The Irish Mind

I

I WAS a plain American, interested, but a little naïve, when I entered Ireland in the spring of 1918. I believed then, like most Americans, that Ireland should have come wholeheartedly into the war; and I think so still, except that I know now that Ireland will have suffered most because she stayed lukewarm. I believed, like most Americans, that Home Rule was a good thing and should be put through; and I still so believe, but see the complexity of the problem. I was a little weary, as are most Americans, of the endless fuss over Ireland while the world was burning; but now I realize that, however insignificant in a universal conflict may seem the Irish political squabble, the mind of Ireland is important, is significant for us and the future, and is deeply misunderstood by general friend and general foe in America.

I hear in the clubs, ‘ Who is interested in Ireland?' and I wish to answer, ‘Millions of Irishmen in America and Canada and Australia, and in our armies in France, who are storing up confusion and bitterness.’ The question was a foolish one. I hear, ‘What difference does it make what happens to Ireland?’ and my answer is, ‘Will it make no difference for the future if in Ireland democratic government, scores a conspicuous failure?’

It was my privilege to see in London the library of German propaganda printed for neutral countries and captured in the course of the war. Half of it treated of race-problems, and of that half, two thirds was on Ireland. Do we still sneer, as in 1914, at German propaganda?

I entered Ireland by the green hills of Ulster, and moved freely through County Antrim and Belfast. I talked there with bishops and deans of the Church of Ireland, and fine upstanding generals and county families in their walled gardens — friendly people, solid, simple, more voluble than the Scotch, but w it h hard-gripping minds like theirs, that took one thing at a time and wrung it. They had worked for their comfort, made prosperous land out of a waste of whin and gorse, and would keep it against Prussian or Sinn Feiner — that was my impression. Speculation upon world-politics did not interest them; they knew little of the new England, less of America; the war was the war, and they intended to fight it out — that was all there was to that subject. They were a perfect type of the genus Tory, with his limitations, and especially with his virtues of self-reliance, self-respect, and the steadiness which comes from caste.

I talked with bankers and manufacturers and gardeners and cabbies — Presbyterians this group and representing the Orange wing of the Ulster party, but, like the others, proud of Belfast and of the relative prosperity of the North of Ireland. Belfast is a black city, a depressing city, full of overdriven faces, but full of energy, too, and the signs of success. Here it was religion one heard about, and the dangers of Roman Catholic domination; it was customs and excises and the fear of a lazy South battening upon Northern taxes that they talked of; it was the shiftless Celt, who still gets his water from rainbarrels and yet thinks he can run the country; the Pope and the £42,000 he draws annually from Ireland, ‘And how much would he be getting under Home Rule?' And I formed, I think, a just idea of the ‘case’ of the North — her right to safeguard her economic prosperity, the honest fear of a vote controlled by the church, her unwillingness to let slack, spendthrift Dublin run neat, orderly Belfast. But I left, wondering w hy these sturdy Scotch-Irish folk were so timorous. Why, unlike their ancestors in the colonies, they dared not run risks in order to gain the benefits of a united island; why these builders of ships and weavers of linen, who alone had made commerce and local government successful in Ireland, were so resolute to cling to England’s skirts, even at the cost of perpetuating Irish division and rancor among their own minorities; so afraid to venture union with a people whose practical efficiency they despised. For while all in the North argued their right to stay in the Union, no one supposed that this would satisfy anyone in Ireland but themselves and a few Unionists of the South.

Later I traveled south through the meadows of County Down and past those dim beautiful mountains of Mourne, in a country so rich and so peaceful that one could not but reflect uneasily upon the men who kept it in turmoil. My compartment was full of officers of the British army of occupation; in the villages I saw children half naked and wholly dirty; on a platform was chalked, ‘Down with Home Rule,’ and ‘Fight for every country except your own.’ And so I came to beautiful, disheveled Dublin, a city of the soul, with dirty finger-nails and a torn dress and a nasty temper and a voice of the angels.

II

While I lived in Dublin I saw much of Nationalists and those intenser Nationalists who, in all but republicanism, are really Sinn Feiners. I talked with friends of George Moore and the Celtic twilight, who loved me because I was au American, and insulted me in the hope of surprising an admission that America came into the war ‘bought by English gold.’ I talked with Æ in his workroom frescoed with Celtic gods, where he strides from his mountainous desk of pamphlets to paint in an Irish scene, then turns back to economics, or pure milk, or poetry. A black-bearded man with burning eyes and a voice that chants, he gave me my first idea of the intensity of life in Ireland.

