Part 6
The first difficulty is to find the natural area within which the life of a community would be comprised. Here, manifestly, the past would supply a very helpful answer, if it could be found. The area comprised by the old stateships would naturally finally be decreed by their internal needs and their external play and interplay upon one another--that is to say, partly by certain obvious geographical necessities and partly by economic conditions. Rivers, lakes, mountain ranges and the sea would impose natural boundaries; and equal accessibility to both mountain pasture and tillage, or alternatively different stateships taking up different kinds of life, would suggest other boundaries. These things can in many cases be traced in the boundaries of the old stateships where they are discoverable--as in many cases they are. Clearly since then the life of the people has changed in many ways, and the statesman thinking of modern conditions would find other boundaries naturally suggested to him. The transition from the modern artificial limits of local life to the proper communities, or fellowships, of the future would not be easy. Yet if certain boundaries, drawn from a comparison of the old stateships with the new requirements, were decreed, subsequent experience would soon suggest a revision of working areas where these were found necessary. At the present time these areas in many cases have already been found in great measure by the co-operative societies that have created petty stateships of their own. Such societies have been grouped round an economic idea that, embodying as it does the sense of unity and fellowship about which the new communities would be grouped, would probably be adopted in some form by the stateships of the future; but that would be for themselves to decide by debate in assembly. And when it is remembered that some of these societies have already undertaken from the power used for their factories to supply light to neighbouring townships it is obvious that a larger relation for the life of a stateship is at once indicated.
Clearly the past is equally full of suggestion in answering the second difficulty. To ask, what officers would the assemblies of the new stateships create for the conduct of its government, is at once to think of the past. In the degree in which the life of these stateships became more various its officers, or ministers, would become more numerous, while if it remained simple they would be few. The first would be the President of the Assembly, who would take his place in the Council of Local Administration. The stateship would take control of its own internal litigation under its own law officer, and the lawyers beneath him would not merely be advocates in criminal actions, but would serve as arbitrators in actions for tort. It would have its own Finance Minister, its own Minister of Public Health, and if necessary its own ministers of trade and agriculture, for local life in these questions will not remain as stagnant as it is now, especially in the wider areas that the stateships would include. Such ministers would hold their power from the Assembly, and could work with committees appointed by the Assembly. Offices, such as that of the recorder, the surveyor, the doctors and the nurses would be filled by public examination, but the actions of those who filled them would come under the departments of government under the constant review of the Assembly, which could terminate appointments at its will.
Stateships such as these would be the recognised units of the State. That is to say, they would be political units, and would thus be the constituencies for the return of one or more members, according to population, to the Assembly of the Nation. From them that Assembly would be constituted, just as the Councils would each be constituted by the vote of all those in the Nation engaged in its own branch of the national life. They would also be economic units, both for raising and expending its own local taxation and for meeting the levies of the State. Some of those levies would be for moneys now chargeable at the discretion of local bodies. Any wise State will at once take within its own control all the main arteries of communication through the country, such as railways, canals and roads. It could re-imburse itself for the maintenance of some or all of these by levies on the stateships through which they pass; and the amount of these levies could come under the review of the Council of Local Administration before being passed to the decision of the Assembly of the Nation.
City Corporations are already such stateships, though with a more compact life. As such they would remain; and the different nature of their life would require corresponding changes in their constitution. They would necessarily have to keep the same control that they now possess. For instance, they now bear the responsibility for their own streets and roadways; and so it would remain; for their roads are not arteries of the country, intersecting many stateships, but only arteries of themselves intersecting themselves. So, in most matters corporations, having already become stateships, would remain as they now are. The only change they would require to bring them into line with their fellow stateships would be that their councils would need to be enlarged. In most cases this enlargement would not need to be considerable, for it is extremely probable that in the course of time the country stateships would outrival the city stateships in wealth, responsibility and the size of their respective corporate undertakings. Thus alone can the life of the country maintain its own against the life of the cities.
This corporate wealth and responsibility of the country stateships would be the greater, and they would better preserve their social and economic unity, if they decided to use the wealth of the whole for the equal advantage of each of their members, regarding themselves, as the old stateships apparently did in the fifteenth century, as great trading units for export. That is to say, their members would not, if they constituted themselves in this form, trade upon one another in an uneconomical and wasteful warfare; they would create great communal stores under the control of their assemblies, they would purchase all their materials, domestic, farming and industrial, at the lowest possible cost by the purchasing power of the whole stateship, and they would bend all their efforts, together with the other stateships under the Council of Trade, to capturing the markets of the world for their produce. Competition, instead of being a destructive element within the State, would become a fighting quality of the State itself in its rivalry with other States, every man’s effort within the Nation being bent to this end. The technical education of the schools, in the application of the highest science to the Nation’s business, would be drafted to this end under the control of the State and the administration of the stateships.
