The Sovereign People - P. H. Pearse (Part Two)
Today we publish part two of a three-part series of ‘The Sovereign People’, written by Pádraig Pearse in early 1916. Pádraig Pearse finished ‘The Sovereign People’ on March 31st, less than four weeks before the Easter Rising. For Pearse, it was to be his last word and testament as to what Irish freedom and nationhood meant to him. Within its few pages he aligns his definition of Republicanism with that of Wolfe Tone, Mitchell and Lalor. That the sovereignty of the Irish people implies their full control of all the moral and material resources of the nation.
The second part focuses on the writings of James Fintan Lalor, who stood out among the Young Irelanders of his day in calling not just for a strike for independence but for a social revolution against the British introduced system of landlordism. Lalor was opposed to the entire system whereby rent was extracted from poor peasants for the benefit of private individuals. He argued that “such a war would propagate throughout Europe.”
If you agree with Pearse’s analysis and you’re ready to help bring about his vision then get in touch today here!
I assert, then, the divine right of the people, ‘God’s grant to Adam and his poor children for ever’, to have and to hold this good green earth. And I assert the sovereignty and the sanctity of the nations, which are the people embodied and organised. The nation is a natural division, as natural as the family, and as inevitable. That is one reason why a nation is holy and why an empire is not holy. A nation is knit together by natural ties, ties mystic and spiritual, and ties human and kindly; an empire is at best held together by ties of mutual interest, and at worst by brute force. The nation is the family in large; an empire is a commercial corporation in large. The nation is of God; the empire is of man – if it be not of the devil.
The democratic truths that I have just stated are implicit in Tone and in Davis, though there was this difference between the two men, that Tone had a manly contempt for ‘the gentry (as they affect to call themselves)’, while Davis had a little sentimental regard for them. But Davis loved the people, as every Nationalist must love the people, seeing that the people are the nation; his nationalism was not mere devotion to an abstract idea, it was a devotion to the actual men and women who make up this nation of Ireland, a belief in their rights, and a resolve to establish them as the owners of Ireland and the masters of all her destinies. There is no other sort of nationalism than this, the nationalism which believes in and seeks to enthrone the sovereign people. Tone had appealed to ‘that numerous and respectable class, the men of no property’, and in that gallant and characteristic phrase he had revealed his perception of a great historic truth, namely, that in Ireland ‘the gentry (as they affect to call themselves)’ have uniformly been corrupted by England, and the merchants and middle-class capitalists have, when not corrupted, been uniformly intimidated, whereas the common people have for the most part remained unbought and unterrified. It is, in fact, true that the repositories of the Irish tradition, as well the spiritual tradition of nationality as the kindred tradition of stubborn physical resistance to England, have been the great, splendid, faithful, common people – that dumb multitudinous throng which sorrowed during the penal night, which bled in ’98, which starved in the Famine; and which is here still – what is left of it – unbought and unterrified. Let no man be mistaken as to who will be lord in Ireland when Ireland is free. The people will be lord and master. The people who wept in Gethsemane, who trod the sorrowful way, who died naked on a cross, who went down into hell, will rise again glorious and immortal, will sit on the right hand of God, and will come in the end to give judgment, a judge just and terrible.
Tone sounded the gallant reveillé of democracy in Ireland. The man who gave it its battle-cries was James Fintan Lalor.
Lalor was a fiery spirit, as of some angelic missionary, imprisoned for a few years in a very frail tenement, drawing his earthly breath in pain; but strong with a great spiritual strength and gifted with a mind which had the trenchant beauty of steel. What he had to say for his people (and for all mankind) was said in a very few words. This gospel of the Sovereign People that Fintan Lalor delivered is the shortest of the gospels; but so precious is it, so pregnant with meaning in its every word, that to express its sense one would have to quote it almost as it stands; which indeed one could do in a tract a very little longer than this. No one who wrote as little as Lalor has ever written so well. In his first letter he laments that he has never learned the art of literary expression; in The Faith of a Felon he says that he has all his life been destitute of books. Commonly, it is by reading and writing that a man learns to write greatly. Lalor, who had read little and written nothing, wrote greatly from the moment he began to write. The Lord God must have inspired the poor crippled recluse, for no mortal man could of himself have uttered the things he uttered.
James Fintan Lalor, in Duffy’s phrase ‘announced himself’ in Irish politics in 1847, and he announced himself ‘with a voice of assured confidence and authority.’ In a letter to Duffy, which startled all the Young Irelanders and which set Mitchel’s heart on fire, he declared himself one of the people, one who therefore knew the people: and he told the young men that there was neither strength nor even a disposition among the people to carry on O’Connell’s Repeal, but that there was strength in the people to carry national independence if national independence were associated with something else.
