The perversity of the fate which governs the relations of England and Ireland obtrudes itself once more in this connection. It might be thought that the simultaneous movement of revolt against the sham of politics would lead to sympathetic understanding of the Sinn Féin point of view. It is true, to some extent, that during the pre-war years of constant Sinn Féin activity, friendly references were made in certain English quarters to the regenerate nationalism which was manifesting itself in literature and industry. Under less ominous names the Sinn Féin spirit had developed and spread until, at the outbreak of the war, the country was apparently absorbed in various enterprises which had received the benediction of benevolent commentators, relieved to find Ireland at last in a practical mood. But the war has changed all that. Not only have these innocent undertakings been revealed as part of the malign machinations of Sinn Féin, but the term itself has become associated with an event undreamt of in the essential pacific and economic philosophy of those who expressed some twelve years ago the growing tendencies in the direction of national self-help. Sinn Féin did not repudiate the task which destiny thrust upon it in Easter 1916, but accepted the hitherto rejected theory of physical force, at the cost of the platonic affection of many who had previously smiled approvingly at the programme of social reconstruction contemplated by the founders of the Sinn Féin movement.
It is doubtful, however, if the Sinn Féin policy could have continued, after the war had broken out, to escape the hostile attention of England. Political realists ceased to recommend themselves to the favourable notice of a people embarking upon a crusade for the Good, the True, and the Beautiful, and whose minds were glamoured by the idealisms so prodigally proclaimed since August 1914. In a burst of enthusiasm the “free peoples of the world” undertook to restore the right of small nations, and since they knew of only one transgressor, they could not wait to consider their own possible sins against the spirit of nationality. At the same time, the discredit and futility of the parliamentary system became more and more obvious as it failed to meet the exigencies of the crisis which had come in the history of the political democracies. From the moment when the latter undertook to vindicate their superiority they were obliged to compromise hastily, when not to abandon entirely, the principles upon which they rested. Normally one might have thought that this would give the final blow to a fiction previously weakened, but the seriousness of national peril, coupled with the mobilization of thought, has helped to obscure that conclusion. Once the system had become a gage of battle, and a challenge to the enemy, it was endeared to its defenders, who clung to it all the more desperately, the more elusive and illusory it appeared.
So it happened that Irishmen were invited to share the enthusiasm for an ideal about which they entertained no more illusions, except the one which experience had not had a chance to confirm or dispel. Pseudo-democracy they knew and rejected, as revealed in the light of a spurious political liberty under the control of English Capitalism, but they had not yet been allowed to make the experiment of politico-economic freedom on their own account. Meanwhile, by an amazing inconsequence, the imposition of these pseudo-democratic conditions became the ambition of precisely the most restive and acute critics of the political system upon which those conditions repose. The complete demoralization of the intellectuals by the present war will supply some future critic material for sceptical reflection. In the past, both remote and immediate, the educated have succeeded in differentiating themselves from the mob by refusing, in times of crisis, to be stampeded by appeals to ignorance. But gradually the Intelligentsia had been learning the expediency of attaching themselves to some social or political propaganda until, when the war broke out, they found themselves everywhere imprisoned by the new status they had assumed. They were no longer free to serve their real master, but had sold their intellectual birthright for a mess of official pottage. Their conscripted minds have definitely lowered their prestige, since they have set themselves to bluster and shout across their respective frontiers, in a manner indistinguishable from that of the plain people, without pretensions to mental discipline and rational speech. Though financially strengthened the intellectuals have been bankrupted, as a class, by the war for liberty.
