ut it is an absence, a void that will most
impress you. You will see not a body that has lost its shadow, but
something more sinister--a soul that has been sundered from its natural
body. She demands restoration. She sues out a _habeas corpus_ of a kind
not elsewhere to be paralleled. That is the "Irish Question."

You may not like this interpretation of things. It may seem to you
fantastic, nasty, perilous to all comfort. Life often does make on the
tender-hearted an impression of coarse violence; life, nevertheless,
always has its way. What other interpretation is possible? Lancashire,
to take any random contrast, is much richer than Ireland in wealth and
population; but Lancashire is not a "Question." Lancashire is not a
"Question" because Lancashire is not a nation. Ireland is a "Question"
because Ireland is a nation. Her fundamental claim is a claim for the
constitutional recognition of nationality.

We have seen that in almost every conflict between English and Irish
ideas the latter have had the justification of success. This holds good
also as regards our long insistence on nationality as a principle of
political organisation. In various passages of the nineteenth century it
seemed to be gravely compromised. Capital, its mobility indefinitely
increased by the improved technique of exchange, became essentially a
citizen of the world. The earth was all about it where to choose; its
masters, falsely identifying patriotism with the Protectionism then
dominant, struck at both, and the Free Trade movement philosophised
itself into cosmopolitanism. Labour, like capital, showed a rapid
tendency to become international or rather supernational. "The workers,"
proclaimed Marx, "have no fatherland." While this was the drift of ideas
in the economic sphere, that in the political was no more favourable.
Belgium seemed on the point of extinction, Italy was a mere geographical
expression, Hungary was abject and broken. In the narrower but even
more significant sphere of British colonial policy the passion for
centralisation had not yet been understood in all its folly. Downing
Street still functioned as the Dublin Castle of the Empire. The
possibility of the overseas possessions developing that rich, strong
individuality which characterises them to-day would have been dismissed
with horror. The colour and texture of men's thought on these subjects
has undergone a notable transformation. Cosmopolitanism of the old type
is a sla