people and people than is yielded by any theorem of fixed race character going back to "Aryan" and "non-Aryan" foundations, or the soil below these, whether such theorem be Weismannised or not. It only needs to add to these considerations one more. It is a fallacy to conceive of one race or people as "older " than another, in the way many people do when they call China a "decrepit" nationality. The Chinese race or stock is physiologically no older and no more decrepit than that of the Japanese or the Bulgarians or the Zulus. But a nation as such may be described as psychologically "young" relatively to another in this sense, that it has mainly subsisted for a long time at a less advanced stage of culture than has been general for a long time in the other. In this sense China may be termed "young" in comparison with Holland. And in a somewhat similar sense Ireland is to be pronounced "young" in comparison with England. So we may say with a good Protestant Irish landlord 1 that some of the faults which are more normal in Ireland than in England are faults of "national youth," a view which perhaps puts them in a more hopeful light than the indurated faults of a world of internecine commerce. For international criticism of the self-conceited and vain-glorious sort always comes home to roost; and the research for the national faults of the Irish does but reflect a new light on the national faults of the fault-finders. It may be well then, by a thorough ventilation of this one matter, in some measure to clear the air. 1 See hereinafter, p. 290. THE SAXON AND THE CELT. I. THE QUESTION OF RACE. § 1. The Present Trouble. THE main hindrances to a right treatment of the "Irish problem" by Englishmen hitherto, apart from mere blind aversion to all change, have been two states or habits of mind which have an unlucky tendency to establish each other. One is, the inability of the bulk of the English "ruling class" to understand the Irish case on the economic side, their class bias or self-interest shutting out all scientific light: the other is the common English tendency to regard the Irish people, in the lump, as incapable alike of orderly self-government and of industrial development. Men who take the latter view to start with will naturally fail to reach any idea of a solution of the problem: they place the source of all evil in the faults of national character which they impute, and conceive of no cure save through a cure of these, which they imply to be impossible. On the other hand, men faced by the age-long trouble of Irish discontent, and unready or unable to see the economic side of the explanation, promptly fall back on the theory of "original sin," on phrases about "the Celt," and on the political doctrine called Unionism. That these alternative or complementary forms of feeling set up or strengthen the opposition to Irish Home Rule in nine cases out of ten, is within the knowledge of all practical politicians, though the fact is naturally denied by most Unionists. It matters nothing that the latter profess a contrary 1 I apply this name, not to those who have simply opposed Mr Gladstone's bills as bad measures, but to those who would reject on principle even a scheme of Federal Home Rule. A |