UNTIL a few years ago this chapter would have been entitled“Great Britain and Ireland”. Then Man improved upon the handiwork of Nature and turned a geographical unit into two separate entities.And all the obedient scrivener can do is to follow suit and give each of the two countries a separate chapter.Any other course might lead to far-reaching complications, and I would hate to see the Irish Navy sail up the Hudson River to demand an apology for this“insufferable insult to the national pride of Saorstat Eireann”.

Dinosaurs drew no maps, but the rocks remained behind to tell their story. And they are all there—the igneous rocks, volcanic products which got cooled off near the surface of the earth, and the granite, born under pressure, and the sedimentary rocks, slowly settling down along the bottoms of lakes and seas, and the metamorphic rocks, like slate and marble, which were really limestone and clay, changed into more valuable materials by the subtle chemistry of the great depths.

They are all there, lying about in disordered profusion, like the furniture in a house struck by a cyclone. They provide us with a geological laboratory of rare interest.They may account for the fact that England, which usually takes to the shooting of rabbits with greater zeal and interest than to the hunting of scientific facts, has given the world so many first-rate geologists.It may of course be the other way around:because there were a great many excellent geologists, we learned more about the geology of England than of any other country.But that hardly seems likely.Swimming champions are usually found near the water and rarely in the heart of the Kalahari Desert.

And so the geology was there and the geologists were there, and what did they tell each other about the origin of the land of their birth?

Try to forget the map of Europe as you have come to know it today. Imagine a world which has only recently emerged from below the surface of the sea, which is still rocking with the effort of creation.Picture to yourself vast continents rising high and bleak above the waters, rent asunder by eruptions that crush the rocks as a manhole explosion in New York will split the pavement of the streets.Meanwhile the forces of Nature's laboratory continue their patient labors.Incessantly the winds blow from the ocean carrying billions of tons of moisture on their way from west to east, drenching the land and giving it moisture, covering it with a wide blanket of grass and ferns, arranging for the maintenance of shrubs and trees.Day and night and night and day and year after year after year, the tireless waves beat and pound and grind and file and crunch and rasp until the shores of the land wilt and crumble as the snow melts and crumbles before the rays of the insistent sun.And then suddenly the ice—the slow, merciless wall of death that groaningly hoists itself across the steepest side of the highest mountain-ranges, that rumbles ponderously down the slopes of wide valleys, that fills deep gorges and narrow ravines with frozen water and piece of rock from the wasted hilltops.

The sun shines—the rain rains—the ice cracks and creeps—the waves gnaw—the seasons follow each other and when Man at last makes his appearance, this is what he finds. A long narrow strip of land, cut off from the rest of the world by a flooded valley which reaches all the way from the Arctic to the Gulf of Biscay, another high plateau rising well above the waves and separated from the narrow strip by an unruly and choppy sea—a few lonely rocks sticking out well above the surface of the sea, a perching place for gulls rather than a habitat for Man.

That vaguely, very vaguely, was the way England came into being. Now let us look at the modern map and see what that shows us.

From the Shetland Islands to Land's End is the same distance as between the middle of Hudson Bay or southern Alaska and the northern frontier of the United States, or, in terms understandable to the average European, from Oslo in Norway to Prague in Bohemia. That means that England, one of the most densely populated countries in the world, with 45,000,000 people, is situated between the same degree of latitude as the peninsula of Kamchatka(opposite Alaska)which also runs from about 50°lat.to 60°lat.,and where less than 7000 people just about manage to keep themselves from starving by living on an exclusive diet of fish.

On the east, England is bounded by the North Sea, which is really nothing but an old depression which has gradually run full of water. Again a single glimpse at the map will tell you more than a thousand words.There on the right(the east)is France.Then we get something that looks like a trench across a road, the British Channel and the North Sea.Then the great central plain of England with London in the deepest hollow.Then the high mountains of Wales.Another depression, the Irish Sea, the great central Irish plain, the hills of Ireland, a few lonely rocks further towards the west, rearing their tops above the shallow sea.Finally the rock of St.Kilda(uninhabited since a year ago as it was too hard to reach)and then suddenly down we go, down, down, down, for there the real ocean begins and the last of the vast European and Asiatic continent, both submerged and semi-submerged, here comes to an end.

