identity which was ignored, and was in danger of being forgotten.

Naturally resentment fixed upon the authors and mediators of the “sacred union” which had failed to fulfil itself, and its weapon was that originally forged for the defence of the conquest of a measure of autonomy abandoned under the terms of the political truce. The armed forces which had been brought into existence by the threat of a loyalist rebellion were turned to the task of asserting the existence of a forgotten small nationality. In due course the Easter Rising took place, and by a blood-sacrifice Ireland once more claimed the rights which, she had been assured, were being enforced on the battlefields of Europe. Death having become more valuable than life, as a result of the new belligerent philosophy of a world at arms, Irishmen determined to demonstrate that there are more ways than one of dying for freedom. The hopelessness of the enterprise proved its ultimate strength, for desperate courage has a peculiar influence upon the pacific civilian, to which category the vast majority of the Sinn Féin public belonged. Just as the militarist is enraged by the spectacle of defiant courage over which he has no control, so the non-combatant patriot is effected by what impresses him as mystic valour. Even official testimony now records the triumph of that insurrectionary failure, in so far as the stiffening of the national purpose is concerned.

Unfortunately for Ireland, sentimentalism has become so fashionable in international politics, that realism, whether in thought or action, is abhorrent to minds soothed with sonorous phrases, and but dimly conscious of the facts behind the words. The mirage of glory not only obscures the material horror of war, but it conduces to a certain impatience of ideas which are not coloured by the prevalent megalomania of idealism. The Irishman who dares to bring forward the case of his own country in discussion with belligerents is regarded as an inferior egotist, whose vision is so warped and limited that he cannot realize the great issues at stake. Otherwise intelligent men talk to him of the German hegemony of Europe and, by extension, of the world, with a seriousness differing from that of the Pan-German League only in its abhorrence of that incredible ambition. The rhetorical exuberances of Teutonic chauvinists are accepted as plain statements of policy by those who would not listen to their own Jingoes. The actual, or contemplated, depredations of one imperialism are not contrasted with those of another, but are used as a foil to the liberal and progressive aspirations of outraged political virtue. An inability to take either party at their own estimate is nevertheless comprehensible in a people whose scepticism of Liberalism is equalled by a corresponding doubt as to the possible differentiation of two imperialisms.

Acute and not wholly orthodox exponents of the British international point of view have expended much ingenuity in finding a formula expressing the conscious or sub-conscious sense of rectitude which pervades the Englishman in this debate with Ireland. Britain is depicted by these critical friends as a well-meaning, if blundering, commercialist, whose imperial adventures, like the amorous adventures of races unblessed by puritan Kultur, must be regarded as venial sins. British imperialism, they say, is not deliberate and systematic; it aims at no hegemony, and is thereby innocent of those evils which the “free peoples of the world” are invited to destroy. As we have the testimony of several hundred years of Anglo-Irish history in refutation of this comfortable illusion, it is enough to say, for the present, that the matter presents itself with no such simplification to the Irish mind. Consequently, viewed in the light of this Herrenmoral, so natural in an imperial race, international events take on a significance wholly incomprehensible to the unfortunate victims of a transfigured and transcendental commercialism. Ireland, therefore, can neither understand nor make herself understood, so long as discussion is confined to the unrealities of international politics. She is obliged to grasp with pathetic gratitude at the straws of comfort blown in her direction by the winds of the European debate, wherein she serves the purposes of tu quoque repartee.

In politics, as in literature and art, realism is abhorrent to the Anglo-Saxon temperament. Wherever the English language is spoken there is implanted the tradition of moral and intellectual compromise. Revolutions are blanketed with reforms, unless, as happened in 1641, they can assume the dignity of a religious crusade. Social problems are discreetly shelved by Acts of Parliament, and the facts of life delicately obscured by a literature unique in its emasculation. Thus America condemns as unpleasantly improper the only honest record of actual warfare in the trivial mass of Bairnsfatherly war books, Le Feu, by Henri Barbusse, a Frenchman unspoiled by the cult of anæmia. Sanctimonious reflections upon the superiority of Anglo-Saxon morals are the response to the urgent question of venereal diseases as a by-product of war. The sexual problems arising out of militarism are the commonplaces of all literature dealing with the subject, but when the English-speaking world becomes for the first time conscripted, and is faced with the military system on a broad scale, the characteristic stampede to fact-proof shelters takes place. The half-world is not to be made safe for democracy, but must be declared taboo. So man becomes chaste by prohibition.

That the present war is at bottom a struggle between two cultures, the Anglo-Saxon and the German, is indicated by the remarkable way in which the ideals of the former have permeated the Allied world, strengthening the natural preponderance, linguistic and material, of the element represented by the United States and the British Empire. The hands that are fighting may be the hands of France, Belgium, Italy, Roumania, Serbia, Japan, China, America, and San Marino, but the voice is the voice of Britain, whose most admirable mouthpiece is Dr. Woodrow Wilson. The result is the reaction of the world to the stimuli of recent history in the perfect British manner. When the Russian Revolution occurred there was but little response to the revolutionary contagion, which had, nevertheless, affected Europe on the previous occasions of similar social upheavals. England, of course, was the great buttress of reaction against the French Revolution, which could not recommend itself on religious and moral grounds to the great Empire of respectability. Yet, France did succeed in infecting Europe with revolutionary ideas. Russia, on the other hand, has evoked only the response of the strikes in Germany and Austria. Elsewhere the reception of this dramatic transition from official words of freedom to popular action has been mixed and lukewarm. Nobody who understood the fundamental abhorrence of real liberty in the English-speaking countries could have been surprised at England’s unconcealed chagrin, and the subsequent hostility of all but a handful of the people to the progress of revolutionary government and diplomacy. What a relief when Germany finally imposed silence—and her terms—on Russia!

The prevailing tone of sentimental idealism in international affairs is, therefore, unpropitious to those who, like the Russians and the Irish, insist upon interpreting au pied de la lettre, the pious phrases which adorn the discourses of altruistic statesmen. Be the victims of oppression only far enough away from immediate Allied control, then their wrongs bedim the eyes of the professors of Liberty, whose vision becomes too