 6 The mistake of England I met one hearty unionist, not to say co-ortionist, in Ireland, in such a manner as to talk to him at some length. One quite genial and genuine Irish gentleman, who was solidly on the side of the system of British government in Ireland. This gentleman had been shot through the body by the British troops in their efforts to suppress the Easter Rebellion. The matter just missed being tragic, but since it did I cannot help feeling as it's slightly comic. He assured me, with great earnestness, that the rebels had been guilty of the most calculated cruelties, and that they must have done their bloody deeds in the coldest blood. But since he himself is a solid, and I am happy to say a living demonstration, that the firing, even on his own side, must have been rather wild, I am inclined to give the benefit of the doubt also to the less elaborately educated marksmen. When discipline troops destroy people so much at random, it would seem unreasonable to deny that rioters may possibly have been rioters. I hardly think he was, or even profess to be, a person of judicial impartiality. And it's entirely to his honour that he was, on principle, so much more indignant with the rioters who did not shoot him than with the other rioters who did. But I venture to introduce him here not so much as an individual as an allegory. The incident seems to me to set forth in a pointed, lucid, and picturesque form exactly what the British military government really succeeded in doing in Ireland. It succeeded in half-killing its friends, and affording an intelligent but somewhat inhumane amusement to all its enemies. The fire-eater held his firearm in so contorted a posture as to give the wandering spectator a simple impression of suicide. Let it be understood that I speak here not of tyranny thwarting Irish desires, but solely of our own stupidity in thwarting our own desires. I shall discuss elsewhere the alleged presence or absence of practical oppression in Ireland. Here I am only continuing from the last chapter of my experiences of the recruiting campaign. I'm concerned now, as I was concerned then, with the simple business matter of getting a big levy of soldiers from Ireland. I think it was Sir Francis Vain, one of the few really valuable public servants in the matter. I need not say he was dismissed for having been proved right, who said that the mere sight of some representative Belgian priest and nuns might have produced something like a crusade. The matter seems to have been mostly left to elder English landlords, and it would be cruel to record their adventures. It will be enough that I found, for a positive fact, that these unhappy gentlemen had displayed throughout Ireland a poster consisting only of the Union Jack and the appeal. Is not this your flag? Come and fight for it. It faintly recalls something we all learnt in the Lenten grammar about questions that expect the answer no. These remarkable recruiting sergeants did not realize, I suppose, what an extraordinary thing this was—not merely an Irish opinion, but generally an international opinion. Over a great part of the globe it would sound like a story that the Turks had placarded Armenia with a crescent of Islam, and asked all the Christians who were not yet massacred whether they did not love the flag. I really do not believe that the Turks would be so stupid as to do it. Of course it may be said that such an impression or association is mere slander and sedition. That is, there is no reason to be tender to such reasonable emotions at all. That men ought to do their duty to that flag whatever is put upon that poster. In short, that it is the duty of an Irishman to be a patriotic Englishman, or whatever it is that he is expected to be. But this view, however logical and clear, can only be used logically and clearly as an argument for conscription. It is simply muddleheaded to apply it to any appeal for volunteers anywhere, in Ireland or England. The whole object of a recruiting poster, or any poster, is to be attractive. It is picked out in words or colors to be picturesquely and pointedly attractive. If it lowers you to make an attractive offer, do not make it, but do not deliberately make it and deliberately make it repulsive. If a certain medicine is so mortally necessary and so mortally nasty that it must be forced on everybody by the policeman, call the policeman, but do not call an advertisement agent to push it like a patent medicine solely by means of publicity and suggestion, and then confine him strictly to telling the public how nasty it is. But the British blunder in Ireland was a much deeper and more destructive thing. It can be summed up in one sentence that whether or no we were as black as we were painted, we actually painted ourselves much blacker than we were. Bad as we were, we managed to look much worse than we were. In a horrible unconsciousness we reenacted history through sheer ignorance of history. We were foolish enough to dress up and play up to the part of a villain in a very old tragedy. We clothed ourselves almost carelessly in fire and sword, and if the fire had been literally stage fire, or the sword a wooden sword, the mere artistic blunder would have been quite as bad. For instance I soon came on the traces of a quarrel about some silly veto in the schools against Irish children wearing green rosettes. Anybody with a streak of historical imagination would have avoided a quarrel in that particular case about that particular color. It is touching the talisman, it is naming the name, it is striking the note of another relation in which we were in the wrong, to the confusion of a new relation in which we were in the right. Anybody of common sense considering any other case and see the almost magic force of these material coincidences? If the English armies in France in 1914 considered themselves justified for some reason in executing some French woman, they would perhaps be indiscreet if they killed her, however logically, tied to a stake in the marketplace of Rouen. If the people of Paris rose in the most righteous revolt against the most corrupt conspiracy of some group of the wealthy French Protestants, I should strongly advise them not to fix the date for the vigil of St. Bartholomew or to go work with white scars tied round their arms. Many of us hoped to see a Jewish commonwealth reconstituted in Palestine, and we could easily imagine some quarrel in which the government of Jerusalem was impelled to punish some Greek or Latin pilgrim or monk. The Jews might even be right in the quarrel, and the Christian wrong, but it may be hinted that the Jews would be ill-advised if they actually crowned him with thorns and killed him on a hill just outside Jerusalem. Now we must know by this time, or the sooner we know what the better, that the whole mind of that European society which we have helped to save, and in which we have henceforth a part right of control, regards the Anglo-Irish story as one of these black and white stories in a history book. It sees the tragedy of Ireland as simply and clearly as the tragedy of Christ or Joan of Arc. There may have been more to be said on the coercive side than the culture of the continent understands. So there was a great deal more than is usually admitted to be said on the side of the patriotic democracy, which condemned Socrates, and a very great deal to be said on the side of the imperial aristocracy, which would have crushed Washington. But these disputes will not take Socrates from his niche among the pagan saints or Washington from his pedestal among the Republican heroes. After a certain testing time, substantial justice is always done to the man who stood in some unmistakable manner for liberty and light against contemporary and fashionable force and brutality. In this intellectual sense, in the only competent intellectual courts, there is already justice to Ireland. In the wide daylight of this worldwide fact, we or our representatives must get into a quarrel with children of all people and about the color green of all things in the world. It is an exact working model of the mistake I mean. It is the more brutal because it is not strictly cruel and yet instantly revives the memories of cruelty. There need be nothing wrong with it in the abstract or in a less tragic atmosphere where the symbols were not talismans. A schoolmaster in the prosperous and enlightened town of Eatonsville might not unpardonably protest against the school children parading in class the buff and blue favors of Mr. Simkin and Mr. Slumkey. But who but a madman would not see that to say the word or make that sign in Ireland was like giving a signal for keening and the lament over lost justice that is lifted in the burden of the noblest national songs? But to point to that rag of that color was to bring back all the responsibilities and realities of that rain of terror when we were quite literally hanging men and women too for the wearing of the green. We were not literally hanging these children. As a matter of mere utility we should have been more sensible if we had been. But the same fact took an even more fantastic form. We not only dressed up as our ancestors but we actually dressed up as our enemies. I need hardly state my own conviction that the pacifist trick of lumping the abuses of one side along with the abominations of the other was a shallow pedantry come of sheer ignorance of the history of Europe and the barbarians. It was quite false that the English evil was exactly the same as the German. It was quite false but the English in Ireland labored long and devotedly to prove it was quite true. They were not content with borrowing old uniforms from the Hessians of 1798. They borrowed the newest and neatest uniforms from the Prussians of 1914. I will give only one story that I was told, out of many, to show what I mean. There was a sort of village musical festival at a place called Cullen in County Cork, at which there were naturally national songs and very possibly national speeches. That there was a sort of social atmosphere which its critics would call sin-fane is exceedingly likely, for that now exists all over Ireland and especially that part of Ireland. If we wish to prevent it being expressed at all, we must not only forbid all public meetings, but all private meetings and even the meeting of husband and wife in their own house. Still there might have been a case on coercionist lines for forbidding this public meeting. There might be a case on coercionist lines for imprisoning all the people who attended it, or a still clearer case on those lines, for imprisoning all the people in Ireland. But the coercionist