A mightier question is in the land – one beside which Repeal dwarfs down to a petty parish question; one on which Ireland may not alone try her own right but try the right of the world; on which she would be not merely an asserter of old principles, often asserted, and better asserted before her, an humble and feeble imitator and follower of other countries – but an original inventor, propounder, and propagandist, in the van of the earth, and heading the nations; on which her success or her failure alike would never be forgotten by man, but would make her for ever a lodestar of history; on which Ulster would be not ‘on her flank’ but at her side, and on which, better and best of all, she need not plead in humble petitions her beggarly wrongs and how beggarly she bore them, nor plead any right save the right of her MIGHT. . .
Repeal may perish with all who support it sooner than I will consent to be fettered on this question, or to connect myself with any organised body that would ban or merge, in favour of Repeal or any other measure, that greatest of all our rights on this side of heaven – God’s grant to Adam and his poor children for ever, when He sent them from Eden in His wrath and bid them go work for their bread. Why should I name it?
His proposals as to means thrilled the young orators and debaters as the ringing voice of an angel might thrill them:
As regards the use of none but legal means, any means and all means might be made illegal by Act of Parliament, and such pledge, therefore, is passive obedience. As to the pledge of abstaining from the use of any but moral force, I am quite willing to take such pledge, if, and provided, the English Government agree to take it also; but ‘if not, not.’ Let England pledge not to argue the question by the prison, the convict-ship, or the halter; and I will readily pledge not to argue it in any form of physical logic. But dogs tied and stones loose are no bargain. Let the stones be given up; or unmuzzle the wolf-dog. . .
At Duffy’s invitation Lalor developed his doctrines in two letters to the Nation, one addressed to the landlords and one to the people. To the landlords he spoke this ominous warning:
Refuse it to be Irishmen, and you commit yourself to the position of paupers, to the mercy of English Ministers and English members; you throw your very existence on English support, which England soon may find too costly to afford; you lie at the feet of events; you lie in the way of a people and the movement of events and the march of a people shall be over you.
The essence of Lalor’s teaching is that the right to the material ownership of a nation’s soil co-exists with the right to make laws for the nation and that both are inherent in the same authority, the Sovereign People. He held in substance that Separation from England would be valueless unless it put the people – the actual people and not merely certain rich men – of Ireland in effectual ownership and possession of the soil of Ireland; as for a return to the status quo before 1800, it was to him impossible and unthinkable. When Mitchel’s United Irishman was suppressed in 1848, Martin’s Irish Felon, with Lalor as its standard-bearer and spokesman, stepped into the breach; and in an article entitled The Rights of Ireland in the first issue of that paper (June 24, 1848) Lalor delivered the new gospel. A long passage must be quoted in full; but it can be quoted without any comment, for it is self-luminous:
Without agreement as to our objects we cannot agree on the course we should follow. It is requisite the paper should have but one purpose; and the public should understand what that purpose is. Mine is not to repeal the Union, or restore Eighty-two. This is not the year ’82, this is the year ’48. For repeal I never went into ‘Agitation’, and will not go into insurrection. On that question, I refuse to arm, or to act in any mode; and the country refuses. O’Connell made no mistake when he pronounced it not worth the price of one drop of blood; and for myself, I regret it was not left in the hands of Conciliation Hall, whose lawful property it was, and is. Moral force and repeal, the means and the purpose, were just fitted to each other – Arcades ambo, balmy Arcadians both. When the means were limited, it was only proper and necessary to limit the purpose. When the means were enlarged, that purpose ought to have been enlarged also. Repeal, in its vulgar meaning, I look on as utterly impracticable by any mode of action whatever; and the constitution of ’82 was absurd, worthless, and worse than worthless. The English Government will never concede or surrender to any species of moral force whatsoever; and the country peasantry will never arm and fight for it – neither will I. If I am to stake life and fame, it must assuredly be for something better and greater, more likely to last, more likely to succeed, and better worth success. And a stronger passion, a higher purpose, a nobler and more needful enterprise is fermenting in the hearts of the people. A mightier question moves Ireland to-day than that of merely repealing the Act of Union. Not the constitution that Wolfe Tone died to abolish, but the constitution that Tone died to obtain – independence; full and absolute independence for this island, and for every man within this island. Into no movement that would leave an enemy’s garrison in possession of all our lands, masters of our liberties, our lives, and all our means of life and happiness – into no such movement will a single man of the greycoats enter with an armed hand, whatever the town population may do. On a wider fighting field, with stronger positions and greater resources than are afforded by the paltry question of Repeal, must we close for our final struggle with England, or sink and surrender.
