TWO ROADS TO "UNION."

Otago Witness, Issue 3277, 3 January 1917, Page 57

TWO ROADS TO "UNION."

By Jessie Mackay.

(Concluded.) In a final summing up of the lines which have led to genuine union between Scotland and England, and unwilling and embittered “union” between Ireland and England, it may seem that the writer has laid far too little stress on the outstanding trait of the Irish in Ireland —that fatal incohesiveness, but for which time after time some effectual bargain might have been made, fraught with real peace and liking. It may also seem to many not unreasonable critics that Home Rule has been urged without any apparent understanding of the pivotal difficulty of religion, and the prospect of an alien hierarchy, supreme and disintegrative, at the heart of a united Protestant Empire. Neither of these considerations has been forgotten. I have not attempted to deny the fact that Irishmen were at variance even before the first dawn of Lollardism. They were nearly as much at variance, in their early glory, as were those pugnacious Athenians and Spartans before whom the Unionist dons of Oxford are still upon their knees. Nor have I attempted to define or discuss the attitude of the Catholic hierarchy towards Home Rule and subsequent Brito-Irish relations. I have but indicated the deep bygone wrongs of that body which was, and which, owing to English action, remained, the National Church of Ireland. That Church and that people remained faithful to each in the ages of anguish and gloom. Whether that trust and fidelity is to be maintained in other years lies between the Catholic hierarchy and the Irish democracy, and cannot affect the inherent justice of the claim for autonomy. That Church, in the very crux of its agony, did not hinder the wave of reconcilement on which the United Irishmen rose under Grattan. True, Orange and Green, class and mass, land, industry, and political fiction have prepared for England a situation of intolerable difficulty, aggravated hugely by her “yca-and-nay” treatment of the late rebellion. Were it not so, men would know there was no God in heaven. Yon cannot sow dragon’s teeth and reap roses. Nevertheless England is faced with that great atonement if she is to enter the Hall of Council this year worthy of her Boers, her Canadians, her Australasians —ay, of her Maoris, who were suffered to keen both the shadow of kingship and the substance of representation in the pakeha Parliament. If the unthinkable worst of a mad Sinn Feiner’s dream were to come true, it would be better for England to lose Ireland than to lose her own soul. But that is impossible. And Presbyterian Ulster, free from the dope of Castle intrigue is not past learning to forgive and be fox given. Is it true, then, as so many have assumed, that there is an eternal gulf of purpose and temperament between the brilliant, factious Irishman and the dogged, clannish Scot? That, again, is for the wise to determine. I have but tried to show in a rough, cursory manner that, had the two peoples once been as similar as peas in a pod, their diverse histories must have changed them beyond recognition during subsequent years. We have seen Scotland time after time breasting the steep hill and winning the crest of it, from which Ireland as often was pnslfed or dragged down. And the reason is one that rings a knell of eternal warning down the aides of time. Ireland, doggedly faithful to her ancient glory and good, refused to adopt herself to new conditions. Politically she stood still, the lady of Celtic kingdoms, while Scotland, poorer, harsher, ruder, succeeded in achieving political unity under the House of Kenneth Macalpine, and. with her stout Saxon alloy in the south, beat out her old Celtic ore into modern forms of renewed power. Thus it was that she held her own with infinite care and pain, till she could dictate her own terms, while Ireland, taken in her uncohering tribal polity, could not regain her footing in a changed world. In reading Irish history, one is struck by the curious rhythmic recurrences that tragically mark her epochs and her cen furies. Looked at widely, we note the succeeding stops in this continued attack of seven centuries’ duration on the natioxxality of one small, proud, unconquerable i land people. The Plantagenet Period saw a long struggle for acknowledged suzerainty, not greatly affecting the clan institutions and ixxdxistrial and trading system of the coxinhy. The Tudor Period saw a fierce attack upon tribal polity, Brehon laws, and the National Church, which had remained more Celtic than Latin. The Stuart Period ax-.d the Georgian Period saw the war carried, moreover, with fatal success against the once coxxsiderable trade and important handicrafts of Ireland. The great Victorian Period saw its slow and grudged reforms discounted by a cx - ass policy of archaic and frictional suppression of national aspirations. If Ireland condemned herself in the twelfth century by holding to the clan system of Columba’s time, equally has England condemned herself in the twentieth bv holding to a model of suzerain government, recalling at once the shifting days of “Thorough” and the ditch-water days of English Vhiggory under Walpole. It is when we glance at Irish history ccxxtnry by century that the x’hythmic tragedy of it all strikes hoxixe. It is then that we feel ourselves in a world of ghosts wherever we appi'oaeh the Irish questioxx, whereas in Scotland the dead past has been allowed to bury its dead m peace. A betrayal begins every century from Tudor time till ixow. Little was there to hold to in the hollow Court promises of Elizabeth and James to the broken Geraldines, and loss than nothing came of them. Hope was more strongly raised and more bitterly dashed in the breaking of Dutch William's pledge at Limerick. Pitt's full promises that won the union turned into the dust and ashes