I talked with poets consuming in an hour a week’s rations of emotion. I talked with John MacNeil, ascetic, intellectual leader of the Sinn Fein party, whose judgment kept the Easter rebellion from becoming a national disaster; who thought clean and cool on all points except the relations between England and Ireland. I talked with radical priests; with Unionists in government service who, after a second glass of port, became equally Irish and almost as radical; with scholars, business men, women, intellectuals; and began to see that nationalism in Ireland (I mean the emotion, not the party) was a religion; was a passion so strong that arguments which ignored it for questions of efficiency or profit were untrustworthy.

I met, too, the wilder Sinn Feiners, in assemblies which began at indefinite hours and lasted indefinitely. There were labor leaders present, whose sense of Ireland’s international responsibilities was struggling with distrust of what they thought was an ‘English war.’ No one in a press censored with more vigor than intelligence had explained to them why it was also America’s. There were destructive radicals, who added to Ireland’s hereditary grievances all grievances that the supposedly downtrodden have voiced anywhere, and slid from Bolshevikism into Nationalism, and from Nationalism into Pacifism, with easy inconsistency accompanied by vituperation. There were fanatic women who kept their watches an hour and twenty-five minutes behind the official time, because ‘summer time’ was an English invention and real Irish time ought to be twenty-five minutes slower still. There were melancholy idealists, pure of motives, noble of heart, drunk with vision and with wrath; and truculent chaps with angry eyes and a general expression of having been kept too long out of a fight. To them all I talked America and American ideals in the war, not hesitating to express views in sharpest conflict with their own; and I was sometimes agreed with, usually understood, always listened to tolerantly. (Except for an excited poetess, who challenged me because in our own Civil War we had thrown the tea into Boston harbor while now we were tied to the apron-strings of Britain!) For as the Irishman once looked to Spain and then to France, so now he looks to America for sympathy. And I came away convinced that the so-called Pro-Germanism of Sinn Fein (a very few individuals excepted) was like much of their extremist politics, mere froth and spume floating up from a troubled mind out of joint with the times and mishandled by those in authority, signifying rebellion against circumstance but no treason. And with this conclusion I find the calmer sense of England agrees.

Afterwards I saw much of Sir Horace Plunkett and the Moderates of the South, in the exciting days when the Convention was closing, and just before conscription, at the moment of expected preliminary settlement, struck Dublin into a mute rage in which fear and indignation had equal parts; the time when the extremists of either party were seeking walls against which to set their backs.

It was easy to admire the system of agricultural coöperation, founded by Sir Horace, which is making rural Ireland comfortable; easy to sympathize with the belief of many Moderates, both Catholic and Protestant, that poverty and waste and alcohol are more dangerous to Ireland than England, or Orange Ulster, or radical Sinn Fein. The imagination warmed to a programme, not exclusively political, which would make of Ireland, not a secondclass England, but a civilization based, like Denmark’s, upon scientific agriculture, free as might be from the evils of industrialism, yet successful and populous. I remembered that Ireland had halved her population in the past while Great Britain had been doubling hers. I considered that the years between 1914 and 1918 have not demonstrated the surpassing value of a civilization moulded by industrial countries where the normal life is of the factory or the sweat-shop; and I wondered why such a programme seemed so little to interest political Irishmen; why we heard so little of it in America. It was like a cool draft after the chill of Ulster commercialism, the vaporous heat of Sinn Fein ideology; but it was clearly not the accepted potion for Ireland’s ills — yet.

Night after night I talked half the night through in Ireland, and I was showered with documents from every party — books, leaflets, letters, statistics, reports, clippings, economic solutions, religious solutions, political solutions, complaints, until, as I looked over my desk, all Ireland seemed to be shouting in print, ‘This is what I want; this is what will cure me’; and no two voices cried alike.

Later, in England, the complexity of the problem was only increased; for England realizes, as America seemingly does not, that Ireland cannot go on as she is without clogging the wheels of international progress; and there is no man in any party who does not have his bitter opinion as to what thing is best to do. And of course I formed my own opinion which, unimportant though it is, I shall probably be unable to keep out of this essay. But more important than any opinion seemed the conviction borne in upon me that all things I had seen and heard were symptoms of some inner malady. That, at least for us Americans, it was better to sweep away all statistics and documentary solutions, discourage the pamphleteer and the writer of letters to the press, and try to understand the Irish before we took a hand in the universal game of solving the Irish question on paper. And I found myself equally convinced that the humblest attempt was worth while, not only because the steady earnestness of Ulsterism and the invigorating Nationalism of Sinn Fein are the best fruits of Ireland, but also because these lovable, vivid Irish have disappointed us in the war, because they puzzle and irritate us, because it will be so easy for us, as for them, to make irrevocable mistakes.

