n a representative position so mean that the British
Government will not pay some price for his Irish soul. Newspaper men
sell their Irish souls for Government advertisements paid for at a
lavish rate. Professors sell their souls for salaries and expenses,
clergymen sell theirs for jobs for their relatives, business men sell
their souls and become recruiters lest they lose the custom of
Government officials. In all the grades of Irish society the only
section that has not furnished even one apostate to the cause it had
worked for in times of peace is that of the much hated and traduced
militant labour leaders.

"But if the militant labour leaders of Ireland have not apostatized, the
same cannot be said of the working class as a whole....

"Perhaps some day the same evil passions the enemy has stirred up in so
many of our Irish people will play havoc with his own hopes, and make
more bitter and deadly the cup of his degradation and defeat.

"But deep in the heart of Ireland has sunk the sense of the degradation
wrought upon its people--our lost brothers and sisters--so deep and
humiliating that no agency less potent than the red tide of war on Irish
soil will ever be able to enable the Irish race to recover its
self-respect, or establish its national dignity in the face of a world
horrified and scandalized by what must seem to them our national
apostasy."

Now the strange thing about Ireland is her definition of "loyalty." It
is not with her a species of sentimental altruism but a plain,
business-like, common-sense view of her own interests, and nothing can
make her change that view, for she has through centuries of
disillusionment become chronically suspicious.

"I dare say I don't take the same view as you would were you in my
place," wrote Mr. Birrell to the Prime Minister on January 25th.
"Loyalty in Ireland is of slow growth, and the soil is uncongenial. The
plant grows slowly. Landlords, grand juries, loyalist magistrates, have
all gone; yet the plant grows, though slowly."

Her patriotism, on the other hand, is almost necessarily a matter of
internal administration; and for this she fights with all the spirit
that animated her in the past against Dane and Saxon. Hence it is quite
easy for an economic grievance at once to assume the proportions of a
national movement, and once it becomes resisted as such, the spirit of
nationality becomes rekindled again, and it was this latter that
prompted the final effort