that drove Emmet to death and O'Connell to despair. And to-day: If we could drop prejudice and see Ireland detachedly as we see Alsace or Poland (infinitely better though he(r circumstances may be), we could understand how the promises of "Herbert Yea-and-Nay " sounded to the impatient, distressful Home Rule party when they saw two Ulster gun-runners taken into the Imperial Cabinet.

As I write there lies before me a eulogy of Sir Edward Carson written for an English paper by " One Who Knows Him." Amongst glowing praises of heart and brain, one lights on this arresting sentence : " I knew the energy and unflagging courage with which he had conducted coercion prosecutions till he had made himself the most hated man in Ireland." Curious praise, this, for an alleged leader of Presbyterians. Curious praise for a new-created First Lord of the Admiralty to-day. Most curious praise of all is it for a prospective member of the great peace conference that is to be called to settle for ever the rights of small peoples and the claims of downtrodden nationalities! Will not even our Allies smile a little? Of Lord Lansdowne, to whose credit (or discredit) is commonly placed the smashing of the Red-mond-Carson agreement, the triumph of resurrected coersion and the subsequent restoration of the archaic Castle regime, one recalls a recent picture in a woman's paper—the picture of a little, hard, old Tory lord striding into Westminster, without so much as a glance vouchsafed to the starving old-age pensioners ranged at the gate to petition for an increase of their petty dole. Mere personal trifles, these —straws on the water. Yet the more we chase dead theory to a finish, ignoring the personal factor, the more Hunnish we are. And they are ghosts one and all, these lords, old and new—these politicians who promise and those magnates who controvert. We have met them all on the old, old road of Ireland's pilgrim sorrow. They had other names then, but the eyes, the voices, the aims are the same. And they are faced, too. with the same untowardness that played into their hands so long ago. Heaven help the hapless Icaru who has to drive the Irish team across the blue Vast today! Redmondites, O'Brieuites, Dillonites, and what not—they are a yoke of zebras. But they, too, are the finished parliamentary product of inert, indifferent English parliamentarianism. Deny any party the constructive impulse : shut them up to obstruct, and it is not in human power to prevent the blight of negation, disintegration, from becoming chronic. What is the end of it all? Of Ireland beginning her century once more under a military dictator after sporadic and futile rebellion? Of England, stultified unwillingly in the desired hour of atonement? Assuredly the end is hope. The dominions have come to council, bringing the quick hand and the clear eye. And Britain herself will send greater minds to conference than the vapid, double-minded, forensic intelligences of other days. Before herself and before the Powers of Europe lies more than a war-settlement this year. There lies the choice, the vital choice of governance—to widen and humanise or narrow and crystallise. And in the hour of that great choice Ireland and England will look in each other's eyes, and the veil of age-long separation "will fall from between them. Ireland will stand, saved by the undying Celtic soul of love and fire and faith, emerged from the living death of ages. England will stand, saved by her women and the noble boys, who in dying, as Mr Wells finely puts it, "have shown their father's God.'"' In that great near hour cf choice will come the final union of England and Ireland—or never.