st appalling thing in the
world until one remembered his hypocrisy and his cowardice. The
newspaper which led the campaign of denigration against France has come
to another view. Its proprietor now divides his time between signing
L10,000 cheques for triumphant French aviators, and delivering speeches
in which their nation is hailed as the pioneer of all great ideas. As
regards the Boers, the same reversal of the verdict of ten years ago has
taken place. The crowd which in 1900 asked only for a sour appletree on
which to hang General Botha, adopts him in 1911 as the idol of the
Coronation. At this progress towards sanity we must all rejoice. But
most of all we have to ask that these two sinister pageants of race
hatred shall not be suffered to dissolve without leaving some wrack of
wisdom behind. Writers on psychology have made many studies of what they
call the collective illusion. This strange malady, which consists in all
the world seeing something which in fact does not exist, wrought more
potently on the mind of England than did reason and justice in the Home
Rule controversies of 1886 and 1893. What has occurred may recur. And
since we are to speak here with all the candour of private conversation
I confess that I cannot devise or imagine any specific against such a
recurrence except an exercise in humility of the kind suggested by Mr
Chesterton. My own argument in that direction is perhaps compromised by
the fact that I am an Irishman. Let us therefore fall back on other
testimony. Out of the cloud of witnesses let us choose two or three, and
in the first place M. Alfred Fouillee. M. Fouillee is a Platonist--the
last Platonist in Europe--and consequently an amiable man. He is
universally regarded as the leader of philosophy in France, a position
not in the least shaken by Bergson's brief authority. In a charming and
lucid study of the "Psychology of the Peoples of Europe" Fouillee has
many pages that might serve for an introduction to the Irish Question.
The point of interest in his analysis is this: he exhibits Irish history
as a tragedy of character, a tragedy which flows with sad, inevitable
logic from a certain weakness which he notes, not in the Irish, but in
the English character.

"'In the eyes of the English,' says Taine who had studied them so
minutely, 'there is but one reasonable civilisation, namely their
own. Every other way of living is that of inferior beings, every
other religi