionary did almost certainly cross that unquiet sea, and look up at those mysterious mountains. And though I should be enchanted in an abstract artistic sense to imagine St. George sailing toward the sunset, flying the silver and scarlet colors of his cross, I cannot in fact regard that journey as the most fortunate of the adventures of that flag. Nor for that matter do I know why the green should be called St. Stephen's Green, nor why the parliamentary enclosure at Westminster is also connected with the first of the martyrs, unless it be because St. Stephen was killed with stones. The stones piled together to make modern political buildings might perhaps be regarded as a cairn or heap of missiles marking the place of the murder of a witness to the truth. And while it seems unlikely that St. Stephen was pelted with statues as well as stones, there are undoubtedly statues that might well kill a Christian at sight. Among these graven stones, from which the saints suffer, I should certainly include some of those figures in front coats standing opposite St. Stephen's Westminster. There are many such statues in Dublin also, but the one with which I am concerned was at first partially veiled from me, and the veil was at least as symbolic as the vision. I saw what seemed the crooked hind legs of a horse on a pedestal, and deduced an equestrian statue in the somewhat bloated fashion of the early eighteenth-century equestrian statues. But the figure from where I stood was wholly hidden in the tops of trees growing rather than a ring masking it with leafy curtains or draping it with leafy banners. But they were green banners that waved and glittered all about it in the sunlight, and the face they hid was the face of an English king, or rather, to speak more correctly, a German king. When laws can stay, it was impossible that an old rhyme should not run in my head, and words that appealed to the everlasting revolt of the green things of the earth. And when the leaves in summer time their color dare not show. The rhyme seemed to reach me out of the remote times and find a resting fulfilment like a prophecy. It was impossible not to feel that I had seen an omen. I was conscious vaguely of a vision of green garlands, hung on gray stones, and the reeds were living and growing, and the stone was dead. Something in the simple substances and elemental colors, in the white sunlight and the somber and even the secret image, held the mind for a moment, in the midst of all the moving city, like a sign given in a dream. I was told that the figure was that of one of the first Georges. But indeed I seemed to know already that it was the white horse of Hanover that had thus grown gray with Irish weather or green with Irish foliage. I knew only too well already that the George who had really crossed the channel was not the saint. This was one of those German princes whom the English aristocracy used when it made the English domestic polity aristocratic and the English foreign policy German. Those Englishmen who think the Irish are pro-German, or the Irishmen who think the Irish ought to be pro-German, would presumably expect the Dublin populace to have hung the statue of this German deliverer with national flowers and nationalist flags. For some reason, however, I found no traces of Irish tributes round the pedestal of the two tonic horsemen. I wondered how many people in the last fifty years have ever cared about it or even been conscious of their own carelessness. I wonder how many have ever trouble to look at it, or even trouble not to look at it. If it fell down, I wonder whether anybody would put it up again. I do not know. I only know that Irish gardeners or some such Irish humorist had planted trees in a ring round that prancing equestrian figure. Trees that had, so to speak, sprung up and choked him, making him more unrecognizable than a jack in the green. Jack or George had vanished, but the green remained. About a stone's throw from this calamity and stone there stood at the corner of a gorgeously colored flower-walk, a bust evidently by a modern sculptor with a modern symbolic ornament surmounted by the fine falcon face of the poet Mangan, who dreamed and drank and died a thoughtless and thriftless outcast in the darkest of the Dublin streets around the place. This individual Irishman really was what we were told all Irishmen were. Hopeless, heedless, irresponsible, impossible, a tragedy of failure. And yet it seemed to be his head that was lifted and not hidden.  Everything around him seemed bright and busy and told rather of a new time. It was clear that modern men did stop to look at him. Indeed modern men had stayed there long enough to make him a monument. It was almost certain that if his monument fell down it really would be put up again. I think it very likely there would be competition among advanced modern artistic schools of admitted crankiness and unimpeachable lunacy. But somebody would want to cut out a cubist mangan in a style less of stone than of bricks, or to set up a vortisist mangan, like a frozen whirlpool, to terrify the children playing in that flowery lane. Or when I afterwards went into the Dublin Art Club, or mixed generally in the stimulating society of the intellectuals of the Irish capital, I found a multitude of things which moved both my admiration and amusement. Perhaps the best thing at all was that it was one society that I have seen where the intellectuals were intellectual, but nothing pleased me more than the fact that even Irish art was taken with a certain Irish pugnacity, as if there could be street fights about aesthetics as there once were about theology. I could almost imagine an appeal for pikes to settle a point about art needlework, or suggestion of dying on the barricades for a difference about book-binding. And I could still more easily imagine a sort of ultra-civilized civil war round the half-restored bust of poor mangan. But it was in a yet plainer and more popular sense that I felt the bust to be the sign of a new world, where the statue of Royal George was only the ruin of an old one. And though I have since seen many much more complex and many decidedly contradictory things in Ireland, the allegory of these two stone images in that public garden has remained in my memory, and has not been reversed. The glorious revolution, the great Protestant deliverer, the Hanoverian succession, these things were the very pageant and apotheosis of success. The Whig aristocrat was not merely victorious, it was as a victor that he asked for victory. The thing was fully expressed in all the florid and insolent statuary of the period, in all those timid horsemen in Roman uniform and Rococo periwigs, shown as prancing in perpetual motion down shouting streets to their triumphs. Only today the streets are empty and silent, and the horse stands still. Of such a kind was the imperial figure round which the ring of trees had risen, like great green fans to sue the sultan, or great green curtains to guard him. But it was in a sort of mockery that his pavilion was thus painted with the color of his conquered enemies, for the king was dead behind his curtains, his voice will be heard no more, and no man will even wish to hear it while the world endures. The dynastic eighteenth century is dead, if anything is dead, and these idols at least are only stones. But only a few yards away the stone that builders rejected is really the head of a corner, standing at the corner of a new pathway, colored and crowded with children and with flowers. That I suspect is the paradox of Ireland in the modern world. Everything that was thought progressive as a prancing horse has come to a standstill. Everything that was thought decadent, as a dying drunkard, has risen from the dead. All that seemed to have reached a cul-de-sac has turned the corner and stands at the opening of a new road. All that thought itself on a pedestal has found itself up a tree, and that is why those two chanced stones seemed to meet to stand like graven images on either side of the gateway by which a man enters Ireland. And yet I had not left the same small enclosure until I had seen one other site which was even more symbolic than the flowers near the foot of the poet's pedestal. A few yards beyond the mangan bust was a model plot of vegetables, like a kitchen garden with no kitchen or house attached to it, planted out in a patchwork of potatoes, cabbages and turnips, to prove how much could be done with an acre. And I realize, as in a vision, that all over the new Ireland that patch is repeated like a pattern, and where there is a real kitchen garden there is also a real kitchen. And it is not a communal kitchen. It is more typical even than the poet and the flowers. For these flowers are also food, and this poetry is also property. Property which, when properly distributed, is the poetry of the average man. It was only afterwards that I could realize all the realities to which this accident corresponded. But even this little public experiment, at the first glance, had something of the meaning of a public monument. It was this which the earth itself had reared against the monstrous images of the German monarch, and I might have called this chapter, Cabbage in Kings. My life is passed in making bad jokes and seeing them turn into true prophecies. In the little town of South Bucks where I live I remember some talk of appropriate ceremonies in connection with the work of sending vegetables to the fleet. There was a suggestion that these proceedings should end with God Save the King, an amendment by someone of a more naval turn of mind to substitute rural Britannia, and the opposition of one individual claiming to be of Irish extraction, who loudly refused to lend the voice to either. Whatever I retain in such rural scenes of the frivolity of Fleet Street led me to suggest that we could all join in singing the Waring of the Greens. But I have since discovered that this remark, like other typical utterances of the village idiot, was in truth inspired, and was a revelation and a vision from across the sea, a vision of what was really being done, not by the village idiots, but by the village wise men. For the whole miracle of modern Ireland might well be summed up in the simple change from the word green to the word greens. Nor would it be true to say that the first is poetical and the second practical. For a green tree is quite as poetical as a green flag, and no one in touch with history doubts that the waving of the green flag has been very useful to the growing of the green tree. But I shall have to touch upon all such controversial topics later, for those to whom such statements are still controversial. Here I would only begin by recording a first impression as vividly coloured and patchy as a modernist picture, a square of green things growing where they are least expected, the new vision of Ireland. The discovery, for most Englishmen, will be like touching the trees of a faded tapestry and finding the forest alive and full of birds. It will be as if on some dry urn or dreary column, figures which had already begun to crumble magically began to move and dance. For culture as well as mere fetishness assumed the decay of these Celtic or Catholic things. They were artists sketching the ruins as well as trippers picnicking in them, and it was not only evidence that a final silence had fallen on the harp of Tara that it did not play Tararabumdie. Englishmen believed in Irish decay even when they were large-minded enough to lament it. It might be said that even those who were penitent because the thing was murdered were quite convinced that it was killed. The meaning of these green and solid things before me is that it is not a ghost that has risen from the grave. A flower, like a flag, might be little more than a ghost, but a fruit has that sacramental solidity which, in all mythologies, belongs not to a ghost but to a god. This sight of things sustaining and beauty that nourishes and does not merely charm is the premonition of the practicality in the miracle of modern Ireland. It is a miracle more marvellous than the resurrection of the dead. It is the resurrection of the body. THE END OF CHAPTER II The only excuse of literature is to make things new, and the chief misfortune of journalism is that it has to make them old. What is hurried has to be hackneyed. Suppose a man has to write on a particular subject, let us say America. If he has a day to do it in, it is possible that in the last afterglow of sunset he