# The Gaelic State in the Past & Future/Chapter 6

VI.
The Resurrection from the Dead.
The horror of the Plantations and Confiscations was not due simply to the land-avarice of a conqueror. In some measure they sprang from that simple and immediate lust, but really they arose from a much remoter necessity. They were logically inevitable from the invader's point of view. The war of State against State, from, that point of view, was always finally helpless because the Irish State, dismembered though if was, took strangers coming into the country and enveloped them in its own polity. And it was indestructible so long as it was based on the free ownership of land. Therefore to destroy the State it was necessary to root it out of the land; and as the State was composed of the people, and could not be composed otherwise, it was necessary to root them out of the land. What happened to them afterwards was but an incident in the campaign. They were to be replaced by a new set of proprietors who would come with the intuitions and desires of the foreign State, and who would be provided with very good reasons to see that the new shire-land with themselves as lords thereof did not revert to stateships in the possession of the people.
Cromwell's gentle watchword "To Hell or to Connacht," therefore, was the logical consummation of that policy. It was the full peal of bells of which the Statutes of Kilkenny were the first brazen ​intimation. And when he had finished his righteous labours for the Lord God of Hosts the wildest dreamer in the world in his wildest of dreams would not have thought that his work could be undone. But a strange thing happened. Official documents indicate that his work was completely done. The Nation was first decimated—"nits will be lice" was the playful phrase of his soldiers as they caught babes on their pike-heads. Then it was swept west of the Shannon; and thoroughly swept, to judge by the procedure adopted. But within thirty years it is found back upon the land—O'Neills where O'Neill stateships had been, Maguires where Maguire stateships had been, and so forth. The Roll of the Parliament of 1689 as clearly indicates the countries from which the members came from the names they wore as those names would have indicated two centuries before. Historians have therefore thought that, in spite of the effectiveness of Cromwell's procedure, his work had not been very completely done. But what is more likely is that, with hopes raised by the Restoration, the people began steadily to stream back across the country to the places they knew, where their fathers had lived in free stateships, in order to be ready for any change that might come. There is no record of their journey. There is no place where such a journey could have been recorded. All that is sure is that, whereas Cromwell intended to sweep the Nation west of the Shannon, and adopted a procedure well-drafted to achieve his end, at the end of the century the Nation is found back upon its ​lands in the very groupings in which it had held them in old times in free possession.
The change was that the freemen were a rent-paying tenantry. In other words, there were, as it were, two layers through the country, and each layer represented its own State-idea. The topmost layer was the landlordry, which, being in power, had enforced its own State-idea. When it became, as it finally did, an absentee landlordry, that State-idea did not voice any of the desires, expectations or intuitions of the resident population. In fact, it outraged them at every point. The more truly was this the case when, under the Penal code, the submerged layer of the rent-paying tenantry was denied every right in the existent State. In the words of the Lord Chancellor of that State, "The law" (that is to say, the law of the imported State) "did not suppose any such person to exist as an Irish Catholic/* The two State-ideas were not only mutually contradictory, but they were deliberately kept apart; and there is no indication to show that those who carried in their instincts or memories the old State-idea took any interest in the foreign State except the interest of sufferers.
Such was the position during the eighteenth century. The Nation seemed dead and buried, with a stone rolled across its sepulchre. Any thought of its resurrection would have been treated by its jailers as a proper subject for comedy. Certainly its Polity seemed to have passed into history—indeed, to have passed beyond history, for those jailers did not intend to let intellectual curiosity, their's or ​others', stray into that neglected field. But at this moment, when the Nation lived on sorrel boiled up with blood let from cattle while the tillage of their land went to rents, a strange parenthesis in the history of Ireland occurred. The jailers themselves arose and demanded the liberty for which the ancient Nation had fought over whom they had been placed in guard. They demanded it with cannon, musket and pike; and with these persuasive arguments they won a great measure of that liberty They established a Sovereign Parliament under a Dual Monarchy, but with an utterly unworkable constitution. It was unworkable because they remembered the source from which they sprang; and would not, and indeed could not, carry victory to its logical conclusion. If they severed themselves from the source of their power, they were thrown into the arms of the Nation over whom they were in guard, and who formed the overwhelming majority of the population of the county. It was also unworkable in itself. In the Regency debate they asserted their right to appoint their own Regent; and that logically meant the right to appoint their own king; but, as FitzGibbon pointed out, the Seal was in the care of the English Chancellor, and that gave England the final word in all matters. It was an independence that needed force at every moment to make it of any avail; but it was independence, nevertheless, and therefore by the Act of Union England struck down her own jailers and abolished their little hour of liberty.
The parenthesis was concluded, and history was ​(able to take its course again. The liberty that Grattan had won had been the liberty of the English State in Ireland; the liberty, that is to say, of the State-idea of the uppermost layer. The overwhelming mass of the population was comprised of the old Nation with its own and separate State-idea. It had no part in, and no interest in, the liberty their jailers had won for themselves; and the State in which that liberty had been held (if State it may be called that represented nothing of the population) voiced none of its instincts or desires. But when the watcher at the gate had been struck down the Nation arose, feebly at first, and marched into the nineteenth century to claim satisfaction for those desires and instincts.
The course of the nineteenth century in Ireland is like a resurrection from the dead. It is full of memories—memories prior to 1603 and the destruction of the Irish State. The very order is significant. The Nation had lost certain things in a certain order; in its resurrection it set about to regain them in the inverse order. It had lost, first, its State; then its language and culture, the flowers of that State, had been penalised; then its land, on which the State had been based, was taken; and finally its liberty of faith. It won back, first, its liberty to faith; then its land; then its separate culture; and now it seeks its State.
