From The United Irishman, August 12th, 1899.
That product of our times, ‘the practical man,’ has ever on the tip of his tongue the utter impotency of our people, and the consequent impossibility of our ever being any better than we are. His superficiality may deceive himself, and, perhaps, gall the unthinking individual who imagines that everything at present existing is more or less eternal and what has been can never be again, but his arguments only need examination to be found shallow and unfounded. They are primarily the product of cowardice, nurtured by a smug sense of personal comfort, which takes no heed of the needs and disabilities of its neighbour. What is it to the country shopkeeper who can drive in his trap of a Sunday to look over his ‘farm of ground’ and his twenty or thirty head of cattle, if the countryside round about him is thinning and growing more lonely every year? What is it to him either if on the bare mountain sides, by the bleak rocks on the seashore, men and women wear themselves away to secure what merely keeps body and soul together? He has never felt the pinch; he has a balance in the bank, and can give an odd dinner of a Sunday to the parish priest. He might if he wished be a Guardian; he has sent his sons to college and his daughters to a French convent to be educated. He expects they will marry well, and he looks forward, possibly, to a hale old age spent, retired from the cares of business, in some Dublin suburb. He looks across his counter at you, and sneers at the idea of thinking of a change in matters political. We are too few, too poor, too uneducated, he tells you, to ever be anything but as we are. We are only four millions, and daily growing less; the best we can do is to send our members to Westminster and take whatever we are offered. He has grown fat and made money, though the district during the same time has been growing poorer and poorer. Selfishness and conservatism have grown upon him as he grew richer, and the most blue-blooded sprig of aristocracy is not more full of the necessity for maintaining existing institutions than he. If he has become a magistrate he is utterly lost; one cannot reasonably expect a revolutionary mind in the dispenser of justice at a quarter sessions.
It is not to be imagined that he does not take part in politics. He is very prominent in all ‘constitutional’ affairs, and would possibly deny he was not a Nationalist; but whatever he calls himself, his actions and his opinions betray him a sordid, soulless, selfish, money-grubbing old Whig. He is harmless as far as he is personally concerned, but as an example he is dangerous, for the country has many of his kind, and the imitative tendency of human nature makes him a model of the worst type possible. He, more than anybody else, is responsible for the low and sordid ideal which masquerades as a national spirit in the country, for being a man of position he naturally gets a prominent place in everything, and an opportunity of airing his fossilised views and swaying the unthinking. One hears his arguments repeated by the labourer in the field and the artisan in the workshop, and since the sense of impotency kills all effort and withers enthusiasm, it must be evident that it is to be removed if we desire progress in any direction.
The prime need of the moment is organisation. Not alone in Ireland, but wherever we have been scattered all over the world, our first duty should be to organise and array our strength. We are only a bare four millions here, but we are rather more numerous than most other nationalities in America. We are strong all through Britain. In Australia, Africa, and the South Americas our numbers are not to be despised. All this power and influence, running to waste, we must utilise. Let us see how. In Ireland it is evident the present state of affairs cannot last much longer. For a long time past it has merely been a war of party leaders and party papers. The people are willing enough to stand together; but the popular mind has been thwarted and corrupted. Almost a generation of jugglers and platform mountebanks have whittled the national demand down till it has all but approached vanishing point. We must raise the national ideal; we must restore the standard of nationality to its proper proportions; we must teach and preach and never cease declaring that anything less than the complete control of everything affecting the nation by the people of Ireland and the people of Ireland alone is not Nationhood.