authorities did not merely forbid the meeting, which would mean something. They did not arrest the people at the meeting, which would mean something. They did not blow the whole meeting to hell with big guns, which would also mean something. What they did was this. They caused a military airplane to jerk itself backwards and forwards in a staggering fashion just over the heads of the people, making as much noise as possible to drown the music and dropping flare rockets and fire in various somewhat dangerous forms in the neighborhood of any men, women and children who happen to be listening to the music. The reader will know with what exquisite art and fine fastidious selection the strategist has here contrived to look as prussian as possible without securing any of the advantages of prussianism. There was a certain amount of real danger to the children, but not very much. There was about as much as there generally has been when boys have been flogged for playing the fool with fireworks. But by laboriously climbing hundreds of feet into the air in an enormous military machine, these ingenious people managed to make themselves a meteor in heaven and a spectacle to all the earth. The English raining fire on women and children, just as the Germans did. I repeat that they did not actually destroy children, though they did endanger them, for playing with fireworks is always playing with fire. And I repeat that as a mere matter of business it would have been more sensible if they had destroyed children. They would at least have had the human meaning that has run through a hundred massacres, wolf cubs who would grow into wolves. It might at least have the excreable excuse of decreasing the number of rebels. What they did would quite certainly increase it. An artless member of parliament, whose name I forget, attempted an apology for this half-witted performance. He interposed in the Unionist interests when the Nationalists were asking questions about the matter and said with much heed. May I ask whether honest and loyal subjects have anything to fear from British aeroplanes? I have often wondered what he meant. It seems possible that he was in the mood of that medieval fanatic who cried, God will know his own, and that he himself would fling any sort of flaming bolts about anywhere, believing that they would always be miraculously directed toward the heads harboring at that moment the most incorrect political opinions. Or perhaps he meant that loyal subjects are so superbly loyal that they do not mind being accidentally burnt alive, so long as they are assured that the fire was dropped on them by government officials out of a government apparatus. But my purpose here is not to fathom such a mystery, but merely to fix the dominant fact of the whole situation, that the government copied the theatricality of Potsdam even more than the tyranny of Potsdam. In that incident the English laboriously reproduced all the artificial accessories of the most notorious crimes of Germany, the flying men, the flame, the selection of a mixed crowd, the selection of a popular festival. They had every part of it except the point of it. It was as if the whole British army in Ireland had dressed up in spike helmets and spectacles merely that they might look like Prussians. It was even more as if a man had walked across Ireland on three gigantic stilts taller than the trees and visible from the most distant village, solely that he might look like one of those inhuman monsters from Mars striding about on their iron tripods in the great nightmare of Mr. Wells. Such was our educational efficiency, that before the end multitudes of simple Irish people really had about the English invasion the same particular psychological reaction that multitudes of simple English people had about the German invasion. I mean that it seemed to come not only from outside the nation but from outside the world. It was unearthly in the strict sense in which a comet is unearthly. It was the more appallingly alien for coming close. It was the more outlandish the farther it went inland. These Christian peasants have seen coming westward out of England what we saw coming westward out of Germany. They saw science in arms, which turns the very heavens into hells. I have purposely put these fragmentary and secondary impressions before any general survey of the Anglo-Irish policy in the war. I do so first because I think a record of the real things that seem to bulk biggest to any real observer at any real moment is often more useful than the setting forth of theories he may have made up before he saw any realities at all. But I do it in the second place because the more general summaries of our statesmanship or lack of statesmanship are so much more likely to be found elsewhere. But if we wish to comprehend the queer cross purposes it will be well to keep always in mind a historical fact I have mentioned already. The reality of the old Franco-Irish intent. It lingers alive in Ireland and especially the most Irish parts of Ireland, in the firstly Fennean city of Cork, walking around the young Ireland monument that seems to give revolt the majesty of an institution. A man told me that German bands had been hooted and belted in those streets out of an indignant memory of 1870, and an imminent scholar in the same town, referring to the events of the same terrible year, said to me, in 1870 Ireland sympathized with France and England with Germany and, as usual, Ireland was right. But if they were right when we were wrong they only began to be wrong when we were right. A sort of play or parable might be written to show that this apparent paradox is a very genuine piece of human psychology. Suppose there are two partners named John and James. The James has always been urging the establishment of a branch of the business in Paris. Long ago John quarreled with this furiously as a foreign fad, but he has since forgotten all about it, for the letters from James bored him so much that he has not opened any of them for years. One fine day John, finding himself in Paris, conceives the original idea of a Paris branch. But he is conscious in a confused way of having quarreled with his partner and vaguely feels that his partner would be an obstacle to anything. John remembers that James is always cantankerous and forgets that he was cantankerous in favor of this project and not against it. John therefore sends James a telegram of a brevity amounting to brutality, simply telling him to come in with no nonsense about it, and when he has no instant reply, sends a solicitor's letter to be followed by a writ. How James will take it depends very much on James. How he will hail his happy confirmation of his own early opinion will depend on whether James is an unusually patient and charitable person. And James is not. He is unfortunately the very man of all men in the world, to drop his own original agreement and everything else into the black abyss of disdain, which now divides him from the man who has the impudence to agree with him. He is the very man to say he will have nothing to do with his own original notion, because it is now to be a related notion of a fool. Such a character could easily be analyzed in any good novel. Such a conduct would readily be believed in any good play. It could not be believed when it happened in real life. And it did happen, in real life. The Paris Project was the sense of the safety of Paris as the pivot of human history. The abrupt telegram was the recruiting campaign and the writ was conscription. As to what Irish conscription was, or rather would have been, I cannot understand any visitor in Ireland having to faint his doubt. Unless, as is often the case, his tour was so carefully planned as to permit him to visit everything in Ireland except the Irish. Irish conscription was a piece of rank raving madness, which was fortunately stopped, with other bad things, by the blow of force at the second battle of the Marne. It could not possibly produce at the last moment allies on whom we could depend, and it would have lost us the whole sympathy of the allies on whom we at that moment depended. I do not mean that American soldiers would have mutiny, though Irish soldiers might have done so. I mean something much worse. I mean that the whole mood of America would have altered, and there would have been some kind of compromise with German tyranny in sheer disgust at a long exhibition of English tyranny. Things would have happened in Ireland week after week and month after month, such as the modern imagination has not seen except where Prussia has established hell. We should have butchered women and children. They would have made us butcher them. We should have killed priests and probably the best priests. It could not be better stated than in the words of an Irishman, as he stood with me in a high terraced garden outside Dublin, looking towards that unhappy city, who shook his head and said sadly, they will shoot the wrong bishop. Of the meaning of this huge furnace of defiance, I shall write when I write of the national idea itself. I'm concerned here not for their nation, but for mine, and especially with its peril from Prussia and its help from America. And it is simply a question of considering what these real things are really like. Remember that the American Republic is practically founded on the fact or fancy that England is a tyrant. Remember that it was being ceaselessly swept with new waves of immigrant Irishry, telling tales, too many of them true, though not all, of the particular cases in which England had been a tyrant. It would be hard to find a parallel to explain to Englishmen the effect of awakening traditions so truly American, via prolonged display of England as the tyrants in Ireland. A faint approximation might be found if we imagine the survivors of Victorian England, steeped in the tradition of Uncle Tom's cabin, watching the American troops march through London. Suppose they noted that the Negro troops alone had to march in chains with a white man in a broad brimmed hat walking beside them and flourishing a whip. Scenes far worse than that would have followed Irish conscription. But the only purpose of this chapter is to show that scenes quite as stupid marked every stage of Irish recruitment. For it certainly would not have reassured the traditional sympathizers with Uncle Tom, to be told that the chains were only part of the uniform, or that the blacks moved not at the touch of the whip, but only at the crack of it. Such was our practical policy, and the single and sufficient comment on it can be found in a horrible whisper, which can scarcely now be still. It is