Darrell Figgis

“ The course of the nineteenth century in Ireland is like a resurrection from the dead. It is full of memories—memories prior to 1603 and the destruction of the Irish State. The very order is significant. The Nation had lost certain things in a certain order; in its resurrection it set about to regain them in the inverse order. It had lost, first, its State; then its language and culture, the flowers of that State, had been penalised; then its land, on which the State had been based, was taken; and finally its liberty of faith. It won back, first, its liberty to faith; then its land ”

“ Yet, even so, because one-fourth of a fundamental right may be jeopardised by an abuse of the Judicial Power, that is no reason why four-fourths should be surrendered to the abuse of the Executive Power.
Therefore the Judiciary is placed in care of the provisions [Pg 50] of the Constitution, not to imperil but to protect them. The rights conferred in the Constitution are the People’s rights. The Constitution is the People’s Constitution. The Judiciary is the People’s Judiciary. It is for the people, by alert and active citizenship, to make them so in every real sense. ”

“ A Nation is crowned when it exists in the world not only by virtue of a continuing national life, sustained by history and limited by natural frontiers, but also by reason of a State in which its intuitions and desires are expressed in a form as flexible as its containing life. The stubbornest national sense and nowhere in the world has that sense proved more stubborn than in Ireland can only be said to exist as a protest, rather than as a power, until it can take to itself that eventful crown. No other nation, or combination of nations, or empires or dominions, can give it that crown. ”

“ No student of the recent action of parliaments is at all likely to be weighed to the earth by his overpowering admiration for them as effective instruments for the will of peoples. They are, it is true, the displacement of one kind of arbitrary power by another kind of arbitrary power. They are, in the form in which we best know them, the substitution of a king and his chosen advisers by a government and an assembly of popular representatives to which it is responsible. ”

“ A nation may confer a Constitution on itself, and that Constitution may contain no declaration that the people are sovereign; but the fact that the nation did so make their own Constitution is itself a declaration of sovereignty. ”

“ BY G. K. CHESTERTON There are signs of a certain stirring in English poetry, a minor Renaissance of which Francis Thompson may be regarded as the chief ensign and example. It is partly the Elizabethan spirit, that permanent English thing working its way again to the surface; but, of course, like every Renaissance, it is in many ways unlike its origin and model. It is as true in art as it is in religion, that when a man is born again, he is born different. And the latest Elizabethanism has differed not only from the actual Elizabethan work, but from other revivals of it. ”

“ And from that past the answer must be found for its future, for the past has stored up instincts and intuitions, old memories of the blood and desires of the national mind, that are waging to burst into the future. The answer therefore is not to be found in a study of the constitutions of other peoples, but in a wise study of Irish history.
There is, outside of books, no such thing as Utopia. There is no such thing as a State abstractly good or bad in itself. A State is only good or bad in the degree in which it answers, or fails to answer, the needs of the Nation for which it is devised. ”

“ Were the enthusiasm of the Gaelic League that is to say, the national enthusiasm linked to the economic life of such communities, were Irish music, Irish dance, Irish history and Irish tale-telling provided in its halls, of a winter's evening, the flowing together of both streams would make these communities, not only stateships, but centres of national life as they were in the days of old. They would maintain their own musicians and their own historians and professors, would vie with one another in their excellence and exchange them with one another. ”

“ Ireland is still a mother-country, fully resolved to employ her empire of memory and love for the purposes which she and it judge worthy. Her place and power in the Community will prove to be of no mean degree, and of no small meaning for the nations outside that Community, as well for the peoples and nations within it, if she rally her strength around her and prove worthy of her destiny. When she shall have conferred a Constitution upon herself, within the limits of her contractual obligation in the Treaty, she will not have foresworn her heritage (unless she elect to do so) ”

“ Without some such provision a Constitution might be written in water, and its guarantees set aside by any powerful executive, or any executive not instantly answerable to the people’s will. A provision of this kind is, therefore, a necessary democratic safeguard. It is true that in the United States the judicial review of the Supreme Court over legislative and executive acts has led to unfortunate decisions and much acrimonious discussion. The evils of an institution are always apparent, and no institution but has its evils. ”

