Part 2

University Education

This important question was settled in 1908 by the foundation of a new University, the "National University," with its central authority in Dublin and colleges in Dublin (the old Catholic University of which Cardinal Newman was rector), in Cork, and in Galway. The University is open to all creeds, and may not impose religious tests upon its students, but its government is mainly in the hands of the Roman Catholic hierarchy, and it is accepted as a fair settlement of the question of Catholic higher education in Ireland. In the management of its internal affairs, the appointment of professors, the selection of textbooks, etc., the National University is wholly autonomous and free from Government interference. One of its most remarkable features is that the Irish language has been made an obligatory subject for matriculation. The endowment of the University, with its constituent colleges, amounts to 74,000 pounds a year, and it was voted a capital sum for building and equipment of 170,000 pounds. It need hardly be said that no parallel to this institution exists in Prussian Poland.

Language and Native Culture

In this as in other respects a comparison with the theory and practice of German administration may help to place the policy of the United Kingdom in its proper light. When at the Congress of Vienna, 1815, Prussia definitely acquired her present share of Polish territory, King Friedrich Wilhelm III promised for himself and his successors, "on my kingly word," that the Poles should have religious freedom, the use of the Polish language in administration, in the Law Courts and in the schools, and be in all respects on an equality with their German fellow-citizens. We have already seen how these promises were kept in regard to the vital question of the ownership of land. They have been no less flagrantly broken in regard to the national language. The use of Polish is strictly prohibited at all public meetings. No Polish deputy to the Reichstag may address his constituents in the only language they understand. Since 1873 German alone may be taught in the national schools. The language of instruction must be German wherever half the pupils are capable of understanding it, and after 1928 it is decreed that no other language must be heard in the schoolroom. A decree of 1899 forbids teachers to use Polish even in their own family circles. Anyone who is caught teaching Polish, even gratuitously, is punished by fine or imprisonment. Polish literature found in the houses of private persons is confiscated, and its possessors imprisoned, if the police consider it to bear the least trace of any propagandist character.[*]

All this, it will be seen, is merely the drastic execution tion of the policy laid down by Treitschke, the prophet of modern Germany, and more recently urged by the most popular living representative of Prussian ideals, H. S. Chamberlain.

"There is," writes Chamberlain, "no task before us so important as that of forcing the German language on the world (die deutsche Sprache der Welt aufzuzwingen.)" The German has "a twofold duty" laid on him: "never must a German abandon his own speech, neither he nor his children's children; and in every place, at every time, he must remember to compel others to use it until it has triumphed everywhere as the German Army has done in war. ... So far as the German Empire extends, the clergy must preach in German alone, in German alone the teacher must give his lessons ... Mankind must be made to understand that anyone who cannot speak German is a pariah."[*]

Such are the ideals and such the practice of the people whom Roger Casement and one or two other enthusiasts for Gaelic culture in Ireland have sought to make the dominant power in that country, because it will rid them of "English" rule.

Let us now see what "English" rule (it is not really English at all, but the rule of the United Kingdom) is actually like in regard to this particular subject. Up to the decade 1830-40 it may be said that the Irish language was spoken by fully half the population of Ireland. No restrictive measures were in force against it. But during that decade a general system of elementary education was introduced, and in the Board Schools the language withered away with astonishing rapidity. At the last census (1911) only 16,000 persons were recorded as speaking Irish alone, while the number of those who knew anything of the language was only about 13 per cent. of the population. Whether this change was a blessing or a bane to Ireland is a subject which is outside the range of this discussion, but whatever it was the Irish people themselves had a full share of responsibility for the result. With scarcely an exception, the abandonment of Irish was approved by the clergy, the political leaders, and the masses of the people "The killing of the language," writes Dr. Douglas Hyde, "took place under the eye of O'Connell and the Parliamentarians, and, of course, under the eye and with the sanction of the Catholic priesthood and prelates ... From a complexity of causes which I am afraid to explain, the men who for the last sixty years have had the ear of the Irish race have persistently shown the cold shoulder to everything that was Irish and racial."[*] Their attitude is easily understood. Irish had long ceased to be used for literary purposes. No Irish newspapers, no Irish books were printed; English was regarded as the only available key to the world of modern culture, and Ireland became an English-speaking country without a struggle and almost without a regret.

