believed in Home Rule. "_If you can't trust these
people to manage a municipality, how can you trust them to manage a
nation?_" And he had written a lengthy epistle on the state of Ireland.

"_You see, dear_," he wrote, "_it isn't reasonable to expect us to undo
in a generation work which it took your country several centuries to do.
Your people have steadily destroyed and corrupted my people. I know
they're trying to make amends, but they mustn't expect miracles. You
can't wave a wand over Ireland, and say 'Let there be light!' and
instantly get light. You've got to remember that Ireland is populated
largely by the dregs of Ireland ... what was left after your countrymen
had persecuted and exiled and hanged the most vigorous and most
courageous men we had ... and it'll take a generation or two, more
perhaps, to get a decent level again. The most powerful man in Dublin at
this minute is a haberdasher who owns almost everything there is to own:
newspapers, conveyances and heaven knows what; and he has the mind of
... well, an early nineteenth-century mill-owner! John Marsh spends a
deal of time in vilifying the English as a mean-minded people, but my
God, he has only got to look round the corner in Dublin, to see
mean-minded men by the hundred. He wrote to me the other day, crowing
because his Volunteers had prevented the application of conscription to
Ireland, and that's a frame of mind I don't understand. He's an
idealist, but all his ideals are being employed to enable mean-minded
and greedy men like the farmers to go on being more mean-minded and
greedier. The principal argument seems to be that the Irishman must stay
at home and make money out of the war. That's a long way from the days
of the 'wild geese' and the order of chivalry, isn't it?_

"_I'm a Home Ruler because I want to see a sense of responsibility
cultivated in these people, and you can't have a sense of responsibility
until you've got something for which you are responsible. I don't doubt
that out of this heart-breaking population, a decent-minded population
will come. After all, the first settlers in Australia weren't much
better than the people who control the Dublin Corporation, were they? If
John Marsh had been about the world more, had had to manage things, and
if Mineely and Connolly and the Dublin Labour people had not been
embittered beyond all sanity of judgment by that haberdasher I mentioned
earlier in this letter, they'd have been useful i