“There is no need to make rejoicing for me, for I am sure of your welcome as every son is sure of his foster-mother, and this, then, is my foster-mother,” said Fintan, “the island in which ye are, even Erin, and the familiar knee of this island in which ye are, namely, Tara. Moreover it is the mast and the produce, the flowers and the food of this island that have sustained me from the deluge until this day. And I am skilled in its feasts and its cattle-spoils, its destructions and its courtships, in all that have taken place from the deluge until now.”
Every race in turn that entered Ireland drank in the spirit of the soil: all became citizens of the one land. Even that gift of “English invention” and “British extraction,” the Pale Parliament, was by mere human nature and necessity stirred to loyalty for “the land of Ireland.” “More conveniently,” so they urged in a statute of 1460, “a proper coin distinct from the coin of the realm of England was to be had therein.” And the Anglo-Norman colonists decreed that of the coins they ordered one should be called an “Irelands,” with that name engraven on it, and the other a “Patrick,” with the name and cross of the national Irish saint.
This persistence of the name of Ireland with its national pride, and its perpetual recalling of a distinct people, was displeasing to Englishmen in the height of their “godly conquest.” If the name was extinguished the fact might be more easily denied. They pleaded, as we learn in the Carew Papers (I. 251-2), for its disappearance, in the true spirit of modern Unionism. When Paul IV. gave to Philip and Mary the title of King and Queen of Ireland:
“Men of judgment, ... thought it a vanity, not seeing what profit, either of authority or honour, it might bring to a King to have many titles in the country which he possesseth, considering [pg 223] that the Most Christian King is more honoured by the only title of King of France, than if his state were divided into as many kingly titles as he hath provinces.... But it seemed hard to induce England to quit that which two kings had used, and the Queen, not thinking much of it, had continued.”
There was indeed a power in nature far older than the habit of two English kings; and in spite of the Unionist grumblings the ancient name survived, and the ancient fact. Cardinal Pole was appointed legate to “the realms of England and Ireland.” Our ambassadors and consuls still carry with them abroad the significant title “of Great Britain and Ireland”; and we may read in a Russian newspaper concerned with the East, of the “policy of Great Britain and Ireland in Afghanistan.”
The persistence of race in Ireland was no less remarkable than the triumph of its name. There are some who profess to distinguish the Iberians. We know that successive streams of immigrants, Danes, Normans, English, French, have been merged in the commonwealth. But the Registrar-General gives, in spite of outgoings of the Celtic and incomings of Teutonic peoples, an overwhelming majority of men of Celtic blood and name—a majority which is in fact less than the truth, owing to the continual change during centuries of Celtic into English surnames. But it is not on purity of race that Ireland, any more than other countries, would rely. Difference in blood was recognised, but it was not held a bar to patriotism. Ireland was the common country to which all races who entered it were bound by every human interest. It had a unity of its own, which as “the Pale” shrank and the sense of country deepened, laid hold on the minds of the later as of the earlier inhabitants. Belfast Orangemen indeed, as “the loyalists of Ireland,” [pg 224] accepted the doctrine in 1886 that a Parliament in Dublin chosen by the whole Irish people “must be to them a foreign and alien assembly.” It was the echo of an old fiction. We know that the ascendency of a constantly recruited English group, above all of safe men born in England and consequently held worthy of trust there, was for seven centuries the favourite dream of English politicians; and that it invariably failed before the broader and humaner influences that move communities of men dwelling side by side under the equal heavens. Faithful citizens of Norman or English stock did brave service for their country: “Ireland-men” they called themselves, or “commonwealth men,” or “good ‘country men’ as they would be gloriously termed.” What name indeed is there for men of Ireland to take unless they frankly own their country? The term chosen for them by The Times: “The British Colony on the other side of St. George's Channel” will scarcely endure.
Mr. Balfour is probably the last statesman to press a claim to ascendency in the partial favour of Great Britain for a selected group, “who, of all others in the United Kingdom, surely deserve the protection of England and Scotland.” It is a curious return in these days of equal citizenship to the tyrannical distinctions of the middle ages—“wild Irish our enemies, Irish rebels, and obedient English,” who had varying claims on the dominating race according to their deserts.
To return, however, to the special charges urged against Gaelic life in Ireland. The island may be the same, and the race of ancient date, and with no less than their ancient pride; but what of that, if the people could not have, nor ever did have, a polity of their own, nor any Irish institutions nor an Irish idea of government? “The fiction has been assiduously [pg 225] propagated,” says a Unionist writer in the Morning Post, “by the Irish extreme section ... that the nationhood of Ireland is a thing which once had an actual objective existence.... But such teaching, however romantically attractive, is simply incompatible with the plain facts of history. Ireland as a political entity dates from the period of the conquest by England, when for the first time the princes and chieftains with their followers were fused into something like national unity.” So Macedon might have boasted that for the first time it had put some order into Greece, given it a political entity, and brought it into line with modern Imperial civilization.
Is this unhistoric statement all the Unionists have in the end got to give us of the Irish story? Is there nothing behind it—no trace of any soul of the people in Ireland? How then was it that with so incomplete a military or political organization, they could defy for centuries the whole power of England? Ireland in fact drew her strength from a remarkable State system of her own. In the Gaelic form of civilization the national sentiment did not gather round a military king, as in the Teutonic states, but round a common learning, literature, and tradition; and this exalted belief in the spiritual existence of a nation, though it is not the English idea of a kingdom, may belong nevertheless to a high order of human aspiration. It produced in Ireland a literature which has not been surpassed among any people for its profound and ardent sense of nationality.
The union of the Irish people lay in the absolute community of learning, institutions, and law. Irish law was one of the most striking products of Irish genius. If we know nothing of its beginnings, we see it as a body of custom that spread over the entire [pg 226] country, varying not at all from province to province. Highly finished, highly technical, worked on for hundreds of years by successive commentators, it still remained the law of the people, and claimed their allegiance—an allegiance could only have been possible to a law founded on reason and justice, and expedient and efficient in practice. If we take that which in an agricultural country comes home to every peasant—the land system—the native law in Ireland was equal, enduring, and respected. The farmer was assured a fair rent and compensation for improvements. No chief in Ireland could molest the people in their ancient privilege; he could neither evict them, nor take their grazing-lands, nor make a forest waste and impose a forest law for his hunting. Five hundred years after the Norman invasion Irish farmers holding under the old Irish law were still paying the same rent that their forefathers had paid centuries before. It is certain that no system can wholly prevent misfortune, injustice, or usurpation; but there seems to have been among the people a social content far beyond that in mediæval England, a long security of farmers, a passionate belief in their land system, an extraordinary tenacity in its defence against any other, and as far as we can see no bitterness of classes. A satirist might mock at the depth of the chief's pocket, as deep as the pocket of the Church or of the poet; but the Irish no more wanted to get rid of the chief than of the poet or the priest. In Tudor times the only way in which a chief could be absolutely alienated and divided from his people was by pledging him to the English land system and government.