said, with a dreadful plausibility, that the Unionists were deliberately trying to prevent a large Irish recruitment, which would certainly have meant reconciliation and reform. In plain words it is said that they were willing to be traitors to England, if they could only still be tyrants to Ireland. Only too many facts can be made to fit in with this, but for me it is still too hideous to be easily believed. But whatever our motives in doing it, there is simply no doubt whatever about what we did in this matter of the pro-Germans in Ireland. We did not crush the pro-Germans. We did not convert them or coerce them or educate them or exterminate them or massacre them. We manufactured them. We turned them out patiently, steadily and systematically, as from a factory. We made them exactly as we made munitions. It needed no little social science to produce, in any kind of Irishman, any kind of sympathy with Prussia. But we were equal to the task. What concerns me here, however, is that we were busy at the same work among the Irish Americans, and ultimately among all the Americans. And that would have meant, as I have already noted, the things that I always feared. The dilution of the policy of the Allies, anything that looked like a prolonged Prussianism in Ireland, would have meant a compromise, that is a perpetuated Prussianism in Europe. I know of some who agree with me in other matters disagree with me in this. But I should indeed be ashamed if, having to say so often where I think my country was wrong, I did not say as plainly where I think she was right. The notion of a compromise was founded on the coincidence of recent national wars, which were only about the terms of peace, not about the type of civilization. But there do recur at longer historic intervals, universal wars of religion, not concerned with what one nation shall do, but with what all nations shall be. They recommence until they are finished, in things like the fall of Carthage, or the rout of Attila. It is quite true that history is, for the most part, a plain road, which the tribes of men must travel side by side, bargaining at the same markets or worshipping at the same shrines, fighting and making friends again, and wisely making friends quickly. But we need only to see the road stretch but a little farther, from a hill but a little higher, to see that sooner or later it comes always to another place, where stands a winged image of victory and the ways divide. CHAPTER 7 THE MISTAKE OF IRELAND There is one phrase which certain Irishmen sometimes use in conversation, which indicates the real mistake that they sometimes make in controversy. When the more bitter sort of Irishman is at last convinced of the existence of the less bitter sort of Englishman, who does realize that he ought not to rule a Christian people by alternations of broken heads and broken promises, the Irishman has sometimes a way of saying, I am sure you must have Irish blood in your veins. Several people told me so, when I denounced Irish conscription, a thing runeous to the whole cause of the alliance. Some told me so, even when I recalled the vile story of 98, a thing damned by the whole opinion of the world. I assured them in vain that I did not need to have Irish blood in my veins, in order to object to having Irish blood on my hands. So far as I know I have not one single drop of Irish blood in my veins. I have some Scottish blood and some which, judging merely by a name in the family, must once have been French blood. But the determining part of it is purely English, and I believe East Anglican, at the flattest and farthest extreme from the Celtic fringe. But I am here concerned not with whether it is true, but why they should want to prove it is true. One would think they would want to prove precisely the opposite. Even if they were exacterative and unscrupulous, they should surely seek to show that an Englishman was forced to condemn England rather than an Irishman was inclined to support Ireland. As it is, they are laboring to destroy the impartiality and even the independence of their own witness. It does not support but rather surrenders Irish rights to say that only the Irish can see that there are Irish wrongs. It is confessing that Ireland is a Celtic dream and delusion, a cloud of sunset mistaken for an island. It is admitting that such a nation is only a notion and a nonsensical notion, but in reality it is this notion about Irish blood that is nonsensical. Ireland is not an illusion, and her wrongs are not the subjective fancies of the Irish. Irishmen did not dream that they were evicted out of house and home by the ruthless application of a land law no man now dares to defend. It was not a nightmare that dragged them from their beds, nor were they sleepwalkers when they wandered as far as America. Skeffington did not have a delusion that he was being shot for keeping to peace. The shooting was objective, as the Prussian professors would say, as objective as the Prussian militarists could desire. The delusions were admittedly peculiar to the British official, whom the British government selected to direct operations on so important an occasion. I could understand it if the imperialists took refuge in the Celtic cloud, conceived culthurst as full of a mystic frenzy like the chieftain who fought with the sea, pleaded that Pijot was a poet whose pen ran away with him, or that Sergeant Sheridan romanced like a real stage Irishman. I could understand it if they declared that it was merely in the elvish ecstasy described by Mr. Yates that Sir Edward Carson, that famous First Lord of the Admiralty, rode on the top of the disheveled wave, and Mr. Walter Long, that great agricultural minister, danced upon the mountains like a flame. It is far more absurd to suggest that no man can see the green flag, unless he has some green in his eye. In truth this association between an Irish sympathy and an Irish ancestry is just as insulting as the old jive of Buckingham about an Irish interest or an Irish understanding. It may seem fanciful to say of the Irish nationalists that they are sometimes too Irish to be national. This is really the case in those who would turn nationality from sanctity to a secret. That is, they are turning it from something which everyone else ought to respect to something which no one else can understand. Nationalism is a nobler thing even than patriotism, for nationalism appeals to a law of nations. It implies that a nation is a normal thing, and therefore one of a number of normal things. It is impossible to have a nation without Christendom as it is impossible to have a citizen without a city. Now normally speaking this is better understood in Ireland than in England. But the Irish have an opposite exaggeration and error, and tend in some cases to the cult of real insularity. In this sense it is true to say that the error is indicated in the very name of Sinn Féin. But I think it is even more encouraged in a cloudier and therefore more perilous fashion by much that is otherwise valuable in a cult of the Celts, and the study of the old Irish language. It is a great mistake for a man to defend himself as a Celts when he might defend himself as an Irishman. For the former defense will turn on some tricky question of temperament while the latter will turn on the central pivot of morals. Celtism by itself might lead to all the racial extravagances which have lately led more barbaric races to dance. Celts also might come to claim not that their nation is a normal thing, but that their race is a unique thing. Celts also might end by arguing not for inequality founded on the respect for boundaries, but of an aristocracy founded on the ramification of blood. Celts also might come to pitting the prehistoric against the historic, the heathen against the Christian, and in that sense the barbaric against the civilized. In that sense I confess I do not care about Celts. They are too like Teutons. Now of course everyone knows that there is practically no such danger of Celtic imperialism. Mr. Lloyd George will not attempt to annex Brittany as a natural part of Britain. No Tories, however antiquated, will extend their empire in the name of the buff, the blue, and the ancient Britons. Nor is there the least likelihood that the Irish will overrun Scotland on the plea of an Irish origin for the old name of Scots, or that they will set up an Irish capital at Stratford on Avon, merely because Avon is the Celtic word for water. So is the sort of thing that Teutonic ethnologists do, but Celts are not quite so stupid as that. Even when they are ethnologists, it may be suggested that this is because even prehistoric Celts seem to have been rather more civilized than historic Teutons. And indeed I have seen ornaments and utensils in the admirable Dublin Museums suggestive of a society of immense antiquity and much more advanced in the arts of life than the Prussians were, only a few centuries ago. For instance there was actually what appeared to be a safety raiser. I doubt if the godlike Goths had much use for a raiser, or if they had, it was altogether safe. Nor am I so dull as not to be stirred to an imaginative sympathy with the instinct of modern Irish poetry to praise this primordial in the mysterious order, even as a sort of pagan paradise, and that not as regarding a legend as a sort of a lie, but a tradition as a sort of a truth. It is but another hand of a suggestion, huge yet hidden, that civilization is older than barbarism, and that the further we go back into pagan origins, the nearer we come to the great Christian origin of the fall. But whatever credit or sympathy be due to the cult of Celtic origins in its proper place, it is none of these things that really prevents Celtism from being a barbarous imperialism like Tutanism. The thing that prevents imperialism is nationalism. It was exactly because Germany was not a nation that it desired more and more to be an empire. For a patriot is a sort of lover, and a lover is a sort of artist, and the artist will always love a shape too much to wish it to grow shapeless, even in order to grow large. A group of Teutonic tribes will not care how many other tribes they destroy or absorb, and Celtic tribes, when they were heathen, may have acted for all I know in the same way. But the civilized Irish nation, a part and product of Christendom, has certainly no desire to be entangled with other tribes, or to have its outlines blurred with great blots like Liverpool and Glasgow, as well as Belfast. In that sense, it is far too self-conscious to be selfish. Its individuality may, as I shall suggest, make it too insular. It will not make it too