her own elected assemblies, as it would have been for revolutionary France to question the practical value of the Declaration of the Rights of Man. Second, because the immediate cause of dissatisfaction with constitutional nationalism was the evident impossibility of its ever realizing the true aims of nationalism. Consequently, it is in vain that the Nationalist Party appeals for recognition of its actual services. A generation has arisen which accepts as a matter of course the fruits of a hard struggle, and insists upon the one vital and essential fact, namely, that the Irish members at Westminster have not brought Ireland a step nearer independence, and in the very nature of things, they cannot do so. Meanwhile, the burdens of over-taxation and misgovernment press every year more heavily on the country. Party achievements are dismissed as of slight importance by impatient and perhaps ungenerous critics, who assert—and rightly—that the Nationalist Party did not represent merely a section of public opinion in the House of Commons, but represented the Irish nation. Therefore, the test of party politics cannot be allowed. To which it is open to the apologist of constitutionalism to reply: you cannot participate in the game of party politics and then refuse to recognize the rules of that game. It is no more reasonable to believe that the Irish nation can be represented in the British Parliament, than to believe that the British nation is represented there. In both cases the elected persons vaguely correspond to actual phases of popular opinion, elicited, as a rule, under conditions which would make it difficult for a crowd of philosophers to express their judgment, not to mention a semi-educated, newspaper-fed mob.

We can observe over the same period a gradual disintegration of confidence in elected representatives both in England and Ireland, though the operative causes have not been the same, to the superficial glance. Intelligent Englishmen have been driven to doubt the efficacy of parliamentary government by the exposure of party corruption, and by the realization of the fact that political power is the shadow of which economic power is the substance. Irishmen, on the other hand, having being baulked of the opportunity of arriving at the same conclusion as a result of actual political experience in Ireland, found themselves, by force of national circumstances, confronted with evidence of the futility of Westminster politics. They have reached the stage of disillusion, but are unable to see clearly the intervening stages, owing to the thwarted and abnormal political evolution of the country. If it seems a paradox to claim that a country which has demanded a parliament of its own is dissatisfied with the parliamentary system, it should be recalled that there is no necessary obligation upon the Irish people to set up in Dublin a legislature upon the English model. The national political institutions of Ireland, as competent authorities have pointed out, are susceptible of meeting the needs of a community, whose social and intellectual conditions are quite unlike those of England. Moreover, as our national economists, Molyneux, Berkeley, Swift, Lalor, and Connolly have shown, the Irish case against government from Westminster has been based, from the beginning of modern history, upon this fundamental necessity for a combination of political and economic power, without which there can be no freedom. If one aspect of the question has been over-emphasized, the fault is common to more countries than Ireland, and is peculiarly comprehensible in a people whose political development has been interrupted and delayed.

The perversity of the fate which governs the relations of England and Ireland obtrudes itself once more in this connection. It might be thought that the simultaneous movement of revolt against the sham of politics would lead to sympathetic understanding of the Sinn Féin point of view. It is true, to some extent, that during the pre-war years of constant Sinn Féin activity, friendly references were made in certain English quarters to the regenerate nationalism which was manifesting itself in literature and industry. Under less ominous names the Sinn Féin spirit had developed and spread until, at the outbreak of the war, the country was apparently absorbed in various enterprises which had received the benediction of benevolent commentators, relieved to find Ireland at last in a practical mood. But the war has changed all that. Not only have these innocent undertakings been revealed as part of the malign machinations of Sinn Féin, but the term itself has become associated with an event undreamt of in the essential pacific and economic philosophy of those who expressed some twelve years ago the growing tendencies in the direction of national self-help. Sinn Féin did not repudiate the task which destiny thrust upon it in Easter 1916, but accepted the hitherto rejected theory of physical force, at the cost of the platonic affection of many who had previously smiled approvingly at the programme of social reconstruction contemplated by the founders of the Sinn Féin movement.

It is doubtful, however, if the Sinn Féin policy could have continued, after the war had broken out, to escape the hostile attention of England. Political realists ceased to recommend themselves to the favourable notice of a people embarking upon a crusade for the Good, the True, and the Beautiful, and whose minds were glamoured by the idealisms so prodigally proclaimed since August 1914. In a burst of enthusiasm the “free peoples of the world” undertook to restore the right of small nations, and since they knew of only one transgressor, they could not wait to consider their own possible sins against the spirit of nationality. At the same time, the discredit and futility of the parliamentary system became more and more obvious as it failed to meet the exigencies of the crisis which had come in the history of the political democracies. From the moment when the latter undertook to vindicate their superiority they were obliged to compromise hastily, when not to abandon entirely, the principles upon which they rested. Normally one might have thought that this would give the final blow to a fiction previously weakened, but the seriousness of national peril, coupled with the mobilization of thought, has helped to obscure that conclusion. Once the system had become a gage of battle, and a challenge to the enemy, it was endeared to its defenders, who clung to it all the more desperately, the more elusive and illusory it appeared.

So it happened that Irishmen were invited to share the enthusiasm for an ideal about which they entertained no more illusions, except the one which experience had not had a chance to confirm or dispel. Pseudo-democracy they knew and rejected, as revealed in the light of a spurious political liberty under the control of English Capitalism, but they had not yet been allowed to make the experiment of politico-economic freedom on their own account. Meanwhile, by an amazing inconsequence, the imposition of these pseudo-democratic conditions became the ambition of precisely the most restive and acute critics of the political system upon which those conditions repose. The complete demoralization of the intellectuals by the present war will supply some future critic material for sceptical reflection. In the past, both remote and immediate, the educated have succeeded in differentiating themselves from the mob by refusing, in times of crisis, to be stampeded by appeals to ignorance. But gradually the Intelligentsia had been learning the expediency of attaching themselves to some social or political propaganda until, when the war broke out, they found