As for the different seas and bays and channels that surround England, I had better mention them in some detail. I have done my best not to clutter this book with unnecessary names which you would forget as soon as you had turned to the next page.But here we are on classical ground, for this strange little island has influenced the life of every man, woman and child on the whole of the planet for at least four entire centuries.That, however, has not been entirely a matter of chance or racial superiority.That the English have made the best of their opportunities is undoubtedly true.But Nature had given them a tremendous advantage when she placed their lovely island right in the heart of the greatest amount of land in the eastern hemisphere.If you want to realize what that means, think of poor Australia, lost amidst an endless expanse of water, left entirely to its own devices, with no neighbors, with no chance to get new ideas from anywhere;and then compare Australia's position with that of England, which, like a spider in a net, was equally far removed from all the four corners of the world, yet, unlike the spider, was safely protected from the rest of humanity by a convenient moat of salty water.

Of course this peculiar location meant nothing as long as the Mediterranean was still the center of civilization. Up to the end of the fifteenth century, England was just another slightly remote island, holding about the same position in men's minds as Iceland does today.“Have you ever been to Iceland?”“No, but I have an aunt who went there once.Funny place—interesting island—but too far away—means five days of seasickness.”

That is exactly what England meant to the people of the first ten centuries of our era-three or four days of seasickness—and remember, a Roman galleon was even less comfortable than a seven hundred ton steamer from Leith to Reykjavik.

Gradually, however, the knowledge about these outskirts of civilization increased. The painted savages who lived in small round huts, sunk well into the ground and surrounded by a low earthen wall, were tamed by the Romans who, listening to their speech, came to the conclusion that they must belong to the same racial stock as the Celts of northern Gaul and who found them on the whole docile and willing to pay tribute without talking too much about their“rights”.It was doubtful anyway whether they had any“rights”to the soil they occupied, for it appeared almost certain that they were newcomers and had taken the land away from an older race of invaders of whom the traces could be found here and there among the less accessible regions of the east and west.

The Roman occupation of England lasted, roughly speaking, four centuries, almost as long as the time during which the white man has been the dominating race in America. Suddenly, almost abruptly, it came to an end.For almost five hundred years the Romans had been able to keep the hungry Teutonic tribes out of their European domains.Then the badly defended barriers gave way, the flood of barbarians swept across southern and western Europe.Rome recalled her foreign garrisons.Temporarily, of course, for no empire ever acknowledges itself beaten until years after it has ceased to exist.A few regiments were left behind to guard the high earthen wall which protected the plains of Britain from the invasions of the savages who dwelled among the impassable mountain-ranges of Scotland.Other castles guarded the boundaries of Wales.

But one day the regular supply ships failed to come from across the water. That meant that Gaul had been lost to the enemy.From that moment on the Romans in England were cut off from the mother country and connections were never reestablished.A little later news appeared from the coastal towns that foreign ships had been seen off the mouth of the Humber and the Thames, and that villages in Durham and York and Norfolk and Suffolk and Essex had been attacked and plundered.The Romans had never dreamed of fortifying their eastern frontier because it had not been necessary.But now some mysterious pressure(whether hunger or wanderlust or an enemy in the rear, we shall never know),which had pushed the advance guard of the Teutons across the Danube and through the mountain passes of the Balkans and the Alps, was carrying raiding parties of Saxon pirates all the way from Denmark and Holstein to the shores of Britain.