may have discovered at least one thing which he himself really thinks about America. It is conceivable that somewhere under the evening star he may have a new idea, even about the new world. If he has only half an hour in which to write, he will just have time to consult an encyclopedia and vaguely remember the latest leading articles. The encyclopedia will only be about a decade out of date. The leading articles will be eons out of date, having been written under similar conditions of modern rush. If he has only a quarter of an hour in which to write about America, he may be driven in mere delirium and madness to call her his gigantic daughter in the West, to talk of the feasibility of hands across the sea, or even to call himself an Anglo-Saxon, when he might as well call himself a jute. But whatever debasing banality be the effect of business scurry and criticism, it is but one example of a truth that can be tested in twenty fields of experience. If a man must get to Brighton as quickly as possible, he can get there quickest by traveling on rigid rails on a recognized route. If he has time and money for motoring, he will still use public roads, but he will be surprised to find how many public roads look as new and quiet as private roads. If he has time enough to walk, he may find for himself a string of fresh footpaths, each one a fairytale. This law of the leisure needed for the awakening of wonder applies indeed to things superficially familiar as well as to things superficially fresh. The chief case for old enclosures and boundaries is that they enclose a space in which new things can always be found later, like live fish within the four corners of a net. The chief charm of having a home that is secure is having leisure to feel it as strange. I have often done the little I could to correct the stale trick of taking things for granted. All the more because it is not even taking them for granted, it is taking them without gratitude. That is emphatically as not granted. Even one's own front door, released by one's own latchkey, should not only open inward on things familiar, but outward on things unknown. Even one's own domestic fireside should be wild as well as domesticated, for nothing could be wilder than fire. But if this light of the higher ignorance should shine even on familiar places, it should naturally shine most clearly on the roads of a strange land. It would be well if a man could enter Ireland really knowing that he knows nothing about Ireland. If possible, not even the name of Ireland. The misfortune is that most men know the name too well and the thing too little. This book would probably be a better book as well as a better joke if I were to call the island throughout by some name like Atlantis, and only reveal on the last page that I was referring to Ireland. Ireland would see a situation of great interest, objects with which they could feel considerable sympathy, and opportunities of which they might take considerable advantage. If only they would really look at the place plain and straight, as they would at some entirely new island, with an entirely new name, discovered by that seafaring adventure which is the real romance of England. In short, he might do something with it if he would only treat it as an object in front of him, and not as a subject or story left behind him. There will be occasion later to say all that should be said of the need for studying the Irish story. But the Irish story is one thing, and what is called the Irish question, quite another. In a purely practical sense, the best thing the stranger can do is forget the Irish question and look at the Irish. If he looked at them simply and steadily as he would look at the natives of an entirely new nation with a new name, he would become conscious of a very strange but entirely solid fact. He would become conscious of it as a man in a fairy tale might become conscious that he had crossed the border of Fairyland, by such a trifle as a talking cow or a haystack walking about on legs. For the Irish question has never been discussed in England. Men have discussed home rule. But those who advocated it most warmly and, as I think wisely, did not even know what the Irish meant by home. Men have talked about unionism, but they have never even dared to propose union. A unionist ought to mean a man who is not even conscious of the boundary of the two countries, who can walk across the frontier of Fairyland and not even notice the walking haystack. As a fact, the unionist always shoots at the haystack, though he never hits it. But the limitation is not limited to unionists, as I have already said. The English radicals have been quite as incapable of going to the root of the matter. Half the case for home rule was that Ireland could not be trusted to the English home rulers. They also, to recur to the parable, have been unable to take the talking cow by the horns, for I need hardly say that the talking cow is an Irish bull. What has been the matter with their Irish politics was simply that they were English politics. They discussed the Irish question, but they never seriously contemplated the Irish answer. That is, the Liberal was content with the negative truth that the Irish should not be prevented from having the sort of law they liked. But the Liberal seldom faced the positive truth about what sort of law they would like. He instinctively avoided the very imagination of this, for the simple reason that the law the Irish would like is as remote from what is called Liberal as from what is called Unionist. Nor has the Liberal ever embraced it in his broadest liberality, nor the Unionist ever absorbed it into his most complete unification. It remains outside us altogether. A thing to be stared at like a fairy cow, and by far the wisest English visitor, is he who will simply stare at it. Sooner or later he will see what it means, which is simply this, that whether it be a case for coercion or emancipation, and it might be used either way, the fact is that a free Ireland would not only be what we call lawless, but might not even be what we call free. So far from being an anarchy it would be an orderly and even conservative civilization like the Chinese, but it would be a civilization so fundamentally different from our own, that our own Liberals would differ from it as much as our own Conservatives. The fair question for an Englishman is whether that fundamental difference would make division dangerous. It has already made Union impossible. Now interning over these notes of so brief a visit, suffering from all the stale scurry of my journalistic trade, I have been in doubt between a chronological and a logical order of events, but I have decided in favor of logic of the highlight that really revealed a picture, and by which I firmly believe that everything else should be seen. And if anyone were to ask me, what was the sight that struck me most in Ireland, both as strange and as significant, I should know what to reply. I saw it long after I had seen the Irish cities, had felt something of the brilliant bitterness of Dublin, and the stagnant optimism of Belfast. But I put it first here, because I am certain that without it all the rest is meaningless, that it lies behind all politics, enormous and silent as the Great Hills lie behind Dublin. I was moving in a hired motor down a road in the northwest towards the middle of that rainy autumn. I was not moving very fast because the progress was slowed down through the solemn procession, by crowds of families with their cattle and livestock going to the market beyond. Which things are also an allegory. But what struck my mind and stuck in it was this, that all down one side of the road, as far as we went, the harvest was gathered in neatly and safely, all down the other side of the road, it was rotting in the rain. Now the side where it was safe was a string of small plots, worked by peasant proprietors, as petty by our standards as a row of the cheapest fillers. The land on which all the harvest was wasted was the land of a large, modern estate. I asked why the landlord was later with his harvesting than the peasants, and I was told rather vaguely that there had been strikes and similar labor troubles. I did not go into the rites of the matter, but the point here is that whatever they were, the moral is the same. You may curse the cruel capitalist landlord, or you may rave at the ruffianly Bolshevest strikers, but you must admit that between them they had produced a stoppage, which the peasant proprietorship a few yards off did not produce. You might support either where they conflicted, but you could not deny the sense in which they had combined and combined to prevent what a few rustics across the road could combine to produce. For all that we in England agree about and disagree about, all for which we fight and all from which we differ, our darkness and our light, our heaven and our hell, were there, on the left side of the road. On the right side of the road lay something so different that we do not even differ from it. It may be that trusts are rising like towers of gold and iron, overshadowing the earth and shutting out the sun, but they are only rising on the left side of the road. It may be that trade unions are laying labyrinths of international insurrection, sellers stored with dynamite of a merely destructive democracy, but all that international maze lies to the left side of the road. And unemployment are there. Marx and the Manchester School are there. The left side of the road may even go through amazing transformations of its own. Its story may stride across abysses of anarchy, but it will never step across the road. The landlord's estate may become a sort of Morris utopia, organized communally by socialists, or more probably by guilds socialists. It may, as I fear, is much more likely. Pass through the stage of an employer's model village to the condition of an old pagan slave state. But the peasants across the road would not only refuse the servile state, but would quite as resolutely refuse the utopia. Europe may seem to be rent from end to end by the blast of a Bolshevist trumpet, sundering the bourgeois from the proletarian. But the peasant across the road is neither a bourgeois nor a proletarian. London may seem to be rent by an irreconcilable rivalry between capital and labor. But the peasant across the road is both a capitalist and a laborer. He is several other curious things, including the man who got his crops in first, who was literally first in the field. To an Englishman, especially a Londoner, this was like walking to the corner of a London street and finding the policemen in rags with a patch on his trousers and a smudge on his face. But the crossing sweeper wearing a single eyeglass and a suit fresh from the West End tailor. In fact it was nearly as surprising as walking haystack or a talking cow. What was generally dingy, dilatory, and down at the heels was here comparatively tidy and timely. What was orderly and organized was belated and broken down. One must be sharply realized that the peasant proprietors succeeded here not only because they were really proprietors but because they were only peasants. It was because they were on a small scale that they were a great success. It was because they were too poor to have servants that they grew rich in spite of strikers. It was so far as it went, the flattest possible contradiction to all that is said in England, both by collectivists and capitalists, about the efficiency of the great organization. For in so far as it had failed it had actually failed not only through being great but through being organized. On the left side of the road the big machine had stopped working because it was a big machine. The small men were still working because they were not machines. Such were the strange relations of the two things, that the stars in their courses fought against capitalism, that the very clouds rolling over that rocky valley warred for its pygmies against its giants. The rain falls alike on the just and the unjust, yet here it had not fallen alike on the rich and poor. It had fallen to the destruction of the rich. Now I do, as a point of personal opinion, believe that the right side of the road was really the right side of the road. That is, I believe it represented the right side of the question. That these little pottering peasants had got a hold of the true secret which is missed both by capitalism and collectivism. But I am not here urging my own preferences on my own