Chapter IX

THE ELSEWHERE EMPIRE

Every man born in Ireland holds a “hereditary brief” for the opponents of English sway, wherever they may be.  The tribunal of history in his own land is closed to him; he must appeal to another court; he must seek the ear of those who make history elsewhere.  The Irishman is denied the right of having a history, as he is denied the right of having a country.  He must recover both.  For him there is no past any more than a future.  And if he seeks the record of his race in the only schools or books open to him he will find that hope has been shut out of the school and fame taken out of the story.

The late John Richard Green, one of the greatest of English historians, was attracted to Ireland by a noble sympathy for the fallen which he shared with very few of his fellow-countrymen.  We are told that he sympathized with the spirit of Irish nationality.  “A State,” he would say, “is accidental; it can be made or unmade; but a nation is something real which can be neither made nor destroyed.”

He had once planned a history of Ireland, “but abandoned the idea because the continuous record of misery and misgovernment was too painful to contemplate.”  All pleasure lies in contrast.  The history of Ireland offers no contrast; it is a tale of unmitigated wrong.

It is too full of graves and the ghosts are not laid yet.  As well write the history of a churchyard.  Forty years before John Richard Green thus explained why he had abandoned the plan of the graveyard, Victor Hugo lashed the front of England with this very thong.  “Ireland turned into a cemetery; Poland transported to Siberia; all Italy a galleys—­there is where we stand in this month of November, 1831!”

The history of Ireland remains to be written, because the purpose of Ireland remains yet to be achieved.  The widow of John Richard Green has laid the foundations of that temple of hope in which the youth of Ireland must enter and be sworn to the task that yet remains for Irishmen to accomplish.

And so in closing the days of 1913 I bring, with a message of hope, these scattered thoughts upon the British Empire and its approaching dissolution to lay before the youth of Ireland.  I say approaching dissolution advisedly, for the signs are there to be read.  “Home Rule” will not save it.  The attempt now being made to bribe Ireland and the greater Ireland beyond the seas, to the side of the Elsewhere Empire by what has been aptly termed a “ticket-of-leave” bill, will not suffice.  The issue lies in stronger hands.  Even could the two Irelands be won by the dole now offered, of a subordinate Parliament in Dublin, its hands tied so that it must be impotent for any national effort, “a Parliament” as Mr. Herbert Samuel says, “for the local affairs of Irishmen,” there are other and more powerful agencies that no measure of conciliation within the Empire can permanently win to that system of world exploitation centred in London.