The Open Secret of Ireland | Page 7

spin the plot; We
are betrayed by what is false within."
Least of all am I to be understood as ascribing to modern Englishmen
any sort of planned, aforethought malice in regard to Ireland. It is what
Bacon might have called a mere idol of the platform to suppose that
they are filled with a burning desire to oppress Ireland. The dream of
their lives is to ignore her, to eliminate from their calculations this
variable constant which sheds bewilderment upon every problem.
Could they but succeed in that, a very Sabbath of peace would have
dawned for them. The modern Englishman is too much worried to plan
the oppression of anybody. "Did you ever," asked Lord Salisbury on a
remembered occasion, "have a boil on your neck?" To the Englishman
of 1911--that troubled man whose old self-sufficiency has in our own
time been shattered beyond repair by Boer rifles, German shipyards,
French aeroplanes--Ireland is the boil on the neck of his political
system. It is the one _péché de jeunesse_ of his nation that will not
sleep in the grave of the past. Like the ghost in "Hamlet" it pursues and
plagues him without respite. Shunned on the battlements it invades his
most private chamber, or, finding him in talk with friends, shames and

scares him with subterranean mutterings. Is there no way out of a
situation so troublesome and humiliating?
There is. Ireland cannot be ignored, but she can easily be appeased. The
boil is due to no natural and incurable condition. It is the direct result of
certain artificial ligatures and compressions; remove these and it
disappears. This spectre haunts the conscience of England to incite her
not to a deed of blood but to a deed of justice; every wind is favourable
and every omen. It is, indeed, true that if she is to succeed, England
must do violence to certain prejudices which now afflict her like a
blindness; she must deal with us as a man with men. But is not the
Kingdom of Heaven taken by violence?

CHAPTER II
HISTORY
_(a) Coloured_
Mendacity follows the flag. There never yet was an invader who did
not, in obedience to a kindly human instinct, lie abundantly respecting
the people whose country he had invaded. The reason is very plain. In
all ages men delight to acquire property by expedients other than that of
honest labour. In the period of private war the most obvious alternative
to working is fighting, or hiring servants to fight; the sword is mightier
than the spade. If we add that an expedition into a foreign country
offers the additional advantages of escape from your exacting creditors,
and your still more exacting king, we have something very like the
economics of the Invasion of Anywhere in early feudal times. Had the
leaders of these invasions, or rather their clerkly secretaries, written the
plain tale of their doings they would have left some such record as this:
"There were we, a band of able-bodied, daring, needy men. Our only
trade was war; our only capital our suits of armour, our swords and
battle-axes. We heard that there was good land and rich booty to be had
in Anywhere; we went and fought for it. Our opponents were brave
men, too, but badly organised. In some places we won. There we

substituted our own law for the queer sort of law under which these
people had lived; when they resisted too strongly we had, of course, no
option but to kill them. In other places we got mixed up completely by
alliances and marriages with the old stock, and lived most agreeably
with them. In others again the natives killed us, and remained in
possession. Such was the Invasion of Anywhere."
But (I had almost said unhappily) the invaders were not content with
having swords, they had also consciences. They were Christians, and
thought it necessary to justify themselves before the High Court of
Christian Europe. Consequently the clerks had to write up the record in
quite a different fashion. They discovered that their bluff, hard-bitten,
rather likeable employers, scarcely one of whom could read or write,
had really invaded Anywhere as the trustees of civilisation. Now it may
be said in general--and the observation extends to our own time--that
the moment an invader discovers that he is the trustee of civilisation he
is irretrievably lost to the truth. He is forced by his own pose to become
not an unprincipled liar, but that much more disgusting object, a liar on
principle. He is bound, in order to legitimise his own position, to prove
that "the natives" are savages, living in a morass of nastiness and
ignorance. All facts must be adapted to this conclusion. The clerks,
having made this startling discovery, went on to