“ But with the Referendum in their hands (especially with the Initiative added to it) the will of the people is always present. The people can hasten legislation where it moves slowly. They can retard it where it presses too fast ahead. They themselves can make the pace. And the effect on themselves is that with this added responsibility, they take a quick interest in their own concerns. In the first place they break up the power of political organisations; and in the second place they themselves become alert and educated citizens, responsible and intelligent guiders of their own destinies. ”

“ It is in the discovery of those foundations that history becomes a matter of first importance. Not a portion of that history; not the history of the eighteenth century, which did not express the life of the people but the life of a small colony the proportion of which to the whole is even smaller now than it was then, besides being under the influence of the awakening of the nineteenth century; but the whole of that history, from the beginnings to the present, for in Irish history probably more than in any other the end is in the beginning and the beginning in the end. ”

“ I mean that taste of sickness and aimless revolt which dominated Byron and even Shelley, and discoloured the moods of Coleridge. I am well aware of how much of strong art, of mercy, and egalitarian justice there was in the revolt, and those men in England who were its essential and spiritual enemies (such as Gifford in literature and Castlereagh in politics) are now covered with a contempt which can never be wiped away. Yet, when all is said, the weakness of the indispensable Revolution was in its artistic voices, in their notes of negation, of license, and of despair. ”

“ Nor is Ireland, indeed, what they are now. Canada, for example, and Australia, are English Colonies, first established by white men in a coloured population. The greater part of these white men draw their traditions and inspiration, their habits of thought and habits of public conduct, from the rootstock of the English nation. They look to England as their mother-country. But Ireland is an ancient nation and a mother-country in her own right. She has herself peopled the earth with her children. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The century was continually shaken by a series of revolutions, the pulsations of its reawakening life, each of which struck its roots down deeper into the past, and brought forth memories like blossoms that became completer and more perfect with the years. After the broken attempt for freedom in 1848 a new impetus was given to the cultural movement that had begun with the Young Irelanders, but this now took the form of a search into the forgotten manuscripts in the Irish language, in which the elder culture was stored. ”

“ It is true that, the development having been hindered for so long, it is difficult to gauge what these intuitions would mean in the light of wholly changed conditions. Yet, in spite of all this, the principle remains sound, that it is only by searching into a nation's mind that its desires and impulses can be discovered, and it is only by watching those desires and impulses when they were free to exercise themselves creatively that a State can be guessed-at that shall be that Nation's crown. ”

“ We are more frequently, in the intake and output of our lives, blacksmiths or architects, or whatever else, than we are individuals or citizens. Have we not rights and duties there too, both for ourselves and to the Nation; and should not the Constitution make provision for this, the larger part of our lives, as well as for the lesser parts? Can provision be said to have been completely made either for our own lives or for the interplay that constitutes the life of the Nation if this aspect be neglected? ”

“ If there is one thing sure for the future of an Ireland free to develop its own State it is this, that one by one the moulds shaped by England for its governance will be thrown back into the cauldron and new moulds made to accord with the Nation's own sense of wisdom and economy. ”

“ Piece by piece that state was taken and hammered into dust, with a malignancy and hatred very hard to understand, until the people, driven forth into the mountains and waste places of their own land, had no longer any part of their own State in which to house themselves, had to rely on a continuing national sense, fed partly by faith, enriched by old memories, burnt by a suffering hardly to be paralleled in history, but in itself something quite peculiar and indefinable. ”

“ Under the Constitution the minorities of the day have the honest chance of becoming the majorities of the morrow in a peaceable manner. But what would be the worth of this honest chance before a powerful Government unless these protections, these rights of a sovereign people, were placed in the care of the third institution of the Constitution, the institution entrusted with the interpretation and enforcement of laws?
It is true that the Judiciary may abuse its power (since power is nearly always abused) by interpreting social reform, let us say, to be “opposed to public morality.” ”

“ Certain parts of government belong so essentially to the business of the whole that they would not come under the review of any special council. The Minister, or Ministers, in charge of these would be responsible to none but the Nation, for they would directly concern the Nation as a whole and not in any one of its parts. The chief of these of course is finance. The only council which the Minister of Finance could consult or advise would be the Assembly of Representatives, as drawn directly, well or ill, from the people's choice. ”