III

To begin then with apparent but not real harshness, if I may be allowed to present my diagnosis, the atmosphere of Ireland is psychopathic, and the Irish, South and North, and, what is more curious, the English who are sent to rule them, all, at one time or another and in different fashions, manifest clear symptoms of abnormality. Ireland is like those interesting abnormal cases which specialists have to handle, where the patient is sometimes a genius and sometimes subnormal, where every trait that is really characteristic, good or bad, is magnified until it threatens to crush all the others. There have been many such cases among famous individuals, — Poe was one, Nietzsche was another, — and science seeks them out. keenly because by their exaggeration of traits common to humanity they have become large-print books in which the qualities of modem man can be easily read. But an abnormal nation is dangerous to itself and others because it cannot, like a patient, be kept under easy observation; because it may at any moment carry through the unexpected, ruinous act. Yet, even in partial derangement, it may exhibit, for the world to read, virtues as well as vices more emphatic than those of less turbulent races.

The fanatic patriotism of the radical Sinn Feiners is abnormal. It bums so intensely that their judgment is affected. Great Britain, in spite of her creditable world-history, in spite of her modern leadership in social reform, they see only through the darkening lens of Irish history. Hatred of England is like a hand before their eyes; and the balked vision turns back always upon the woes of Ireland. Their grievances are real ones, — especially the historical grievances which mean so much to Irishmen, — but they are magnified. Sir Horace Plunkett’s epigram, ‘Irish history is for Ireland to forget and for England to remember,’ has been applied on neither side of the Channel. And their own virtues are also magnified — the strengths and the loyalties and the ideals of their patriotism. Ireland is full of men who are willing to die for a principle, although they cannot agree with each other as to which principle to die for. ‘I want to fight in this war,’ I heard an Irish poet say; ‘I want to be conscripted; but I think I ought to let myself be shot for refusing. I don’t mind dying, but I should like to die for Ireland.’ Particularistic patriotism this is, like the patriotism of Prussia; but if it is less practically effective, it is also far nobler. Intense and fine and also self-regarding, it is the patriotism of my country right or wrong and the devil take the rest of the world. In brief, it is the patriotism of the man who has a genius for being just patriotic — who is, thus far, abnormal.

Ulster, with her determined ‘standpatism,’ is abnormal in quite another sense. Is there such a thing as abnormal normality? If so, Ulster has it. It is normal to care for one’s pocketbook, to distrust visionaries, to prefer a low tax-rate to soap-box oratory. Telephone Belfast, they say, and your business is done in five minutes. Telephone Cork, and it takes fifteen. Telephone Dublin, and they reply, ‘Ah, call again to-morrow.’ It is normal to be proud of a clever, hard-headed community which is as pleased with the status quo as most of us were before 1914. But to be as wholly and successfully Tory as the ruling class in the North of Ireland is abnormal. The Bourbons were also abnormal in this respect, but the Bourbons were stupid and Ulster is not. She merely manifests a typical case of being completely satisfied with the state of life into which it has pleased God to call one. All she wants is to be let alone; 1913 (English Liberals say 1774) was quite good enough for her; there would be no desire for change in Ireland if mischief-makers would keep their mouths shut. The war is a good war; her system of industries based upon cheap labor is a good system; the Protestant religion is a good religion; all is for the best, — as the Deist-Tories of the eighteenth century used to say, — if only Dublin and the Liberals and the Labor Party would let well enough alone.

It is not surprising that Ulster has been popular with a British government which had to keep the Empire going in war-time; but such a warmhearted desire to stop the clock is certainly abnormal. These fine, steady, self-reliant Scotch-Irish, full of Puritan dogmatism and practical efficiency, are museum specimens exhibiting in its unmixed condition the conservatism possible to man. Indeed, when one breaks away from the fold, he becomes, not a moderate, but a radical Nationalist like George Russell, or a Sinn Feiner like John MacNeil, and puts drive into the ideas of the opposite party. Everywhere in the world except in Ulster they are wondering what will happen after the war. Ulster knows — nothing will happen!

