ome observations on "loyalty." The
passion of the English people for assurances on this point is in curious
contrast with their own record. It is not rhetoric, but crude history,
to say that the title-deeds of English freedom are in great part written
in blood, and that the seal which gave validity to all the capital
documents was the seal of "treason." No other nation in the world has so
clearly recognised and so stoutly insisted that, in the ritual game of
loyalty, the first move is with governments. With that premised, the
difference between the two countries is very simple. England has
developed from within the type of government that her people want. She
expresses satisfaction with the fact. This is loyalty. Ireland, on the
contrary, has had forced on her from without a type of government which
her people emphatically do not want. She expresses dissatisfaction with
the fact. This is disloyalty. Loyalty, in brief, is the bloom on the
face of freedom, just as beauty is the bloom on the face of health.

If we examine the methods by which England attained her very desirable
position we are further enlightened. It is a study admirably adapted to
inculcate liberty, not at all so well adapted to inculcate "loyalty."
The whole burden of English history is that, whenever these two
principles came in conflict, every man in England worth his salt was
disloyal even to the point of war. Whenever the old bottle was
recalcitrant to the new wine of freedom it was ignominiously scrapped. A
long effort has been made to keep Irish history out of our schools in
the interests of "loyalty." But it is English history that ought to be
kept out, for it is full of stuff much more perilous. You teach Irish
children the tale of Runnymede, covering with contempt the king of that
day, and heaping praise on the barons who shook their fists under his
nose. This is dangerous doctrine. It is doubly dangerous seeing that
these children will soon grow up to learn that the Great Charter, which
is held to justify all these tumultuous proceedings, has never even to
our own day been current law in Ireland. You introduce them to the Wars
of the Roses as a model of peaceful, constitutional development; to the
slaying of Edward II., Richard II., and I know not how many more as
object-lessons in the reverence which angry Englishmen accord to an
anointed king when they really dislike him. Later centuries show them
one Stuart beheaded outside his own palace, an