harmful because their class has the power to commute. If they fall, they fall into a protective net. If the poor fall, on the contrary, their class is infinitely less powerful to forestall the punishment of society. There is one law for the rich, another for the poor, only because property is able to qualify the law. Everyone who is poor or who knows the poor knows their tendency to succor, to console and to condone. But their organization is loose and ineffectual. Time, the time that allows for recuperation, is their enemy. Their defalcation is registered as soon as it is committed, their credit is morally short, their rate of interest high. Theirs is a narrow road where a false step means a loss, not of luxury and comfort, but raiment, shelter and food. Their margin demands a standard of conduct inversely proportioned to their income. If poverty ceases to be holy, it is branded vicious overnight. This is the reason why the poor make up the great majority of the criminal classes. They are huddled together on a restive island of needs, surrounded by a sea of temptations which is peopled by the sharks of the law.

It is not any special love of the poor that makes the democrat wish to see this changed. It is his hatred of the waste of life. Men talk of healthy competition. There is a competition that is unhealthy to the depths of infamy. Our life is possibly a mere journey from one eternal darkness to another. We may be mere spawn of the earth, and our religions a cosmic fable, but whether we adopt the material or the mystical version of experience, we surely unite in revolting against the factors that

defeat the will to live. Poverty is undesirable in proportion as it defeats this will to live; and it is evil in proportion as it is unnecessary. That it is unnecessary, more the result of culpable selfishness than culpable weakness, is the inspiration of all social reform.

The particularism of Ulster is one item in the fight on poverty. The particularism of the employer and the middleman is another. Irish labor is still an infant too weak to stand by itself, the victim of every provincialism and ignorance, the bullied servant of stupid urban life. When the dreamers of Ireland A Civilization give up the fight on poverty, the practical and immediate fight on it, they throw away the irreplaceable resources of Ireland. They pursue a mirage of independence, they leave their country open to the worst imperialist of all.

MANUMISSION

THE EMPIRE HAS FAILED

IT is bitter for the English to admit their continued failure in Ireland. Every art and craft that is known to patient and resourceful administrators has been utilized in dealing with the Irish, and time after time, when the administrators have attempted to rely on it, the structure has crumbled under their hands. Men from Oxford and Cambridge have been given preference in the constabulary, men who have succeeded in India have been imported to the Castle, the best kind of government servants have been made resident magistrates and commissioners and judges and yet the integrity and squareness and reticent dignity which have worked so well elsewhere have no principle of life in them for the Irish people. The English government has tried everything. Sometimes it has adopted the most enlightened methods, sometimes the most disgraceful. If bribery and corruption could advance Pitt's programme they were extravagantly employed. If compliance with the Catholic church seemed to promise a control over the people the Catholic church was sought in consultation. If the suppression of group action or the discarding of trial by jury or the simple expedient of deportation appeared to favor English purposes, the English government readily stooped to conquer.

There is nothing of Cossack severity, at one extreme, or of absurd yielding to strong local sentiment, at the other, that is not to be found in the last century of governmental record the last four years, for that matter and yet the outcome of all this pliancy and subtlety, accompanied by measures of legislation often wholly admirable, has been a continuous and even fatuous failure. The settlement of land tenure, local self-government, the national university and the popular department of agriculture do lift themselves above fatuity and offer a solid footing for mutual satisfaction. The rest is a moral quagmire. It has given England a notoriety throughout the world. The Germans try to lisp in Gaelic, for the edification of the disaffected Dubliner. Trotzky meets the good offices of Englishmen with a satiric inquiry, "How about Ireland?" The nationalistic Hindu does not forget it. Neither do thousands of detached observers who are no allies of Hindu or Russian or German. Whatever may be said to extenuate the failure or to fix the blame for it, the one thing undeniable is the moral insolvency of the empire in Ireland. "No, my Lords," as the Marquess of Crewe told the upper house in 1913, house in 1913, "Ireland by whose fault does not matter - has never become an integral part of Britain; her government has in essence remained a colonial government.'

This insolvency has been exposed to the world during the world war. In a struggle affecting the destiny of hundreds of millions it has obtruded itself continually. Because its importance is a moral one it has asserted itself even in the hour of Armenian massacre and Polish famine. And that importance could not be disguised by propagandists. When

conscription took up the people of Britain as a lion would lift its whelps by its teeth, not to maul them but to make them, it morally could not afford to touch the people of Ulster or the people of the south of Ireland. Union could not stand that elemental test. It is not that Irishmen would not be soldiers. Irishmen before had fought for the empire. At the very moment when hunger was stalking the poor peasantry of Ireland in 1844, the Delanys and the Kellys were at Meanee and Dubba with Sir Charles Napier, "magnificent Tipperary Irishmen, strong in body, high-blooded, fierce, impetuous soldiers who saw nothing but victory before them, and counted not their enemies." Reluctance to shoulder arms did not hold the Irish people back from the world war. Over 90,000 Catholics did enlist in the beginning, and the Nationalist party did its best to prove that the people were good Europeans." But there was a reason for the weakness of Irish response. It was the absence of union, the dearth of heart, between the rulers and the ruled. Ireland did not look on the army of the empire as a force required for security to itself, thereby accepting conscription as a necessary evil. On whatever occasion the red coat had been seen in Ireland in the past, it was to protect a landlord or an employer or a clergyman collecting tithes, or else to shoot down mobs or destroy rebels. The invasion of Ireland was not sufficiently probable to frighten the Irish, and Germany was clever enough to understand this. The one thing that might have prepared Ireland for the war was true membership in an imperial society. But until that membership was honorable and voluntary, nationalist Ireland looked on England as Schles

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