CASTE FIDELITY IN IRELAND.
THERE is a feature in the social war going on on the shore of Lougb Mask which deserves more attention than it has received, and that is the strange coherence of the population, their unswerving fidelity to one another. Within a certain area,
the whole people of all classes below the middle, of all occupa- tions, farmers, shopkeepers, labourers, loafers, and of both sexes, are united in a determination to excommunicate Captain Boycott. The farmers threaten him, the shopkeepers will not take profit from him, the labourers decline his wages, the loafers watch him incessantly and evilly, the women and girls curse him, his labourers, and his policemen, as they pass. The whole people is bound together in the effort to coerce him, till a carman ordered to drive to his house refuses heavy pay, and at last, driven to his wits' end, asks his would-be employer, a stranger, understood to be friendly to the people, whether he " wants to set the whole country side agin' a poor carman." Now, unan- imity of that sort—complete unanimity in a design which is not legal, and not in harmony with the temperament of the people, who are naturally kindly—is excessively difficult to pro- duce, and one would say, was specially difficult among Irishmen. They are much divided in opinion—Nationalists, for instance, not loving Land Leaguers—much inclined to resist dictation, very eager for small gains, and individually very brave. It is easy to say they are terrorised; but supposing Major Sirr in Mayo again, and threatening death or torture to anybody who communicated with Captain Boycott, every third boy in the barony would risk his life, but he would, somehow or other, find his way to Boycott Farm. An army could not starve the owner out, unless they surrounded his house with an impassable cordon of sentries ; and even then, those sentries would be eluded, or cajoled, or made drunk, or killed, or made powerless in some way. What enables the people, when they choose, so to combine that nobody can be tempted or coerced into break- ing their unwritten decree, not even those who, like the herds- men, risk starvation in consequence of it ? Clearly, it is not only terror, but opinion in some form, acting with a pressure which no individual or minor group of individuals is competent to resist.
This, however, is only pushing the question one step back. What makes popular opinion so irresistible in Ireland, where every other form of influence acts so uncertainly, and with such an impression of hesitation P Englishmen would not yield to it in that way, or Frenchmen, or even Italians outside the Nea- politan provinces. There would be differences and resistances, and outbursts of individualism, and even small treacheries, which would in a very short time sap the unanimity. This man would be aggrieved by the dictation, that man would be greedy for money, and the other man would be as perverse as a mule, till somebody or other would communicate with the agent under ban, just as somebody or other, in defiance of law, always does communicate with the interior of English prisons. The men who watch would be bribed, or animals taught to run to the house with food, or a system of secret sig- nalling set up, as has been done a hundred times for the benefit of prisoners watched and hated, e.g., during the Reign of Terror, by the immense majority of the population. We believe that the explanation is to be sought not in the strength, but in the weakness of the Irish character,—in the existence in it of certain servile qualities, gradually strengthened by centuries of oppression, till they have become instincts. One of these qualities is fidelity to the community under all circum- stances, against all above it. All men familiar with the history of subjugated or enslaved communities know that this quality, be it virtue or vice, always develops itself among them, till the ruler, be he king or master, is opposed by a corporation with which he is powerless to deal. The members of the corporation know that their eafety depends upon their secret confidence in each other, and the knowledge, handed down for generations, develops a feeling that treachery to the community is the one unpardonable sin, the most degrading of conceivable offences, one for which a man is, at best, to be left alone, till he dies or commits suicide of the shame. In an ancient Roman house- hold of a hundred slaves, there would probably be ten races, five languages, and at least two degrees of civilisation, the Greek slaves differing from the rest as gentlemen differ from the lowest roughs. The house was full of jealousies, quarrels, hatreds, and pairings-off, all tending to disunion; yet, as against the owner, so complete grew this fidelity, that the Romans despaired, even after extremities of torture, of making slaves betray one another, and passed the terrible but logical law that if the master were killed, every slave in the house at the time must be put to death. It was hopeless to try and ascertain who had killed him. William the Conqueror issued a decree similar in principle against all Saxons who might have known of a Norman's murder; and in our own time, Nihilist Russian students have been arrested. on much the same idea. The
slaves of the Southern States, absolutely as they were in their masters' power, rarely or never betrayed each other; and the masters knew perfectly that if a rising occurred, it would be at some unexpected moment. The caste laws of India are carried .
