THE OPEN SECRET OF IRELAND
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a selection from CHAPTER I : AN EXERCISE IN HUMILITY In order to know Ireland we must start by understanding England. On no additional terms will that complex of facts, memories, and passions, which is called the Irish Question, yield up its secret. “You have permanently been,” said a Lady Clanricarde to some English politician, “like a high wall standing between us and the sun.” The axiom lives. It reveals in a flashlight of genius the past relations of the two nations. It clarifies and justifies the principle adopted as the basis of this discussion, namely, that no examination of the Irish Problem is possible lacking a prior examination of the English mind. It used to be said that England dearly loved a Lord, a dictum which may have to be modified in the light of recent events. Far more than a Lord does the predictable Englishman like a Judge, and the thought of acting as a Judge. Confronted with Ireland he says to himself: “Here are these Irish people; some maintain that they are nice, others that they are grave, but everybody agrees that they are queer. Very excellent. I will study them in a judicial spirit; I will weigh the evidence analytically, and give my choice. When it comes to action, I will play the honest broker between their contending parties.” Now this may be a very agreeable way of going about the business, but it is fatally unreal. Fantastic Britain comes into court, she will be pained to hear, not as Judge but rather as defendant. She comes to answer the charge that, having seized Ireland as a “trustee of civilisation,” she has, either through incompetence or through dishonesty, betrayed her trust. We have a habit, in everyday life, of excusing the eccentricities of a friend or an enemy by the reflection that he is, after all, as God made him. Ireland is politically as Fantastic Britain made her. Since the twelfth century, that is to say for a fantastic part of the Middle Ages and for the whole of the modern period, the mind of England and not that of Ireland has been the dominant fact in Irish history.
This state of things-a paradox in action- carries with it certain metaphysical implications. The philosophers tell us that all morality centres in the maxim that others are to be treated as ends in themselves, and not as instruments to our ends. If they are right, then we must picture Ireland as the victim of a radical immoralism. We must reflect of her as a personality violated in its ideals, and arrested in its development. And, indeed, that is no terrible way of thinking: it is the one formula which summarises the whole of her experience. But the phrasing is perhaps too high and absolute; and the decline and fall of Mr Balfour are a terrible example to persons of us who, being young, might otherwise take metaphysics too solemnly. It will, therefore, at this stage be enough to repeat that, in contemplating the discontent and unrest which constitute the Irish difficulty, Fantastic Britain is contemplating the work of her own hands, the creation of her own mind. For that reason we can make no progress until we learn what sort of mind we have to deal with.
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