The Roman governors, the Roman garrisons, the Roman women and children who must have inhabited those charming villas of which we continue to find the remnants, disappeared from view—disappeared as mysteriously and silently as the earliest white settlers along the coast of Virginia and Maine vanished from the face of the earth. They dissolved into space.Some of them were murdered by their own servants.The women were married by kind-hearted natives—a strange fate for a proud race of conquerors, but one that has overtaken more than one group of“colonials”who have neglected to take the last ship home.

Thereafter chaos—and groups of savage ax-men from Scotland and Caledonia, industriously killing off their Celtic neighbors who had grown soft during the centuries when Rome had acted as the national and international policeman. Then the usual mistake made under such distressing circumstances—the bright idea that invariably spells ultimate disaster:“Let us call in a few strong men from somewhere else and hire them to do our fighting for us.”The strong men came from the marshes and the plains between the Eider and the Elbe.They belonged to a tribe called the Saxons, which tells us nothing about their origin, for northern Germany was full of Saxons.

Why they should ever have become identified with the Angles is another problem that will probably never be solved. The term Anglo-Saxon was invented centuries after they had made their first appearance upon the English scene.Anglo-Saxon is now a slogan which makes people fight:the Anglo-Saxon blood—the Anglo-Saxon traditions.Well, one fairy story is as good as the next, and therefore if it makes people happy to think themselves superior to all other people, why not?But the historian must regretfully announce that the Angles as a racial unit are the little brothers of the Lost Tribes of Israel—they have often been mentioned in spurious chronicles of the past but no one has ever been able to find a trace of their whereabouts.As for the Saxons, they were about on a par with the hordes of northern European immigrants one might have seen in the steerage of an ocean liner of thirty years ago.But they were strong.They worked and fought and played and plundered with equal zest.They were given five centuries in which to organize the land over which they now ruled as hereditary masters, and during that period they were able to force their own tongue upon the poor Celtic natives, who rapidly lost all recollection of the few Latin words they had pickled up while working in the kitchen of some noble Roman lady.Then they in turn were thrown out of house and home by still another wave of Teuton immigrants.

In the year 1066 England became a Norman dependency, and for a third time the British Isles were forced to acknowledge a sovereign from over the seas. Soon, however, the tail was wagging the dog.The British colony proved to be a more profitable investment than the temporary motherland in France and the Normans left the continent and settled down in England for good.

Their final defeat and the loss of their properties in France were a blessing in disguise for the English. They ceased to be forever looking towards the continent and they became conscious of the existence of the Atlantic Ocean.Even so, England would probably not have started upon her maritime career when she did if HenryⅧhad not fallen in love with a lady by the name of Anne Boleyn, who informed him that the road to her heart led through a well-lighted church.This had meant a divorce from His Majesty’s lawful spouse, the mother of Bloody Mary, and this had caused a definite break between England and Rome upon the subject of the Pope’s supremacy over all Christendom.Since Spain took the side of the Pope, England must then learn how to sail ships and defend herself, or else perish as an independent nation and become a Spanish province.In this curious, roundabout way, a divorce quarrel was the real cause which taught the English how to become expert navigators;and having learned their new trade, the marvellous geographic position of their home country did the rest.

The change, however, did not take place without a very severe domestic struggle. No one can reasonably expect one class of society to commit suicide for the benefit of another, and it was no more than natural that the feudal chiefs who had ruled supreme ever since the Norman conquest should have tried to prevent their country from giving up its agricultural habits and going in for commerce on a world-wide scale.Feudalism and capitalism have always been each other's sworn enemies.The medieval knight looked down upon business as something totally unworthy of free men.A merchant in his eyes was something like a bootlegger.You used him but did not allow him to come in by the front door.Trade therefore was mostly left to foreigners, mainly to Germans, to people who came from the North Sea and the Baltic, the famous“Easterlings”who gave England its first notion of a coin of an absolute and unquestionable value, the“Easterling's pound”—the pound sterling of today.The Jews were expelled and were so rigorously kept out of the country that even Shakespeare can have known his Shylock merely from hearsay.The coastal towns did a little fishing, but the main occupation of the country was and for centuries to come remained the pursuit of agriculture.Nature had greatly favored the land for this purpose, more especially for stock-breeding, for the soil was often too rocky to raise grain, while offering abundant fodder for cows and sheep.