In the early 'nineties, however, a popular movement took shape for the rescue of what still remained of the language and for its restoration, so far as was practically possible. Classes for the study of Irish were formed all over the country, folk-tales were collected, MSS. of half-forgotten poets were disinterred and edited, the first scholarly and adequate dictionary of modern Irish was compiled,[*] and plays, poems, and stories began to be written in the re-discovered language. These activities were mostly organised and directed by the Gaelic League, a body founded in 1893. One can easily imagine how a Prussian Government would have dealt with such a movement, especially as a certain disaffected element in the country immediately began to make use of it for its own ends. The British Government looked on not only calmly but approvingly. When a general demand arose for the effective teaching of Irish in the elementary schools--though at this time only about 21,000 old people were recorded in the census as ignorant of English--it was at once agreed to. Irish had been permitted and paid for, though not markedly encouraged, since 1879. It was now placed on a list of subjects which might be taught in school hours, and extra fees were allotted for teaching it at the rate of ten shillings per pupil--twice the amount allowed for French, Latin, or music. Grants are also made to certain colleges where teachers of the language can be trained. All this began in 1901, and since that time over 12,000 pounds a year has been paid for Irish teaching directly from Imperial funds--about twice the amount collected in the same period by voluntary contributions from Ireland and the rest of the world. Nor is this the limit of the grant; it is limited only by the willingness of school managers and parents to make use of it. Indirectly, the State is paying much more, for the various professorships and lectureships in Irish subjects--language history, archaeology, and economies--established under the National University account for well over 3,500 pounds a year. Taking the direct expenditure on elementary education alone, the State has paid for Irish teaching since 1879 a sum of no less than 209,000 pounds. It may therefore be claimed that in cultivating her ancient language and native traditions, Ireland enjoys the fairest and most liberal treatment ever accorded to a small nationality incorporated in a great Empire.

Reforms and Their Results

On the reforms which have been thus briefly sketched, one or two general remarks may be in place.

It has sometimes been contended that except by violence, or the menace of violence, Ireland has never obtained anything from the English Legislature. It would be truer to say that she has never obtained anything at all. England is not a sovereign Power, and does not administer Irish affairs, nor even her own. What has been gained has been gained from the Legislature of the United Kingdom, in which Irishmen, like every other race inhabiting that kingdom, have had their full share of representation and of influence. And if in Ireland, as in other countries, the necessity of reform has sometimes been made evident by disorder, it is wholly untrue to say that this has been always or even usually the case. Land-reform in its earliest stages, like trade unionism in England, was accompanied by disorder. But the greatest measure of Irish land-reform--the Wyndham Act of 1903--was worked out on Irish soil by peaceable discussion among the parties concerned, and Parliament acted at once upon their joint demand. It was in precisely the same way that the Department of Agriculture came into being; nor did the great measures of Local Government, of University education for Catholics, of the Labourers' Acts, or the recognition extended to the Gaelic movement, owe their origin to any other cause than the wholesome influences of reason and goodwill.

The internal condition of Ireland already shows a marked response to the altered state of things. It is visible, as many travellers have noticed, in the face of the country; it is proved by official records and statistics. Emigration has declined to its lowest point; education has spread amongst the people. Irish emigrants, when they do leave their own shores, take higher positions than ever before. A population of some four millions, largely composed of small farmers, has lent forty-seven millions sterling to the Government; and, what is still more significant, the deposits in Post Office Savings Banks have risen from six millions in 1896 to over thirteen millions the year before the war. The new War Loan is reported to have had an extraordinary success in Ireland. On the last day of subscription a single Dublin bank took in one million sterling.[*] With some self-appointed champions of Ireland abuse of the British Empire is a very popular amusement, but the Irish farmer and the Irish trader put their money in it, and with it they stand to win or lose.

Irish agriculture, partly owing to climatic conditions and partly to the fact that Ireland has a monopoly of the export of live cattle to England, has developed hitherto rather in the direction of cattle-raising than of tillage; and cattle have increased since 1851 from three million to over five million head, and sheep from two millions to three million six hundred thousand. Poultry have nearly quadrupled in the same period. The gross railway receipts--another significant symptom--were 2,750,000 pounds in 1886. In 1915 they had risen to 4,831,000 pounds. The co-operative agricultural associations, in which Ireland has shown the way to the English-speaking world, now number about 1,000, and do a trade of well over five millions a year. The thousands of labourers' cottages which have sprung up, each with its plot of land, have been to the Irish labourers what the Land Acts have been to the farmer--they have completely transformed his economic status in the country.

Accompanying these symptoms of material progress, we have witnessed in recent years a striking outburst of intellectual activity. Irish literature, in poetry and drama, has attracted the attention of the whole world of culture, and exact and scholarly research in history and archaeology have flourished and found audiences as they were never known to do in Ireland till now. This has not been the work of any one section of the people, either in creed or in politics; but the whole movement has been inspired by an Irish patriotism which no sane person regards as conflicting in any degree with allegiance to the Empire under the shelter of which it has grown and prospered.

The circumstances above set forth do not pretend to be the whole story about modern Ireland, nor do they show that the millennium has arrived in that country. Apart from Home Rule, which is outside our present field, much still remains to be done--there is elementary education to be advanced, commercial facilities to be developed, land-purchase to be completed. But it is contended that the real facts about Ireland are wholly and absurdly inconsistent with the picture of that country which the friends of Germany circulate so industriously at the present time. Ireland is not an oppressed and plundered nation, ground under the heel of a foreign Power, and with her individual life deliberately stifled like that of Poland in the German Empire. Only through ignorance or malice could such an illusion gain currency, and it needs only the touch of reality--reality which every one can easily see or verify for himself--to dispel it for ever from the mind of every candid inquirer.