Without postulating the incompatibility of reason and mob patriotism, although the divergence of the two has been recorded in prominent examples, one may legitimately ask: Why this religious enthusiasm for an ideal whose discredit and disintegration were the chief preoccupation of intelligent men during the years leading up to the war? The greatest iconoclasts, so far as the idols of political democracy are concerned, have become the most fervent advocates of such “democratization,” seized with a malign altruism which would share its ills with those untroubled by them. Benefits, which would be extravagant if claimed for a Utopia, are promised on behalf of a social organization whose human imperfections were never more indecently exposed than during the crisis when it was exalted as the panacea of civilization. But, in inverse ratio to their own hasty abandonment of the fictions tenable only in the uncritical times of peace, the pseudo-democrats urge the adoption of methods which even they find useless in the stress of national crisis. The foxes having lost the ornament of intellectual and economic freedom in the trap of capitalist politics are convinced that the whole world should be handicapped in like manner. The new gospel of equality of sacrifice, internationally interpreted, means the equality of weakness.
It is natural that the great resources of the English-speaking world should be pledged to the defence of the form of democracy which is the special creation of Anglo-Saxon culture, and that Britishers and Americans, rather than Frenchmen and Italians, should be most insistent upon the blessings of “democratization.” That peculiar conception of liberty which has fostered the ignoble individualism of mediocrity, at the expense of intellectual independence and social strength, has evolved, under the ægis of England to her own satisfaction and advantage, until, at last, she came to be admired by foreigners unblessed by so unique a possession. Hence the fiction of British freedom, hymned by harassed outlaws or academic critics, concerned only for the more obvious advantages of a system which offered a refuge to the one and a guarantee of respectable stability to the other. When England was the safe haven for continental refugees, the admiring gratitude of the latter was untroubled by the reflection that it is one thing to harbour persons likely to cause trouble with an immediate neighbour, whose frontier is invitingly near, and quite another to give them the shelter of insular isolation. Moreover, the governments of more inflammable peoples, susceptible to the contagion of revolutionary ideas, cannot afford to take risks, which have no reality in the case of a people protected from that contagion by semi-education and an innate servility. Perhaps the greatest illusion of the last century has been the innocent admiration of other nations for the security of a system which postulates a race inhibited by ignorance, snobbishness, and mal-nutrition, from all revolutionary desires. They envy the impunity with which scandals, whose publication would elsewhere inspire assassination, if not revolution, may be revealed in the reports of Royal Commissions, without provoking more than a few columns of newspaper summary and comment. But these benighted foreigners know the temper of their own populations too well not to pay them at least the compliment of being afraid to provoke popular fury. Blue Books and parliamentary questions are not yet universally accepted substitutes for democratic control.
The Irish people have more wisely adopted the ancient device, oderint, dum metuant, as the more intelligent attitude of a people towards its rulers, who have essayed in vain the process of demoralization so effective elsewhere. In Ireland alone the familiar ostentatious displays of Blue Book liberty fail in their purpose of disarming criticism, and consigning vital questions to an oblivion of official words. The capacious and retentive Irish memory actually feeds on those indigestible slices of British freedom, whose price and mode of distribution render them inaccessible to the vast majority of taxpayers at whose expense these sepulchres of truth are constructed. The effect of such serious attention to utterances designed as soporifics is a profound contempt for precisely that democratic virtue which has excited the admiration of certain foreigners, so consoling to the Anglo-Saxon sense of superiority. When the Irish-Irelander learns of England’s claim to be the leader of democratic progress in Europe, and finds that claim endorsed by apparently disinterested critics, his instinctive movement is one of revulsion from all implied in the laudation. If English rule involves the acceptance of the democratic ideal, then he rejects the ideal, for he knows that its irradiations have not lightened his political darkness, and its practical workings have effected the ruin of his country. If democratization be synonymous with anglicization, Ireland begs to be excused. She is, therefore, thrown back upon herself, brooding and indifferent to the issues which convulse the peoples for whom the problems of the war have a definite meaning. This scepticism, however, does not bring Ireland into contact with any current of internationalism, based upon a conviction of economic evil existing in all capitalistic countries alike. The egoism of Sinn Féin determines the Irish attitude towards the war. “Ourselves alone,” not German gold, determines Ireland’s foreign policy.