countrymen, and I am not concerned primarily to point out that this is an argument against capitalism and collectivism. What I do point out is that it is the fundamental argument against unionism. Perhaps it is on that ultimate level the only argument against unionism which is probably why it is never used against unionists. I mean of course that it was never really used against English unionists by English home rulers in the recriminations of the Irish question which was really an English question. The essential demanded of that question was merely that it should be an open question. A thing rather like an open wound. Modern industrial society is fond of problems and therefore not at all fond of solutions. A consideration of those who really have understood this fundamental fact will be sufficient to show how confusing and useless are the mere party labels in the matter. George Wyndham was a unionist who was deposed because he was a home ruler. Sir Horace Plunkett is a unionist who is trusted because he is a home ruler. By far the most revolutionary piece of nationalism that was ever really affected for Ireland was affected by Wyndham, who was an English Tory squire, and by far the most brutal and brainless piece of unionism that was ever imposed on Ireland was imposed in the name of the radical theory of free trade when the Irish juries brought in verdicts of willful murder against Lord John Russell. I say this to show that my sense of reality is quite apart from the personal accident that I have myself always been a radical in English politics as well as a home ruler in Irish politics. But I say it even more in order to reaffirm that the English have first to forget all their old formula and look at a new fact. It is not a new fact, but it is new to them. To realize it we must not only go outside the British parties but outside the British Empire, outside the very universe of the ordinary Britain. The real question can be easily stated, for it is as simple as it is large. What is going to happen to the peasantries of Europe, or for that matter of the whole world? It would be far better, as I have already suggested, if we can consider it as a new case of some peasantry in Europe or somewhere else in the world. It would be far better if we ceased to talk of Ireland and Scotland and began to talk of Ireland and Serbia. Let us, for the sake of our own mental composure, call this unfortunate people sloveness, but let us realize that these remote sloveness are by the testimony of every truthful traveler rooted in the habit of private property and now ripening into a considerable private prosperity. It will often be necessary to remember that the sloveness are Roman Catholics, and that with that impatient pugnacity which marks the sloven temperament, they have often employed violence, but always for the restoration of what they regarded as a reasonable system of private property. Now in a hundred determining districts, of which France is the most famous, this system has prospered. It has its own faults as well as its own merits, but it has prospered. What is going to happen to it? I will here confine myself to saying with the most solid confidence what is not going to happen to it. It is not going to be really ruled by socialists, and it is not going to be really ruled by merchant princes like those who ruled Venice or like those who rule England. It is not so much that England ought not to rule Ireland as that England cannot. It is not so much that Englishmen cannot rule Irishmen as that merchants cannot rule peasants. It is not so much merely that we have dealt benefits to England and blows to Ireland. It is that our benefits for England would be blows to Ireland. And this we already began to admit in practice before we had even dimly begun to conceive it in theory. We do not merely admit it in special laws against Ireland like the coercion acts, or special laws in favor of Ireland like the land acts. It is admitted even more by especially exempting Ireland than by especially studying Ireland. In other words, whatever else the Unionists want, they do not want to unite. They are not quite so mad as that. I cannot myself conceive any purpose in having one parliament except to pass one law, and one law for England and Ireland is simply something that becomes more insanely impossible every day. If the two societies were stationary, they would be sufficiently separate, but they are both moving rapidly in opposite directions. England may be moving towards a condition which some call socialism, and I call slavery. But whatever it is, Ireland is speeding further and further from it. Whatever it is, the men who manage it will no more be able to manage a European peasantry than the peasants in these mud cabins could manage the stock exchange. All attempts, whether imperial or international, to lump these peasants along with some large and shapeless thing called labour, are part of a cosmopolitan illusion which sees mankind as a map. The world of the international is a pill as round and as small. It is true that all men want health, but it is certainly not true that all men want the same medicine. Let us allow the cosmopolitan to survey the world from China to Peru, but do not let us allow the chemist to identify Chinese opium and Peruvian bark. My parallel about the sloveness was only a fancy. Yet I can give a real parallel from the Slavs, which is a fact. It was a fact from my own experience in Ireland, and it exactly illustrates the real international sympathies of the peasants. Their internationalism has nothing to do with the international. I had not been in Ireland many hours when several people mentioned to me with considerable excitement some news from the continent. They were not, strange as it may seem, dancing with joy over the disaster of Caporetto, or glowing with admiration of the crown prince. Few really rejoiced in English defeats, and none really rejoiced in German victories. It was news about the Bolshevists, but it was not the news of how nobly they had given votes to the Russian women, nor how savagely they had fired bullets into the Russian princesses. It was the news of a check to the Bolshevists, but it was not a glorification of Kerensky, or Kornolov, or any of the newspaper heroes who seem to have satisfied us all, so long as their names began with K and nobody knew anything about them. Be sure there was nothing that could be found in all our myriad newspaper articles on the subject. I would give an educated Englishman a hundred guesses about what it was, but even if he knew it he would not know what it meant. It had appeared in the little paper about peasant produce so successfully conducted by Mr. George Russell, the celebrated A.E., and it was told me eagerly by the poet himself, by a learned and brilliant Jesuit, and by several other people as the great news from Europe. It was simply the news that the Jewish Socialists of the Bolshevist governments had been attempting to confiscate the peasant's savings in the cooperative banks and had been forced to desist. And they spoke of it as a great battle won on the Danube or the Rhine. That is what I mean when I say that these people are of a pattern and belong to a system which cuts across all our own political divisions. They felt themselves fighting the Socialists as fiercely as any capitalist can feel it. But they not only knew what they were fighting against, but what they were fighting for, which is more than the capitalist does. I do not know how far modern Europe really shows a menace of Bolshevism, or how far merely a panic of capitalism. But I know that if any honest resistance has to be offered to mere robbery, the resistance of Ireland will be the most honest, and probably the most important. It may be that International Israel will launch against us, out of the East, an insane simplification of the unity of man, as Islam once launched out of the East, an insane simplification of the unity of God. If it be so, it is where property is well distributed that it will be well defended. The post of honour will be those who fight in very truth for their own land. If ever there came such a drive of wild dervishes against us, it would be the chariots and elephants of plutocracy that would roll in confusion and rout, and the squares of the peasant infantry would stand. Anyhow, the first fact to realize is that we are dealing with a European peasantry, and it would be really better, as I say, to think of it first as a continental peasantry. There are numberless important inferences from this fact, but there is one point politically topical and urgent, on which I may well touch here. It will be well to understand about this peasantry, something that we generally misunderstand even about a continental peasantry. English tourists in France or Italy commonly make the mistake of supposing that the people cheat because the people bargain or attempt to bargain. When a peasant asks ten pence for something that is worth four pence, the tourist misunderstands the whole problem. He commonly solves it by calling the man a thief and paying the ten pence. There are ten thousand errors in this, beginning with the primary error of an oligarchy, of treating a man as a servant when he feels more like a small squire. The peasant does not choose to receive insults, but he never expected to receive ten pence. A man who understood him would simply suggest two pence in a calm and courteous manner, and the two would eventually meet in the middle at a perfectly just price. There would not be what we call a fixed price at the beginning, but there would be a very firmly fixed price at the end. That is, the bargain once made would be a sacredly sealed contract. The peasant so far from cheating has his own horror of cheating, and certainly his own fury at being cheated. Now in the political bargain with the English, the Irish simply think they have been cheated. They think home rule was stolen from them after the contract was sealed, and it would be hard for anyone to contradict them. If Le Roy Le Vilt is not a sacred seal on a contract, what is? The sentiment is strong because the contract was compromised. Home rule was the four pence and not the ten pence, and in perfect loyalty to the peasant's code of honor they have now reverted to the ten pence. The Irish have now returned in a reaction of anger to their most extreme demands, not because we denied what they demanded, but because we denied what we accepted. As I shall have occasion to know, there are other and wider elements in the quarrel. But the first fact to remember is that the quarrel began with a bargain, that it will probably have to end with another bargain, and that it will be a bargain with peasants. On the whole, in spite of abominable blunders and bad faith, I think there is still a chance of bargaining. But we must see that there is no chance of cheating. We may haggle like peasants, and remember that their first offer is not necessarily their last. But we must be as honest as peasants, and that is very hard for politicians. The great Parnell, a squire who had many of the qualities of a peasant, qualities the English so widely misunderstood as to think them English when they were really very Irish, converted his people from a Fenianism fiercer than Sinn Féin to a home rule, more modern than that which sane statesmanship could now offer to Ireland. But the peasants trusted Parnell, not because they thought he was asking for it, but because they thought he could get it. Whatever we decide to give Ireland, we must give it. It is now worse than useless to promise it. I will say here, once and for all, the hardest thing that an Englishman has to say of his impressions of another great European people, that over all those hills and valleys areward his wind, and our bond is waste paper. But in any case, the peasantry remains, and the whole weight of the matter is that it will remain. It is much more certain to remain than any of the commercial or colonial systems that will have to bargain with it. We may honestly think that the British Empire is both more liberal and more lasting than the Austrian Empire or other large political combinations. But a combination like the Austrian Empire could go to pieces, and ten such combinations could go to pieces, before people like the Serbians cease to desire to be peasants, and to demand to be free peasants. And the British combination, precisely because it is a combination and not a community, is in its nature more lax and liable to real schism