I draw the attention of the Labour Party particularly to this interesting suggestion. It is bad enough to try to cover up failure by telling us that the poorer people are the better patriots. They are. But there is a new monster, a new stage Irishman, the Plain Man. The Plain Man has to be proud not because of his manhood, but because of his plainness, his shortcomings. The Plain Man is intended to be our Irish version of the Communists, who for the first time in Europe claim rights because they are Communists, plain common men. They proclaim the rights of the common place, rights of shortcomings.
Now when the Government took office there was never a time when the necessity of reviving outworn slogans and raising old alarms was less. Never was there a time when England was more ripe for friendship and never was this country presented with such an opportunity for gaining in honourable trade the place in the world for her families and children from which for centuries she complained that she had been thrust out. Never was there a time when England had drawn more attention to her agreement with this country than this time. She had called the world to witness that her word was her bond. Never was there a time when we were safer or more ready to take advantage of the amenities and the arts of life and to use them as channels of the spirit of the nation— to escape from the curse of politics and demagogues. But it was not to be. There was to be no freedom for the Republican Ireland. A man arose bringing dark and evil days and black magic. For his purposes the voters were to be kept in an atmosphere of political ferment: there was to be no genial Ireland of Liberality and the Arts. The day was darkened. He put a Cromwell in the soul of each of his dupes. He made every man his own manacler, his own Cromwell—and the jailer he conjured up in him was hate. Hate froze the genial current and shrank the country's bravery and exchanged its national buoyancy for earnest dullness or impassioned claptrap. There was not a word about the country's livelihood. That might do for the unromantic busybodies of the last Government whose extravagances and ambitions were satisfied by an income tax of 3/6 in the £. There was not a word or a plan for what we could have had for half he cost this nation: a cultured Arcadia. Not a word. We were to follow him not to wealth but to war. And he chose the time for his campaign, a privilege which was withheld from Marshals such as Alexander, Genghis Khan or Napoleon. He could go to war when the enemy had gone away. Oh, death, where is thy sting? It was we who got stung. He is engaging Japan from Geneva, as he engaged England from Ennis. But we are paying indemnities for these curious campaigns. Our Celtic Calvin, predestined to failure, has gone to Geneva. We must wait until the people find out that Meath is nearer than Manchuria.
And our Postmaster has gone with him to "face up" to world perplexities while he turns his back to his own. This apostle and archetype of the worst stage-Irishman ever proposed for our acceptance, the Plain Man, is hobnobbing with very complex associates. We who are not lost in admiration are "playing England's game." What is England's game? If it is tax collecting, President de Valera and Senator Connolly have won a victory. The Irish nation was never so mulcted by all its external foes. For the Senator's sinister "Plain Man," and the poorest in the land, will have to pay taxes on indispensable commodities such as their half hundredweight of coal. But hate has gone one further than the notion that you must be a pauper before you can be a patriot. Senator Connolly is the apostle if not the archetype of a new monster—the Plain Man. This creature of his imagination is offered up for our acceptance as something to be admired. "The Plain Man will not stand for ... this or that." In my case he will not stand for, as the Senator informed me—coming to this House in a motor car—that extravagant parade owing to taxes, and the Senator's exemption from them is now possible only for that dignity alone. The "Plain Man" is ugly, cantankerous, and conceived as being ripe for revolution at a moment's notice; particularly if the Opposition use their votes in some way,—unrevealed but left to the imagination,—that might not be acceptable to the Plain Man's traditious obscurities. I think of the two, the pauper patriot and the Plain Man, the latter is the most sinister apparition that has ever emanated from spoilt ambition, spite and realised incompetence. But examine the lure: Once you get a man to be proud of his shortcomings you can feed him on his own ordure. The more shortcomings the more "rights"—a Belfast counterpart to the idea of the pauper patriot. But it is no use telling the starving unemployed of Dublin to be proud of this translation unto plainness. That may do for the farmer's son who is getting poorer. It was tried to some extent at the Ard-Fheis when the somewhat dissatisfied commons were told to turn their comments on glorious things such as the size of their gathering. I may be solitary in my opinion when I think that we Irish are, deserving of a better destiny than a heritage of hate is likely to bring. We cannot be nourished on a diet of negations by the Spirit who Denies. There are others in the country who do not look to pauperism as a justification and who resent the implication of Plain Man. If the country wishes to go downwards let us not forget that it can only do so by the co-operation of the Government, of Joseph's version of Pharaoh's dream, by the co-operation of the Seven Labour Members for the Seven Lean Years.
