The deference which Mr. Asquith and Mr. Lloyd George paid to the supposed oppression of Ulster came less from principle than from policy. There was no principle by which Ulster could reveal itself compromised or baulked or injured. In setting itself up to veto home rule, it took the position not of an offended and outraged minority but of a resolute dictator. The proposal of Ulster seclusion was rejected by John Redmond at first, at last submitted to the vote of Nationalist party delegates in Ulster, and finally assented to, only to be thrown aside by the Unionists. The difficulties and disadvantages of seclusion are certainly enormous, and Ulster was really wise to reject it, but its rejection can only mean that a genuine measure of home rule, equivalent to the measure conferred on the Dominion of Canada, is to become the demand of Ireland.

The enactment of full dominion government would prevent the injury to Ulster that might occur from a supine measure like the Asquith measure. It would hearten Irishmen everywhere to a large and creative experiment. It would afford Ireland that "moral satisfaction" without which it has been handicapped and depressed in all its relations to the empire. It would make it a full and a glad member in the comradeship of the dominions. Anything less is morally and materially dangerous.

Until England takes its lesson from CampbellBannerman's treatment of the Boers there is no hope in the Irish situation, and no travesty of the South African convention like Lloyd George's Irish convention-appointed with too obvious intention from groups too brazenly manœuvred - can bring about that glorious adjustment. Mr. S. K. Ratcliffe

has narrated a story, possibly a parable, of that "When the future of the Boer repub

Liberal act. lics was being considered, Campbell-Bannerman was talking with a distinguished Canadian statesman. He spoke about the great pressure that was being brought to bear upon him in reference to delay in the granting of self-government to the Boers, and asked, 'What is your advice?' The Canadian statesman said: 'In 1837 Canada was in revolution. You trusted us. Have you ever had any reason to regret that action? Do the same for South Africa, and you will have the same result and the same response.' Campbell-Bannerman said, 'By God, I will '—and he did it. As a result, we have had South Africa in this war lined up with the older self-governing colonies of Great Britain, and the disruption of the British Empire has been averted."

The destiny of Ireland has slipped from the hands of the old order in England. A new order is arising within the British commonwealth, and it is by the statesmen of this new order that the problem of Ireland must be solved. An imperial history has preceded the accession of British labor to British government. Ireland's memory of this history will disappear like last year's leaves if the believers in British democracy apply their first principles to the settlement of Ireland. The task is a creative one. It is not simply a task of assisting stubborn Ulster to abide with the nationalist, nor is it simply a task of seeing religious institutions as human institutions, to be respected as well as restrained. It is a more formidable task. The new England has to trust its own belief in liberty to the extent of trusting in Irishmen's liberty. It has to admit Ireland to full and

free membership in the commonwealth for which so many Britons have died. It was the England of privilege that sought in a blind moment to enforce conscription on Ireland. The bankruptcy of grudging and self-seeking England was never more completely revealed. It was these very qualities in the England of privilege that gave democratic England its right to insist upon the revision of existing institutions and existing concepts of government. The new order is on the verge of realization. The degree in which it becomes realized is the degree in which Ulster and nationalist Ireland can clear their past and enter into their common destiny.

career.

XIV

THE WAY TO FREEDOM

THE END OF DOCILITY

WHEN Daniel O'Connell died at Genoa he ordered that his body should be sent to Ireland, but his heart to Rome. "A disposition," said John Mitchel, "which proves how miserably broken and debilitated was that once potent nature." A disposition, on the contrary, which proved the essential division and debility of Daniel O'Connell's entire "He was a Catholic, sincere and devout," said Mitchel," and would not see that the church had ever been the enemy of Irish Freedom." of Irish Freedom." That is the truth. He was a Catholic who feared and dreaded Revolution. His first allegiance was to his religion, his second to his country. Reared in abhorrence of Napoleon, he believed and declared that no revolution was worth the spilling of a single drop of blood. "He was an aristocrat by position and by taste; and the name of a Republic was odious to him." He was the child of authority. He strove to win his way by feigning violence, by eternally half-unsheathing a visionary sword." But he was one of those men whose scales are always turned by a power outside. The centre of his being was not within himself. He was the child of authority. For that reason, possessing no effective will of his own, he

indoctrinated cowardice, and his doctrine of cowardice, as M. Pa !-Dubois rightly calls it, " is proved untrue by the whole history of modern liberty."

The doctrine of cowardice has always had its advocates in Ireland. It has long fed the policy of nonresistance. It pretends that life is an idyl in which effective will is "materialism" and the struggle for survival a debasement of the soul. A great deal is heard of Irish conservatism: this is its fountain-head. In the name of spirituality Ireland is asked to accept a doctrine of laissez faire, to glide on the current of authority.

But this docile programme was shattered in Easter, 1916. The earnestness of Padraic Pearse's career as a teacher, we are told by P. Browne of Maynooth, was nothing to the terrible seriousness that grew upon him when he came to realize the maladies of the political movement that was supposed to aim at Irish nationhood." Padraic Pearse accepted the necessity of choosing between submission and rebellion. "The Volunteers, at whose foundation he had assisted, were at first negotiated with and then divided by the constitutional party; the original founders, who determined to adhere to their principles, were left high and dry without any constitutional support. The conviction gained on him that only blood could vivify what tameness and corruption had weakened, and that he and his comrades were destined to go down the same dark road by which so many brave and illustrious Irishmen had gone before them."

This tremendous decision of Padraic Pearse and his associates was not the result of temperamental intransigence. No whit less Catholic than Daniel