imperial. This is a merit in nationalism too little noted, that even what is called its narrowness is not merely a barrier to invasion, but a barrier to expansion. Therefore, with all respect to the prehistoric Celts, I feel more at home with the good if sometimes mad Christian gentlemen of the young Ireland movement, or even the Easter rebellion. I should feel more safe with meager of the sword than with the primitive Celt of the safety razor. The microscopic meanness of the mid-Victorian English writers, when they wrote about Irish patriots, could see nothing but a very small joke and modern rebels thinking themselves worthy to take the titles of antique kings. But the only doubt I should have, if I had any, is whether the heathen kings were worthy of the Christian rebels. I am much more sure of the heroism of the modern Fenians than of the ancient ones. Of the artistic side of the cult of the Celts, I do not especially speak here, and indeed its importance, especially to the Irish, may easily be exaggerated. Mr. W. B. Yates long ago disassociated himself from a merely racial theory of Irish poetry, and Mr. W. B. Yates thinks as hard as he talks. I often entirely disagree with him, but I disagree far more with the people who find him a poetical opiate, where I always find him a logical stimulant. For the rest, Celtism, in some aspects, is largely a conspiracy for leading the Englishmen a dance, if it be a fairy dance. I suspect that many names and announcements are printed in Gaelic, not because Irishmen can read them but because Englishmen can't. The other great modern mystic in Dublin, A. E., entertained us first by telling an English lady present that she would never resist the Celtic atmosphere, struggle how she might, but would soon be wandering in the mountain mists with a fillet around her head, which fate had apparently overtaken the son or nephew of an Anglican bishop who had strayed into those parts. The English lady, whom I happen to know rather well, made the characteristic announcement that she would go to Paris when she felt it coming on. But it seemed to me that such drastic action was hardly necessary, and that there was comparatively little cause for alarm, seeing that the mountain mists certainly had not that effect on the people who happened to live in the mountains. I knew that A. E. knew, even better than I did, that Irish peasants do not wander about in fillets, or even indeed wander about at all, having plenty of much better work to do. And since the Celtic atmosphere had no perceptible effect on the Celts, I felt no alarm about its effect on the Saxons. But the only thing involved by wave and effect on the Saxons was a practical joke on the Saxons, which may, however, have lasted longer in the case of the Irish bishop's nephew than it did in mine. Anyhow, I continued to move about, like Atlanta in Caledon, with unshaplitted hair, with unfilled cheek, and found a sufficient number of Irish people in the same condition, to prevent me from feeling shy. In a word, all that sort of thing is simply Mr. Russell's humor, especially his good humor, which is of a golden and godlike sort. And a man would be very much misled by the practical joke if he does not realize that the Joker is a practical man. On the desk in front of him, as he spoke, were business papers of reports and statistics much more concerned with Philae's avail than Philae's vision. That is the essential fact about all this side of such men in Ireland. We may think the Celtic ghost a turnip ghost, but we can only doubt the reality of the ghost. There's no doubt of the reality of the turnip. But if the Celtic pose be a piece of the Celtic ornament, the spirit that produced it does also produce some more serious tendencies to the segregation of Ireland. One might almost say to the secretion of Ireland. In this sense it is true that there is too much separatism in Ireland. I do not speak of separation from England, which, as I have said, happened long ago in the only serious sense, and is a condition to be assumed, not a conclusion to be avoided. Nor do I mean separation from a federation of free states, unfortunately known as the British Empire, for that is a conclusion that could still be avoided with a little common sense and common honesty in our own politics. I mean separation from Europe, from the common Christian civilization, by whose law the nations live. I would be understood as speaking here of exceptions, rather than the rule, for the rule is rather the other way. The Catholic religion, the most fundamental fact in Ireland, is itself a permanent communication with the continent. So as I have said, is the free peasantry, which is so often the economic expression of the same faith. Mr. James Stevens himself, a spiritually detached man of genius, told me with a great humor a story which is also at least a symbol. A Catholic priest, after a convivial conversation and plenty of good wine, said to him confidentially, You ought to be a Catholic. You can be saved without being a Catholic, but you can't be Irish without being a Catholic. Nevertheless the exceptions are large enough to be dangers, and twice lately I think they have brought Ireland into danger. This is the age of minorities, of groups that rule rather than represent. And the two largest parties in Ireland, though more representative than most parties in England, were too much affected, I fancy, by the modern fashion expressed in the world of fads, by being Celtic rather than Catholic. They were just a little too insular to accept the old unconscious wave of Christendom, the Crusade. But the case was the more extraordinary than that. They were even too insular to appreciate not so much their own international needs, as their own international importance. It may seem a strange paradox to say that both nationalist parties underrated Ireland as a nation. It may seem a more startling paradox to say that, in this, the most nationalist was the least national. Yet I think I can't explain, however roughly, what I mean by saying that this is so. It is primarily Sinn Féin, or the extreme national party, which thus relatively failed to realize that Ireland is a nation. At least it failed in nationalism exactly so far as it failed to intervene in the war of the nations against Prussian imperialism. For its argument involved unconsciously, the proposition that Ireland is not a nation, that Ireland is a tribe or a settlement, or a chance sprinkling of Aborigines. If the Irish were savages oppressed by the British Empire, they might well be indifferent to the fate of the British Empire. But as they were civilized men, they could not be indifferent to the fate of civilization. The Cafirs might conceivably be better off if the whole system of white colonization, Bohr and British, broke down and disappeared altogether. The Irish might sympathize with the Cafirs, but they would not like to be classed with the Cafirs. Hotentots might have a sort of hotentot happiness if the last European city had fallen in ruins, or the last European had died in torments. But the Irish would never be hotentots, even if they were pro-hotentots, in other words, if the Irish were what promwell thought they were. They might well confine their attention to hell and conaut, and have no sympathy to spare for France. But if the Irish are what Wolf Tone thought they were, they must be interested in France, as he was interested in France. In short, if the Irish are barbarians, they need not trouble about other barbarians sacking the cities of the world. But if they are citizens, they must trouble about the cities that are sacked. This is the deep and real reason why their alienation from the Allied cause was a disaster for their own national cause. It was not because it gave fools a chance of complaining that they were anti-English. It was because it gave much cleverer people the chance of complaining that they were anti-European. I entirely agree that the alienation was chiefly the fault of the English government. I even agree that it required an abnormal imaginative magnanimity for an Irishman to do his duty to Ireland, in spite of being so insolently told to do it. But it is nonetheless true that Ireland today would be ten thousand miles nearer her deliverance, if the Irishman could have made that effort, if he had realized that the thing ought to be done, not because such rulers wanted it, but rather, although they wanted it. But the much more curious fact is this. There were any number of Irishmen, and those among the most Irish, who did realize this, who realized it with so sublime a sincerity as to fight for their own enemies against the world's enemies, and consent at once to be insulted by the English and killed by the Germans. The Redmans and the Old Nationalist Party, if they have indeed failed, have the right to be reckoned among the most heroic of all the heroic failures of Ireland. If theirs is a lost cause, it is wholly worthy of a land where lost causes are never lost. But the Old Guard of Redmond did also, in its time, I fancy, fall into the same particular and curious error, but in a more subtle way and on a seemingly remote subject. They also, whose motives, like those of the Sinfaners, were entirely noble, did in one sense fail to be national in the sense of appreciating the international importance of a nation. In their case it was a matter of English and not European politics, and as their case was much more complicated, I speak with much less confidence about it. But I think there was a highly determining time in politics, when certain Irishmen got to the wrong side in English politics, as other Irishmen afterwards got on to the wrong side in European politics. And by the wrong side, in both cases, I do not only mean the side that was not consistent with the truth, but the side that was not really congenial to the Irish. A man may act against the body, even the main body, of his nation. But if he acts against the soul of his nation, even to save it, he and his nation suffer. I can best explain what I mean by reaffirming the reality which an English visitor really found in Irish politics for the ends of war. It may seem odd to say that the most hopeful fact I found, for Anglo-Irish relations, was the fury with which the Irish were all accusing the English of perjury and treason. Yet this was my solid and sincere impression. The happiest omen was the hatred aroused by the disappointment over home rule. For men are not furious unless they are disappointed of something they really want. And men are not disappointed except about something they were really ready to accept. If Ireland had been entirely in favor of entire