Ireland her own – Ireland her own, and all therein, from the sod to the sky. The soil of Ireland for the people of Ireland, to have and hold from God alone who gave it – to have and to hold to them and their heirs forever, without suit or service, faith or fealty, rent or render, to any power under Heaven. . . When a greater and more ennobling enterprise is on foot, every inferior and feebler project or proceeding will soon be left in the hands of old women, of dastards, imposters, swindlers, and imbeciles. All the strength and manhood of the island – all the courage, energies, and ambition – all the passion, heroism, and chivalry – all the strong men and strong minds – all those that make revolutions will quickly desert it, and throw themselves into the greater movement, throng into the larger and loftier undertaking, and flock round the banner that flies nearest the sky. There go the young, the gallant, the gifted, the daring; and there, too, go the wise. For wisdom knows that in national action littleness is more fatal than the wildest rashness; that greatness of object is essential to greatness of effort, strength, and success; that a revolution ought never to take its stand on low or narrow ground, but seize on the broadest and highest ground it can lay hands on; and that a petty enterprise seldom succeeds. Had America aimed or declared for less than independence, she would, probably, have failed, and been a fettered slave to-day.
Not to repeal the Union, then, but the conquest – not to disturb or dismantle the empire, but to abolish it utterly for ever – not to fall back on ’82, but act up to ’48 – not to resume or restore an old constitution, but found a new nation and raise up a free people, and strong as well as free, and secure as well as strong, based on a peasantry rooted like rocks in the soil of the land – this is my object, as I hope it is yours; and this, you may rest assured, is the easier, as it is the nobler and more pressing enterprise.
Lalor proceeds to develop his teaching as to the ownership of the soil of Ireland by its people:
The principle I state, and mean to stand upon, is this: that the entire ownership of Ireland, moral and material, up to the sun and down to the centre, is vested of right in the people of Ireland; that they, and none but they, are the land-owners and law-makers of this island; that all laws are null and void not made by them, and all titles to land invalid not conferred or confirmed by them, and that this full right of ownership may and ought to be asserted by any and all means which God has put in the power of man. In other, if not plainer words, I hold and maintain that the entire soil of a country belongs of right to the entire people of that country, and is the rightful property, not of any one class, but of the nation at large, in full effective possession, to let to whom they will, on whatever tenures, terms, rents, services, and conditions they will; one condition, however, being unavoidable and essential, the condition that the tenant shall bear full, true, and undivided fealty and allegiance to the nation, and the laws of the nation whose lands he holds, and own no allegiance whatsoever to any other prince, power, or people, or any obligation of obedience or respect to their will, orders, or laws. I hold, further, and firmly believe, that the enjoyment by the people of this right of first ownership of the soil is essential to the vigour and vitality of all other rights, to their validity, efficacy, and value; to their secure possession and safe exercise. For let no people deceive themselves, or be deceived by the words, and colours, and phrases, and forms of a mock freedom, by constitutions, and charters, and articles, and franchise. These things are paper and parchment, waste and worthless. Let laws and institutions say what they will, this fact will be stronger than all laws, and prevail against them – the fact that those who own your lands will make your laws, and command your liberties and your lives. But this is tyranny and slavery; tyranny in its widest scope and worst shape; slavery of body and soul, from the cradle to the coffin – slavery with all its horrors, and with none of its physical comforts and security; even as it is in Ireland, where the whole community is made up of tyrants, slaves, and slave-drivers. . .
As to the question of dealing with land-owners, Lalor re-echoes Tone and Davis:
There are, however, many landlords, perhaps, and certainly a few, not fairly chargeable with the crimes of their order; and you may think it hard they should lose their lands. But recollect the principle I assert would make Ireland, in fact, as she is of right, mistress and queen of all those lands; that she, poor lady, had ever a soft heart and grateful disposition; and that she may, if she please, in reward of allegiance, confer new titles or confirm the old. Let us crown her a queen; and then – let her do with her lands as a queen may do.
In case of any existing interest, of what nature soever, I feel assured that no question but one would need to be answered. Does the owner of that interest assent to swear allegiance to the people of Ireland, and to hold in fee from the Irish nation? If he assent he may be assured he will suffer no loss. No eventual or permanent loss I mean; for some temporary loss he must assuredly suffer. But such loss would be incidental and inevitable to any armed insurrection whatever, no matter on what principle the right of resistance should be resorted to. If he refuses, then I say – away with him – out of this land with him – himself and all his robber rights and all the things himself and his rights have brought into our island – blood and tears, and famine, and the fever that goes with famine.