than this sort of community, which might almost be called a communion. Any attack on it is like an attempt to abolish grass, which is not only the symbol of it in the Old National Song, but it is a very true symbol of it in any new philosophic history, a symbol of its equality, its ubiquity, its multiplicity, and its mighty power to return. To fight against grass is to fight against God. We can only so mismanage our own city and our own citizenship that the grass grows in our streets. And even then, it is our streets that will be dead, and the grass will still be alive. CHAPTER III There was an old joke of my childhood to the effect that men might be grouped together with a reference to their Christian names. I've forgotten the cases then under consideration, but contemporary examples would be sufficiently suggestive today. A ceremonial brotherhood in arms between Father Bernard Vaughn and Mr. Bernard Shaw seems full of possibilities. I am faintly pleased with the fancy of Mr. Arnold Bennett endeavoring to extract the larger humanities of fiction from the political differences of Mr. Arnold White and Mr. Arnold Lupton. I should pass my own days in the Exclusive Society Professor Gilbert Murray and Sir Gilbert Parker, whom I can conceive as differing on some points from each other and on some points from me. Now there is one odd thing to notice about this old joke, that it might have been taken in a more serious spirit, though in a saner style, in a yet older period. This fantasy of the Victorian age might easily have been a fact of the Middle Ages. There would have been nothing abnormal in the moral atmosphere of medievalism in some feast or pageant celebrating the fellowship of men who had the same patron saint. It seems mad and meaningless now, because the meaning of Christian names has been lost. They have fallen into a kind of chaos and oblivion which is highly typical of our time. I mean that there are still fashions in them, but no longer reasons for them. For a fashion is a custom without a cause. A fashion is a custom to which men cannot get accustomed, simply because it is without a cause. That is why our industrial societies, touching every topic from the cosmos to the coat collars, are merely swept by a succession of modes which are merely moods. They are customs that fail to be customary. And so amid all our fashions in Christian names we have forgotten all that was meant by the custom of Christian names. We have forgotten all the original facts about a Christian name, but above all the fact that it was Christian. Now if we note this process going on in the world of London or Liverpool, we shall see that it has already gone even farther and fared even worse. The surname also is losing its root and therefore its reason. The surname has become as solitary as a nickname. Or it might be argued that the first name is meant to be an individual and even isolated thing, but the last name is certainly meant by all logic and history, to link a man with his human origins, habits, or habitation. Historically it was a word taken from the town he lived in or the trade-gill to which he belonged. Legally it is still the word on which all questions of legitimacy, succession, and testamentary arrangements turn. It is meant to be the corporate name, in that sense it is meant to be the impersonal name, as the other is meant to be the personal name. Yet in the modern mode of industrialism it is more and more taken in a manner at once lonely and light. Any corporate social system built upon it would seem as much of a joke as the joke about Christian names which I began. It would seem odd to require a Thomas to make friends with any other Thomas. It would appear almost as perplexing to insist that any Thompson must love any other Thompson. It may be that Sir Edward Henry, late of the police force, does not wish to be confined to the society of Mr. Edward Claude. But would Sir Edward Henry necessarily have sought the society of Mr. O. Henry, entertaining as that society would have been? Sir John Barker, founder of the great Kensington Emporium, need not specifically seek out and embrace Mr. John Masefield. But need he any more swiftly precipitate himself into the arms of Mr. Granville Barker? This vista of varieties would lead us far. But it is enough to notice, nonsense apart, that the most ordinary English surnames have become unique in their social significance. They stand for the man rather than the race or the origins. Even when they are most common they are not communal. What we call the family name is not now primarily the name of the family. The family itself, as the corporate conception, has already faded into the background, and is in danger of fading from the background. In short, our Christian names are not the only Christian things that we may lose. Now the second solid fact which struck me in Ireland, after the success of small property and the failure of large organization, was the fact that the family was in a flatly contrary position. All I have said above in current language about the whole trend of the modern world is directly opposite to the whole trend of the modern Irish world. Not only is the Christian name a Christian name, but what seems still more paradoxical and even pantomimic. The family name is really a family name. Touching the first of the two it would be easy to trace out some very interesting truths about it, if they did not divert us from the main truth of this chapter. The second great truth about Ireland. People contrasting the education of the two countries, or seeking to extend to the one the thing which is called education in the other, might indeed do worse than study the simple problem of the meaning of Christian names. It might dawn at last, even on educationist, that there is value in the content as well as the extent of culture. Or in other words, that knowing nine hundred words is not always more important than knowing what some of them mean. It is strictly and soberly true that any peasant in a mud cabin in County Clear, when he names his child Michael, may really have a sense of the presence that smoked down Satan, the arms in plumage of the Paladin of Paradise. I doubt whether it is so overwhelmingly probable that any clerk in any villa on Clapham Commons, when he names his son John, has a vision of the holy eagle of the Apocalypse, or even the mystical cup of the disciple whom Jesus loved. In the face of that simple fact I have no doubt about, which is the more educated man, and even a knowledge of the daily male does not redress the balance. It is often said and possibly true that the peasant named Michael cannot write his own name. But it is quite equally true that the clerk named John cannot read his own name. He cannot read it because it is in a foreign language, and he has never been made to realize what it stands for. He does not know that John means John, as the other man does know that Michael means Michael. In that rigid, realistic sense the pupil of the industrial intellectualism does not even know his own name. But this is a parenthesis, because the point here is that the man in the street, as distinct from the man in the field, has been separated not only from his private but from his more public description. He has not only forgotten his name but forgotten his address. In my own view he is like one of those unfortunate people who wake up with their minds ablank, and therefore cannot find their way home. But whether or no we take this view of the state of things in industrial society like the English, we must realize firmly that our totally opposite state of things exists in an agricultural society like the Irish. We may put it, if we like, in the form of an unfamiliar and even unfriendly fancy. We may say that the house is greater than the man, that the house is an amiable ogre that runs after and recaptures the man. But the fact is here, familiar or unfamiliar, friendly or unfriendly, and the fact is the family. The family pride is prodigious, though it generally goes along with glowing masses of individual humility. And this family sentiment does attach itself to the family name, so that the very language in which men think is made up of names. In this the atmosphere is singularly unlike that of England, though much more like that of Scotland. Indeed it will illustrate the impartial recognition of this, apart from any partisan deductions, that it is equally apparent in the place where Ireland and Scotland are supposed to meet. It is equally apparent in Ulster, even in the Protestant corner of Ulster. In all the Ulster propaganda I came across, I think the thing that struck me most sharply was the one phrase in the one Unionist leading article. It was something that might fairly be called Scottish, something which was really even more Irish, but something which could not in the wildest mood be called English, and therefore could not with any rational meaning be called Unionist. Yet it was part of a passionate, sincere and indeed truly human and historic outburst of the politics of the northeast corner, against the politics of the rest of Ireland. Most of us remember that Sir Edward Carson put in the government a legal friend of his named Campel. It was at the beginning of the war and few of us thought anything of the matter, except that it was stupid to give posts to carcinides at the most delicate crisis of the cause in Ireland. Since then, as we also know, the same Campel has shown himself a sensible man, which I should translate as a practical home ruler, but which is anyhow something more than what is generally meant by a carcinide. I entertain myself a profound suspicion that Carson also would very much like to be something more than a carcinide. But however this may be, his legal friend of whom I speak made an excellent speech containing some concession to Irish popular sentiment. As might have been expected there were furious denunciations of him in the press of the Orange Party, but not more furious than might have been found in the Morning Post or the Saturday Review. Nevertheless there was one phrase that I certainly never saw in the Morning Post or the Saturday Review, one phrase I should never expect to see in any English newspaper, though I might very probably see it in a Scottish paper. It was this sentence that was read to me from the leading article of a paper in Belfast. There never was treason yet, but a Campel was at the bottom of it. Let anybody imagine an Englishman saying about some business quarrel, how like it at Kins, or what could you expect of a Wilkinson? A moment's reflection will show that it would be even more impossible touching public men in public quarrels. No English liberal ever connected the earlier exploits of the present Lord Birkenhead with atavistic influences or the totem of the wide and wandering tribe of Smith. No English patriot traced back the family tree of any English pacifist or said there was never a treason yet, but a Pringle was at the bottom of it. It is the indefinite article that is here the definite distinction. It is the expression a Campel, which suddenly transforms the scene and covers the robes of one lawyer with the ten thousand tartans of a whole clan. Now that phrase is the phrase that meets the traveler everywhere in Ireland. Perhaps the next most arresting thing I remember, after the agrarian revolution, was the way in which one poor Irishman happened to speak to me about Sir Roger Casement. He did not praise him as a deliverer of Ireland. He did not abuse him as a disgrace to Ireland. He did not say anything of the twenty things one might expect him to say. He merely referred to the rumour that Casement meant to become a Catholic, just before his execution, and expressed a sort of distant interest in it. He added, he's always been a black Protestant. All the Casements are black Protestants. I confess that at the moment of that morbid story there seems to me to be something unearthly about the very idea of there being other Casements. Have ever a man seemed solitary, if ever a man seemed unique to the point of being unnatural? It was the man on the two or three occasions, when I have seen his somber handsome face and his wild eyes, a tall dark figure walking already in the shadow of a dreadful doom. I do not know if he was a black Protestant. But he was a black something, in the sad, if not the bad sense of the symbol. I fancy in truth he stood rather for the third of Browning's famous triad of rhyming monosyllables, a distinguished nationalist member, who happened