out by reliance on the development of this fidelity. The caste man does not dread an oppressor, but society generally, against which he has slowly learned to protect himself by this form of combination, and though the weakest and most timid of mortals, nothing will induce him to incur the social ban. We are not
speaking of the religious element in caste, which exists, though not in the strength Europeans imagine, Hindoos being nearly as ready to do wrong for profit or pleasure as Christians are, but of the social element. The social laws of caste are defended with the same pertinacity as the religious, till a man as sensitive and gentle as a woman will die by fire, or under the lash, or of starvation, sooner than dissolve the bond of his community by breaking purely secular rules, such as accept- ing less wages than their minimum tariff allows, or giving up a deposit or a letter entrusted to him under caste sanctions. He is not afraid of hell, that is all nonsense, except when his per- sonal purity, i.e., his obedience to certain rules of diet, is con. cerued ; he declines to destroy a community, the existence or coherence of which depends on his fidelity. There is, or was, a caste of carriers in Oude which might be trusted with anything. The welfare of that community, as against the world, depended on the universal belief in that trustworthiness, which brought them their business. No temptation, and no threat, and no torture had the smallest effect in making any one of them break the rule of honesty, though the very same men, outside the business, would lie, and steal, and betray like other uncultivated folk. The Irish peasant or labourer, in a bad district, has fallen into that caste way, and will no more break the unwritten bond than an old Roman slave would, or a modern Hindoo. It used to be impossible even in England to get evidence about the stricter Trades Unions, and we have been told, but do not for ourselves know, that in every large factory there is an unwritten understanding among the hands to be absolutely silent upon one or two points, and that it is never broken. All men are capable of showing the quality in a degree, as we know from the history of Sheffield ; but in its perfection it requires in the race displaying it a traditional fear of acting alone, and a serenity of passive courage, seldom discovered except in the oppressed. The terms offered to Broad- head and his accomplices would not have drawn a word of evidence from a Hindoo caste man or from a Mayo peasant, if he thought the revelation would benefit agrarian opponents. To a man under this conviction, to relieve Boycott would be to break faith with the community, to become an outcast not only in fact, but in his own eyes ; and against that spell, no indi- vidualism, or separate opinion, or even feeling of affection, would prevail for a moment. No doubt the lawless law of fidelity is sanctioned by terror, as it is also in India, and was in Rome; but the law is binding even without that. The Irish horror of being an " informer "—the product of the habit of combination for centuries against oppressive law—is not a mere result of terror ; it is felt in cases where consequences could not follow and men have committed suicide to avoid informing. A new virtue, or quasi-virtue, has been evolved by circumstances, and has become in the people's eyes the very highest of all.
This kind of fidelity, for it is a fidelity, is so intolerably inconvenient in its consequences, that it is a little difficult to decide on its exact relation to morals without prejudice. We suppose, however, that like most forms of conduct involving self-suppression for the sake of the community, it is a virtue, mingled, like patriotism, with selfishness, and raised to an absurd supremacy over other and better sanctioned virtues, such, for example, as truth. It is class patriotism, in fact, and like national patriotism, is a virtue till it comes into conflict with other and higher obligations. Nobody is in the right in perjure ing himself for his country, and no Irishman can be in the right in swearing that his community knew nothing of the outrage which he probably saw them commit. He is a different man, nevertheless, to the perjurer for gain, and his notion of fidelity is one out of which a great deal of good, working virtue of the practical sort could, under favourable circumstances, b developed. The " brotherhood " of the Irish peasantry migh and may, if only wisely directed, give them that power of com- bination for the improvement of their position which has hitherto of all qualities been most lacking. There may be a
time yet when the people who now combine against the law may combine to enforce it, and when it will be as dangerous to shoot a landowner in Mayo as to steal a horse in Texas. The faculty is there, in a high state of development, and the power to use it for social ends, instead of unsocial ends, may yet arrive. We at least cannot despair of a people among whom a shepherd or a herd will throw up his place and go out into poverty, because he has been made to believe that fidelity to his community requires that he should undergo that suffering. He is hopelessly in the wrong, for he breaks contract and forgets his duty to his work and to his beasts ; but he is wrong from an impulse which is only indirectly selfish, and he is capable of self-forgetfulness for a public, though a mistaken, end.
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