Nor would the life of culture be neglected. The stateship so constituted would employ, for example, its own chemist, not only for its technical work, but for lectures. So would it also employ its own historian and its own body of musicians. For when men are relieved from the necessity of competition among themselves, and realise the dignity of a life fellowship, they realise also the other dignities and beauties of life. The finer flowers of life cannot bloom over a soil choked by mutual rapacity, but when the soil is cleared by a cleaner and more economical order those flowers, being a purer output of the spirit of man, would find their natural life possible again. The old stateships are the best indication of this. Men were neither more nor less naturally corrupt then than they are now. Yet they were proud of their poets; they esteemed the possession of a poet whose fame was wide to be a high honour; poets coming from other stateships were received with distinction and hospitality; and when in the Contention of the Bards in the seventeenth century poets all over the country conducted a controversy, it was not only they who rivalled one another, but the stateships whom they represented who were pitted against one another. That was when the stranger was warring through the land, and if such a condition did not still the Nation’s culture, how much purer would be the opportunity if a State order created a condition of life in which the human desire for rivalry became the asset of a community instead of the destruction of a community? It is the first function of a State to create such an order; but in the case of Ireland that order lies ready to her hand in her past Statehood that only requires to be adapted to the needs and necessities of her new life.
VIII. APPROACHING PROBLEMS.
The purpose of this little book has been to examine the working of the old Irish State, to show how that State was affected by the attempt at military conquest, to see how, when that conquest succeeded in overthrowing the form of the State and uprooting it out of the soil, its memory persisted in the instincts and expectations of the Nation, and made all the uprisings of the Nation malleable to its ancient will, and finally to see how far those instincts could be translated into the new conditions and experiences of the national life in a re-birth of the old State. It is no part of its business to examine the problems that will beset the future State of Ireland. It has a sufficiently hardy task to carry out, however inefficiently, its declared purpose without undertaking expeditions not proper to that purpose. Yet certain problems lie within the automatic function of such a State, and some of these may be briefly indicated.
There is, for example, the question of taxation. In most countries of late movements have arisen demanding that taxation should be charged upon wealth and not upon the heads of the population. This has, necessarily perhaps, taken the form of a class-war in these other countries; but it is at bottom not a class question at all, but a question of a sound and a fairly obvious economic principle. A State can only levy taxation in proportion to its wealth, and therefore can only levy taxation upon that wealth, wherever that wealth be held. To attempt to discover that wealth by a mere counting of heads is a procedure the falsity of which could be exposed by a class of school-children. That means that any taxation by heads of population, direct or indirect, however it be scaled, graded or disguised, is bad national economy, and therefore bad national finance. How otherwise, then, can taxation be levied? Here again the old State comes with a suggestion. We have seen that, though there is no direct proof that the system was completed, its taxation was levied on the stateships, presumably with some regard to their capacities. That taxation was redistributed by them in their own assemblies according to their local circumstances. If that method were adopted again the State would derive its revenues from its stateships, and would levy it in proportion to their abilities. That proportion would at least be more easy to estimate in their case than in the case of individuals; whereas if the stateships became not merely economic units but trading units their balance-sheets would at once reveal the proportion of their capacities, and the State would thus be enabled to charge its taxation directly upon its wealth in an equitable ratio.
At first the incidence of this system would be light, but it would gather importance with time. It is agreed that Ireland will need to protect, and in some cases heavily protect, her young industries. But in the degree in which such protection succeeded in its intention it would cease to be profitable from the point of view of taxation. Then the Nation would need to claim a levy on the wealth it had created for itself, for the purposes of government and security.
Such a system would in great measure answer the question of the unused mineral resources of the country. These are, as is well-known, very considerable, and one of the first tasks of an Irish State would be to see that they were used--though it would be an equally important task to see that they were not mined so that they rendered whole tracts of countryside foul and filthy as in other countries. Such mineral deposits in the soil of a country are part of the national wealth. Its State cannot grant monopolies of them to individuals or companies, especially in a country where the soil of old was held and of late was won back by its people. They would naturally, in such a State as has been outlined, be held and worked by the stateships in whose territories they lay, under the direction of the State. But then the question arises, what royalties would the State charge for the working of what truly is the wealth of the whole Nation and not the sole possession of any of its stateships? And the answer is that if taxation were levied on stateships according to their capacities this would automatically adjust itself without the necessity of adopting any direct device.