to have had medical training said to me, I was quite certain when I first clapped eyes on him the man was mad. Anyhow the man was so unusual that it would never have occurred to me or any of my countrymen to talk as if there were a class or clan of such men. I could almost have imagined he had been born without a father or mother. But for the Irish his father and mother were really more important than he was. There is said to be a historical mystery about whether Parnell made upon, when he said that the name of Kettle was a household word in Ireland. Few symbols could be more contrary than the name of Kettle and the name of Casement, save for the courage they had in common. For the younger Kettle, who died so gloriously in France, was a nationalist as broad as the other was cramped, and as sane as the other was crazy. But if the fancy of a punster, following his own delightful vein of nonsense, should see something quaint in the image of a hundred such Kettles singing as he sang by a hundred hertz, or a more bitter jester, reading that black and obscure story of the capture on the coast, might utter a similar flippancy about the other Casements, opening on the foam of such very perilous seas in England so truly forlorn. But even if we were not annoyed at the pun, we should be surprised at the plural, and our surprise would be the measure of the deepest difference between England and Ireland. To express it in the same idle imagery it would be the fact that even a Casement is a part of a house, as a Kettle is a part of a household. Every word in Irish is a household word. The English would no more have thought of a plural for the word Gladstone than for the word God. They would never have imagined Israeli compassed about with a great cloud of Israelis. It would have seemed to them altogether to apocalyptic and exaggeration of being on the side of the angels. To this day in England, as I have reason to know, it is regarded as a rabid and insane form of religious persecution to suggest that a Jew very probably comes of a Jewish family. In short, the modern English, while their rulers are willing to give due consideration to eugenics, has a reasonable opportunity for various forms of polygamy and infanticide. Are drifting farther and farther from the only consideration of eugenics it could possibly be fit for Christian men? The consideration of it as an accomplished fact. I have spoken of infanticide, but indeed the ethic involved is rather that of parasite and matricide. To my own taste the present tendency of social reform would seem to consist of destroying all traces of the parents in order to study the heredity of the children. But I do not here ask the reader to accept my tastes or even opinions about these things. I only bear witness to an objective fact about a foreign country. It can be summed up by saying that Parnell is the Parnell for the English, but a Parnell for the Irish. This is what I mean when I say that English home rulers do not know what the Irish mean by home. And this is also what I mean when I say that the society does not fit into any of our social classifications liberal or conservative. To many radicals this sense of lineage will appear rank reactionary aristocracy. And it is aristocratic, if we mean by this, a pride of pedigree. But it is not aristocratic in the practical and political sense. Strange as it may sound its practical effect is democratic. It is not aristocratic in the sense of creating an aristocracy. On the contrary it is perhaps the one force that permanently prevents the creation of an aristocracy in the manner of the English squirearchy. The reason of this apparent paradox can be put plainly enough in one sentence. If you are really concerned about your relations, you have to be concerned about your poor relations. You soon discover that a considerable number of your second cousins exhibit a strong social tendency to be chimney sweeps and tinkers. You soon learn the lesson of human equality, if you try honestly and consistently to learn any other lesson, even the lesson of heraldry and genealogy. For good or evil, a real working aristocracy has to forget about three quarters of its aristocrats.  If a man is interesting because he is a McCarthy, it is so far as he is interesting because he is a man, that is, he is interesting whether he is a duke or a dust man. But if he is interesting because he is Lord FitzArthur and lives at FitzArthur house, then he is interesting when he has merely bought the house or when he has merely bought the title. To maintain a squire, Arche, it is necessary to admire the new squire and therefore to forget the old squire. The sense of family is like a dog and follows the family. The sense of oligarchy is like a cat and continues to haunt the house. I am not arguing against aristocracy if the English choose to preserve it in England. I am only making clear the terms on which they hold it, and warning them that a people with a strong family sense will not hold it on any terms. Aristocracy, as it has flourished in England since the Reformation, with not a little national glory and commercial success, is in its very nature built up of broken and desecrated homes. It has to destroy a hundred poor relations to keep up a family. It has to destroy a hundred families to keep up a class. But if this family spirit is incompatible with what we mean by an aristocracy, it is quite as incompatible with three-quarters of what many men praise and preach as democracy. The whole trend of what has been regarded as liberal legislation in England, necessary or unnecessary, defensible or indefensible, has for good or evil been at the expense of the independence of the family, especially of the poor family. From the first most reasonable restraints of the factory acts to the last most maniacal antics of interference with other people's nursery games or Christmas dinners, the whole process has turned sometimes on the pivot of the state, more often on the pivot of the employer, but never on the pivot of the home. All this may be an emancipation. I only point out that Ireland really asked for home rule, chiefly to be emancipated from this emancipation. But indeed the English politicians, to do them justice, show their consciousness of this by the increasing number of cases in which the other nation is exempted. We may have harried this unhappy people with our persecutions, but at least we spare them our reforms. We have smitten them with plagues, but at least we dare not scorch them with our remedies. The real case against the Union is not merely a case against the Unionists. It is a far stronger case against the Universalists. It is this strange and ironic truth that a man stands up holding a charter of charity and peace for all mankind, that he lays down a law of enlightened justice for all the nations of the earth, that he claims to behold man from the beginnings of his evolution equal without any difference between the most distant creeds and colors, that he stands as the orator of the human race whose statue only declares all humanity to be human, and then slightly drops his voice and says, This act shall not apply to Ireland. CHAPTER IV THE PARADOX OF LABOR My first general and visual impression of the Green Island was that it was not green, but brown, that it was positively brown with khaki. This is one of those experiences that cannot be confused with expectations, the sort of small thing that is seen but not foreseen in the verbal visions of the books and newspapers. I knew, of course, that we had a garrison in Dublin, but I had no notion that it had been considered necessary to occupy the country in such force or with so much parade of force. And the first thought that flashed through my mind found words in the single sentence, how useful these men would have been in the breach at St. Quentin. For I went to Dublin towards the end of 1918, and not long after those awful days which led up to the end of the war, and seemed more like the end of the world. There hung still in the imagination, as above a void of horror, that line that was the last chain of the world's chivalry, and the memory of the day when it seemed that our name and our greatness and our glory went down before the annihilation from the north. Ireland is hardly to blame if she has never known how noble in England was in peril in that hour, or for what, beyond any empire, we were troubled, when under a cloud of thick darkness we almost felt her ancient foundations move upon the floor of the sea. But I, as an Englishman at least, knew it, and it was for England and not for Ireland that I felt this first impatience and tragic irony. I had always doubted the military policy that culminated in Irish conscription and merely on military grounds. If any policy of the English could deserve to be called in the proverbial Irish sense, I think it was this one. It was wasting troops in Ireland because we wanted them in France. I had the same purely patriotic and even pugnacious sense of annoyance mingling with my sense of pathos in the sight of the devastation of the great Dublin Street, which had been bombarded by the British troops during the Easter Rebellion. I was distressed that such a cannonade had ever been aimed at the Irish, but even more distressed that it had not been aimed at the Germans. The question of the necessity of the heavy attack, like the question of the necessity of the large army of occupation, is of course bound up with the history of the Easter Rebellion itself. That strange and dramatic event which came quite unexpectedly to Nationalist Ireland as to Unionist England, is no part of my own experiences, and I will not dogmatize on so dark a problem. But I will say in passing that I suspect a certain misunderstanding of its very nature to be common on both sides. Everything seems to point to the paradox that the rebels needed the less to be conquered, because they were actually aiming at being conquered, rather than at being conquerors. In the moral sense they were certainly heroes, but I doubt if they expected to be conquering heroes. They desired to be in the Greek and literal sense martyrs. They wished not so much to win as to witness. They thought that nothing but their dead bodies could really prove that Ireland was not dead. How far this sublime and suicidal ideal was really useful in reviving national enthusiasm, it is for Irishmen to judge. I should have said that the enthusiasm was there anyhow. But if any such action is based on international hopes, as they affect England, or a great part of America, it seems to me it is founded on a fallacy about the facts. I shall have occasion to note many English errors about the Irish, and this seems to me a very notable Irish error about the English. If we are often utterly mistaken about their mentality, they were quite equally mistaken about our mistake. And curiously enough they failed, through not knowing the one compliment that we had really always paid them. Their act presupposed that Irish courage needed proof, and did never did. I have heard all the most horrible nonsense talked against Ireland before the war, and I never heard Englishmen doubt Irish military valor. What they did doubt was Irish political sanity. It will be seen at once that the Easter action could only disprove the prejudice that they hadn't got, and actually confirm the prejudice they had got. The charge against the Irishmen was not a lack of boldness but rather an excess of it. Men were right in thinking him brave, and they could not be more right. But they were wrong in thinking him mad, and they had an excellent opportunity to be more wrong. Then when the attempt to fight against England developed by its own logic into a refusal to fight for England, men took away the number they first thought of, and were irritated into denying what they had originally never dreamed of doubting. In any case this was, I think, the temper in which the minority of the true sin-faners sought martyrdom. I for one will never sneer at such a motive, but it would hardly have amounted to so great a movement but for another force that happened to ally itself with them. It is for the sake of this that I have here begun with the Easter tragedy itself, for with the consideration of this we come to the paradox of Irish labour. Some of my remarks on the stability and even repose of a peasant society may seem exaggerated in the light of a labour agitation that breaks out in Ireland as elsewhere. But I have a particular and even personal reason for