During two-thirds of the year the winds blew(and continue to blow)from the west, which meant rain, as any one will remember who ever was obliged to spend part of a winter in London. Today agriculture, as I told you when we talked of the northern European states, is no longer as absolutely dependent upon Nature as it used to be a thousand or even a hundred years ago.We can't as yet make rain, but the chemical engineer has taught us how to overcome many difficulties which the contemporaries of Chaucer and Queen Bess accepted as acts of God against which there was neither remedy nor redress.There again the geological structure of the island proved a great boon to the landowners of the east.A cross-section of the British Isles shows that they resemble a soup plate, tilted much higher in the west than in the east.It is a result of the fact, mentioned before, that England is part of a very old continent, that the oldest mountains which used to cover the east have been entirely worn away by water and wind, while the younger rock formations of the west are still standing upright and won't be gone before another ten or fifteen million years.These younger mountains which occupy the territory called Wales(one of the last strongholds of some of the original Celtic tongues)act as a fence to break the force of the Atlantic rainstorms ere they reach the lowlands of the east, and they temper their violence so successfully that the great eastern plain enjoys an almost ideal climate for the purpose of raising grain and cattle.

Since the invention of the steam-boat, which allows us to order our grain from the Argentine or Chicago, and since the introduction of cold storage for the purpose of transporting frozen meats from one end of the world to the other, no nation, able to pay the price, is any longer dependent upon its own farms and fields for the purpose of feeding the home population. But until a hundred years ago, the owners of the food supply were also the masters of the world.Whenever they decided to lock the doors of their larder, millions of people died a slow death of starvation.The wide plain formed by the British Channel in the south, the Severn in the west(the river that divides Wales from England and runs into the British Channel),the Humber and Mersey in the north, and the North Sea in the east was therefore the most important part of the old England, for it produced the greatest amount of food.

Of course, when I speak of a plain, I do not mean a plain in the sense of the word to which we ourselves are accustomed. The great central English plain is no flat pancake like Kansas but consists of a rolling landscape.The river Thames(which is almost as long as our own Hudson,215 miles against 315)runs through the heart of it.The Thames takes its origin among the Cotteswold Hills, famous for their sheep and for the presence of the city of Bath, where ever since the days of the Romans, the victims of British cookery have come together to partake of the hot calcium and sodium baths and fortify their constitutions by further slabs of underdone beef and half-drowned vegetables.

The Thames then flows between the Chilton Hills and the White Horse Hills, provides the University of Oxford with a convenient water supply for its rowing experiments, and finally enters the lower Thames valley, situated between the low hills of the East Anglian Ridge and the North Downs, which would run all the way to France if the strait of Dover had not eaten its way through this soft chalky substance in its laudable effort to connect the Atlantic with the North Sea.

It is on this river that the world's biggest town is situated. Like Rome and most other cities that go back to obscure and remote dates, the city of London was not an accident or the result of a sovereign's whim.It was located where it stands today as a result of sheer economic necessity.In order to get from southern England to northern England without being dependent upon the proverbially bad good will of the nefarious tribe of ferrymen, it was necessary to construct a bridge.And London arises at the exact spot where the river ceased to be navigable but was not too wide to allow the engineers of twenty centuries ago to build something that would safely carry people and merchandise from one shore to the next without getting their feet wet.

When the Romans left, a great many things were changed in the British Isles, but London remained behind and today, with more than 8,000,000 population, it is still more than an entire million ahead of New York. It covers an area five times as large as ancient Babylon, the biggest city of antiquity, and four times as large as that of Paris.For London is a city of low buildings.The Englishman, with his insistence upon privacy and his desire for being allowed to mind his own business, refuses to live in a bee-hive and as a result, London moves horizontally, whereas our American cities have a tendency to move vertically.