separation, the loss of home rule would not be felt as a loss. But if anything, as an escape. But it is felt bitterly and savagely as a loss. To that at least I can testify with entire certainty. I may or may not be right in the belief I build on it, but I believe it would still be felt, as a gain, that dominion home rule would in the long run satisfy Ireland. But it would satisfy her if it were given to her, not if it were promised to her. As it is, the Irish regard our government simply as a liar who has broken his word. I cannot express how big and black that simple idea bulks in the landscape and blocks up the road. And without professing to regard it as quite so simple, I regard it as substantially true. It is upon any argument an astounding thing. The king's lords and commons of a great nation should record on its statute book that a law exists and then illegally reverse it in answer to the pressure of private persons. It is and must be for the people benefited by the law an act of treason. The Irish were not wrong in thinking it an act of treason, even in the sense of treachery and trickery. Where they were wrong, I regret to say, was in talking of it as if it were the one supreme solitary example of such trickery, when the whole of our politics were full of such tricks. In short, the loss of justice for Ireland was simply a part of the loss of justice for England. The loss of all moral authority in government, the loss of the popularity of parliament, the secret plutocracy which makes it easy to take a bribe or break a pledge, the corruption that can pass unpopular laws or promote discredited men. The lawgiver cannot enforce his law because whether or know the law be popular, the lawgiver is wholly unpopular and is perpetually passing wholly unpopular laws. Intrigue has been substituted for government and the public man cannot appeal to the public because all the most important part of his policy is conducted in private. The modern politician conducts his public life in private. He sometimes condescends to make up for it by effecting to conduct his private life in public. He will put his baby or his birthday book into the illustrated papers. It is his dealings with the colossal millions of the cosmopolitan millionaires that he puts in his pocket or his private safe. We are allowed to know all about his dogs and cats, but not about those larger and more dangerous animals, his bulls and bears. Now there was a moment when England had an opportunity of breaking down this parliamentary evil as Europe afterwards had an opportunity which it fortunately took of breaking down the Prussian evil. The corruption was common to both parties, but the chance of exposing it happened to occur under the rule of a home-rule party which the nationalists supported solely for the sake of home rule. In the Marconi case they consented to whitewash the tricks of Jew robbers whom they must have despised, just as some of the sin-faners afterwards consented to whitewash the wickedness of Prussian bullies whom they must also have despised. In both cases the motive was wholly disinterested and even idealistic. It was the practicality that was unpractical. I was one of a small group which protested against the hushing up of the Marconi affair, but we always did justice to the patriotic intentions of the Irish who allowed it. But we based our criticism of their strategy on the principle of falses en uno, falses en omnibus. The man who will cheat you about one thing will cheat you about another. The man who will lie to you about Marconi will lie to you about home-rule. The political conventions that allow of dealing in Marconi's at one price for the party and another price for oneself. Our conventions also allow of telling one story to Mr. John Redmond and another to Sir Edward Carson. The man who will imply one state of things when talking large in Parliament and another state of things when put into a witness box in a court is the same sort of man who will promise an Irish settlement in the hope that it may fail and then withdraw it for fear it should succeed. Among the many muddle-headed modern attempts to coerce the Christian poor to the Muslim dogma about wine and beer, one was concerned with the abuse by loafers or tiplers of the privilege of the Sunday Traveller. It was suggested that the Traveller's claims were in every sense Traveller's tales. It was therefore proposed that the limits of three miles should be extended to six, as if it were any harder for a liar to say he had walked six miles than three. The politicians might be as ready to promise to walk the six miles to an Irish Republic as the three miles to an Irish Parliament. But sinfane is mistaken in supposing that any change of theoretic claim meets the problem of corruption. Those who would break their word to Redmond would certainly break it to Develle error. We urge all these things on the nationalists whose national cause we supported. We ask them to follow their larger popular instincts, break down a corrupt oligarchy, and let a real, popular Parliament in England give a real popular Parliament to Ireland. With entirely honourable motives they adhered to the narrower conception of their national duty. They sacrificed everything for home rule, even their own profoundly national emotion of contempt. For the sake of home rule, or the solemn promise of home rule, they kept such men in power and for their reward. They found that such men were still in power, and home rule was gone. When I mean about the Nationalist Party and what may be called as prophetic shadow of this sinfane mistake, may well be symbolised in one of the noblest figures of that party, or any party. An Irish poet, talking to me about the pointed diction of the Irish peasant, said he had recently rejoiced in the society of a drunken Kerry farmer, whose conversation was a litany of questions about everything in heaven and earth, each ending with a sort of chorus. Will you tell me that now? And at the end of all, he said abruptly, Did you know Tom Kettle? And on my friend the poet ascending, the farmer said, as if in triumph, And why are so many people alive that ought to be dead, and so many people dead that ought to be alive? Will you tell me that now? That is not unworthy of an old heroic poem, and therefore not unworthy of the hero and poet whom it was spoken. Petrarchalus died, who was a better man than you. Thomas Michael Kettle was perhaps the greatest example of that greatness of spirit, which was so ill-rewarded on both sides of the channel, and to the quarrel which marked Redmond's brother and so many of Redmond's followers. He was a wit, a scholar, an orator, a man ambitious in all arsepses, and he fell fighting the barbarians because he was too good a European to use the barbarians against England, as England a hundred years before had used the barbarians against Ireland. There is nothing to be said of such things except what the drunken farmer said, unless it be a verse from a familiar ballad on a very remote topic which happens to express my own immediate feelings about politics and reconstruction after the decimation of the great war. The many men so beautiful, and they all dead did lie, and a thousand slimy things lived on, and so did I. It's not a reflection that adds any inordinate self-satisfaction to the fact of one's own survival. In turning over a collection of Kettle's extraordinary varied and vigorous writings, which contains some of the most pointed and piercing criticisms of materialism, of modern capitalism, and mental and moral anarchism generally, I came on a very interesting criticism of myself and my friends in our Marconi agitation, a suggestion on a note of genial cynicism that we were asking for an impossible political purity, a suggestion which, knowing it to be patriotic, I will venture to call pathetic. I will not now return on such disagreements with a man, with whom I so universally agree, but it will not be unfair to here find an exact illustration of what I mean by saying that the national leaders, so far from merely failing as wild Irishmen, only failed when they were not instinctive enough. That is, not Irish enough. Kettle was a patriot, whose impulse was practical and whose policy was impolitic. Here also the nationalists underrated the importance of the intervention of his own nationality. Kettle left the fine and even terrible poem, asking if his sacrifice were in vain, and whether he and his people were again being betrayed. I think nobody can deny that he was betrayed, and it was not by the English soldiers with whom he marched to war, but by those very English politicians with whom he sacrificed so much, who remained at peace. No man will ever dare to say his death in battle was in vain, not only because in the highest sense it could never be, but because even in the lowest sense it was not. He hated the icy insolence of Prussia, and that ice is broken, and already as weak as water. As Carlisle said of a far lesser thing, that at least will never through unending ages insult the face of the sun any more. The point is here, that if any part of his fine work was in vain, it was certainly not the reckless romantic part. It was precisely the plotting parliamentary part. None can say that the weary marching and counter-marking in France was a thing thrown away, not only in the sense which consecrates all footprints along such via crucies, or highway of the army of martyrs, but also in the perfectly practical sense that the army was going somewhere and that it got there. But it might possibly be said that the weary marching and counter-marking at Westminster, in and out of a division lobby, belonged to what the French call the salle des pères deus. If anything was practical, it was the visionary adventure. If anything was unpractical, it was the practical compromise. He and his friends were betrayed by the men whose corruptions they had contemptuously condoned, far more than by the men whose bigotries they had indignantly denounced. There darkened about them treason and disappointment, and he that was happy has died in battle, and one who knew and loved him spoke to me for a million others in saying, and now we will not give you a dead dog until you keep your word. CHAPTER VIII An example and a question. We all had occasion to rejoice at the return of Sherlock Holmes when he was supposed to be dead, and I presume we may soon rejoice in his return, even when he is really dead. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, in his widespread new campaign in favour of spiritualism, ought at least to delight us with the comedy of Holmes as a control and Watson as a medium. But I have for the moment a use for the great detective not concerned with the psychical side of the question. Of that I will only say in passing that in this has in many other cases I find myself in agreement with an authority about where the line is drawn between good and bad. But I have the misfortune to think his good bad and his bad good. Sir Arthur explains that he would lift spiritualism to a graver and more elevated plane of idealism, and that he quite agrees with his critics that the mere tricks with tables and chairs are grotesque and vulgar. I think this is quite true if turned upside down. Like the table, I do not mind the grotesque and vulgar part of spiritualism. What I object to is the grave and elevating part. After all, a miracle is a miracle, and means something. It means that materialism is nonsense. But it is not true that a message is always a message, and it sometimes only means that spiritualism is also nonsense. If the table at which I am now writing takes to itself wings and flies out of the window, perhaps carrying me along with it, the incident will arouse in me a real intelligent interest, verging, unsurprise. But if the pen with which I am writing begins to scroll all by itself, the sort of things I have seen in spirit writing, if it begins to say that all things are aspects of universal purity and peace and so on, why then I shall not only be annoyed but also bored. If a great man, like the late Sir William Crooks, says that table went walking upstairs, I am impressed by the news, but not by the news from nowhere, to the effect that all men are perpetually going upstairs, a spiritual staircase which seems to be as mechanical and labor-saving as a moving staircase at Jaring Cross. Moreover even a benevolent spirit might conceivably throw the furniture about merely for fun, whereas I doubt if anything but a devil from hell would say that all things are aspects of purity and peace. But I am here taking from the spiritualistic articles a text that has nothing to do with spiritualism. In a recent contribution to Nash's magazine Sir Arthur Conan Doyle remarks very truly that the modern world is weary and wicked and in need of a religion, and he gives examples of its more typical and terrible corruptions. It is perhaps natural that he should revert to the case of the Congo, and talk of it in the torrid fashion which recalls the days when Morale and Caseman had some credit in English politics. We have since had an opportunity of judging the real attitude of a man like Morale, in the plainest case of black and white injustice that the world has ever seen. It was at once a replica and a reversal of the position expressed in the pious editor's creed, and might roughly be rendered in similar language. I do believe in freedom's cause, as furrow away as tropics are, but Belgians caught in precious claws, to me less tempting topics are. It's will again a foreign king to rouse the chapel's rigors, but liberty's a kind of thing we only owed to niggers. He had, of course, a lurid denunciation of the late king Leopold, of which I will only say that, uttered by a Belgian about the Belgian king in his own land and lifetime, it would be highly courageous and largely correct. But that the parallel test is how much truth was told by British journalists about British kings in their own land and lifetime, and that until we can pass that test such denunciations do us very little good. But what interests me in the matter at the moment is this. Sir Arthur feels it right to say something about British corruptions and passes from the Congo to Putimeo, touching a little more lightly, for even the most honest Britons have an unconscious trick of touching more lightly on the case of British capitalists. He says that our capitalists were not guilty of direct cruelty, but of an attitude careless and even callous. But what strikes me is that Sir Arthur, with his taste for such protests and inquiries, need not have wandered quite so far from his own home as the forests of South America. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is an Irishman, and in his own country, within my own memory, there occurred a staggering and almost incredible crime or series of crimes which were worthier than anything in the world of the attention of Sherlock Holmes in fiction or Conan Doyle in reality. It always will be a tribute to the author of Sherlock Holmes that he did about the same time do such good work in reality. He made an admirable plea for Adolf Beck and Oscar Slater. He was also connected, I remember, with a reversal of a miscarriage of justice in a case of cattle mutilation. And all this, while altogether to his credit, makes it seem all the more strange that his talents could not be used for and in his own home in native country, in a mystery that had the dimensions of a monstrosity and which did involve, if I remember right, a question of cattle maiming. Anyhow, it was concerned with moonlighters and the charges made against them, such as the common one of cutting off the tails of cows. I can imagine Sherlock Holmes on such a quest, keen-eyed and relentless, finding the cloven hoof of some sinister and suspected cow. I can imagine Dr. Watson, like the cow's tail, always behind. I can imagine Sherlock Holmes remarking in a light elusive fashion, that he himself had written a little monograph on the subject of cow's tails, with diagrams and tables solving the great traditional problem of how many cow's tails would reach the moon. A subject of extraordinary interest to moonlighters. And I can still more easily imagine him saying afterwards, having resumed the pipe and dressing gown of Baker Street, a remarkable little problem, Watson. In some of its features it was perhaps more singular than any you have been good enough to report. I do not think that even the footing-trouser-stretching mystery you, or the singular little affair of the radium toothpick, offered more strange and sensational developments. For if the celebrated pair had really tracked out the Irish crime, I have in mind, they would have found a story which considered merely as a detective story, is by far the most dramatic and dreadful of modern times. Like nearly all such sensational stories, it traced the crime to somebody far higher in station and responsibility than any of those suspected. Like many of the most sensational of them, it actually traced the crime to the detective who was investigating it. For if they had really crawled about with a magnifying glass studying the supposed footprints of the peasants, incriminated, they would have found they were made by the boots of the policemen, and the boots of a policeman one feels are things that even Watson might recognize. I have told the astounding story of Sergeant Sheridan before, and I shall often tell it again. Hardly any English people know it, and I shall go on telling it in the hope that all English people may know it some day. It ought to be first in every collection of costs of celebrities, in every book about criminals, in every book of historical mysteries, and on its merits it would be. It is not in any of them. It is not there because there is a motive in all modern British plutocracy against finding the big British miscarriages of justice where they are really to be found. And that is a great deal nearer than Pudamale. It is a place far more appropriate to the exploits of the family of the doils. It is called Ireland, and in that place a powerful British official named Sheridan had been highly successful in the imperial service by convicting a series of poor Irishmen of agrarian crimes. It was afterwards discovered that the British official had carefully committed every one of the crimes himself, and then with equal foresight perjured himself to imprison innocent men, one of whom lost his reason. One who does not know the story will naturally ask what punishment was held adequate for such a neuronian monster. I will tell him. He was bowed out of the country like a distinguished stranger, his expenses politely paid as if he had been delivering a series of instructive lectures, and he is now probably smoking a cigar in an American hotel and much more comfortable than any poor policeman who has done his duty. I defy anybody to deny him a place in our literature about great criminals. Cheryl's peace escaped many times before conviction. Sheridan escaped altogether after conviction. Jack the Ripper was safe because he was undiscovered. Sheridan was discovered and was still safe. But I only repeat the matter here for two reasons. First we may call our rule in Ireland what we like. We may call it the union when there is no union. We may call it Protestant ascendancy when we are no longer Protestants, or Teutonic lurchship when we could only be ashamed of being Teutons. But this is what it is, and everything else is a waste of words. And second, because an Irish investigator of cattle-maiming, so oblivious of the Irish cow, is in some danger of figuring as an Irish bull, anyhow that is the real and remarkable story of Sergeant Sheridan. And I put it first because it is the most practical test of the practical question of whether Ireland is misgoverned. It is strictly a fair test, for it is a test by the minimum and an argument a fortoriory. A British official in Ireland can run a career of crime punishing innocent people for his own felonies, and when he is found out he is found to be above the law. This may seem like putting things at the worst, but it is really putting them at the best. This story was not told us on the word of a wild Irish Fenian, or even a responsible Irish nationalist. It was told word for word, as I have told it, by the Unionist minister in charge of the matter, and reporting it, with regret and shame to Parliament. He was not one of the worst Irish secretaries, who might be responsible for the worst regime. On the contrary, he was by far the best. If even he could only partially restrain or reveal such things, there can be no deduction in common sense, except that in the ordinary way such things go on gaily in the dark, with nobody to reveal and nobody to restrain them. It was not something done in those dark days of torture and terrorism which happened in Ireland a hundred years ago, and which Englishmen talk of as having happened a million years ago. It was something that happened quite recently. In my own mature manhood, about the time that the better things, like the land acts, were already before the world, I remember writing to the Westminster Gazette to emphasize it when it occurred. But it seems to have passed out of memory in an almost half-witted fashion. But that people into hell has afforded