How is it to be remedied? The first thing one should do is to make the country fool-proof. Show up the bluff; and point out that they need not expect more from a machine than is in it. The machines at the head of the State have failed signally and thoroughly in their two respective dimensions. President de Valera has failed to show that he is a better man than Griffith or half as good. And without entering Belfast to examine the fate of his enterprises Senator Connolly characteristically has at Edenderry added barrenness to the Bog of Allen! Meanwhile, how have the Irish people fared? The slums are with us still. Already I detect a wail, a whinge. The Minister for Posts told us last Wednesday that the war was not of their own making. It was not a "second round." It is to be presumed that it was thrust on them. We know better. But they want to enlist pity not for the country's but for their own plight. If it was not of their own making there is the League of Nations and Mr. de Valera is Chairman. What more could he want?
It is a bad business to hate anybody but worse to hate England, not because of possible reprisals, for how could she possibly imagine that we have any hate left over when we have done so strangely by ourselves? But England here has become identified with all that comes to us from Europe, all advances in civilisation, all advances in humanitarianism; those things which are indispensable for human life are pilloried in the general hate. Everything becomes anathema save ruin and vulgarity. We are to be fed on the negations of a progressive people— pauperism and plainness. Is there no other way of not being English? Is there no other way of being Irish? The cult of the Plain Man is Communism undisguised. Plainness is its stigma. It is this arrogance of this unambitious grasping iconoclastic brute that would do more damage to our religion than all the penal laws, the memory of which it is that doubtless is goading President de Valera to forget his advice to Nicaragua or Japan and refuse to deal amicably with our neighbours, with England now. There are no plain men in Ireland except one or two whose image and likeness, the Irish people will, I hope, never assume. There are poor men and weak men and badly housed and hungry men, but there is not one of those who if he were given a chance to be rich to-morrow would not be as respectable and as decent as the best in the land. There is enough inborn nobility in the people who address themselves to a man's honour when they hail him to make a race of aristocrats the moment the hard frost of penury is thawed. Has penury been put further away? Have the people been given a chance to stand up and look the world in the face in their own right as Irishmen, members of the one race in Europe who were not stampeded standardised into mediocrity by the iron clogs and laws of Imperial Rome? No! They are to be the Plain Men of this emigré from Belfast. They are to revel in their plainness until, coupled with the discomfort of the still seething slums, they will find themselves defacing all that the nation held on to through years of real national struggles to preserve. This is the real alienator, the real sender to Siberia of the genial people who are gifted to rise to heights of beauty and truth. The makers of the Plain Men—"I can be twice as ugly as you and we'll be great Irishmen then." What death watch beetle has crept into the timbers of our roof-tree? What channering worm is under ground?
If you once get those who look to you, those whose confidence you have engaged to become proud of their plainness because it gives them relief from the obligations and even the decencies of life, if you can cajole the people who put up with pauperism because it gives them a monopoly of patriotism and shortcomings become distinctions, you can feed them on their own ordure. You may fool them for a time but not for a long time. This is a very well-stocked country. For a while the shop-keeper can consume his own shop; but he will be unable to relinquish it. Next year those who look to him for even a small supply will find that he has not laid it in. It will be no use sending ukases to the farmer to raise stock to be communised. The inducement to a stock raiser is a market, not a commissar. A blow will have been struck at the immemorial wealth of Ireland. Since history began the country's wealth, even its money, has been live-stock. The live-stock is worth many millions. We are told that the cattle trade is collapsing in foreign countries. Its absence is most noticeable to Senator Connolly in those countries where it never existed. And even if it did what would he know about it since where it does thrive he is bent on wiping it out. The day of reckoning with the wreckers cannot be deferred. They may attempt to side-step and evade the issue. We may hear from them that they "have gone as far as constitutional methods admit." They may offer the ruined country to its "rightful owners" and expect to be included among its rightful revolutionary leaders. But oh, no! the specialists in failure will find it hard to escape in the smoke. They may be reminded of their promises and asked where did they get a mandate from the country to beggar it and to betray it.
Our Spartacus may lurk in an ashpit of extinct eruptions, but he, though he may ruin, is incapable of planning one single comely dwelling in his adopted land. Now that he is in closer touch with the Japanese than the Irish he may learn from them a custom full enough of chivalry to be after his own heart. It is known as "honourable despatch," whereby a man who has served his country ill may pay by his valour for oblivion. But like his tariffs he would pass hari-kari on to the farmers and we would fall even further short of the 17,000,000 subjects of his Imperial Irish dreams.
It is too late to recapture a deliberately lost market. But it is not too late to claim an Ireland that is not, in order to be Irish, necessarily a land of mist and gloom and bad feeling. It is too late to avail ourselves of the British offer of trade facilities; but it is not too late to avoid bitterness and pusillanimity, the curse, not of Cromwell, but of Connolly.