It cannot be denied also that, by some curious process of infection, the actions of the British government in Ireland have become abnormal also by comparison with their procedure elsewhere. The friends of the government praise its attempts to conciliate or its efforts to ‘hold down’ Ireland, according to their views, but wonder at the inconsistency of doing both together. The enemies of the government maintain that no policy whatsoever is to be found, but only the resultant of attempts to soothe the party which at a given time is likely to make the most trouble.

The truth is that it is extremely difficult to handle abnormal conditions and keep your head. A wise Cabinet proposed to accept the report of the Irish Convention, and then, in spite of imperfections, to pledge itself to put through its moderate proposals. A perturbed Cabinet, on the day the report was delivered, announced immediate conscription in Ireland, even though knowing that this would make impossible any ‘Moderate’ solution. A panicky Cabinet, a little later, suspended conscription in Ireland in hopes that the Irish would become ‘Moderates.’ This is not normal British policy or British sanity. I am, indeed, not the first by many to observe that the Britisher in Ireland, or treating of Ireland, loses his tolerance, his patience, and sometimes his balance, and often becomes either a despot, or a weakling, or (if he stays long enough) a radical Sinn Feiner.

The disease, however, is an Irish disease, and it is in Ireland that it must be cured. In Ulster it is constitutional, and will probably yield only to operation, or atrophy of the obstructing parts. Ulster is relatively happy, and rightly so; for, no matter how reactionary in policy, she has earned selfrespect. She is useful in the war, which is certainly more than can be said without reservation of the rest of Ireland. She is making money. And furthermore, her excessive desire to let the future take care of itself is less punished in this world than any other abnormality. Except in times of revolution or rapid change, it runs with the wheels of ordinary living, and often directs them.

But the malady in Southern Ireland is more dangerous and more sharply affected by the difficulties of the present. In some respects this Ireland is, I think, the unhappiest country in all this unhappy world. Others — Serbia, Roumania, Belgium — are infinitely more miserable, but they have not unhappy souls. The chief reason is that all her emotions of patriotism, hate, love, desire for action, are suppressed. I do not mean suppressed in the sense of being put down by force, like seditious meetings, rebellious organizations, or scurrilous newspapers. I mean suppressed by circumstance and the conflict of the emotions themselves.

IV

The history of Ireland up to the last century has, of course, been one long tale of suppression in every sense the word can bear; but I am not referring to inherited maladies, although no one can deal intelligently with Ireland who fails to take into account the reaction of her past upon a people vividly, abnormally conscious of it. I speak rather of the immediate suppressions of the present. Patriotism, for example, in Ireland, even among the bitterest Sinn Feiners, is a mixed brew of fierce love for Ireland with enthusiasm for the cause of the Allies; and when their distrust of England blocks the way of sympathy with democracy, the result is a choked utterance and hysteric actions. Hate for England is an honest, though not an admirable sentiment in Ireland, but even that gets no free outlet, for whatever England may have been in the past or may intend in the future, it is clear even to the most impassioned intellect that she has been fighting an avowed tyrant. And it is evident to more thoughtful observers that the anger hurled at liberal-minded, presentday England should often be reserved for Ulster, or a wing of the Tory party, or for mere unfortunate circumstance. Love for Ireland turns to gall daily as the Irish factions wrangle and backbite and forget, not only the larger issues of the war, but even the welfare of Ireland. Suppressed desire for action is the keenest torment of all. It has always been characteristic of Irishmen to spend their energies freely wherever feeling ran high. They have been in all wars everywhere among white races, and in politics wherever a man speaking English could vote. They have always loved action more than the fruits of action; and yet in our war — the greatest of enterprises—they stood aside or entered with troubled hearts. They went about their business (and few Southern Irishmen care fundamentally for business) while the rest of the world dropped prose for rough poetry and emotional sluggishness for intense activity. As a result, minds are fevered; they became like mischievous boys kept indoors on a rainy day. Suppression is always dangerous. When windows are shut, the house grows sour and mouldy.

But this suppression as one sees it in Ireland is perhaps also only a symptom. The real malady of the Irish state results from deeper causes, and is of the tragic sort of which great drama is made. Irish literature is solemn with its note. Irish brawls attain a dignity because of it, which we of the outer world admit by the attention we give them, but are at a loss to understand. In Ireland, the age-long, universal conflict between realist and idealist fights its sharpest and least conclusive battles. In Ireland, this conflict in philosophies of living, like everything else, is abnormal, and its exaggeration may explain abnormality in other directions and may be the ultimate cause of her unfortunate suppressions.

