ggars or eighty pugilists "to be paid by
results."

She was the first who spoke publicly or semi-publicly of the withdrawal of
the Irish Members as a practical policy for our time, so far as I know,
but others may have been considering it. A nation in crisis becomes almost
like a single mind, or rather like those minds I have described that
become channels for parallel streams of thought, each stream taking the
colour of the mind it flows through. These streams are not set moving, as
I think, through conversation or publication, but through "telepathic
contact" at some depth below that of normal consciousness, and it is only
years afterwards, when future events have shown the themes' importance,
that we discover that they are different expressions of a common theme.
That self-moving, self-creating nation necessitated an Irish centre of
policy, and I planned a premature impossible peace between those two
devouring heads because I was sedentary and thoughtful; but Maud Gonne was
not sedentary, and I noticed that before some great event she did not
think but became exceedingly superstitous. Are not such as she aware, at
moments of great crisis, of some power beyond their own minds; or are they
like some good portrait painter of my father's generation and only think
when the model is under their eye? Once upon the eve of some
demonstration, I found her with many caged larks and finches which she was
about to set free for the luck's sake.

I abandoned my plans on discovering that our young men, not yet educated
by Mr. Birrell's university, would certainly shout down everyone they
disagreed with, and that their finance was so extravagant that we must
content ourselves with a foundation stone and an iron rail to protect it,
for there could never be a statue; while she carried out every plan she
made.

Her power over crowds was at its height, and some portion of the power
came because she could still, even when pushing an abstract principle to
what seemed to me an absurdity, keep her own mind free, and so when men
and women did her bidding they did it not only because she was beautiful,
but because that beauty suggested joy and freedom. Besides there was an
element in her beauty that moved minds full of old Gaelic stories and
poems, for she looked as though she lived in an ancient civilization where
all superiorities whether of the mind or the body were a part of public
ceremonial, were in some way the crowd's creation, as th