In the issue of the Irish Felon for July 8, Lalor, expecting suppression and arrest, wrote The Faith of a Felon – a statement which, ill-framed and ill-connected though he knew it to be, he firmly believed to ‘carry the fortunes of Ireland’, and sent ‘forth to its fate, to conquer or be conquered.’ It was conquered for the time, but, like such immortal things, it was destined to rise again. In it Lalor re-affirmed his principles and re-stated his programme. The idea of the ownership of the soil by the whole people, which is his essential contribution to modern political thought, was in this statement put more clearly even than before:
What forms the right of property in land? I have never read in the direction of that question. I have all my life been destitute of books. But from the first chapter of Blackstone’s second book, the only page I ever read on the subject, I know that jurists are unanimously agreed in considering ‘first occupancy’ to be the only true original foundation on the right of property and possession of land.
Now, I am prepared to prove that ‘occupancy ’ wants every character and quality that could give it moral efficacy as a foundation of right. I am prepared to prove this, when ‘occupancy’ has first been defined. If no definition can be given, I am relieved from the necessity of showing any claim founded on occupancy to be weak and worthless.
To any plain understanding the right of private property is very simple. It is the right of man to possess, enjoy, and transfer the substance and use of whatever HE HAS HIMSELF CREATED. This title is good against the world; and it is the sole and only title by which a valid right of absolute private property can possibly vest.
But no man can plead any such title to a right of property in the substance of the soil.
The earth, together with all it spontaneously produces, is the free and common property of all mankind, of natural right, and by the grant of God – and all men being equal, no man, therefore, has a right, to appropriate exclusively to himself any part or portion thereof, except with and by the common consent and agreement of all other men.
The sole original right of property in land which I acknowledge to be morally valid, is this right of common consent and agreement. Every other I hold to be fabricated and fictitious, null, void, and of no effect.
As for Lalor’s programme of action, it was in brief:
To refuse all rent and arrears beyond the value of the overplus of harvest remaining after due provision for the tenants’ subsistence for twelve months.
To resist eviction under the English law of ejection.
To refuse all rent to the usurping proprietors, until the people, the true proprietors, had decided in national congress what rents were to be paid, and to whom.
That the people should decide that rents should ‘be paid to themselves, the people, for public purposes, and for behoof and benefit of them, the entire general people.’
Lalor saw clearly that this programme might, and almost certainly would, lead to armed revolution. If so –
Welcome be the will of God. We must only try to keep our harvest, to offer a peaceful, passive resistance, to barricade the island, to break up the roads, to break down the bridges – and, should need be, and favourable occasions offer, surely we may venture to try the steel…
It has been said to me that such a war, on the principles I propose, would be looked on with detestation by Europe. I assert the contrary. I say such a war would propagate itself throughout Europe. Mark the words of this prophecy: – The principle I propound goes to the foundations of Europe, and, sooner or later, will cause Europe to outrise. Mankind will yet be masters of the earth. The rights of the people to make the laws – this produced the first great modern earth-quake, whose latest shocks, even now, are heaving in the heart of the world. The right of the people to own the land – this will produce the next. Train your hands, and your son’s hands, gentlemen of earth, for you and they will yet have to use them. I want to put Ireland foremost, in the van of the world, at the head of the nations – to set her aloft in the blaze of the sun, and to make her for ages the lodestar of history. Will she take the path I point out – the path to be free, and famed, and feared, and followed – the path that goes sunward?. . .
A fortnight later, in the Irish Felon for July 22, Lalor wrote the article Clearing the Decks, which was intended to declare the revolution. It was worthy of a braver response than it received:
If Ireland be conquered now – or what would be worse – if she fails to fight, it will certainly not be the fault of the people at large, of those who form the rank and file of the nation. The failure and fault will be that of those who have assumed to take the office of commanding and conducting the march of a people for liberty without, perhaps, having any commission from nature to do so, or natural right, or acquired requisite. The general population of this island are ready to find and furnish everything which can be demanded from the mass of a people – the members, the physical strength, the animal daring, the health, hardihood, and endurance. No population on earth of equal amount would furnish a more effective military conscription. We want only competent leaders – men of courage and capacity – men whom nature meant and made for leaders. . . These leaders are yet to be found. Can Ireland furnish them? It would be a sheer and absurd blasphemy against nature to doubt it. The first blow will bring them out. . .
In the case of Ireland now there is but one fact to deal with, and one question to be considered. The fact is this – that there are at present in occupation of our country some 40,000 armed men, in the livery and service of England; and the question is – how best and soonest to kill and capture these 40,000?. . .
Meanwhile, however, remember this – that somewhere, and somehow, and by somebody, a beginning must be made. Who strikes the first blow for Ireland? Who wins a wreath that will be green forever?
That was Lalor’s last word. The issue containing the article was seized, the Irish Felon suppressed, and Martin and Lalor arrested. In a few months Lalor was released from prison a dying man. From his sick bed he tried to rally the beaten forces; he actually went down into North Munster and endeavoured to lead the people. This effort – the almost forgotten rising of 1849 – failed. Lalor died in Dublin a few weeks after. But his word has marched on, conquering.