The Doctrine of Force

"Force rules the world, has ruled it, shall rule it" : thus Longfellow, and it would seem that the spirit of the age is witness of the truth of the expression.

Physical force is in the ascendant, moral force, like a timid weakling, hides its head before the thunderbolt. It is a pity that it should be so, a thousand pities, but men must gird their souls to face facts.

Those who will not or cannot fight can only surrender: there is no other alternative. In war there is scant mercy. To be merciful is to be beaten. In war, likewise, almost every method of destroying the foe is permissable. This raises a question.

Are we in the Gaelic League too merciful and too gentlemanly in our methods of warfare, too hide-bound to moral force conventions, too easily tricked by official rascaldom; in other words, have we failed to push home our attack through fear of infringing the etiquette of constitutional warfare?

The point is worth examination. For twenty years we have conducted an agitation in favour of Irish in the schools, in the training colleges, and in the conduct of official business. We have had at our back the best intellect of Ireland and the more or less active support of the great mass of the Irish people.

What is the result? We have received promises, cajolery, flattery, point-blank refusal, according to the mood of our rulers, and little else. Now at last we are up against a stone wall. The same Government which can spend Irish blood and treasure like water in a Continental war, from which Ireland stands to lose everything and gain nothing, refuses a few paltry thousands to ensure the proper leaching of the Irish language in the schools of Ireland.

It refuses to make it a compulsory subject in the training colleges; it ignores it officially. It is a pretty picture. What has the Gaelic League been doing all these years! It has bean tacitly assuming the existence of a constitutional Government in Ireland and basing its policy accordingly. There is not now, and never has been, a constitutional Government in Ireland. The British Government in Ireland is a Government ruling by and only yielding to force. It is a basic misconception of the facts of the situation to assume otherwise.

Sooner or later facts have to be faced. Had the Gaelic League twenty years ago made Irish in the schools a burning question in more senses than one, had it made it possible for the sun's rays to penetrate into the dark recesses of Tyrone House, had it drawn a ringed fence around the training colleges, had its members faced the terrors of the dock and the prison, the Gaelic League would be less loved to-day but more feared.

Long ago its demands would have been granted. The Treasury would not stint of its thousands, nor would its Irish satellites knife the language in the dark, as they are now doing, without a protest being raised. It will be said that at long last we are on the eve of constitutional Government in Ireland.

Heaven grant that it may be so, that instead of appealing to Castle Boards and Shylock-hearted Treasury officials we will be appealing to our own flesh and blood to save our Irish language from death; but should the fates rule otherwise, then there is only one alternative left, and that a fighting one, not with gloves on, but with the gloves off—a fight in every corner of the land by constitutional and unconstitutional methods when, and how, and where we can, a fight to the death for the one thing we hold dearer than life.

There is work for us to do in the coming days. Let the rotten Press of Ireland obscure the issue as it will, this is the one war into which we will put all the energies of our lives and souls. Away with fear and moral cowardice. We fight for Ireland's honour, for her place amongst the nations, for all that the generations of Irishmen and women stretching hack to the dawn of time knew and loved. Graven on a stone in the martyrs' plot in Glasnevin are the following lines. The dead appeals to the living. Let not the appeal fall on deaf cars and stony hearts :—

"Come forth, ye eagle-eyed and young,
Whose veins are hot, whose souls are true;
Come forth the battling host among And raise the 'ancient' flag anew.

And ye, the weary in the strife,
Who've braved the bursting of the gale,
Rise up refreshed to youthful life,
And aid the cause that must not fail."

Ogánac