The heart of London, the“city”,is now merely a workshop. In the year 1800 it still had 130,000 inhabitants.The number has since shrunk to less than 14,000.But every day almost half a million people come down to the city to administer the billions of capital which England, out of her vast surplus wealth, has invested in foreign enterprises, and to supervise the distribution of those almost incredible quantities of colonial products which lie heaped up in the store-houses stretching all the way from the Tower Bridge to a distance of twenty miles below London Bridge.

As the Thames must remain open to traffic all the time, the only way to handle the shipping was by building docks and warehouses along both sides of the river. Those who want to know what international commerce really means should visit these London docks.It will give them the uncomfortable feeling that New York is after all still some sort of a provincial village, a little too far removed from the main highways of trade to be of any special importance.Eventually this may change.The center of commerce seems to be moving westward.But London still is supreme in her knowledge of the technique of foreign trade, while New York is only beginning to learn the rudiments.

But I am running ahead of my subject. I have got to get back for a moment to the English plain of the year 1500.Its entire southern rim consisted of mountains.In the extreme west lay Cornwall, the geological continuation of Brittany from which it was separated by the British Channel.Cornwall is a curious land where the Celtic tongue maintained itself until two centuries ago and where strange stone monuments, in all respects resembling those of Brittany, bear out the theory that once upon a time all these regions must have been inhabited by people of the same race.Cornwall, by the way, was the first part of England to be discovered by the sailors from the Mediterranean.The Phoenicians in their quest of lead and zinc and copper(remember that they flourished at the beginning of the metal age)used to come as far north as the Scilly Islands.There they met the savages from the fog-bound mainland and did their bartering.

The most important city of this whole region is Plymouth, a military port without much shipping except an occasional Atlantic steamer. On the other side of Cornwall lies the Bristol Channel, the“Wrong Channel”of the maps of the seventeenth century because skippers who returned from America were very apt to mistake it for the British Channel and were then shipwrecked among these treacherous waters where the tide may rise as high as forty feet.

North of the Bristol Channel lie the mountains of Wales. They were of no great importance to anybody until the discovery of their coal and iron beds and of the copper deposits of the nearby island of Anglesey which turned that part of the country into one of the richest industrial units of the entire kingdom.Cardiff, an old Roman fort, is now one of the greatest coal centers of the world.It is connected with London by means of a railroad which dives underneath the river Severn.This tunnel has gained almost as much fame in engineering circles as the bridge which connects the mainland of Wales with the island of Anglesey and the island of Holyhead, from where one starts for Kingston, the port of the city of Dublin in Ireland.

This ancient quadrangle of England, where every city and village is so hoary with age and history that I almost fear to mention their names lest I be tempted to make this a geography of England rather than the whole world, has until this day remained the backbone of the land-owning classes. In France, where large estates are not absolutely unknown but rather rare, there are ten times as many land-owners as in this part of Britain.In Denmark the proportional difference is even greater.That this class of county-squires has lost so much of its former importance and now merely survives as a social institution which teaches the rest of the world the correct way to wear golf-breeches and to kill time by killing what are sometimes called“our dumb friends,”is not due to any lack of virtue of their own but rather to that sudden change in our economic life brought about by the invention of a practical and workable steam-engine by James Watt.When that mathematically inclined instrument-maker of the University of Glasgow began to play with his grandmother's tea-kettle, steam was still a plaything used to work a few slow and laborious pumps.When he died, steam ruled supreme and land was no longer the source of riches.

It was then, during the first forty years of the last century, that the center of economic gravity, which ever since the beginning of history had lain in the south, moved northward to Lancastershire where the vapor of water set the cotton mills of Manchester a-spinning, and to Yorkshire, where steam turned Leeds and Bradford into the woollen centers of the whole world, and to the so-called Black Country where horse-power made Birmingham the breeding-place for all those millions of tons of steel plates and girders which were needed to build the ships that must carry the finished products of the British Isles to the ends of the earth.