Literally and precisely the nineteenth century in Ireland is one of the most remarkable movements in history. It is like a great hall full of ghostly memories, but ghosts that bewilderingly become ​flesh and blood before our very eyes. It is a haunted hall where memories become realities again, instead of realities passing into memories. The struggle for Catholic Emancipation, it is true, was not of this order. It was part of a larger world movement into which the Nation was compelled by the leadership of one man. It may or may not have been the best beginning to have made; its fruits were unreal; and the victory was soon lost sight of by the Nation. But the land-war arose spontaneously from the people in a form that suggested an ancient memory. Before it found expression the compiler of the Devon Commission Digest remarked "that the tenant claims what he calls a tenant-right in the land, irrespective of any legal claim vested in him, or of any improvement effected by him." He mentions it as a curious thing; and to him, with his foreign State-idea, it was indeed a curious thing; yet it was only the first re-assertion of a very old memory. For the Nation was not asserting a tenant's right, but re-asserting a freeman's right. And inasmuch as the landlordry was now mainly absentee it was making that re-assertion in a solid national formation.
It was for this moment it had clung to the land with such fidelity. During the first forty years of the century rents were increased by thirty, forty, and in some cases fifty per cent. On an average it took a man 250 days of the year to clear his rent; and this meant that the people could only live on the dregs of the land and on sorrel and cattle-blood. Yet still they clung. When Pestilence and ​Starvation stalked through the land, and the young men and girls had to fly over-seas, the families still clung to their holdings. Those young men and girls lived in penury in America in order that their earnings should be sent home to maintain the grip on the land. The Nation was holding its old property, and meant to win it back. They arose in war and shot the usurpers on their ancient property. And then at the height of that war they suddenly, in a new awakening of memory, put their old law into operation—the very law by which the land had been ensured to them as a freeman's possession. "The body of the law which all Ireland enacted none dared to transgress; and he that perchance did so was outlawed from the men of Ireland." The landlord transgressed that law, so the people outlawed him. Boycotting according to the foreign State-idea was lawlessness, yet it was truly the assertion of the law of one State against the usurpation of another State. Not being the enactment of its own central authority it was naturally subject to local abuse; yet it was not lawlessness but the revival of a legal procedure. And finally the land was won back, though the people were compelled to pay for the property that had been robbed from them. So potent a thing was the old expectation.
So deep a national stirring was not without its effects far and wide, especially as it was less an event in itself than part of a greater whole. The century was continually shaken by a series of revolutions, the pulsations of its reawakening life, each of which struck its roots down deeper into the past, and ​brought forth memories like blossoms that became completer and more perfect with the years. After the broken attempt for freedom in 1848 a new impetus was given to the cultural movement that had begun with the Young Irelanders, but this now took the form of a search into the forgotten manuscripts in the Irish language, in which the elder culture was stored. After 1867 the active publication of these records began by a number of societies, and the Society for the Preservation of the Irish Language was started. Irishmen's minds turned to the annals of their own elder history, and viewed with alarm the perishing, under tense economic strain, of their national speech, the only adequate vehicle of their distinctive thought and intuitions. After the Land War the Gaelic League was started as an organised attempt, not only to save the national language and to compel its study and use, but to revive all that was distinctively national by means of that language. It became a shame among Irishmen not to speak their own language, not to delight in their own music, not to dance their own dances, and not to make their national past, especially the past of the days of glory, their intellectual possession. For, as was inevitable, the awakening had passed out of spontaneity into an organised intellectual effort, as the spontaneous hours of youth pass into the discipline of intellectual manhood. Yet neither is artificial, for both partake of the growth that is part of life.
Both instinct and intellect were present, and each was part of the other. When an Irishman threw ​the co-operative idea among farmers as a means by which they could combat the great organised farming of the Americas, the people took slowly to the idea as a foreign economic theory. Then they seized it, and turned their co-operative societies into rural communities that were a re-birth in modern conditions of their old stateships. Most of them, as the fruit of the Land War, were now beginning to own their farms, and that gave them the foundation of which the stateships had been built. In the central hall of the co-operative society the economic business of the community was discussed, and around it its artisans and artificers collected. That was done naturally, as the result of instinct, but then intellect saw the natural drift, and (not too bravely perhaps, through fear of "political" consequences) sought to guide it definitely in the direction indicated by history.
If there were greater courage and clearer thought, together with the freedom within which thought and courage could act, such communities, instead of being, as they now are, only economic and social units of the national life, could also become the recognised political units of that life. In other words, they could become stateships awaiting their final integration into a State that would equally be a translation into modern conditions of the old Irish State. Though they are social units their social life is stagnant, because (again for what are called "political" reasons) those who control their guidance are afraid to guide it into the only cultural life any nation can know and within which can find ​liberty: its own. Were the enthusiasm of the Gaelic League that is to say, the national enthusiasm linked to the economic life of such communities, were Irish music, Irish dance, Irish history and Irish tale-telling provided in its halls, of a winter's evening, the flowing together of both streams would make these communities, not only stateships, but centres of national life as they were in the days of old. They would maintain their own musicians and their own historians and professors, would vie with one another in their excellence and exchange them with one another. They would maintain their own physicians as the older stateships did. They would elect their own administrative heads, and, under their presidency, would meet in their own assemblies to order and control, not only their business transactions, but all the life contained within them. In their own arbitration courts they could control all their internal litigation, and compel recognition of the findings of such courts by the force of the whole community as the old stateships did.
To such a point has the national resurrection come in the awakening of its distinctive State, that these things could be brought to pass by the smallest manipulation and arrangement. Yet in the early centuries their completion and organisation required the function of a State with its central authority. Not only did the parts make the State but the State also made the parts. Each acted together, and flowed together. So it will be again; and the Nation has come to a point when it only awaits its State.