se, and I, as a novelist, have a notoriously flighty
imagination, and am content to leave it at that.

But this secondary Irish question is not so terrible as it appears. It
is terrible now, it would not be terrible if Ireland had national
independence.

The great protection against a lie is--not to believe it; and Ireland,
in this instance, has that protection. The claims made by the Unionist
Wing do not rely solely on the religious base. They use all the
arguments. It is, according to them, unsafe to live in Ireland. (Let us
leave this insurrection of a week out of the question.) Life is not safe
in Ireland. Property shivers in terror of daily or nightly
appropriation. Other, undefined, but even more woeful glooms and creeps,
wriggle stealthily abroad.

These things are not regarded in Ireland, and, in truth, they are not
meat for Irish consumption. Irish judges are presented with white
gloves with a regularity which may even be annoying to them, and were it
not for political trouble they would be unable to look their salaries in
the face. The Irish Bar almost weep in chorus at the words "Land Act,"
and stare, not dumbly, on destitution. These tales are meant for England
and are sent there. They will cease to be exported when there is no
market for them, and these men will perhaps end by becoming patriotic
and social when they learn that they do not really command the Big
Battalions. But Ireland has no protection against them while England can
be thrilled by their nonsense, and while she is willing to pound Ireland
to a jelly on their appeal. Her only assistance against them is freedom.

There are certain simplicities upon which all life is based. A man finds
that he is hungry and the knowledge enables him to go to work for the
rest of his life. A man makes the discovery (it has been a discovery to
many) that he is an Irishman, and the knowledge simplifies all his
subsequent political action. There is this comfort about being an
Irishman, you can be entirely Irish, and claim thus to be as complete
as a pebble or a star. But no Irish person can hope to be more than a
muletto Englishman, and if that be an ambition and an end it is not an
heroic one.

But there is an Ulster difficulty, and no amount of burking it will
solve it. It is too generally conceived among Nationalists that the
attitude of Ulster towards Ireland is rooted in ignorance and bigotry.
Allow that both of these bad parts are included in the Norther