The upheaval caused by the substitution of steam for human muscles was the most formidable revolution mankind had ever experienced. The engines, of course, were not able to think for themselves, and they needed a certain number of human attendants to feed them and tend them and tell them when it was time to begin and to stop.In return for such very simple services, the farm hands were promised what to them seemed riches.The country people listened to the lure of the city.The cities grew by leaps and bounds.The contractors for tenement houses grew rich.And within a remarkably short space of time eighty percent of the country population had moved to the towns.It was then that England accumulated that vast surplus wealth which will keep her going long after all her other assets shall have been exhausted.

Many people nowadays are asking themselves whether that point has actually been reached. Time only will tell—time, meaning the next ten or twenty years.But it will be very interesting to see what happens.The British Empire up till now has been the result of a series of accidents.In this it resembled the Roman Empire.The Roman Empire was the center of the Mediterranean civilization and it had to conquer its neighbors in order not to lose its own independence.As soon as England had become the center of the Atlantic civilization, it was obliged to follow a similar policy.Now at last the era of world wide exploitation seems to have come to an end.Commerce and civilization are beginning to move across the ocean.What only a few years ago was the heart of a vast empire is rapidly becoming an over-populated island, somewhere off the Dutch coast.

It seems too bad. But that is the way things happen on our planet.

SCOTLAND

The Romans knew of the existence of the Scotch as our own ancestors along the Atlantic seaboard knew about the existence of the Five Nations. Somewhere in the north, beyond the last line of imperial block-houses and the last of the Northumbrian hovels, there lay a land of unhospitable mountains inhabited by rough tribes of shepherds and sheep-owners.They dwelled in almost legendary simplicity, counted descent through the mother instead of the father, as all the rest of the world did, had no roads except a few trails almost too steep for a horse, and had resisted all efforts to civilize them with such ferocious violence that the best policy had seemed to be that of leaving them strictly alone.But as they were also formidable cattle-thieves and had a way of suddenly descending from their mountains to steal the sheep of the Cheviot Hills and the cows of Cumberland, it was considered wise to protect these regions by means of a high wall running all the way from the Tyne to the Solway and bid them stay out on pain of death by means of the sword or crucifixion.

This was done, and during the four centuries of Roman domination in England, the Scots, with the exception of a few punitive expeditions, were rarely exposed to the blessings of civilizaion. They continued their old commercial relations with their Celtic cousins in Ireland, but their needs were few and they rarely came in contact with the rest of the world.The ancient Roman wall is gone but even today the Scots live very much a life of their own, and they have been able to develop a culture of their own.

The fact that Scotland is such a dreadfully poor land may have helped them to retain their individuality. The greater part of their country is mountainous.Long before the appearance of Man these mountains were as high as the Alps.Erosion(wind and rain)wore them gradually away and great geological upheavals did the rest.Then came the ice, the same ice that covered Scandinavia, and the little bit of soil that had accumulated in the valleys was swept away by it.No wonder that only ten percent of the population of Scotland can maintain themselves in the Highlands.The other ninety percent are gathered together in the Lowlands, a narrow strip of land, often not more than fifty miles wide, which runs from the Clyde in the west to the Firth of Forth in the east.In this valley a wide rift between two mountain-ranges of volcanic origin(most of its castles are built on the necks of extinct volcanoes)lie the two big Scottish cities, Edinburgh, the ancient capital, and Glasgow, the modern city of iron and coal and shipbuilding and manufacturing.These two are connected by a canal.Another canal, running from the Firth of Forth to the Moray Firth, allows small vessels to go directly from the Atlantic to the North Sea without being obliged to navigate the difficult waters between John o'Groats and the Orkneys and Shetlands, remnants of the big continent that reached from Ireland to the North Cape of Norway.

