ribe as an attempt to produce the present curve of
evolution into the future. First, then, as to the temper of mind in
which an autonomous Ireland will face the world. The one clear certainty
is that it will not be rhetorical or Utopian. Of all the libels with
which we are pelted the most injurious to our repute is a kindly libel,
that which represents us as a nation of orators. To the primitive Tory
the Nationalist "agitator" appears in the guise of a stormy and
intractable fiend, with futility in his soul, and a College Green
peroration on his lips. The sources of this superstition are easily
traced. The English have created the noblest literature in the world,
and are candidly ashamed of the fact. In their view anybody who succeeds
in words must necessarily fail in business. The Irishman on the contrary
luxuriates, like the artist that he is, in that _splendor verborum_
celebrated by Dante. If a speech has to be made he thinks that it should
be well made, and refuses altogether to accept hums and haws as a token
of genius. He expects an orator not merely to expound facts, but to
stimulate the vital forces of his audience. These contrary conceptions
of the relation of art to life have, throughout the Home Rule campaign,
clashed in the English mind much to our disadvantage. And there has been
another agent of confusion, more widely human in character. Every idea
strongly held and, on the other side, strongly challenged, kindles
spontaneously into passion, and every great cause has its poetry as well
as its dialetics. Men, forced to concentrate all their thought on one
reform, come to see it edged with strange, mystical colours. Let justice
only triumph in this one regard, and our keel will grate on the shore of
the Fortunate Islands, the Earthly Paradise. All the harshness of life
will be dulcified; we shall lie dreaming on golden sands, dipping full
goblets out of a sea that has been transmuted into lemonade. This, the
Utopian mood of humanity, is inextinguishable, and it has embroidered
the Home Rule idea in common with all others. Before the complexity of
modern economic organisation was as well understood as is now the case,
there is no doubt that certain sections of opinion in Ireland did regard
self-government as a sort of Aladdin's Lamp, capable of any miracle. The
necessity of pressing all the energy of the nation into one channel had
the effect of imposing on political life a simplicity which does not
belong to