ge, "what is the nature of your
objection? Do you object to the panel or to the array?" "Ah!" replied
the traverser, "if you want to know, I object to the whole damned
business." That is approximately our objection to the present system of
government in Ireland. But let me attempt to group under a series of
somewhat arbitrary headings the "case for Home Rule," that is to say,
the case for applying to Ireland the plain platitudes of constitutional
freedom.

The whole matter roots in the fact of nationality. Nationality is to
political life what personality is to mental life, the mainspring,
namely, of the mechanism. The two principles of organisation have this
in common, that although by, through, and for them the entire pageant
of our experience is unfolded, we are unable to capture either of them
in a precise formula. That I am a person I know; but what is a person?
That Ireland is a nation I know; but what is a nation? "A community of
memories and hopes," says Anatole France; but that applies to a football
club. Something for which a man will die, says Mr T. M. Healy: but men
will die for strange reasons; there was a French poet who shot himself
because the trees were always green in the spring and never, for a
change, blue or red. A cultural unit, say the anthropologists; an idea
of the divine mind, declare Mazzini and the mystics' of sociology. Each
of these formulas possesses a certain relative truth, but all of them
together come short of the whole truth. Nationality, which acts better
perhaps than it argues, is one of the great forces of nature and of
human nature that have got to be accepted. Nationality will out, and
where it exists it will, in spite of all resistance, strain fiercely to
express itself in some sort of autonomous government.

German romance depicts for us the misery and restlessness of a man who
had lost his shadow. Catholic theologians--if the masters of a wisdom
too high and too austere for these days may be invoked--tell us that
the departed soul, even though it be in Paradise, hungers with a great
desire for the Resurrection that it may be restored to its life-long
comrade, the body.

"The crimson-throbbing glow
Into its old abode aye pants to go."

Look again at Ireland and you will discern, under all conflicts, that
unity of memory, of will, of material interest, of temperamental
atmosphere which knits men into a nation. You will notice the presence
of these characteristics, b