But the sort of prosperity found in Glasgow is not the sort of prosperity that makes a country rich, and the average Scotch peasant spends his days getting just a little too much to eat to die of starvation but never quite enough to feel that he is really alive. This has perhaps made him a little too“careful”in spending his few hard-earned pennies but it has also taught him to depend entirely upon his own efforts, upon his own intellectual courage, regardless of what the rest of the human race may say.

The historical accident which made Queen Elizabeth die bestowing the throne of England on her Scotch cousin James of the house of Stuart, made Scotland a part of the English Kingdom. Thereafter the Scotch could enter England at will, and whenever that island proved too narrow for their ambitions they could roam across the length and the breadth of its Empire.Their thrift and intelligence and their general lack of emotions made them ideally fit for leadership among the provinces in distant climes.

THE FREE STATE OF IRELAND

And now a different story, one of those inexplicable tragedies of human destiny in which a race possessed of unlimited mental possibilities was seen to turn its back deliberately upon the task in hand and to waste its strength in the futile pursuit of some lost cause;while on a nearby island an implacable enemy was ever on the alert, stolidly relentless in its determination to humiliate and enslave those who had failed to learn that an enlightened self-interest is the primary law of existence.

Who was to blame?I don't know. Nobody knows.Geology?Hardly.Ireland, also a remnant of the great Arctic continent of prehistoric days, would have been much better off if during the period of readjustment the center of the land had not sunk so deep below the mountainous ridges of the seaboard, giving the entire country the shape of a soup-plate and making it almost impossible for the few rivers to wind their way towards the sea without developing such a large number of curves as to be practically unnavigable.

The climate?No, for it is not very different from that of England, only perhaps a trifle more moist and a little more foggy.

The geographic situation?Again the answer is no, for after the discovery of America Ireland was the nearest and the most conveniently located of all European countries to engage in commerce with the New World.

Then what?Once more I am afraid it was the incalculable human element which upset all prophecies, turned every natural advantage into a physical disability, victories into defeat and courage into a sullen acceptance of a dreary and not very cheerful fate.

Has the atmosphere anything to do with it?We have all of us heard how dearly the Irish people love their fairy stories. Every Irish play and every Irish peasant tale mentions elves and werewolves and goblins and leprechauns and, truth to tell, in these prosaic days we sometimes get a little tired of their kobolds and pixies and all their whimsical relatives.

Wandering again, you will say. What, if you please, has all this got to do with geography?Nothing with the geography that consists of the enumeration of mountains and rivers and cities and vital statistics upon the export of coal and the import of woollens.But man is not merely a tummy in search of food.He has also got a mind and the gift of imagination.And there is something unnatural about this country called Ireland.When you see other countries from a distance, you say to yourself,“There is a piece of land.It seems to be high or flat, brown or black or green.There are people there and they probably eat and drink, are all handsome or ugly, happy or miserable, and they live and die and are buried with or without the benefit of clergy.”

But with Ireland it is different. Ireland has an air of other-worldliness or rather un-worldliness.An air of solitude pervades the sky.The loneliness of the atmosphere becomes almost tangible.Whatever was true yesterday is now surrounded by doubt.What seemed so simple only a few hours before has suddenly become complicated.Just towards the west lies the deep abyss of the silent ocean.It is less mysterious than the land at your feet.

The Irish, conscious of their unhappy past, have blamed everybody and everything for that terrible fate which made them a subject race for a longer period than any other nation. But there must have been a quality in their own mental make-up, a subtle defect of perception, which allowed the uninterrupted continuation of conditions that were wellnigh unique in the annals of history.And this weakness, for all I know, may have grown out of that very soil for which they were ever ready to die but rarely prepared to live.