Then there is the question of the promotion of industry. No State can leave this to hazard. It must be made part of a disciplined effort. Nations must be made as far as is possible self-subsistent. No government can stand idly by and say that its people are either naturally industrial or agricultural, or declare piously that the whims and hazards of private enterprise are the workings of wisdom. Attitudes of this kind are the abrogation of all government. Governments, in the degree in which they are governments, must set out to create what, after careful thought, they conceive to be a living and liveable balance of the activities of the national life, and to create it by and in an order that ensures dignity, decency and subsistence to all its people. The task may not be easy, but any neglect of it is treason to the State. In an Ireland organised by responsible stateships the task would be simplified. Ireland possesses, possibly in as great a measure as any nation, what is known as White-Power. By harnessing the manifold rivers that intersect her soil electricity can be directed to each of these stateships for their use in order that they might as communities create industries within their territories. It would be to their interest to do so, if only to keep their population within their fellowships, and to the general wealth of the fellowships, instead of letting them drift to the stateships of the cities. But the general direction of such efforts would lie with the State, which would seek so to order things that there be in the national life a balance of all the parts that are necessary to a self-subsistent and thriving nation. Ireland would remain mainly agricultural, because of the richness of the soil and because the neglect of agriculture is national suicide; but she will cease to repeat the words of her enemies that her destiny is agricultural only. Her destiny is what she will make it by an organised and disciplined endeavour.
Finally there is the question of the language. This does not truly lie within the scope of the book, but only because without it the book would not be possible. Firstly, because it was in the language of the Irish Nation that the Irish State was created; secondly, because it was only when the language was recovered as an intellectual possession and passion that the outlines of that State could be seen clearly, the memories of which at that time were struggling in the acts and deeds of a resurgent people. We have been tracing a historical continuity, but the key of that continuity is the language. The State of the future might be built on the foundations of the past, but the Nation inhabiting it would not be the same Nation if it spoke by the tongue of a foreigner; and then it is probable that the State would not fully answer its expectations, because the change of a nation’s speech implies a weakening of its surety of intuition. The recovery of the language in daily use is not a sentimentalism but a national necessity if the Nation is to act with the full certainty of its hereditary mind. It is also necessary to its dignity among the nations--which also is not merely an honourable emotion but actually an estimable quality in commerce. Ireland will utter her State aright when she utters her own speech aright, and when she does both other nations will look at her, think separately of her and deal directly with her. Her dignity will be a national beauty, and will aid her prosperity. For it is not when a Nation is crowned that its dignity is completed, but when it speaks; and not when it lisps with a stranger’s tongue but when it speaks with its own.
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PADRAIC PEARSE
COLLECTED WORKS
=Vol. I--PLAYS, POEMS AND STORIES.= Demy 8vo. 7s. 6d. net.
He was an out-and-out rebel ... a rebel who was a poet, a visionary who worked not for prosperity, or even for political freedom, but for an idea.--_Times Literary Supplement._
Probably no more selfless spirit ever broke itself against the might of the Iron Age than this man’s spirit, which was lit up by love of children and country, a dreamer with his heart in the Golden Age.--_The Irish Homestead._
The publication ... of the literary works of the leaders of the Irish Insurrection has helped us more than might have been expected to understand the motives and hopes which lay behind their action.--_Westminister Gazette._
=Vol. II--SONGS OF THE IRISH REBELS=, and Specimens from an Irish Anthology. Gaelic Poems collected and translated by PADRAIC PEARSE. Demy 8vo. 5s. net.
=THE STORY OF A SUCCESS.= An account of St. Enda’s School by PADRAIC PEARSE, edited and completed by DESMOND RYAN. Illustrated. 3s. 6d. net.
=THE NATIONAL BEING.= Some Thoughts on an Irish Polity. By Æ. Crown 8vo 5s. net.
“Commands respect as an expression of the aspirations of a true friend of Ireland, and an indefatigable worker in the one field in which a constructive and reconciling policy has been carried to a successful issue in that country.”--_The Spectator._
“A great book for Ireland, and for the socialist movement.”--_Labour Leader._
A HISTORY OF THE IRISH REBELLION OF 1916
By WARRE B. WELLS and N. MARLOWE. Cloth, 7s. 6d. net. Cheap edition, Wrappers, 1s. 6d. net. Contains Casement’s Speech from the Dock.
=THE INSURRECTION IN DUBLIN.= By JAMES STEPHENS. 2s. 6d. net. Wrappers, 1s. net.
=MY LITTLE FARM.= By “PAT,” Author of “Economics for Irishmen,” and the “Sorrows of Ireland.” Wrappers, 1s. net.
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Transcriber’s Notes:
The one footnote has been moved to the end of its chapter.
Punctuation has been made consistent.
Variations in spelling and hyphenation were retained as they appear in the original publication, except that obvious typographical errors have been corrected.