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[zan]

A Crib for Home Rules

(Unsigned review of Robert Oliver’s Unnoticed Analogies: A talk on the Irish Question. Pall Mall Gazette, 25 September 1888)


This book of Mr. Robert Oliver’s is 233 pages long. It is the record of a single conversation on a single subject between James and Andrew. For three hours and a quarter, as one calculates, these two gentlemen debate the question of Home Rule with a self-control, a strict keeping to the point, and an undulled sense of literary form that are beyond all praise. Weaker men would have sacrificed propriety to dramatic opportunity, but not these, James does not sneer nor Andrew swear. There are none of those gusts of wrath in which the raised voice and scornful accent arrest the passer-by with promise of a fight. The result is that James and Andrew personally impress the reader as the pair of well-conducted and well-informed members of the middle class, whose arguments and analogies will serve at secondhand in private wranglings over the question of the hour. Indeed, with Andrew’s speeches at his tongue’s end, a man might become a finished Gladstonian. But he might also become a finished bore. For the truth is, Andrew, though conclusive, is not convincing. One feels that James, the nether millstone of the debate, might make short work of him by quoting Hegel’s dictum that all mistakes are made for good reasons.

To the mere literary reviewer, admiring from his study windows the omniscience, the readiness, the energy of is political comtemporaries, it seems a strange thing that any human being should discuss Home Rules as if its accomplishment depended on the upshot of a utilitarian discussion of its probable results. Nationalism is surely an incident of organic growth, not an invention. A man discusses whether he shall introduce a roasting jack into his kitchen, but not whether he shall introduce an eye tooth into his son’s mouth or lengthen him as he grows older. If men did discuss such things, the result would undoubtedly be a consensus of opinion to the effect that thirty teeth are quite sufficient for modern purposes, and that every inch of stature above five feet six inches is a waste of the world’s industry in providing clothing fabrics, carrying power, uselessly high rooms, and so on. But as it is clear that this decision, however scrupulously rational, would not have the slightest effect on the proceedings of the power which arranges our teeth and our inches for us, we have to accept the inevitable average son of five feet eight, with thirtytwo teeth, and provide for him accordingly. We shall have to accept the growth of nationalism in exactly the same way. In any purely abstract utilitarian discussion where the historical method is excluded, and political and social institutions are treated as inventions of the roasting jack order, Home Rules must stand condemned, as Mr. Chamberlain or any utilitarian materialist republican can shew. Is not federation the most economical – the most social course? Is it not an advance in complexity of structure and order of organism – a step further towards the Parliament of Man, the Federation of the World? The conviction that all these questions must be answered in the affirmative lurks disquietingly in the consciousness of many a Home Ruler who was wont, when Ireland was not the theme, to indulge imperial dreams of a federated Greater Britain.

In the meantime Ireland and Poland are as deaf to academic discussions as Italy was in her evil days. Go to the Cork mechanic and point out to him that the condition of the Parisian ouvrier who works as a Frenchman under a French Republic is in no way superior to his own under the tyranny of the Castle. Shew him that when he works as an Irishman under an Irish Republic, and Irish industry develops by leaps and bounds, he will assuredly find the bread of freedom as bitter and scarce under King Capital as ever it has been under Mr. Balfour. Then advise him to vote against Mr. Parnell and Mr. Maurice Healy at the next election. He will be about as much impressed as Garibaldi would have been by a discourse on the advantages of a united Austria and Italy. What Mr. Oliver calls an “unnoticed analogy” is to be found in the slavery struggle in America. The advantages of being a chattel slave were proved over and over again by the friends of the South. The master who bought a man valued him as something in which his capital was locked up. Just as a tramway company now takes more care of its horses than of its men, so did the planter take move care of his slave than the employer of his free wage worker. Slaves were cared for in their old age instead of being abandoned to the discomfort and disgrace of a pauper ward, In short, who would be a slave rather than a free proletarian? Who indeed, except a man in whom the instinct towards personal liberty was as a burning fire shut up in his bones, so that he was weary with forbearing and could not stay? History tells us that it is useless to cross these instincts – tells us so dogmatically, and will not argue the point for a moment, with James or Andrew or anyone else. The slave equally unreasonable, sees nothing ahead of him but his freedom. He may be a moth flying towards a candle, but he has the moth’s power of making it impossible for us to attend to our own business if we undertake the task of keeping him out of the candle by any other means than killing him.

Here then, we have to face an inevitable order of social growth. First, the individual will have his personal liberty, in pursuit of which he will at least weary out and destroy feudal systems, mighty churches, medieval orders, slave-holding oligarchies, and what else may stand in his way. Then he will enlarge his social consciousness from his individual self to the nation of which he is a unit; and he will have his national liberty as he had his personal liberty, nor will all the excellent reasons in the world avail finally against him. He will rarely take the two steps at a time; he will never take the second before the first, or the third before the second. The third step is the federation of nationalities; but you cannot induce him to forego the achievement of national independence on the ground that international federation is a step higher. He knows by instinct that if his foot missed that one rung of the ladder he would not reach the higher rung, but would rather be precipitated into the abyss; and so it comes that there is no federating nationalities without first realising them. And as the slave destroyed great hierarchies in his fight for freedom, so the conquered subject races will destroy great empires when their time comes, if the empires persist in opposing them.

It may be that Providence has specially exempted the British Empire from these readjustments to social growth. The English middle class has always been more or less of that opinion. Indeed history teaches us that the middle class is invariably wrong. For, to quote another Hegeian dictum, we learn from history that men never learn anything from history.

Bernard Shaw.

[Get Real!]

Someone move this to the Irish section...

[zan]

:? Someone move this to the Irish section...

I didn't say "Simon says" GR. YOU ARE OUT.

know your enemy GR. I am giving you an insight. Not that I see you as one. Just know my place.

[fig head]

:? Someone move this to the Irish section...

I didn't say "Simon says" GR. YOU ARE OUT.

know your enemy GR. I am giving you an insight. Not that I see you as one. Just know my place.

zan u have really nice avatar!! bit gothic and dark, i like that

if u wont mind ill use it as my avatar