You cannot bring twelve men together anywhere in the world without feeling their division into tough and tender-minded, into those who are interested in facts and those others whose minds are stirred chiefly by ideas and emotions. And the tough are usually too tough, the tender too tender, and conflict between them is inevitable. So it is in Ireland, where a South which, in spite of its shrewdness, is predominantly idealist and ’tender-minded’ faces an Ulster and a landed aristocracy which, in spite of its sentimental obstinacy in religion and economics, is realist and ‘practical.’ And there is this added circumstance, that it is ‘tough-minded’ realists in England who have usually governed or tried to govern the Irish idealists. Even Spenser became a realist when he turned from Faery land to write of the Irish about him.

Barring the Ulster party, some of the Southern Unionists, and the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church, Ireland is the most hopelessly idea listic of modern nations. Life proceeds from idea to emotion, not from fact to fact, and happiness depends upon a state of mind, not upon welfare of body. Talk proceeds in Dublin with fiery lightness because the speaker for the time breathes and lives in the ideas which form and reform as he speaks. In the country the peasants are rich in humor, joy, and sorrow in huts that an American ‘dago’ would despise. Ideas, principles, emotions, which with us seldom see the light, are the worn coin of Irish currency. All pockets are full of them, and on their exchange the business of life is based. You are poor without them, wealthy with them, even if in poverty and distress. It is the rich and facile idealism which Dr. Johnson could never understand in Goldsmith, which we love and condemn and misunderstand in the Irish to-day.

In its upper ranges, this Irish idealism is a desire for spirituality, for poetry, for beauty of thought and feeling, and so is in sharpest conflict with our prosaic industrial civilization. This is the idealism of the Irish literary movement and of the fine minds among the Sinn Feiners. It is ‘unpractical’ only in its tendency to go around facts instead of over them. In its lower ranges, this idealism manifests itself as a desire for joy and ‘easiness’ of living, and so is opposed to current conceptions of efficiency, industry, and progress for the sake of getting on. It may be due to climate, or to race, or to circumstance, but undoubtedly it is there. We as a nation, and England as a nation, want an orderly, progressive, productive state. The Irish wish a happy one, which might conceivably be disorderly, unprogressive, and just productive enough to keep the citizens going; and almost certainly would not be efficient according to our ideas of efficiency. Grattan’s Home Rule Ireland was a scene of wild disorders, yet all testimony goes to prove that it was relatively a happy time for Ireland, when Irishmen, in the midst of corruption and conflict, were better satisfied and more productive than before or since.

This same too logical idealism makes trouble in international affairs. All Nationalist Ireland warmed to President Wilson’s declaration of the rights of small peoples and a rule of justice. His programme, with all its implications, was better understood there than even in America. But when it came to supporting the Alliance which alone could make it effective, principle encountered fact, and the Irishman became indecisive. Sentiment for Irish self-determination collided with the rough fact that he must fight for England in order to win the right to it. Ireland became sullen, unhappy, a liability, not an asset, in the world-struggle for better international government.

Facts, indeed, elude them. ‘If England,’ I said to a conservative Sinn Feiner, ‘is beaten in this war, as you believe she will be, the burden of fighting off Germany will fall crushingly upon France and America.’ — ‘If England is beaten, and France and America must carry on the war,’ he replied, ‘there’ll be no men but only old women left in Ireland.’ — ‘What good will your handful of soldiers do us then?’ was the inevitable answer.

It is the refinement of these ideals into a national programme which gives Sinn Fein its strength. Otherwise it would be less than Bolshevist, for it would be inspired merely by hate, poverty, and the desire for power. ‘I do not understand Sinn Fein,’ said one of the best known of the Nationalist M.P.’s. ‘It is not a party; it is an emotion, or a dissipation.’ That is precisely true. The Sinn Fein party is after ends not means; and its ends are Irish self-respect, a sense of national being, the right to live and think and act in an Irish way. The means — no one seems to have thought out the means in terms of a possible Ireland in an existing world-empire; and hence they run all the way from peaceful penetration to open rebellion.

The strength of the Ulster party is its realism, and its position is exactly opposite. Here the means are all codified and can be put into statistics: so much prosperity to be protected from Southern inefficiency, so many determined Protestants afraid of Roman Catholic domination. But its ends are the maintenance of a status quo which has not allowed a really peaceful moment to Ireland for hundreds of years. This is realism with a vengeance, the acute sense of the needs of the present which keeps men sane and also makes them dangerous in an age that is changing its garments. Extreme realists like Sir Edward Carson, stiff-necked and efficient, extreme idealists like Pearse, the educational reformer, who rebelled in order to advertise the danger of neglecting Ireland, are in inevitable conflict with a hopeful settlement as well as with each other. Thus a cleavage in temperament runs throughout Ireland, and between Ireland and those Scotch and Welsh and English who, by the logic of circumstance, are set to govern an ‘intractable’ people.

