name or another, had made towards understanding and sympathizing with the Nationalist position; to the facility with which Mr. Birrell passed his University Bill; to the many thousands of non-political meetings which were being held in connection with the co-operative movement and the Gaelic League; and to all the opportunities for mutual association afforded by the workings of the Department of Agriculture and, in a lesser degree, by the administration of the Local Government Act.

What it came to was that there was a slow but steady approximation of all Irishmen towards a common point. The best Irish thought was turning inwards. It was moving away from London and fastening upon Ireland herself. There was a shifting of the center of interest and energy. Men were coming to realize more and more that the upbuilding of the Irish nation depended less on the passing or the repeal of laws at Westminster or on external assistance of any kind than on work in Ireland; that it was not in the House of Commons but in Ireland that the true current of national life flowed; and that even in the absence of Home Rule, Irishmen might still accomplish something useful for their common country. I must dwell on this a little more because nobody will understand the recent outbreak in Dublin who does not clearly grasp that it was directed as much against the Nationalist Party as against Great Britain. It was one of the most marked characteristics of the "new Ireland " that it betrayed a very general disenchantment with the personnel and policy of the Nationalist Party. That was not due to any real waning of Nationalist sentiment. Nor was it due merely to the absence of a strong and commanding leader in the Party itself, or to the fact that the peasant, having satisfied his historic passion for ownership, believed that he had received from agitation all that it was capable of yielding. It was due above everything else to the folly and myopia that had insensibly separated the Party from the most vigorous thought of the country. My complaint as an Englishman and a Home Ruler against the Nationalists was not that they were Anti-British, but that they were not sufficiently pro-Irish, and had never risen above a purely political view of nationality. The new Ireland had come into existence in spite of them, without their collective assistance and often in the face of their collective hostility. Not one of the vital movements of regeneration I have touched

upon owed anything to the Party as a Party. They were the product of a spirit and an atmosphere that the official exponents of Irish Nationalism had failed or had not tried to comprehend.

The new Ireland was beginning to think and inquire; the Party insisted on manufacturing its public opinion and did what it could by gasconading resolutions and systematic thimble-rigging to stifle private thought. The Party, again, always confounded nationality with politics, and dubbed as anti-national those who did not subscribe to its own political formulae and organization. The new Ireland relegated politics to a secondary place, worked for a union of all classes, creeds and parties, and welcomed everything from whatever source that contributed to Irish well-being. The Irish Party had long acted on the principle that the salvation of Ireland was to be wrought by speeches and manoeuvres in the House of Commons; it had neglected the intellectual, moral and in large part the economic progress of the country in order to devote its exclusive power to the constitutional panacea; it had denied that Ireland could be prosperous without Home Rule, and it had opposed and condemned nearly every effort to make her prosperous as an act of treason to the national cause. The new Ireland, on the other hand, relied for the upbuilding of the country and its people upon the practical work of Irishmen in Ireland, scouted the notion that the Irish question was a question of politics merely, and insisted that the task of betterment should no longer be postponed until an Irish Parliament was able to take it in hand. There had thus been propagated a subtle but unmistakable opposition of aims and ideals between the most stalwart leaders of the people in Ireland and their Parliamentary representatives.

The political party that most clearly reflected this opposition was the Sinn Féin Party. There is no need to discuss its policy of withdrawing the Irish members from Westminster, of boycotting the agencies of British rule, and of erecting out of hand an Irish government in Dublin. The important thing about the Sinn Féiners was the spirit that animated them and the arguments they relied upon in advocating their programme. Parliamentarianism, they said, acted upon the national energies like a soporific. The people quickly came to think they had done all that could be expected of them when they had elected a certain number of

Home Rulers to act for them at Westminster. No tangible sacrifice of any kind was asked of them; all sense of personal responsibility and initiative was destroyed; and the political contribution of "the people " to the cause of Home Rule took the form of shouting and passing unbridled resolutions and waiting for results which they did next to nothing towards producing. As against this, the Sinn Féiners appealed directly to the individual citizen. Their aim was a bilingual, self-sufficing, wholly Irish Ireland, created and supported by the sacrifices, the individual exertions, and the ordered unity of the people themselves. This, too, was the aim of the Gaelic League. Indeed all the movements I have mentioned worked, consciously or otherwise, towards one comprehensive end-an Irish Ireland. Whether their immediate aim was that of strengthening the national will or awakening the national soul or of stiffening the national backbone, all proceeded upon the formula that the salvation of Ireland must be sought and achieved by Irishmen on Irish soil. All in their different ways set forth an ideal of nationality that overrode parties, creeds and sections. All inculcated selfreliance as the primal need. All discouraged that fatal Irish habit, of all the fruits of misgovernment the most poisonous and paralyzing, of throwing upon anybody and everybody but themselves the responsibility for their moral or material shortcomings. To encourage and find or force an outlet for the native instincts and genius of the people, to save them from Anglicization, and to lead them back to the well-head of the old Irish language, arts and recreations, were the objects of the Gaelic League. To make the Irish politically virile, united and constructive was the essence of Sinn Féinism. To promote Irish industries and equip the peasant for the realities of a competitive agricultural existence were the more prosaic aims of the industrial revival and of the co-operative movement. At first sight, they might not seem to have had much in common; in reality, they had everything. They all made for initiative and self-dependence, and intensified the sense of an upbuilding nationality. And they proceeded side by side with an interesting and even brilliant outburst of Irish letters, drama and art and with a rapid advance of prosperity among the newly-made peasant proprietors.