me ever since a horrible amusement when I hear the Irish softly rebuke for remembering old, happy, far-off things and wrongs done in the dark ages. Thus I was especially amused to find Reverend R. J. Campbell saying that Ireland has been petted and coddled more than any other part of the British Isles. Because Mr. Campbell was chiefly famous for a comfortable creed himself, for saying that evil is only a shadow where light should be, and there is no doubt here of his throwing a very black shadow where light is very much required. I will conceive the policeman at the corner of the street in which Mr. Campbell resides, as in the habit of killing a crossing sweeper every now and then for his private entertainment, burgling the houses of Mr. Campbell's neighbors, cutting off the tails of their carriage horses, and otherwise disporting himself by moonlight a fairy. It is his custom to visit the consequences of each of these crimes upon the Reverend R. J. Campbell, whom he arrests at intervals, successfully convicts by perjury, and proceeds to coddle in penal servitude. But I have another reason for mentioning Mr. Campbell, a gentleman whom I hardly respect in many other respects, and the reason is connected with his name, as it occurs in another connection on another page. It shows how in anything, but especially in anything coming from Ireland, the old facts of family and faith outweigh a million modern philosophies. The words in Whose Who, Ulster Protestants of Scottish Ancestry, give the really Irish and the really honourable reason for Mr. Campbell's extraordinary remark. A man may preach for years with radiant universalism, that many waters cannot quench love, but boine water can. Mr. Campbell appears very promptly with what Kettle called the bucket full of boine to put the surprise out. I will not take the opportunity of saying, like the Ulsterman, that there never was a treason yet, but a Campbell was at the bottom of it. But I will say that there never was a modernism yet, but a Calvinist was at the bottom of it. The old theology is much livelier than the new theology. Many other such true tales could be told. But what we need here is a sort of test. This tale is a test because it is the best that could be said about the best that could be done by the best Englishman ruling Ireland in face of the English system established there, and it is the best or at any rate the most that we can know about that system. Another truth which might also serve as a test is this. To note among the responsible English not only their testimony against each other, but their testimony against themselves. I mean the consideration of how very rapidly we realize that our own conduct in Ireland has been infamous, not in the remote past, but in the very recent past. I have lived just long enough to see the wheel come full circle inside one generation. When I was a schoolboy, the sort of Kensington middle class to which I belong, was nearly solidly resisting. Not only the first home rule bill, but any suggestion that the land league had a leg to stand on, or that the landlords need do anything but get their rents or kick out their tenants. The whole Unionist press, which was three quarters of the press, simply supported Klanricard and charged anyone who did not do so with supporting the Klanagale. Mr. Balfour was simply admired for enforcing the system, which it is his real apology to have tried to end, or at least to have allowed Wyndham to end. I'm not yet far gone in senile decay, but already I have lived to hear my countrymen talk about their own blind policy and the time of the land league, exactly as they talked before of their blind policy and the time of the Limerick Treaty. The shadow on our past shifts forward as we advance into the future, and always seems to end just behind us. I was told to my youth that the age-long misgovernment of Ireland lasted down to about 1870. It is now agreed among all intelligent people that it lasted at least down to about 1890. A little common sense, after a hint like the Sheridan case, will lead one to suspect the simple explanation that it is going on still. Now I heard scores of such stories as the Sheridan story in Ireland, many of which I mentioned elsewhere, but I do not mention them here because they cannot be publicly tested, and that for a very simple reason. We must accept all the advantages and disadvantages of the rule of absolute and iron militarism. We cannot impose silence and then sift stories. We cannot forbid argument and then ask for proof. We cannot destroy rights, and then discover wrongs. I say this quite impartially in the matter of militarism itself. I am far from certain that soldiers are worse rulers than lawyers than merchants, and I am quite certain that a nation has a right to give abnormal power to its soldiers in time of war. I only say that a soldier, if he is a sensible soldier, will know what he is doing and therefore what he cannot do, that he cannot gag a man and then cross-examine him any more than he can blow out his brains and then convince his intelligence. There may be, humanly speaking, there must be, a mass of injustices in the militaristic government of Ireland. The militarism itself may be the least of them, but it must involve the concealment of all the rest. It has been remarked above that establishing militarism is a thing which a nation has a right to do, and what is not at all the same thing which it may be right in doing. But with that very phrase, a nation, we collide, of course, with the whole real question, the alleged abstract wrong about which the Irish talk much more than about their concrete wrongs. I have put first the matters mentioned above, because I wish to make clear, as a matter of common sense, the impression of any reasonable outsider that they certainly have concrete wrongs. But even those who doubt it, and say the Irish have no concrete grievance but only a sentiment of nationalism, fall into a final and very serious error about the nature of the thing called nationalism, and even the meaning of the word concrete. For the truth is that, in dealing with a nation, the grievance which is most abstract of all is also the one which is most concrete of all. Not only is patriotism a part of practical politics, but it is more practical than any politics. To neglect it, and ask only for grievances, is like counting the clouds and forgetting the climate. To neglect it, and think only of laws, is like seeing the landmarks, and never seeing the landscape. It will be found that the denial of nationality is much more of a daily nuisance than the denial of votes or the denial of juries. Nationality is the most practical thing, because so many things are national, without being political, or without being legal. A man in a conquered country feels it, when he goes to market, or even goes to church, which may be more often than he goes to law. And the harvest is more general than the general election. Altering the flag on the roof is like altering the sun in the sky. The very chimney pots and lamp posts look different. They after a certain interval of occupation they are different. As a man would know he was in a land of strangers, before he knew it was a land of savages. So he knows a rule is alien, long before he knows it is oppressive. It is not necessary for it to add injury to insult. For instance, when I first walked about Dublin, I was disposed to smile at the names of the streets being gravely inscribed in Gaelic as well as English. I will not here discuss the question of what is called the Irish language. The only arguable case against which is that it is not the Irish language. At any rate it is not the English language, and I have come to appreciate more imaginatively the importance of the fact. It may be used rather as a weapon than a tool, but it is a national weapon if it is not a national tool. I see the significance of having something which the eye commonly encounters, as it does a chimney pot or a lamp post, but which is like a chimney reared above an Irish earth, or a lamp to light an Irish road. I see the point of having a solid object in the street, to remind an Irishman that he is in Ireland, as the red pillar box reminds an Englishman that he is in England. But there must be a thousand things as practical as pillar boxes, which remind an Irishman that, if he is in his country, it is not yet a free country. Everything connected with the principal seat of government reminds him of it perpetually. It may not be easy, for an Englishman to imagine, how many of such daily details there are. But there is, after all, one very simple effort of the fancy, which would fix the fact for him for ever. He has only to imagine that the Germans have conquered London. A brilliant writer who has earned the name of a pacifist, and even a pro-German, wants preponder to me his highly personal and even perverse type of internationalism, by saying as a sort of unanswerable challenge, wouldn't you rather be ruled by Geth than by Walter Long? I replied that words could not express the wild love and loyalty I should feel for Mr. Walter Long, if the only alternative were Geth. I could not have put my own national case in a clearer or more compact form. I might occasionally feel inclined to kill Mr. Long. But under the approaching shadow of Geth, I should feel more inclined to kill myself. That is the deadly element in the de-nationalization that it poisons life, itself, the most real of all realities. But perhaps the best way of putting the point conversational is to say that Geth would certainly put up a monument to Shakespeare. I would sooner die than walk past it every day of my life. And in the other case of the street inscriptions, it is well to remember that these things, which we also walk past every day, are exactly the sort of things that always have, in a nameless fashion, the national note. If the Germans conquered London, they would not need to massacre me, or even enslave me, in order to annoy me. It would be quite enough that their notices were in a German style, if not a German language. Suppose I looked up an English railway carriage and saw these words written in English exactly as I have seen them in a German railway carriage, written in German. The outleaning of the body from the window of the carriage is because of the therewith bound up life's danger, strictly prohibited. It is not rude. It would certainly be impossible to complain that it is curt. I should not be annoyed by its brutality and brevity, but on the contrary by its elaborateness and even its laxity. But if it does not exactly shine in lucidity, it gives a reason which, after all, is a very