regarding that agitation as the exception that proves the rule. It was the background of the peasant landscape that made the Dublin strike, the peculiar sort of drama that it was, and this operated in two ways. First by isolating the industrial capitalist as something exceptional and almost fanatical, and second by reinforcing the proletariat with a vague tradition of property. My own sympathies were all with Larkin and Connolly as against the late Mr. Murphy, but it is curious to note that even Mr. Murphy was quite a different kind of man from the Lord Something, who is the head of a commercial combat in England. He was much more like some morbid prince of the fifteenth century, full of cold anger, not without perverted piety. But the first few words I heard about him in Ireland were full of that vast, vague fact which I have tried to put first among my impressions. I've called it the family, but it covers many cognate things, youth and old friendships, not to mention old quarrels. It might be more fully defined as a regalism about origins. The first things I heard about Murphy were facts of his forgotten youth, or a youth that would in England have been forgotten. They were tales about friends of his poorer days with whom he had set out to push some more or less sentimental vendetta against somebody. Suppose whenever we talked of Herod's stories we heard first about the boyish daydreams of Herod. Suppose the mention of Bradshaw's railway guide brought up tales of feud and first love in the early life of Mr. Bradshaw, or even a Mrs. Bradshaw. That is the atmosphere to be felt, rather than described, that a stranger in Ireland feels around him. English journalism and gossip dealing with English businessmen are often precise about the present and prophetic about the future, but seldom communicative about the past, at poor cause. They will tell us where the capitalist is going to, as to the House of Lords, or to Monte Carlo, or inferentially to heaven, but they say as little as possible about where he comes from. In Ireland a man carries the family mansion about with him like a snail, and his father's ghost follows him like his shadow. Everything good and bad, they could be said, was said. Not only about Murphy, but about Murphy's. An anecdote of the old Irish parliament describes an orator as gracefully alluding to the presence of an opponent's sister in the lady's gallery, by praying that wrath overtake the whole accursed generation, from the toothless old hag who is grinning in the gallery, to the white-livered paltrune who is shivering on the floor. The story is commonly told as suggesting the rather wild disunion of Irish parties, but it is quite a serious suggestion of the union of Irish families. As a matter of fact the great Dublin strike, a conflagration of which the embers were still glowing at the time of my visit, involved another episode which illustrates once again this recurrent principle of the reality of the family in Ireland. Some English socialists, it may be remembered, moved by an honourable pity for the poor families starving during the strike, made a proposal for taking the children away and feeding them properly in England. I should have thought the more natural cause would have been to give money or food to the parents. But the philanthropists, being English and being socialists, probably had a trust in what is called organisation and distrust of what is called charity. It is supposed that charity makes a man dependent, though in fact charity makes him independent, as compared with the dreary dependence usually produced by organisation. Charity gives property and therefore liberty. There is manifestly much more emancipation in giving a beggar a shilling to spend, than in sending an official after him to spend it for him. The socialists, however, had placidly arranged for the deportation of all the poor children when they found themselves to their astonishment confronted with the red hot reality called the religion of Ireland. The priests and the families of the faithful organised themselves for a furious agitation, on the ground that the faith would be lost in foreign and heretical homes. They were not satisfied with the assurance which some of the socialists earnestly offered, that the faith would not be tampered with. And as a matter of clear thinking I think they were quite right. Those who offer such a reassurance have never thought about what a religion is. They entertain the extraordinary idea that religion is a topic. They think religion is a thing like radishes which can be avoided throughout a particular conversation with a particular person, whom the mention of a radish may convulse with anger or agony. But a religion is simply the world a man inhabits. In practice a socialist living in Liverpool would not know when he was or was not, tampering with the religion of a child born in Louth. If I were given a complete control of an infant parsee, which is fortunately unlikely, I should not have the remotest notion of when it was most vitally reflecting on the parsee system. But common sense and a comprehension of the meaning of a coherent philosophy would lead me to suspect that I was reflecting on it every other minute. But I mention the matter here not in order to enter into any of these disputes, but to give yet another example of the way in which the essentially domestic organisation of Ireland will always rise in rebellion against any other organisation. There was something of a parable in the tales of old evictions in which the whole family was besieged and resisted together and the mothers emptied boiling kettles on the besiegers. For any official who interferes with them will certainly get into hot water. We cannot separate mothers and children in that strange land. We can only return to some of our older historical methods and massacre them together. A small incident within my own short experience, however, illustrated the main point involved here. The sense of a peasant base, even of the proletarian attack. And this was exemplified not in any check to labour, but rather in a success for labour insofar as the issue of a friendly and informal debate may be classed with its more solid successes. The business originally began with a sort of loose-jointed literary lecture which I gave in the Dublin theatre, in connection with which I only mentioned two incidents in passing, because they both struck me as peculiarly native and national. One concern not only the title of my address, which was Poetry and Property, an educated English gentleman who happened to speak to me before the meeting said with an heir of one who foresees that such jokes will be the death of him. While I have simply given up puzzling about what you can possibly mean by talking about poetry as something to do with property. He probably regarded the combination of words as a mere illiterate fantasy like peacocks and Paddington or polygamy and potatoes, if indeed he did not regard it as a mere combination of incompatible contrasts like pulpery and protestants or patriotism and politicians. On the same day, an Irishman of similar social standing remarked quite carelessly, I've just seen your subject for tomorrow. I suppose the Socialist won't agree with you, nor words to that effect. The two terms told him at once not about the lecture, which was literary if it was anything, but about the whole philosophy underlying the lecture, the whole of that philosophy which the lumbering elephant called by Mr. Shaw, the Chester Bellock, laboriously toils to explain in England under the ponderous title of distributivism. As Mr. Hugh Law once said and equally truly about our pitting of patriotism against imperialism, what is a paradox in England is a common place in Ireland. My actual monologue, however, dealt merely with the witness of poetry to a certain dignity and man's sense of private possessions, which is certainly not either vulgar ostentation or vulgar greed. The French poet of the Peleides remembers the slates on his own roof almost as if he could count them, and Mr. W. B. Yates, in the very wildest vision of a loneliness, remote and irresponsible, is careful to make it clear that he knows how many beanrows make nine. Of course there were people of all parties in the theatre, wild sin-faners and conventional unionists. But they all listened to my remarks as naturally as they might have all listened to an equally incompetent lecture on monkeys or the mountains of the moon. There was not a word of politics, least of all party politics in that particular speech. It was concerned with the tradition in art, or at the most, in abstract ethics. But the one amusing thing which makes me recall the whole incident was this, that when I had finished a stalwart, hearty, heavy sort of legal gentleman, a well-known Irish judge, I understand, was kind enough to move a mold of thanks to me. And what amused me about him was this, that while I who am a radical in sympathy with the revolutionary legend had delivered a mild essay on minor poets to a placid, if-bored audience, the judge who was a pillar of the castle of a conservative, sworn to law and order, proceeded with the utmost energy and joy to raise a riot. He taunted the sin-faners and dared them to come out. He trailed his coat, if ever a man trailed it, in this world. He glorified England, not the Allies, but England. Splendid England, sublime England, all in the broadest brogue. Just wise and merciful England, and so on, flourishing what was not even the flag of his own country, and a thing that had not the remotest connection with the subject in hand any more than the Great Wall of China. I need not say that the theatre was soon a roar of protests and repartees, which I suppose was what he wondered. He was a jolly old gentleman, and I liked him. But what interested me about him was this, and it is of some importance in the understanding of his nationality. That sort of man exists in England. I know and like scores of him. Often he is a major, often a squire, sometimes a judge, very occasionally a dean. Such a man talks the most ridiculous, reactionary nonsense in an apoplectic fashion over his own poor wine, and occasionally in a somewhat gasping manner at an avowedly political meeting. But precisely what the English gentleman would not do, and the Irish gentleman did do, would be to make a scene on a non-political occasion, when all he had to do was move a formal vote of thanks to a total stranger who was talking about Ithaca and Innisfree. An English conservative would be less likely to do it than an English radical. The same thing that makes him conventionally political would make him conventionally non-political. He would hate to make too serious a speech on too social an occasion, as he would hate to be in morning dress when everyone else was in evening dress. And whatever coat he wore he certainly would not trail it solely in order to make a disturbance, as did that jolly Irish judge. He taught me that the Irishman is never so Irish as when he is English. He was very like some of the Sinfaners who shouted him down, and he would be pleased to know that he helped me to understand them with a greater sympathy. I have wandered from the subject in speaking in this trifle, thinking it worth while to note the positive and provocative quality of all Irish opinion, but it was my purpose only to mention this small dispute, as leading up to another. I had some further talk about poetry and property with Mr. Yates at the Dublin Arts Club, and there again I am tempted to irrelevant, but for me interesting matters, for I am conscious throughout of saying less than I could wish of a thousand things, my omission of which is not altogether thoughtless, far less thankless. There have been and will be better sketches than mine in all data-tractive society, the paradox of an intelligentsia that is intelligent. I could write a great deal not only about those I value as my own friends like Catherine Tinnan or Stephen Gwynn, but about men with whom my meeting was all too momentary, about the elvish energy conveyed by Mr. James Stevens, the social greatness of Dr. Gogarty, who is like a literary legend of the 18th century, of the unique universalism of A.E., who has something of the presence of William Morris, and a more transcendental type of spiritual hospitality, of Walt Whitman. But I am not in this rough sketch trying to tell Irishmen what they know already, but trying to tell Englishmen some of the larger and simple things that they do not know. The large