This may appear a fantastic programme, but I would like to see it argued out. It would create a real brotherhood in work, just as the army creates in its own way a brotherhood between men in the same regiments. The nation adopting civil conscription could clean itself up in a couple of generations, so that in respect of public services it would be incomparable. The alternative to this is to starve all public services, to make the State simply the tax-collector, to pay the interest on a huge debt, and so get it hated because it can do nothing except collect money to pay the interest on a colossal national debt. Obviously the State as an agency to bring about civilization cannot perform both services—pay interest on huge public loans, and continue an expensive service. It must find out some way in which public services can be continued, and if possible improved, and the open way to that is civil conscription and the assertion of a claim to two or three years of the work of every citizen for civil purposes, just as it now asserts a claim on the services of citizens for the defense of the State. As national debts are more and more piled up, it has seemed to many that here must be an end to what was called social reform, that we were entering on a black era, and no dawn would show over Europe for another century. There is always a way out of troubles if people are imaginative enough and brotherly enough to conceive of it and bold enough to take action when they have found the way. The real danger for society is that it may become spiritless and hidebound and tamed, and have none of those high qualities necessary in face of peril, and the more people get accustomed to thinking of bold schemes the better. They will get over the first shock, and may be ready when the time comes to put them into action. When a country is poor like Ireland and yet is ambitious of greatness; when the aspect of its civilization is mean and when it yet aspires to beauty; when its people are living under unsanitary conditions and yet the longing is there to give health to all; when Ireland is like this, its public men and its citizens might do much worse than brood over the possibilities of industrial conscription, and of revising the character of the purposes for which nations have hitherto claimed service from their young citizens on behalf of the State. Debarred by a fate not altogether unkind from training every citizen in the arts of war Ireland might—if the love of country and the desire for service are really so strong as we are told—suddenly become eminent among the nations of the world by adopting a policy which in half a century would make our mean cities and our backward countryside the most beautiful in the modern world.
XVIII
I have not in all this written anything about the relations of Ireland with other countries, or even with our neighbors, in whose political household we have lived for so many centuries in intimate hostility. I have considered this indeed, but did not wish, nor do I now wish, in anything I may write, to say one word which would add to that old hostility. Race hatred is the cheapest and basest of all national passions, and it is the nature of hatred, as it is the nature of love, to change us into the likeness of that which we contemplate. We grow nobly like what we adore, and ignobly like what we hate; and no people in Ireland became so anglicized in intellect and temperament, and even in the manner of expression, as those who hated our neighbors most. All hatreds long persisted in bring us to every baseness for which we hated others. The only laws which we cannot break with impunity are divine laws, and no law is more eternally sure in its workings than that which condemns us to be even as that we condemned. Hate is the high commander of so many armies that an inquiry into the origin of this passion is at least as needful as histories of other contemporary notorieties. Not emperors or parliaments alone raise armies, but this passion also. It will sustain nations in defeat. When everything seems lost this wild captain will appear and the scattered forces are reunited. They will be as oblivious of danger as if they were divinely inspired, but if they win their battle it is to become like the conquered foe. All great wars in history, all conquests, all national antagonisms, result in an exchange of characteristics. It is because I wish Ireland to be itself, to act from its own will and its own centre, that I deprecate hatred as a force in national life. It is always possible to win a cause without the aid of this base helper, who betrays us ever in the hour of victory.
When a man finds the feeling of hate for another rising vehemently in himself, he should take it as a warning that conscience is battling in his own being with that very thing he loathes. Nations hate other nations for the evil which is in themselves; but they are as little given to self-analysis as individuals, and while they are right to overcome evil, they should first try to understand the genesis of the passion in their own nature. If we understand this, many of the ironies of history will be intelligible. We will understand why it was that our countrymen in Ulster and our countrymen in the rest of
