Darrell Figgis

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ All history is new and living, because in it are to be discovered the urge and impulse of national minds. Particularly is this so with Ireland, where the right national development was suppressed by an alien military conquest. The nineteenth century, for instance, was full of unrest, of demands, of swift instinctive actions, that can only be understood by turning back three hundred years of history. It is true that these national intuitions have been frustrated so long that they are no longer sure of themselves. ”

“ For the same reason Irishmen in these places, though less solid and unified from the nature of their case, generally become subversive and revolutionary units, introducing and desiring changes such as the constitutions never contemplated. When these changes are examined they are generally found to hark back to the laws and meanings of the old State of Ireland. But in Ireland itself the Nation, reduced though it be in population, and by oppression made unsure of itself, is entire and compact; racially more compact than any nation in Europe, with little of the colonial element remaining in it ”

“ For certainly time so spent will be more profitably spent than in the study of constitutions of alien peoples across the seas, or by any sort of constitution-mongering that gives no heed to the impulses of an old and historic Nation. ”

“ Housed, on their own historic land, in a State which was no State at all because it was not of their own devising, the Irish people have repudiated all responsibility for it, have misused and abused it, and have arisen in a, continual series of revolts against it. They were morally bound to do so, or become no more a nation but a slave race. Continuing a Nation they were bound to assert their protest ”

“ I have tried to make the criticism as direct And obvious as possible; but it is of course unavoidable, even if it be desirable, that a man's predilections should influence the nature of his criticism. And as the speculation is based upon the criticism it is equally unavoidable that the speculation should also express the personal desire though it does so happen that this is not always the case. All constitution-building is speculation^ ”

“ Dusty tomes are turned down from the top shelf, and every form of constitution and government is studied in order that it may contribute some new beauty to the destined scheme. Canada, Australia and South Africa have been laid under special contribution, because these are held to be adornments of the English Empire. ”