matter concerned here is labor, and I have only paused upon the other points because they were the steps which accidentally led up to my first meeting with this great force. And it was nonetheless a fact in support of my argument, because it was something of a joke against myself. On the occasion I have mentioned a most exhilarating evening at the Arts Club, Mr. Yates asked me to open a debate at the Abbey Theatre, defending property on its more purely political side. My opponent was one of the ablest of the leaders of Liberty Hall, the famous stronghold of labor politics in Dublin. Mr. Johnson, an Englishman like myself, but one deservedly popular with the proletarian Irish. He made a most admirable speech, to which I mean no disparagement when I say that I think his personal popularity had even more weight than his personal eloquence. My own argument was confined to the particular value of a small property as a weapon of militant democracy, and was based on the idea that the citizen resisting injustice could find no substitute for private property, for every other impersonal power, however democratic in theory must be bureaucratic in form. I said, as a flippant figure of speech, that committing property to any officials, even guild officials, was like having to leave one's legs in the cloakroom along with one's stick or umbrella. The point is that a man may want his legs at any minute to kick a man or to dance with a lady, and recovering them may be postponed by any hitch, from the loss of the ticket to the criminal flight of the official. So in a social crisis such as a strike, man must be ready to act without officials, who may hamper or betray him, and I asked whether many more strikes would not have been successful if each striker had owned so much as a kitchen garden to help him to live. My opponent replied that he had always been in favor of such a reserve of proletarian property, but preferred it to be communal rather than individual, which seems to me to leave my argument where it was. For what is communal must be official, unless it is to be chaotic. Two minor jokes, somewhat at my expense, remain in my memory. I appear to have caused some amusement by cutting a pencil with a very large Spanish knife, which I value as it happens as the gift of an Irish priest who is a friend of mine, and which may therefore also be regarded as a symbolic weapon, the sort of sword of the spirit. Whether the audience thought I was about to amputate my own legs in the illustration of my metaphor, or that I was going to cut Mr. Johnson's throat in fury at finding no reply to his arguments, I do not know. The other thing which struck me as funny was an excellent retort by Mr. Johnson himself, who had said something about the waste of property on guns, and who interrupted my remark that there would never be a good revolution without guns, by humorously calling out treason. As I told him afterwards, few scenes would be more artistic than that of an Englishman sent over to recruit for the British army, being collared and given up to justice, or injustice, by a pacifist from Liberty Hall. But all throughout the proceedings I was conscious, as I say, of a very real popular feeling supporting the mere personality of my opponent, as in the ovation he received before he spoke at all, or the applause given to a number whose topic elicits allusions which I could not always understand. After the meeting I distinguished Southern Unionist, who happens to own land outside Dublin, said to me, of course Johnson has just had a huge success in his work here. Liberty Hall has just done something that has really never been done before in the whole trade union movement. He has really managed to start a trade union for agricultural laborers. I know, because I have had to meet their demands. You know how utterly impossible it has always been really to found a union of agricultural laborers in England? I did know it, and I also knew why it had been possible to found one in Ireland. It had been possible for the very reason I had been urging all evening, that behind the Irish Poletariat there had been the tradition of an Irish peasantry. In their families, if not in themselves, they had seen some memory of the personal love of the land. But it seemed to me an interesting irony that even my own defeat was an example of my own doctrine, and that the truth on my side was proved by the popularity of the other side. The agricultural guild was due to a wind of freedom that came into that dark city from very distant fields, and the truth that even these rolling stones of homeless proletarianism had been so lately loosened from the very roots of the mountain. In Ireland even the industrialism is not industrial. That is what I mean by saying that Irish labor is the exception that proves the rule. That is why it does not contradict my former generalization that our capitalist crisis is on the English side of the road. The Irish agricultural laborers can become guildsmen because they would like to become peasants. They think of rich and poor in the manner that is as old as the world, in the manner of Ahab and Naboth. It matters little in a peasant society, whether Ahab takes the vineyard privately, as Ahab or officially as King of Israel. It will matter as little in the long run, even in the other kind of society, whether Naboth has a wage to work in the vineyard or a vote that is supposed in some way to affect the vineyard. What he desires to have is the vineyard, and not in apologetic cynicism or vulgar evasions that business is business. But in thunder, as from a secret throne, comes the awful voice out of the vineyard, the voice of this manner of man in every age and nation. The Lord forbid that I should give the inheritance of my fathers unto thee. CHAPTER V. THE ENGLISHMAN IN IRELAND With no desire to decorate my travels with too tall a traveller's tale, I must record the fact that I found one point upon which all Irishmen were agreed. It was the fact that, for some reason or another, there had been a very hopeful beginning of Irish volunteering at the beginning of the war, and that, for some reason or another, this had failed in the course of the war. The reasons alleged differed wildly in the moods of men. Some had regarded the beginnings with hope, and some with suspicion. Some had lived to regard the failure with a bitter pleasure, and some with a generous pain. The different factions gave different explanations of why the thing had stopped, but they all agreed that it had begun. The Sinfainer said that the people soon found they had been lured into a Saxon trap set for them by smooth, subservient Saxons like Mr. Devlin and Mr. Tim Healy. The Velfast citizen suggested that the Poppish priest had terrorized the peasants when they tried to enlist, producing a thumbscrew from his pocket and a portable rag from his handbag. The parliamentary nationalist blamed both Sinfain and the persecution of Sinfain. The British government officials, if they did not exactly blame themselves, at least blamed each other. The ordinary Southern Unionists, who played many parts of a more or less sensible sort, including that of a home ruler, generally agreed with the ordinary nationalist that the government's recruiting methods had been as bad as its cause was good. But it is manifest that multitudes at the beginning of the war thought it really had a very good cause, and moreover a very good chance. The extraordinary story of how that chance was lost may find mention on a later page. I will begin by touching on the first incident that befell me personally in connection with the same enterprise. I went to Ireland at the request of Irish friends who were working warmly for the Allied cause, and who conceived, I fear, in far too flattering a spirit, that I might at least be useful as an Englishman who had always sympathized as warmly with the Irish cause. I am under no illusion that I should ever be efficient at such work in any case, and under the circumstances I had no great hopes of doing much. Where men like Sir Horace Plunkett and Captain Stephen Gwynne, far more competent, more self-sacrificing, and more well informed than I, could already do comparatively little. It was too late. A hundredth part of the brilliant constancy and tragic labours of these men might easily at the beginning of the war have given us a great Irish army. I need not explain the motives that made me do the little I could do. They were the same that, at that moment, made millions of better men do masses of better work. Physical accident prevented my being useful in France, and a sort of psychological accident seemed to suggest that I might possibly be useful in Ireland. But I did not see myself as a very serious figure in either field. Everything could be serious in such a case, except perhaps a conviction, and at least my conviction about the Great War has never wavered by a hair. De Linda asked, and it is typical of the power of Berlin that one must break off for want of a Latin name for it. Being an Englishman, I hoped primarily to help England, but not being a congenital idiot, I did not primarily ask an Irishman to help England. It was obviously something much more reasonable to ask him to do. I hoped I should, in any case, have done my best for my own country. But the cause was more than any country. In a sense it was too good for any country. The Allies were more right than they realized. Nay, they hardly had a right to be so right as they were. The modern Babylon of capitalistic states was hardly worthy to go on such a crusade against the heathen. This perhaps decadent Byzantium was hardly worthy to defend the cross against the Crescent. But we are glad that it did defend the cross against the Crescent. Nobody is sorry that Sobesky relieved Vienna. Nobody wishes that Alfred had not won in Wessex. The cause that conquered is the only cause that survived. We see now that his enemy was not a cause but a chaos, and that is what history will say of the strange and recent boiling up of barbaric imperialism, a whirlpool whose hollow center was Berlin. This is where the extreme Irish were really wrong, perhaps really wrong for the first time. I entirely sympathize with their being in revolt against the British government. I am in revolt in most ways against the British government myself.  Does anybody want to be fixed forever on the wrong side at the battle of Marathon? Through a quarrel with some archon whose very name is forgotten. Does anybody want to be remembered as a friend of Attila? Through a breach of friendship with Aetius. In any case it was with a profound conviction that if Prussia won, Europe must perish, and that if Europe perished England and Ireland must perish together. That I went to Dublin in those dark days of the last year of the war, and it so happened that the first occasion, when I was called upon for any expression of opinion, was at the very pleasant lunch and party given to the representatives of the British dominions who were then on an official tour in the country inspecting its conditions. What I said is of no importance except as leading up to later events, but it may be noted that, though I was speaking perhaps indirectly to Irishmen, I was speaking directly, if not to Englishmen, at least to men in the more English tradition of the majority of the colonies. I was speaking if not to Unionists, at least largely to imperialists. Now I have forgotten, I am happy to say, the particular speech that I made, but I can repeat the upshot of it here, not only as part of the argument, but as part of the story. The line I took generally in Ireland was an appeal to the Irish principle, yet the reverse of a mere approval of an Irish action or inaction. It postulated that while the English had missed the great opportunity of justifying themselves to the Irish, the Irish had also missed a similar opportunity of justifying themselves to the English. But it specially emphasized this, that what had been lost was not primarily a justification against England, but a joke against England. I pointed out that an Irishman missing a joke against an Englishman was a tragedy, like a lost battle, and there was one thing and only one thing which had stopped the Irishman from laughing and saved the Englishman from being laughable. The one and only thing that rescued England from ridicule was Sinn Fein, or at any rate that element in Sinn Fein which was pro-German, or refused to be anti-German. Nothing imaginable under the stars except a pro-German Irishman