The Open Secret of Ireland | Page 5

wholly unfavourable. The Kingdom of Earth is to the thick-skinned,
and bad manners have a distinct vital value. A man, too sensitive to the
rights and the charms of others, is in grave danger of futility. Either he
will become a dilettante, which is the French way, or he will take to
drink and mystical nihilism, a career very popular in Russian fiction.
Bad manners have indeed a distinct ethical value. We all experience
moods in which we politely assent to the thing that is not, because of
the fatigue of fighting for the thing that is. A temperament such as has
been delineated is therefore, as human types go, an excellent type. But
it has its peculiar perils. To ignore the point of view of those in whose
country you eat, drink, sleep, and sight-see may breed only minor
discords, and after all you will pay for your manners in your bill. But to
ignore the point of view of those whose country you govern may let
loose a red torrent of tragedy. Such a temper of mind may, at the first
touch of resistance, transform your stolid, laudable, laughable
Englishman into the beastliest of tyrants. It may drive him into a
delirium of cruelty and injustice. It may sweep away, in one ruin of war,
wealth, culture, and the whole fabric of civilisation. It may darken
counsel, and corrupt thought. In fact, it may give you something very

like the history of the English in Ireland. Now it is not denied that most
Englishmen believe the English mind to be incapable of such excesses.
This, they say, is the Russian in Warsaw, the Austrian in Budapest, the
Belgian in the Congo, the blind fool-fury of the Seine. But it is not the
English way. Nor is it suggested that this illusion is sheer and mere
hypocrisy. It is simply an hallucination of jingoism. Take a trivial
instance in point. We have all read in the newspapers derisive accounts
of disorderly scenes in the French Chamber or the Austrian Reichstag;
we all know the complacent sigh with which England is wont on such
occasions to thank God that she is not as one of those. Does anybody
think that this attitude will be at all modified by recent occurrences at
Westminster? By no means. Lord Hugh Cecil, his gibbering and
gesticulating quite forgotten, will be assuring the House next year that
the Irish are so deficient in self-restraint as to be unfit for Home Rule.
Mr Smith will be deploring that intolerant temper which always impels
a Nationalist to shout down, and not to argue down an opponent. Mr
Walter Long will be vindicating the cause of law and order in one
sentence, and inciting "Ulster" to bloodshed in the next. This is not
hypocrisy, it is genius. It is also, by the way, the genesis of the Irish
Question. If anyone is disposed to underrate the mad passions of which
race hatred can slip the leash, let him recall the crucial examples which
we have had in our own time. We have in our own time seen Great
Britain inflamed by two frenzies--against France, and against the Boer
Republics. In the history of public opinion there are no two chapters
more discreditable. In the days of Fashoda the Frenchman was a
degenerate _tigre-singe,_ the sworn enemy of religion and soap. He had
contributed nothing to civilisation except a loathsome science of
sensuality, and the taint of decay was in his bones. In the days of Spion
Kop the Boer was an unlaundered savage, fit only to be a target for
pig-stickers. His ignorance seemed the most appalling thing in the
world until one remembered his hypocrisy and his cowardice. The
newspaper which led the campaign of denigration against France has
come to another view. Its proprietor now divides his time between
signing £10,000 cheques for triumphant French aviators, and delivering
speeches in which their nation is hailed as the pioneer of all great ideas.
As regards the Boers, the same reversal of the verdict of ten years ago
has taken place. The crowd which in 1900 asked only for a sour

appletree on which to hang General Botha, adopts him in 1911 as the
idol of the Coronation. At this progress towards sanity we must all
rejoice. But most of all we have to ask that these two sinister pageants
of race hatred shall not be suffered to dissolve without leaving some
wrack of wisdom behind. Writers on psychology have made many
studies of what they call the collective illusion. This strange malady,
which consists in all the world seeing something which in fact does not
exist, wrought more potently on the mind of England than did reason
and justice in the Home Rule controversies of 1886 and 1893. What