V

Personally, I think that there will be no final solution of the Irish problem in our time; because I believe that Ireland is one of the world’s volcanos, where the hidden fire of human grievance will always break out until the cooling of the Irish temperament crusts over her hot emotions. The ‘practical’ man will always oppose the man whose ideals are emotional, as long as there are black and white in the world; and in Ireland they are purer bred in their respective temperaments than elsewhere. Yet evil conditions have enormously aggravated, if they have not caused, this conflict.

And there is a middle party in Ireland, whose remedies may save her from ruin. Sir Horace Plunkett, or someone of his quality, is its predestined leader. It will stand for the economic independence of Ireland and a policy which will make it possible for her to prosper without extending the unlovable factory system into regions better suited for agriculture; and it will point to a halfmillion farmers who already have won their way out of poverty by such a programme. It will be a party of conciliation between Catholics and Protestants. It will favor a separate state or states for Ulster, on the American model, but keep her bound to Ireland, where she belongs, first by trade-relations, and second by the religious and racial affinities of her little-heard-of Nationalist minority. It will advocate Home Rule, of course; but a status that at present will of necessity be less independent than Canada’s or Australia’s. For Ireland, internationally regarded, is now England’s back door, and, until the world is surely made safer, will remain so.

Against such a policy, dreamers among the Sinn Fein and Tories in Ulster will irrevocably struggle, and the battle will last beyond our generation. If only a moderate government can be kept in the saddle, one hopes that the battle will last, and keep Ireland so busy and so interesting to Irishmen that the rest of the world may be permitted to profit by her genius without being distracted by her woes. I am not of the opinion of those whose heaven on earth is a stretch of fat prairie upon which all men are equally prosperous, think alike, work alike, agree in everything as their cattle agree, and die like their crops, leaving nothing but wealth behind them. There must be some patches of irritation left on the earth’s surface, or we shall all decline into sluggish mediocrity; and Ireland is bound to be one of them. We cannot make a plodding and sensible community — a Holland or a Pennsylvania — out of a national personality which, whether by harsh circumstance or native tendency, is now part genius, part fanatic, part hardheaded materialist. We have room, indeed, for a turbulent Ireland, if only for the by-products, the sparks of wit and poetry and idealist anger shooting worldwide and kindling. But an Ireland with a grievance, an Ireland forced into dependency, with the faults of a dependent, an Ireland spreading the infection of prejudice and hate — that is a different matter.

My conclusion then is, that it is a waste of energy for Americans to bewail Ireland or to condemn her; to support Home Rule or the status quo; to argue for dominion government or stern repression, until they better understand the inner nature of the Irish mind and the conflict that is waging. After that, they will still violently disagree upon the responsibility for the present situation and upon the means of curing it, but at least they will not beat the air.

It is not loss but gain to feel the powerful fascination of Ireland. I would rather talk in Dublin than elsewhere, save in the Elysian Fields; I would rather walk in the Dargle or on Antrim moors than anywhere except in my own New England; I would rather live, if life were to be all excitement and spiritual conflict, in Ireland than in any country of the world; I would rather be with an Irishman in a trench than with a Prussian in heaven. But if Ireland ceases to be a pricking in the side of civilization; if she becomes a country where a man can be native and yet keep his temper; if from the joy of living near beautiful mountains, in a country greener than spring in America, in a society rich with humor and easily pleased with the daily business of living, is to be abstracted the pathos of physical misery, the bitterness of conflict and suppression, it will be because the Irish mind finds stable levels and can accept and apply practical cures and suggestions. We must dimly understand that mind, or we, only less than England, will pay a price.

The Prussian programme is said to have been to drive out the Irish and colonize the island with Saxons and Bavarians. They were willing to govern Ireland, but not the Irish. What she really needs is a free fight, legally arranged for, umpired but not interfered with — a continuous performance in which every Irishman can join without fear of being jailed by a timorous England. Weapons cannot be allowed, although many think that they would be the more merciful arbiters. Tie hands and feet if you will, — in other words make the struggle constitutional, — but permit no peace without victory and no appeal to England or America. Not until they have fought it out, will the Irish mind be cured and realist and idealist compromise in Ireland. And compromise, self-determined, is the only hope for a stable Irish government.