could at that moment have saved the face of a very recently pro-German Englishman. The reason for this is obvious enough. England in 1914 encountered or discovered a colossal crime of Prussianized Germany. But England could not discover the German crime without discovering the English blunder. The blunder was, of course, a perfectly plain historical fact that England made Prussia. England was the historic, highly civilized western state with Roman foundations and chivalric memories. Prussia was originally a petty and boorish principality used by England and Austria in the long struggle against the greatness of France. Now, in that long struggle, Ireland had always been on the side of France. She had only to go on being on the side of France and the Latin tradition generally to behold her own truth triumph over her own enemies. In a word it was not a question of whether Ireland should become anti-German. But merely whether she should continue to be anti-German. It was a question of whether she should suddenly become pro-German, at the moment when most other pro-Germans were discovering that she had been justified all along. But England, at the beginning of her last and most lamentable quarrel with Ireland, was by no means in so strong a controversial position. England was right, but she could only prove she was right by proving she was wrong. In one sense, and with all respect to her right action in the matter, she had to be ridiculous in order to be right. But the joke against the Englishman was even more obvious and topical, and as mine was only meant for a light speech after a friendly lunch, I took the joke in its lightest and most fanciful form, and touched chiefly on the fantastic theory of the Tutan as the master of the Kelt. For the supreme joke was this, that the Englishman has not only boasted of being an Englishman, he is actually boasted of being a German. As the modern mind began to doubt the superiority of Calvinism to Catholicism, all English books, papers, and speeches were filled more and more with the Tutanism, which substituted a racial for a religious superiority. It was felt to be more modern and even more progressive principle of distinction to insist on ethnology rather than theology, for ethnology was supposed to be a science. Unionism was simply founded on Tutanism. Hence the ordinary, honest, patriotic unionist was in a highly humorous fix, when he had suddenly begun denouncing Tutanism as mere terrorism. If all superiority belonged to the Tutan, the supreme superiority must clearly belong to the most Teutonic Tutan. If I claim the right to kick Mr. Bernard Shaw on the specific ground that I am fatter than he is, it is obvious that I look rather a fool if I am suddenly kicked by somebody who is fatter still. When the earth shakes under the advancing form of one coming against me out of the East, who is fatter than I, for I called upon the Irish imagination to embrace soul-monster suspicion, it is clear that whatever my relations to the rest of the world, in my relations to Mr. Bernard Shaw, I am rather at a disadvantage. Mr. Shaw at any rate is rather in a position to make a game of me, of which it is not inconceivable that he might avail himself. I might have accumulated a vast mass of learned sophistries and journalistic catchwords which had always seemed to me to justify the connection between waxing, fat, and kicking. I might have proved from history that the leaders had always been fat men, like William the Conqueror, St. Thomas Aquinas, and Charles Fox. I might have proved from physiology that fatness is a proof of the power of organic assimilation and digestion, or from comparative zoology, that the elephant is the wisest of the beasts. In short, I might be able to induce many arguments in favor of my position. Unfortunately, unfortunately, they would now all become arguments against my position. Everything I had ever urged against my old enemy could be urged much more forcibly against me by my new enemy. And my position touching the great Edipoi's theory would be exactly like England's position touching the equally sensible Teutonic theory. If Teutonism was creative culture, then on our own showing the German was better than the Englishman. If Teutonism was barbarism, then on our own showing the Englishman was more barbaric than the Irishman. The real answer, of course, is that we were not Teutons, but only the dupes of Teutonism. But some were so wholly duped that they would do anything rather than own themselves dupes. These unfortunate, while they are already ashamed of being Teutons, are still proud of not being Celts. There is only one thing that could save my dignity and such an undignified fix as I have fancied here. It is that Mr. Bernard Shaw himself should come to my rescue. It is that Mr. Bernard Shaw himself should declare in favor of the corpulent conqueror from the east that he should take seriously all the fads and fallacies of that fat-headed superman. That and that alone would ensure all my own fads and fallacies being not only forgotten but forgiven. There is present to my imagination, I regret to say, a wild possibility that this is what Mr. Bernard Shaw might really do. Anyhow, this is what a certain number of his countrymen really did. It will be apparent, I think, from these pages, that I do not believe in the stage Irishman. I am under no delusion that the Irishman is soft-headed and sentimental, or even illogical and inconsequent. Nine times out of ten the Irishman is not only more clear-headed, but even more cool-headed than the Englishman. But I think it is true, as Mr. Max Beerbaum once suggested to me, in connection with Mr. Shaw himself, that there is a residual perversity in the Irishman, which comes after and not before the analysis of a question. There is, at the last moment, a cold impatience in the intellect, an irony which returns on itself and wrens itself, the subtlety of a suicide. However, this may be. Some of the lean men, instead of making a fool of the fat man, did begin almost to make a hero of the fatter man, to admire his vast curves as almost cosmic lines of development.  They revived civilization very much as they restored Louvain, or reconstructed the Lusitania. It was a romance which the English, for a short time, adopted as a convenience, but from which the Irish have continually suffered as a curse. It was a suicidal perversity that they themselves, in their turn, should perpetuate their permanent curse as a temporary convenience. That was the worst error of the Irish, or of some of the best of the Irish. That is why the Easter Rising was really a black and insane blunder. It was not because it involved the Irish in a military defeat. It was because it lost the Irish a great controversial victory. The rebel deliberately let the tyrant out of a trap, out of the grinning jaws of the gigantic trap of a joke. Many of the most extreme nationalists knew this well. It was what Kettle probably meant when he suggested an Anglo-Irish history called the Two Fools, and of course I do not mean that. I said all this in my very casual and rambling speech, but it was based on this idea that men had missed the joke against England, and that now unfortunately the joke was rather against Ireland. It was Ireland that was now missing a great historical opportunity for lack of humor and imagination, as England had missed it a moment before. If the Irish would laugh at the English and help the English, they would win all along the line. In the real history of the German problem, they would inherit all the advantages of having been right from the first. It was now not so much a question of Ireland, consenting to follow England's lead, as of England being obliged to follow Ireland's lead. These are the principles which I thought, and still think, the only possible principles to form the basis of a recruiting appeal in Ireland. But on the particular occasion in question I naturally took the matter much more lightly, hoping that the two jokes might as it were cancel out, and leave the two countries quits and in a better humor. And I devoted nearly all my remarks to testifying that the English had really, in the mass, shed the cruder tautonism that had excused the cruelties of the past. I said that Englishmen were anything but proud of the past government of Ireland, that the mass of men of all parties were far more modest and humane in their view of Ireland than most Irishmen seem to suppose. And I ended with words which I only quote here from memory, because they happened to be the text of the curious incident which followed. This is no place for us to boast. We stand here in the valley of our humiliation, where the flag we love has done very little that was not evil, and where its victories have been far more disastrous than defeats. And I concluded with some general expression of the hope, which I still entertain, that the two lands, so much beloved, by those who knew them best, are not meant to hate each other for ever. A day or two afterwards a distinguished historian who was a professor at Trinity College, Mr. Allison Phillips, wrote an indignant letter to the Irish Times. He announced that he was not in the valley of humiliation, and warmly contradicted the report that he was, as he expressed it, sitting in sackcloth and ashes. He remarked, if I remember right, that I was a middle class, which is profoundly true, and he gently resented my suggestions as a shameful attack upon my fellow Englishmen. This both amused and puzzled me, for, of course, I had not been attacking Englishmen, but defending them. I had merely been assuring the Irish that the English were not so black or so red, as they were painted in the vision of England's cruel red. I had not said there what I have said here about the anomaly and the absurdity of England and Ireland. I had only said that Ireland had suffered rather from the Teutonic theory than the English temper, and that the English temper experienced at close quarters was really quite ready for a reconciliation with Ireland. Nor indeed did Mr. Allison Phillips really complain especially of my denouncing the English, but rather of my way of defending them. He did not so much mind being charged with the vice of arrogance, what he could not bear was being charged with the virtue of humility. What worried him was not so much the supposition of our doing wrong, as that anybody should conceive it possible that we were sorry for doing wrong. After all, he probably reasoned, it may not be easy for an eminent historic scholar actually to deny that certain tortures have taken place, or certain perjuries have been proved. But there is really no reason why he should admit that the memory of using torture or perjury has so morbid an effect on the mind. Therefore he naturally desired to correct any impression that might arise, to the effect that he had been seen in the valley of humiliation, like a man called Christian. But there was one fancy that lingered in the mind over and above the fun of the thing, and through a sort of random ray of conjecture upon that long international misunderstanding, which it is so hard to understand. Was it possible, I thought, that this had happened before, and that I was caught in the treadmill of recurrence? It may be that wherever, throughout the centuries, a roughly representative and fairly good-humored Englishman has spoken to the Irish, as thousands of such Englishmen feel about them. Some other Englishman on the spot has hastened to explain that the English are not going in for sackcloth and ashes, but only for phylacteries and the blowing of their own trumpets before them. Perhaps whenever one Englishman said that the English were not so black as they were painted in the past, another Englishman always rushed forward to prove that the English were not so white as they were painted on the present occasion. And after all, it was only Englishmen against Englishmen. One word against another, and there were many superiority on the side which refused to believe in English sympathy or self-criticism. And very few of the Irish, I fear, understood the simple fact of the matter or the real spiritual excuses of the party thus praising spiritual pride. Few understood that I represented large numbers of amiable Englishmen in England, while Mr. Phillips necessarily represented a small number of naturally irritable Englishmen in Ireland. Few I fancied sympathize with him so much as I do, for I know very well that he was not merely feeling as an Englishman, but as an exile.