l aphorism to "whenever Irishmen are patriotic
it is in reality nothing but pride, yet whenever Englishmen are
overproud it is nothing but the height of patriotism."

None, in fact, could have damaged the English cause in this crisis more
than the English did themselves, in spite of all the Irish Nationalists
were doing to help them out of the difficulty; for, as one wit remarked,
the whole catastrophe had been precipitated not by English Tories so
much as Irish Unionists--men, who it is difficult to say whether they
misrepresent England more to Irishmen than they do Irishmen to the
English, and a class which has ever got England into all Irish crises
and never got her out of a single one.

For the main point about the rebellion that struck Nationalists, who,
after all, were the vast majority of the Irishmen who at all mattered,
was not so much the incidental crime or heroism as the utter folly of
the enterprise. "Separatism" was, and will ever be probably, an
economic, racial, and Imperial impossibility; yet it was just this point
that was forgotten in the heat of the combat by Englishmen, with a few
noble exceptions, of course.

Instead of expounding the folly of the undertaking, they preferred to
dilate upon the criminality of methods and the character of the Sinn
Feiners, which is just where they fell into the most fatal mistake of
all and made the aftermath what it has been since--a far more
complicated problem to deal with than ever existed before the rising or
in the rising itself. Thus, when Sir Edward Carson raised his Volunteers
in Ulster he had calculated most upon the moral effect the spilling of
blood would have upon Englishmen. The Sinn Feiners had calculated upon
exactly the same psychological factor with their countrymen.

When the Government had refused to take their arms by force, which
Unionists were in their hearts hoping they would, the refusal left them
powerless and discredited, save in the eyes of cinema operators, who
only looked upon them as so much copy.

When the authorities proposed, after this example, to take the arms of
the Sinn Feiners and leave the other two bodies in possession of theirs,
they were, in fact, deliberately provoking rebellion; but not only this,
but unconsciously they were also strengthening the cause of the Sinn
Feiners, who, like the Covenanters, looked more to the moral effect than
to the material results of their efforts.

Once the link of race had been appeale