It was on this Ireland, so full of life and hope and promise, that the British Government in 1912 exploded the third

Home Rule Bill. In an instant the old enmities between North and South flared up again. It was an ingenious and complicated measure that was accepted by the Nationalists both in Parliament and in Ireland as a sufficient satisfaction of their demands, but that Ulster from the beginning would have none of. The Sinn Féiners and the Gaelic Leaguers were almost equally opposed to it because of the manifold limitations it imposed on the freedom of the Irish Parliament. Their able pens pretty well tore it to pieces as a sham and an insult; and I personally should be the last to pretend that the Government rose to the full height of their opportunity or that they drafted a Constitution for Ireland in the same lofty and spacious spirit of statesmanship that they had displayed a few years earlier in their dealings with South Africa. Still, with all its shortcomings, the Bill did set up an Irish Parliament with an executive responsible to it; and as such the Irish masses and the Irish Party acquiesced in it as an adequate settlement of their historic claim.

I need do no more than remind my readers how the grim and stubborn men of Ulster organized themselves against it under the leadership of Sir Edward Carson; how they made without the least attempt at concealment every preparation for resisting it; how they drew up a scheme of a provisional government to be established in Ulster the moment a Dublin Parliament became a reality; how they imported arms in open defiance of law and authority; and how when the Government made a move as though to restrain them it was frustrated by something that came near to being a distinct refusal of the Army to obey the civil power. That crucial moment when the Carsonites smuggled in their rifles and cartridges and when the Government flinched from the task of suppressing them and allowed an armed force to be raised and drilled and equipped with impunity, was a turning point in latter-day Irish history. The Nationalists were not slow to follow the Ulster lead and to trade on the weakness and timidity of the executive. They, too, began to arm; and in a very few months there were probably in Ireland not less than 250,000 men marching, manoeuvring, learning the elements of the military trade with weapons in their hands. It is very well worth recalling that on the Nationalist side the movement sprang up without the prompting, and indeed in distinct opposition to the wishes of the Irish Party, and that it was only by stretching his authority to the utmost that Mr.

Redmond was able to secure control of the National Volunteers, and that his success, such as it was, led almost at once to the secession of the bolder spirits and their reorganization under another name. Blood meanwhile had been shed in an attempt by the police to interfere with a Nationalist gunrunning plot; Dublin was convulsed by a strike that lasted for many months, involved many riots, and cost many lives; step by step, to a gathering tumult on both sides of the Irish Channel, the Home Rule Bill drew nearer to the Statute Book and Ireland drew nearer to civil war; the last effort to reach a peaceable agreement by a round-table conference at Buckingham Palace had broken down; and all men were preparing to see one more tragic page written in red on the book of Irish history when-the great war broke out.

That measureless catastrophe shocked and sobered Ireland into an immediate truce. More than that, it gave Mr. Redmond an opportunity for rallying Nationalist Ireland to the Imperial cause. He did not hesitate a moment in saying that this was Ireland's war as much as and as well as England's and that the change in British sentiment and policy towards Ireland had thrown upon Irishmen " a great duty towards the British Empire." Undeterred by the execrations of the Nationalist extremists and by the doubts of the Ulster Unionists, who were firmly convinced that all Nationalists were "disloyal," Mr. Redmond organized a great recruiting campaign in Ireland itself. It was a bold and statesmanlike step and it would have met with better results had the British War Office given him a free hand. But the officials in Whitehall were quite sure they knew more about Ireland than Mr. Redmond. They missed accordingly nearly every opening he gave them, and implored them to grasp, for appealing to Irish sentiment. They went their own way, muddling, interfering, disregarding his advice, committing almost all the imbecilities one would expect from English officialdom in its dealings with Ireland, and committing them, of course, with the best of intentions, in a spirit of genuine gratitude for Ireland's and Mr. Redmond's attitude, and with nothing in their foolish minds except the desire to help them. If I were ever in need of any further arguments to support Home Rule or to strengthen my conviction that the English are temperamentally inhibited from doing in Ireland the right thing in the right way and at the right moment, I should point simply to the record of the War