fallen which he shared with very few of his fellow-countrymen. We
are told that he sympathized with the spirit of Irish nationality. "A
State," he would say, "is accidental; it can be made or unmade; but a
nation is something real which can be neither made nor destroyed."

He had once planned a history of Ireland, "but abandoned the idea
because the continuous record of misery and misgovernment was too
painful to contemplate." All pleasure lies in contrast. The history of
Ireland offers no contrast; it is a tale of unmitigated wrong.

It is too full of graves and the ghosts are not laid yet. As well
write the history of a churchyard. Forty years before John Richard
Green thus explained why he had abandoned the plan of the graveyard,
Victor Hugo lashed the front of England with this very thong. "Ireland
turned into a cemetery; Poland transported to Siberia; all Italy a
galleys--there is where we stand in this month of November, 1831!"

The history of Ireland remains to be written, because the purpose of
Ireland remains yet to be achieved. The widow of John Richard Green
has laid the foundations of that temple of hope in which the youth
of Ireland must enter and be sworn to the task that yet remains for
Irishmen to accomplish.

And so in closing the days of 1913 I bring, with a message of hope,
these scattered thoughts upon the British Empire and its approaching
dissolution to lay before the youth of Ireland. I say approaching
dissolution advisedly, for the signs are there to be read. "Home Rule"
will not save it. The attempt now being made to bribe Ireland and the
greater Ireland beyond the seas, to the side of the Elsewhere Empire
by what has been aptly termed a "ticket-of-leave" bill, will not
suffice. The issue lies in stronger hands. Even could the two Irelands
be won by the dole now offered, of a subordinate Parliament in Dublin,
its hands tied so that it must be impotent for any national effort,
"a Parliament" as Mr. Herbert Samuel says, "for the local affairs of
Irishmen," there are other and more powerful agencies that no measure
of conciliation within the Empire can permanently win to that system
of world exploitation centred in London.

"I would let the Irish have Home Rule," said recently Mr. Winston
Churchill, "for their own idiotic affairs." But the last word came
from Lord Morley, the "father of Home Rule." "Give it them," he said,
in friendly, private counsel, "give it them; let them have the full
sa