That is our first duty. Some part of it has been done by the enthusiasm of last year, much more might have been accomplished, if expediency and weakness had not destroyed the efficiency of the ‘Ninety-Eight Clubs by pandering to the Parliamentarians and their satellites. Our first plain duty, therefore, is to endeavour to resuscitate and rejuvenate these clubs; to teach them that minority does not necessarily mean defeat or inefficiency. It may be said that unless we place a definite object before them the people will not rise to any such academic purpose as the raising of the National ideal. We must boldly face the necessity, and tell them that the prosperity of Ireland and the British connection are incompatible, that if the one is to be achieved the other must be abolished. We must show them that the means for doing so, though not, perhaps, apparent, exist, nevertheless; that everything which makes them more Irish by so much lessens the power and the influence of England over them and their nation. We are in our present position principally because we have neglected to preserve the fundamentals of Nationhood; we cannot expect to keenly realise the loss of things to which we have been indifferent. We must endeavour to restore them, and the effort will at once make us better Irishmen and fitter guardians of what we consider our own. No nation ever won its freedom by mind alone; but we cannot, and never will, bare the sword until we have developed all the characteristics that give a nation individuality. Our policy should be at once a defensive and an offensive one. We must protect and advance our own possessions, and at the same time, make the laws, observances, and institutions of the foreigner as useless and as cumbrous as we can. This at home. In England our people can undoubtedly be organised to act like one man. We must endeavour to draw them from Radical and Liberal clubs, where their identity is lost in the horde of pseudo-republicans who have only to be scratched to be found staunch imperialists and expansionists. We must seek to create centres for them, where their children may see something that will not allow them to grow up without knowledge of or interest in Ireland. We must strengthen the ties that bind them to us, and by social, literary, and political organisation elevate their ideas, broaden their views, and make them ready for the opportunity that must come some day. We do not need to ask them to make their propaganda offensive to the English neighbours among whom circumstances compel them to exist; but they must be taught to regard their individuality as of prime importance; they must be organised to permit their numbers and influence to be used only for Ireland. Against the advance of British ideas they must be at all times ready to act; and the practise of such a system in a few years will at once prove its necessity and justify its existence—the solid, concentrated movement of three millions is a matter of which either Liberal or Tory shall have to take account. It filled every town and city in Britain with alarm during the sixties, it affected a volte face with all British parties during Parnell’s time; its force is not wholly spent, and though it may just now be split up into its component atoms, a few months steady, patriotic effort can do marvels again.
The direction of our forces in America is a matter of far vaster proportions. There, as here, we are split into camps and parties, but it may be taken that however Republicans and Democrats may differ, as far as regards Ireland they are all of a mind. Now the question is whether the merging of our people into various American camps is not detrimental to Ireland; citizens as they are, they must do the citizens’ part, and take their stand on State matters as best of them beseems. That they wield an enormous influence, broken up though they are, the failure of the Anglo-American treaty testifies. What they might do working together and utilising their power towards an anti-British policy in American State affairs can easily be imagined. They have decided many a Presidential election before this, and it is worth discussing whether they might not be organised as a separate party in American politics, with an Irish-American candidate for the Presidency, and a policy of antagonism to Britain such as the States has never had since the days of Andrew Jackson. No one could expect America to be exploited solely for the benefit of Ireland, but our countrymen there must needs gird themselves together into a firm, solid body, for the last has not been heard from the plotters who are seeking to undermine the work of Franklin, Washington, and Jefferson. England is in every way, commercially and industrially, the enemy of the States; and that Irishman will be the best citizen who strives to baffle her diplomacy at Washington and to smite her at every opportunity in Ireland.
There remains the Irish in the British colonies and in South America. These latter it is a welcome sign to see interesting themselves in the Gaelic movement; just yet they may not have many chances of checkmating British interests, but one never knows when a move may necessitate action, and the projectors of the recent stir in the Argentine will do well to prepare their forces for any emergency. The Irish in the British colonies are perhaps the least national of all our exiles; had a truly Irish spirit been amongst them the slavish declaration of Mr. Moses Cornwall at the Dillonite Convention of 1896 would have been an impossibility. They, to a great extent, are wrapped up in the interests of the several colonies, and though the majority of them are in no sense attached to England, they value the protection which her prestige gives them; they are less Irishmen than Australians or Canadians, and their horizon has so long been bounded by a Colonial Parliament that they cannot conceive a separate existence for Ireland. Still there are not lacking true men here and there, and the fresh arrivals at all times are full of the right spirit and material that needs but little moulding. Their position as citizens of dependencies, of course, robs them of the power they could wield in an independent state; but their organisation would be at all times a check on such blustering braggadocio as that which recently prompted the offer from Australia of volunteers to fight the Transvaal. The possibilities abroad are evidenced by the state of affairs in the Transvaal, whose present independence is attributed by the vast majority of Englishmen to the agency of one single Irishman, Alfred Aylward.
That ‘practical man,’ who affects to consider the idea of a free Ireland a child’s dream, reckons but little on all the possibilities that exist abroad for striking the enemy. Even in Europe a well-organised system could maintain an Irish bureau in every continental court of importance that might be just as effectual in upsetting English designs as were the United Irishmen when they outmanoeuvred Lord Malmesbury at Lille in 1796. The question of Irish freedom must eventually be settled by the same means that gave independence to America, Greece, Belgium and Italy; but it would be folly to invite a pitched battle yet. Our forces need to be concentrated and organised; they need discipline and education. These in our hands, the hour will come, and coming, shall find us prepared to grasp the opportunity.