Darrell Figgis

“ 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 end 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 nation has clearly indicated that, just as the old State was built on the free possession of the land, so must the new State be built. It being the task of statesmanship to give expression to the desires of a nation while preserving the unity and balance of the whole, this particular desire must be satisfied, and built into the Polity, if the work of statesmanship is not to fall into ruin in its hands. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The answer to that question is that the spirit of the old State not only may be so conveyed, but that it actually corrects, in great measure, the modern weakness of parliaments, by bringing them into closer relation with the differing and special interests of the Nation. The translation of the old State, that now lives in the intuitions and expectations of the Nation, into the modern conditions that are now part of the Nation's surface-thinking, corrects the weakness of modern ideas while providing just the kind of centralisation that the old State lacked. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The modern state of Ireland is not, in that sense, an organisation at all; it is simply a configuration imposed upon its life, not fitting that life at all, neither expressing, containing nor conveying that life, and therefore used or abused by it according as occasion offers. ”

“ 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. ”

“ So long as they exist, as they now do, it will be impossible to speak of an Irish State, for a State does not exist only by reason of the larger, more central forms of government, but in the degree in which those larger forms are drawn into relation with smaller and local units of government. They neither correspond to any efficiency in the State nor to any efficiency in relation to their own needs. They divide up a given area into a number of separate and even opposed units, whereas the life of that area is generally itself a unit, however variously its activities may be expressed. ”

“ They may persist for awhile with that fictitious life, chiefly because they have become themes of local partisanship; but in the degree in which the Nation sets about to displace its configuration by a real organisation, they must inevitably pass into a historical memory,;and not a very pleasing historical memory at that.
Everything that has been introduced by England into Ireland is destined to rejection, and not as a matter of prejudice, but as an inevitable fact in statesmanship. Suits cut for other people, or demanded by other people's necessities, are the proper wear for clowns. ”

“ It is not at all likely that an agitation that convulsed the nineteenth century will die away with its work incompleted; and no nation can afford to lets its path be encumbered by a continual agitation the justice of which has been admitted. ”

“ We have seen the assault that suspended its completion, and we saw that that assault meant for some centuries the war of a State against a State, a Polity against a Polity, a foreign and alien polity seeking to break and displace the polity of the Nation. We have seen that polity broken arid displaced, and we saw the ideas that went to the building of that polity lying resident in the people and creating a continual warfare with the alien polity that had been imposed upon the country from without. ”

“ Therefore statesmanship must neglect its achievements (though continuity of government may compel their continuance for awhile) and must make a direct approach to the national life, and its needs and necessities, human and economic, in order to build again, however slowly to build, from the foundations the structure that those foundations decree and suggest. ”

“ It is a patchwork quilt of foreign ideas, that express no realities in Ireland, that are alternately the theme of the mirth and the tears, but always the derision, of Irishmen, and that even in the country of their invention have not proved to be a conspicuous success. Urban Councils, District Councils, Poor Law Guardians, Town Commissioners and County Councils all have their independent lives without being fitted in as parts of a co-related whole. ”

“ 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. ”

“ A large council, on the other hand, would have its own kind of efficiency, and would be representative of all the life it expressed. It would naturally have to create its officers of government, from whom it could withdraw the power it gave when they ceased to express its will. Expressing itself by way of debate it would create an interest in local government, and a feeling of general responsibility, that cannot now be said to exist. The subjects debated in the local Assembly would be discussed by the hearthside; the life of the people would be quickened ”

“ However that be, parliaments, or assemblies of popular representatives, have become an essential part of the modern mind, as providers and correctives of a central government. They have proved to be corrupt servers of special interests; but that is because they have been too much trusted without supplementing them with councils each representing its own interest, as the monarch in the Irish State supplemented his executive authority with councils each having power, subject to the national unity of administration, over its special concerns. ”

“ Yet in order that Land Purchase should be completed the Nation must be financially free, without burdens placed upon it by any considerations outside its shores. Needless to say, Land Purchase under an Irish State will be a different matter from the same purchase as devised by foreign governments. The Nation will pay a single-minded attention to its own interests. ”

“ Even the very counties, those -results of the breaking up of the stateships and the making of English shire-lands, are unreal things that express little of the life of the people. Their long continuance has made them familiar, and so has given them a fictitious reality; but they again are a configuration and not an organisation. ”

“ The first need is to restore the life of the community, in a fellowship of town and country, urban and rural, within a given area. The second need is to let that community express its life, and assume control of all its local affairs, in a legislative assembly of not less than fifty and not more than a hundred. ”

“ A field would be offered for the discussion of new ideas of local government, local improvement or trade economy and efficiency, whereas at the present moment local councils are sealed chambers that by their construction can never admit fresh air and are the natural breeding places for corruption. ”

“ In Ireland those other sources are mainly derived from farmers' deposits. The sooner, therefore, farmers can be relieved from the uneconomical drain on their industry known as rent the sooner will they be able to accumulate balances that will be available for industrial enterprise. Sound economy suggests that the main source of a nation's wealth, its land, should be freed from the burden of rents, especially as these rents are usually spent to the advantage of other countries. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Electoral colleges, that act simply and only as electoral colleges, as in America, have generally proved to be failures. They dilute the popular will to no particular purpose, and lend themselves to intrigue. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Those representing Farming and Labour, for instance, would necessarily be large, not only because of the size of the interests they would represent, but also because the nature of those interests would demand a wide expression of opinion. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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 is necessary for several reasons, all of which vitally affect each part of the country, since nations are not tissues of separate interests, nor even an entanglement of separate interests, but co-ordinated wholes. It is economically necessary. Industrial centres, such as Belfast, depend for their enterprise on capital accumulated, not primarily from their own reserves, but from other sources. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Instead of evolving theories from consultation with the permanent officials of departments, as happens in England and most other countries, they would be directly in touch with the interests over whose destinies they preside, and their attention would, be occupied with the immediate practical questions raised from time to time. ”