themselves everywhere imprisoned by the new status they had assumed. They were no longer free to serve their real master, but had sold their intellectual birthright for a mess of official pottage. Their conscripted minds have definitely lowered their prestige, since they have set themselves to bluster and shout across their respective frontiers, in a manner indistinguishable from that of the plain people, without pretensions to mental discipline and rational speech. Though financially strengthened the intellectuals have been bankrupted, as a class, by the war for liberty.

Without postulating the incompatibility of reason and mob patriotism, although the divergence of the two has been recorded in prominent examples, one may legitimately ask: Why this religious enthusiasm for an ideal whose discredit and disintegration were the chief preoccupation of intelligent men during the years leading up to the war? The greatest iconoclasts, so far as the idols of political democracy are concerned, have become the most fervent advocates of such “democratization,” seized with a malign altruism which would share its ills with those untroubled by them. Benefits, which would be extravagant if claimed for a Utopia, are promised on behalf of a social organization whose human imperfections were never more indecently exposed than during the crisis when it was exalted as the panacea of civilization. But, in inverse ratio to their own hasty abandonment of the fictions tenable only in the uncritical times of peace, the pseudo-democrats urge the adoption of methods which even they find useless in the stress of national crisis. The foxes having lost the ornament of intellectual and economic freedom in the trap of capitalist politics are convinced that the whole world should be handicapped in like manner. The new gospel of equality of sacrifice, internationally interpreted, means the equality of weakness.

It is natural that the great resources of the English-speaking world should be pledged to the defence of the form of democracy which is the special creation of Anglo-Saxon culture, and that Britishers and Americans, rather than Frenchmen and Italians, should be most insistent upon the blessings of “democratization.” That peculiar conception of liberty which has fostered the ignoble individualism of mediocrity, at the expense of intellectual independence and social strength, has evolved, under the ægis of England to her own satisfaction and advantage, until, at last, she came to be admired by foreigners unblessed by so unique a possession. Hence the fiction of British freedom, hymned by harassed outlaws or academic critics, concerned only for the more obvious advantages of a system which offered a refuge to the one and a guarantee of respectable stability to the other. When England was the safe haven for continental refugees, the admiring gratitude of the latter was untroubled by the reflection that it is one thing to harbour persons likely to cause trouble with an immediate neighbour, whose frontier is invitingly near, and quite another to give them the shelter of insular isolation. Moreover, the governments of more inflammable peoples, susceptible to the contagion of revolutionary ideas, cannot afford to take risks, which have no reality in the case of a people protected from that contagion by semi-education and an innate servility. Perhaps the greatest illusion of the last century has been the innocent admiration of other nations for the security of a system which postulates a race inhibited by ignorance, snobbishness, and mal-nutrition, from all revolutionary desires. They envy the impunity with which scandals, whose publication would elsewhere inspire assassination, if not revolution, may be revealed in the reports of Royal Commissions, without provoking more than a few columns of newspaper summary and comment. But these benighted foreigners know the temper of their own populations too well not to pay them at least the compliment of being afraid to provoke popular fury. Blue Books and parliamentary questions are not yet universally accepted substitutes for democratic control.

The Irish people have more wisely adopted the ancient device, oderint, dum metuant, as the more intelligent attitude of a people towards its rulers, who have essayed in vain the process of demoralization so effective elsewhere. In Ireland alone the familiar ostentatious displays of Blue Book liberty fail in their purpose of disarming criticism, and consigning vital questions to an oblivion of official words. The capacious and retentive Irish memory actually feeds on those indigestible slices of British freedom, whose price and mode of distribution render them inaccessible to the vast majority of taxpayers at whose expense these sepulchres of truth are constructed. The effect of such serious attention to utterances designed as soporifics is a profound contempt for precisely that democratic virtue which has excited the admiration of certain foreigners, so consoling to the Anglo-Saxon sense of superiority. When the Irish-Irelander learns of England’s claim to be the leader of democratic progress in Europe, and finds that claim endorsed by apparently disinterested critics, his instinctive movement is one of revulsion from all implied in the laudation. If English rule involves the acceptance of the democratic ideal, then he rejects the ideal, for he knows that its irradiations have not lightened his political darkness, and its practical workings have effected the ruin of his country. If democratization be synonymous with anglicization, Ireland begs to be excused. She is, therefore, thrown back upon herself, brooding and indifferent to the issues which convulse the peoples for whom the problems of the war have a definite meaning. This scepticism, however, does not bring Ireland into contact with any current of internationalism, based upon a conviction of economic evil existing in all capitalistic countries alike. The egoism of Sinn Féin determines the Irish attitude towards the war. “Ourselves alone,” not German gold, determines Ireland’s foreign policy.

III

THE SPLENDID ISOLATION OF SINN FÉIN

The prevalence of the illusion of British liberty has been an obstacle to the understanding of Ireland’s problem for many years, and correspondingly the Sinn Féin foreign policy is not a recent phenomenon, since its objective has been the same for centuries as it is to-day. The French critic, Emile Montégut, writing in 1855 of Mitchel’s Jail Journal, admitted the difficulty when he said: “If the oppressor of Ireland were Austria or Russia, no invective, no anger, would suffice to denounce the injustice and cruelty of the tyrant. Unhappily, the oppressor of Ireland is England, Protestant England, constitutional, liberal, industrial, and trading England, the most accomplished type of the modern nation, the model of nineteenth century civilization.” In recent times circumstances have tended to correct and modify the enthusiasm of an opinion which has been fortified, nevertheless, by the current identification of British commercial democracy with an ideal condition of society which must be protected at all costs. The neutral world is blandly assured of the necessity for accepting every humiliation, in view of the precious heritage at stake. The tacit, and often avowed, assumption is that the human race is deeply indebted to the noble altruism of the belligerents, who have brought devastation and famine upon the world for the greater glory of civilization.

As a consequence of this Sinn Féin view of foreign affairs, the Irish themselves are at a disadvantage in presenting