reasonable thing to do. By every cosmopolitan test it is more polite than the sentence I have read in my childhood. Wait until the train stops. This is curt. This might be called rude, but it never annoyed me in the least. The nearest I can get to defining my sentiment is to say I can sympathize with the Englishman who wrote the English notice. Having a rude thing to write, he wrote it as quickly as he could, and went home to his tea, or preferably to his beer. But what is too much for me, an overpowering vision, is the thought of that German calmly sitting down to compose that sentence like a sort of essay? It is the thought of him serenely waving away the one important word until the very end of the sentence, like the day of judgment to the end of the world. It is perhaps the mere thought that he did not break down in the middle of it, but endured to the end, or that he could afterwards calmly review it and see that sentence go marching by like the whole German army. In short I do not object to it because it is dictatorial or despotic or bureaucratic or anything of the kind, but simply because it is German. Because it is German I do not object to it in Germany. Because it is German I should violently revolt against it in England. I do not revolt against the command to wait until the train stops, not because it is less rude, but because it is the kind of rudeness I can understand. The official may be treating me casually, but at least he is not treating himself seriously. And so in return I can treat him and his notice not seriously, but casually. I can neglect to wait until the train stops and fall down on the platform, as I did on the platform of Wolverhampton, to the permanent damage of that fine structure. I can, by a stroke of satiric genius, truly national and traditional, the dexterous elimination of a single letter alter the maxim, wait until the train stops. It is a jest as profoundly English as the weather to which it refers. Nobody would be tempted to take such a liberty with a German sentence, not only because he would be instantly imprisoned in a fortress, but because he would not know at which end to begin. Now this is the truth which is expressed, though perhaps very imperfectly in things like the gaily-glittering on streets in Dublin. It will be wholesome for us, who are English, to realize that there is almost certainly an English way of putting things, even the most harmless things, which appears to an Irishman quite as ungainly unnatural and ludicrous as that German sentence appeared to me. As the famous Frenchman did not know when he was talking prose, the official Englishman does not know when he is talking English. He unconsciously assumes that he is talking Esperanto. Imperialism is not an insanity of patriotism. It is merely an illusion of cosmopolitanism. For the national note of the Irish language is not peculiar to what used to be called the Urse language. The whole nation used the tongue, common to both nations, with a difference far beyond a dialect. It is not a difference of accent, but a difference of style, which is generally a difference of soul. The emphasis, the elision, the short cuts and sharp endings of speech, show a variety which may be almost unnoticeable but is, nonetheless, untranslatable. It may be only a little more weight in a word or an inversion allowable in English, but abounding in Irish. But we can no more copy it than copy the compactness of the French, or the Latin ablative absolute. The commonest case of what I mean, for instance, is the locution that lingers in my mind, with an agreeable phrase from one of Mr. Yates' stories. Whom shall yet see upon the hob of hell and them screeching? It is an idiom that gives the effect of a pointed post-script, a parting kick, or sting, in the tale of the sentence, which is unfathomably national. It is noteworthy, and even curious, that quite a crowd of Irishmen, who quoted to me with just admiration the noble ending of Kathleen Nahulahan, where the newcomer is asked if he had seen the old woman, who is the tragic type of Ireland going out, quoted his answer in that form. I did not, but I saw a young woman, and she was walking like a queen. I say it is curious, because I have since been told that, in the actual book, which I cannot lay my hand on at the moment, a more classic English idiom is used. It would generally be most unwise to alter the diction of such a master of style as Mr. Yates, though indeed it is possible that he altered it himself, as he himself has sometimes done, and not always I think for the better. But whether this form came from himself or from his countrymen, it was very redolent of his country, and there was something inspiring and thus seeing it, as it were before one's eyes, literature becoming legend. But a hundred other examples could be given, even from my own short experience, of such fine turns of language, nor are the finest necessarily to be found in literature. It is perfectly true, though prigs may overwork and snobs underrate the truth, that in a country like this the peasants can talk like poets. When I was on the wild coast of Donegal, an old unhappy woman, who had starved through the famines and evictions, was telling a lady the tales of those times, and she mentioned quite naturally one that might have come straight out of time so mystical that we should call them mythical, that some travelers had met a poor wandering woman with a baby in those great gray rocky wastes, and asked her who she was, and she answered, I am the mother of God, and this is himself, and he is the boy you will all be wanting at the last. There is more in that story than can be put into any book, even on a matter in which its meaning plays so deep a part, and it seems almost profane to analyze it, however sympathetically. But if anyone wishes to know what I mean by the untranslatable truth which makes a language national, it will be worthwhile to look at the mere diction of that speech, and note how its whole effect turns on certain phrases and customs, which happen to be peculiar to the nation. It is well known that in Ireland the husband or head of the household is always called himself, nor is it peculiar to the peasantry but adopted, if partly ingest by the gentry. A distinguished Dublin publicist, a landlord and leader among the more national aristocracy, always called me himself when he was talking to my wife. It will be noted how a sort of shadow of that common meaning mingles with the more shining significance of its position in a sentence where it is also strictly logical, in the sense of theological. All literary style, especially national style, is made up of such coincidences, which our spiritual sort of puns. That is why style is untranslatable, because it is possible to render the meaning, but not the double meaning. There is even a faint differentiation in the half humorous possibilities of the word boy, another holy national nuance, saying instead, and he is the child, and it is something perhaps stiffer, and certainly quite different. Take away this is himself, and simply substitute this as he, and it is a piece of peasantry ten thousand miles from the original. But above all it has lost its note of something national, because it has lost its note of something domestic. All roads in Ireland, of fact or folklore, of theology or grammar, lead us back to that door and hearth of the household, that fortress of the family, which is the key fortress of the whole strategy of the island. The Irish Catholics, like other Christians, admit a mystery in the holy trinity, but they may almost be said to admit an experience in the holy family. Their historical experience, alas, has made it seem to them not unnatural that the holy family should be a homeless family. They also have found that there was no room for them at the end, or anywhere but in the jail. They also have dragged their newborn babes out of their cradles, and trailed in despair along the road to Egypt, or at least along the road to exile. They also have heard in the dark, and the distance behind them, the noise of the horsemen of Herod. Now it is this sensation of stemming a stream of ten thousand things, all pouring one way, labels, titles, monuments, metaphors, modes of address, assumptions and controversy, that make an Englishman in Ireland know that he is in a strange land. Nor is he merely bewildered as among a medley of strange things. On the contrary, if he has any sense, he soon finds them unified and simplified to a single impression, as if he were talking to a strange person. He cannot define it because nobody can define a person and nobody can define a nation. He can only see it, smell it, hear it, handle it, bump into it, fall over it, kill it, be killed for it, or be damned for doing it wrong. He must be content with these mere hints of its existence, but he cannot define it because it is like a person, and no book of logic will undertake to define Aunt Jane or Uncle William. We can only say with more or less mournful conviction, that if Aunt Jane is not a person, there is no such thing as a person. And I say with equal conviction, that if Ireland is not a nation, there is no such thing as a nation. France is not a nation, England is not a nation, there is no such thing as patriotism on this planet. Any Englishman of any party with any proposal may well clear his mind of Kant about that preliminary question. If we free Ireland, we must free it to be a nation. If we go on repressing Ireland, we are repressing a nation. If we are right to repress Ireland, we are right to repress a nation. After that, we may consider what can be done, according to our opinions, about the respect due to patriotism. The reality of cosmopolitan and imperial alternatives, and so on. I will debate with a man who does not want mankind divided into nations at all. I can imagine a case for the man who wants specially to restrain one particular nation, as I would restrain anti-national Prussia. But I will not argue with a man about whether Ireland is a nation, or about the yet more awful question of whether it is an island. I know there is a skeptical philosophy which suggests that all ultimate ideas are only penultimate ideas, and therefore, perhaps, that all islands are really peninsular. But I will claim to know what I mean by an island, and what I mean by an individual, and when I think of my experience in the island in question, the impression is a single one. The voices mingle in a human voice, which I should know if I heard it again, calling in the distance. The crowds dwindle into a single figure whom I have seen long ago upon a strange hillside, and she walking like a queen.