n united in a common cause the defence of
England against a mighty danger and the defence of principles for
which Ireland, to be true to herself, must ever be ready to raise her
voice or draw her sword. Besides her honour and her interest--her
interest, always the last thing to move her, but now happily involved
in the same cause--human Freedom, Justice, Pity, and the cry of the
small nationality crushed under the despot's heel appealed to her.
These things she has followed throughout her history, mostly, up to
now, to her bitter loss, but not to the loss of her soul; in that is
her distinction now. Her sons, fighting for her honour and her
interest, are fighting for these things too. It is for these
things--Honour, Justice, Freedom, Pity--she will stand in that new
place of influence she is winning in the world's councils. There,
acting with and through her sister democracies, Canada, Australia, New
Zealand, South Africa, and Great Britain--in all of which, as in the
great Republic of the West, her children are a potent leaven--her
spirit will help to bend the British Empire to a mission of new
significance for humanity. That is the heritage of her tradition. It
was in that spirit her sons went throughout Europe influencing the
world of a thousand years ago. That is the spirit her sons are
illustrating upon the field of war to-day.

Ireland has chosen this path. I would pause for a moment further to
ask people to think a little on this: suppose she had, as well she
might with her history, and as some of her sons both at home and in
America have wanted her to do, chosen a different alternative?
Ireland's strength as an international factor is not to be measured
only by her political position at the heart of the Empire or her
strategic position in the Atlantic, or by the size of her population
at home, but also by the millions of her kin throughout the Empire and
America, whose deep and enduring sentiment for her, linked as it is
with their distinguished and never-tarnished loyalty to the new lands
of their adoption, is one of the striking facts of modern history.
Germany understands this factor; and keeps on making unceasing and
ingenious efforts, especially in the United States, to make her
account with it.

For Ireland to have chosen the opposite alternative, or to be flung
into it by the fortune of war, would in my opinion be for her an
unmixed calamity, the worst in her history. Her fate as a possession
of German