commerce, down to the present, the destruction of the economic, in addition to the national, freedom of Ireland, has been the deliberate policy of Britain. The programme of industrial revival, the plea for industrial autonomy, which was the point of departure for Sinn Féin many years ago, what is it, after all, but the crystallization of ideas common to three centuries of Irish economic literature? From the beginning of the seventeenth century a vast library of protest against English commercial jealousy has grown up, and is still growing. Obscure pamphleteers and writers of the highest fame stand side by side in this indictment of a country which dares now to assert that its crimes have not been deliberate. Swift’s Proposal for the Universal Use of Irish Manufactures, his Short View of the State of Ireland, his Modest Proposal; the Querist of Bishop Berkeley; Hely Hutchinson’s Commercial Restraints of Ireland;—these are only some of the most prominent documents in the history of the economic revolt, subsequently known as the Sinn Féin movement. A sharp corrective of the lazy ignorance of the fiction which describes the Irish case against England as one of retrospective sentimentality is provided by the economic writings of Irishmen for the past three hundred years.

Sinn Féin succeeds Sinn Féin; one egoism has aroused another, and England now faces in Ireland the projection of her own spirit. Just as British policy has served only England’s interests, so Ireland has learnt to think first of herself, having never seen her enemy give one thought even to fair play, as between country and country. Whatever claims the British Empire may have upon the gratitude or self-interest of other peoples, it has none on Ireland, which has not yet been allowed, as the phrase goes, to be just before she is generous. The sacred egoism of nations, so commendable when urging them to fight for their national existence—and even aggrandisement—against the Hun, is unfavourably regarded in all other circumstances. Neither Russia nor Greece has been pardoned a natural impulse towards self-preservation. Only great Powers are allowed to think of their own welfare; small nations are denied the luxury, except on specified conditions. Yet, in spite of brute force, and perhaps because of it, the smaller nationalities persist in a tenacious selfishness, without which they must abandon the struggle for life. Editors of military age, who are too proud of their verbiage to fight, may lament the shame of a people incapable of the noble altruism which fights for the Sacred Treaties. Even if a miracle of democracy in the Allied ranks had not come to give us those shreds of the truth behind the war, Ireland would still remain unconscious of her shameless soullessness. Strong in the sacred egoism of Sinn Féin, the Irish nation is convinced that only in his own country can an Irishman usefully engage in the struggle for freedom. Flanders, Gallipoli, and Mesopotamia are not milestones on the road which leads to the liberation of at least one forgotten small nationality.

If the anti-conscription movement had not asserted itself pious Liberal phrase-makers would never have believed—British fashion—that any community could actually stand by principles whose statement in England has invariably been a preliminary to their ignominious abandonment. Once again our political realism impinged unpleasantly upon the Anglo-Saxon consciousness, confronting the impotent mourners of theories they were too feeble to defend with the spectacle of a people aroused to fight against the supreme sacrifice demanded by the State of its citizens. The sacred egoism of the individual and of the nation was challenged, and a sacred union was the result, in which Ireland asserted, with uncompromising unanimity, her separate national identity. Characteristically, the professional Protestants kept aloof from this manifestation of liberty, to the bewilderment and shame of certain continental observers, proud of their Calvinistic origins, and surprised to find that, in Ireland, Protestantism is, by definition, antagonistic to the libertarian impulses with which it is associated on the continent of Europe. An aftermath of tragi-comedy followed the religious tension of the anti-conscription demonstrations, when a number of Protestant Irishwomen were contemptuously excluded from the church in which they had intended to associate their prayers with those of their Catholic countrywomen. They discovered that the Church of “Ireland” denied them the elementary right of every Protestant to direct communication with God. The Dean who interposed between heaven and the prayers of the faithful was not, strange to say, invited to enter the communion which teaches the necessity for priestly intercession between man and his Maker. On the contrary, some of the victims of his ecclesiastical and political insolence were more concerned to absolve him from the blame of such an insult than to assert the principle for which Irish Protestants were alleged to be fighting. Such is the dilemma, and such is the quality, of the religion implanted by England in this country, and fostered, like the weakling that it is, in all the peevish selfishness of the spoilt child, eternally exerting the petty tyrannies it imputes to others.

The reaction of Anglo-Saxondom to this Irish experiment in the teaching of the Allies has been somewhat similar to that described in the case of Russia, on the analogous occasion of the revolutionary realization of theories reserved for the academic leisure of the English upper classes. Mr. Lloyd George, that distinguished Liberal, was most insistent upon the “moral right” to impose military service upon subject races, his contention was echoed by all “responsible” statesmen, and the lofty example of Austria was cited as a model. This was a daring instance of associating with enemy ideas, only permissible to the chemically pure in heart.

If only the Hun had served the Bible as he served Bernhardi, the Lord would not have deserted him in his hour of need. In Ireland, however, the devil of imperialism quoted the Scriptures to no purpose, for this is an island, not only of Saints and Scholars, but also of theologians and politicians, who proved equal to this ingenious conflict of moralities. This alliance was particularly obnoxious to those who had engineered the politico-religious Carsonade of North-East Ulster. Just as the Allied governments have standardized the business of rescuing small nationalities, so the dominant British statesmen have the exclusive right to combine religion and politics. A Covenant of “loyalists,” in full Protestant regalia, organizing treason to the King and Parliament recognized by them, is but an incident on the path to political preferment and the honours of public life. A national pledge to resist the greatest infamy one nation can inflict upon another becomes a Papist plot. An Irish bishop is a sinister intruder only when he does not wear the shovel-hat and apron of the Episcopalian minority.

In the greater Anglo-Saxondom across the seas, particularly in the Wilsonian Republic, the spectacle of Irish freedom was most offensive. An American critic once summed up the different characteristics of North and South in the Civil War by saying: “The Southerner was an imitation of an English gentleman, the Northerner was an imitation of an English cad.” In other words, society in the South was a shadowy reflection of the British landed aristocracy, in the North, it followed the example of the capitalist class. In terms of present day America this definition must be modified to meet the change effected by the triumph of the North,