“ It can only be responsible to its own soul and intellectual life for the manner of that crown, not only because in no other sense can the word responsibility be said to apply, but also because of a certain inevitable result. For when a Nation does so crown itself the whole body of the Nation takes on a new dignity and grace. ”

“ To attempt by arbitrary provisions to create an Executive that does not accurately and at all times reflect the Legislature (on whatever party lines that Legislature be composed) is automatically to remove that Executive from the continuous control of the Legislature. And it is surely the essential business of a Constitution to insist that that control be emphasised, not diminished. Otherwise, whatever be the intention, the Executive will become irresponsible, government will fall into the hands of rulers who can only with difficulty be removed, and constant friction will ensue. ”

“ Instead of effecting an organisation it creates a configuration; instead of producing human contentment, comfort and ease it produces irritation, exasperation and enmity; instead of being as flexible as the life it contains it is as rigid as the thought that made it; instead of being capable of development it is only capable of being broken or abused; instead of being a National State it is a national despair and futility. ”

“ Nothing has been said about a Legislature—nothing about the people of Canada. The Constitution begins at once with an Executive Authority which nothing has brought into being, and which therefore exists of its own right, original and indefeasible, all things else in the Constitution depending from it. The pyramid is hung from heaven, for the philosophy of the plan is to be found in the mediaeval myth of the Divine Right of Kings. ”

“ The words Home Rule, Colonial Home Rule and Dominion Rule buzz about the air like flies of a summer's day, and nobody seems to be very clear as to what they exactly mean, except that there is a deep-seated suspicion that they are not being used very honestly. The air is racked with precedents from China to Peru; and amid it all, with a patience born of centuries, stands the Nation for whom all this pother is supposed to be raised. ”

“ There are few things in history more remarkable or arresting than this challenge of an alien government with the laws and procedures of a State that centuries before had been hewn asunder, had been trampled under foot, but had continued in the instincts and intuitions of the Nation—the instincts and intuitions that in the first instance, at the dawn of history, had built that State. ”

“ It is the duty of a Constitution, not merely to provide for the present, but to leave itself lissom and flexible for the development of the future. If those developments can in any way be foreseen, it is its duty further, to indicate them by allowing specifically for them, without of necessity pledging the future to them. How far these indications may profitably be carried is a question not so easy to answer. Times differ. Constitutions made at a time of fixed social and political ideas, are necessarily fixed in their provisions. ”

“ Indeed, it is not unlikely that in the future the Senate and the people (by Referendum) will often be found in practical alliance against any attempt of the Dail to arrogate power to itself. The Senate has the power to make it so—a power of greater worth to it, and to the nation, than any constitutional right arbitrarily to obstruct legislation or to make legislation abortive. ”

“ It is hostile, on the face of it, to the entire spirit of the Constitution. It has everywhere created bitterness and irritation among the other co-equal members of the Commonwealth of Nations, which Ireland has now joined. If the purpose of life, therefore, is to learn from experience as one may reasonably believe, in spite of an apparently united conviction to the contrary, a new State at the outset of its career would be well advised not to create trouble for the future, and others would be well advised to honour that quite reasonable wish. ”

“ The full height of nationhood is the recognition of sovereignty; and the completest act of sovereignty of which a nation may be capable is to confer its Constitution on itself. With the exception of Great Britain, none of the other members of the Community were, when their constitutions were enacted, capable of this. Each of them received its Constitution as bestowed, not by the Act of its own Legislature, but by the Act of a suzerain Legislature. And that shortness of national stature remained until it was removed by the addition of Ireland to the Community. ”

“ Even when folk disapprove of their law-makers and their ministers, they disapprove because they conceive they have acted mistakenly on their behalf, whereas they conceive of judges as having acted from a malignancy inborn in them or in the system, with the kind of disapproval reserved for those who are created and are destined to act against their behalf. That is—in most countries, and especially in Ireland—a legacy from evil days, when judges were not the people’s judges, but whips sent forth through the land by some person who claimed to be sovereign. ”