As soon as the Norman conquerors of England had put their recentiy acquired house more or less in order they cast covetous glances across the Irish Sea which, like the North Sea, is really a submerged valley rather than a bona fide part of the ocean. Circumstances favored their ambitious designs upon this rich island.The native chiefs were forever quarrelling among each other.All efforts to turn the entire island into a single monarchy had failed.To the contemporaries of William the Conqueror, Ireland was“the trembling sod”.The country was full of wide-eyed priests eager to bring the blessings of Christianity unto the heathen of all the world, but there were no roads, there were no bridges, there were no means of communication of any sort.All those little elements that are of such tremendous importance in making ordinary daily life more agreeable and more harmonious had been conveniently overlooked.The center of the island, beng so much lower than the border regions, was a bog and stayed a bog.For marshes have an unfortunate habit of refusing to drain themselves and when the human soul is filled with poetry, the human hand is apt to neglect washing the dishes.

The rulers of England and France, being mighty sovereigns, were on excellent terms with the powers that ruled the world at that time. Had not pope Innocent　Ⅲrushed to the aid of his beloved son John, declaring Magna Charta“null and void”and damning the nobles to perdition who had dared to force their King to sign so outrageous a document?When one of the warring Irish chieftains appealed to Henry　Ⅱfor aid against his more successful rivals(I have forgotten exactly how many there were of them at that moment)certain invisible wires were pulled in Rome and Pope Adrian　Ⅳobligingly signed a piece of parchment which granted unto His English Majesty the hereditary lordship over Ireland.A Norman army, composed of 200 knights and less than a thousand other troops, thereupon occupied Ireland and forced the feudal system upon a people who still dwelled amidst the simple virtues and pleasures of a tribal system long since obsolete in the rest of the world.That was the beginning of a quarrel which officially at least did not end until only a few years ago, which even today may break into the front page news with the suddenness and the violence of a volcanic eruption.

For the Irish landscape, like the Irish soul, lent itself ideally to a warfare of murder and ambush, a conflict in which high ideals and low deeds of treachery got themselves so hopelessly intermixed that it looked as if nothing short of the complete extermination of the original natives could settle the problem. Alas, these are no idle words.Upon several occasions the conquerors tried the experiment of wholesale slaughter and deportation, followed by the confiscation of all the worldly goods for the benefit of the King and his henchmen.What Cromwell, for example, did to the Irish after suppressing the rebellion of 1650,when the Irish with their marvellous sense of the unreal and their great intuitive gift for doing the wrong thing at the wrong moment had taken the side of worthless King Charles, is still in the memory of many who were born centuries after, that foul crime.As a result of this attempt to settle the Irish question definitely and for all time, the population of the island was reduced to 800,000 and the rate of starvation(the rate of living had never been very high)was raised to such proportions that those who could beg, borrow or steal the money necessary for a short sea voyage moved hashly to foreign shores.The others remained behind, nursing their grievances, tending their cemeteries and living on a diet of potatoes and hope that had to support them until the exigencies of the Great War brought them final relief.

Geographically speaking, Ireland has always been part of northern Europe. Spiritually speaking, Ireland until very recently was located somewhere in the heart of the Mediterranean.And even today, when the island has attained the rank of a dominion and enjoys the same wide degree of selfgovernment as Canada or Australia or South Africa, it continues to be a world apart.Instead of working for a united fatherland, the people have divided themselves into two separate and mutually hostile parts.The southern and Catholic half, containing about 75% of the entire population, enjoys the status of a“free state”and has retained Dublin as its capital.The northern half, usually known as Ulster, and consisting of six counties, inhabited almost exclusively by the descendants of Protestant immigrants, remains a part of England and continues to send its representatives directly to the British Parliament in London.

That is the situation at the moment of sending this volume to the binder. What it will be one year or ten years from now, no one can foretell.But for the first time in over a thousand years, the fate of Ireland is in Irish hands.They now are at liberty to develop their ocean ports and turn Cork and Limerick and Galway into real harbors.They can experiment with those cooperative systems of agriculture which have proved such a success in Denmark.Their dairy products are able to compete on an equal basis with those of the rest of the world.As free and independent citizens, they can at last play their role among the other nations of the world.

But can they forget their past sufficiently well to prepare intelligently for the future?