Yes, all her failures count: they get into the blood! Why, even the
silly statues in her streets mean more than statues can mean here.
Prosperity forgets; adversity remembers. Even hatred has its use: it
grips, and drives men on.

KATHARINE. Did you need--hatred, to do that for you?

PARNELL. Yes: till I got love!... Reason, conviction aren't enough. Morley
said a good thing the other day. The English, he said, meant well by
Ireland: but they didn't mean it much.

KATHARINE. I suppose that's true of some?

PARNELL. Quite true: and what is the most that it amounts to? Compromise.
Morley's an authority on compromise. And yet I like him: I get on with
him. But he's too thick with Gladstone to be honest over this. Curious
_his_ having to back the conventions, eh?

KATHARINE. Why does he?

PARNELL. Because the political salvation of his party and its leader comes
before Ireland. He means well by her: but he doesn't mean it so much as
all that. Still he's the only one of them who doesn't pretend to look on
me as a black sheep. He too has to work with his material. That's
politics. The Nonconformist conscience means votes--so it decides him:
just as the priests decide me.... They would decide him in any case, I
mean. And so-so it goes on.... "Look here upon this picture, and on this":
Ireland trying to please England; England trying, now and then, to please
Ireland! I don't know which is the more ludicrous; but I know that both
equally must fail. And they've got to see it!--and some day they will. It
won't be "Home Rule" then....

(_So for a while he sits and thinks, his hand in hers. Then he
resumes._)

My ruin? What would my ruin matter anyway? Put it, that the making public
of our claim--our right to each other--is to be allowed by any possibility
to affect the cause of a nation--the justice of that cause: doesn't that
fact, if true, show that the whole basis of the political principles they
have so boasted, and on which we have so blindly relied, was utterly and
fantastically false and rotten? Haven't we, providentially, given the
world the proof that it needed of its own lie?

KATHARINE. We didn't give it, my dear.

PARNELL. Well, their proof has satisfied them, anyhow: as they are acting
on it. Oh! When I see what poor, weak things nations really are--so
inadequately equipped for the shaping of their own destinies--I wonder
whether in truth the history we read is not the wrong history--mere side
history, to w