arming actress ten years ago. He has made a name for himself as a
journalist, and his articles are the chief glory of a leading weekly
paper. But the business to which he has really devoted himself is that
of an Irish patriot. He says amazingly foolish things in public and,
in private, is always quite ready to laugh at his own speeches. He is
a genuine lover of Ireland, an inheritor of that curious tradition of
Irish patriotism which has survived centuries of disappointed hopes,
and, a much stranger thing, has never been quite asphyxiated by its own
gases.

I happen to belong to that unfortunate class of Irishmen whom neither
Gorman nor any one else will recognise as being Irish at all. I owned,
at one time, a small estate in Co. Cork. I sold it to my tenants
and became a man of moderate income, incumbered with a baronetcy
of respectable antiquity and occupied chiefly in finding profitable
investments for my capital. By way of recreation I interest myself in my
neighbours and acquaintances, in the actual men and women rather than
in their affairs. No definition of the Irish people has yet been
framed which would include me, though I am indubitably a person--I take
"person" to be the singular of people which is a noun of multitude--and
come of a family which held on to an Irish property for 300 years. My
religion consists chiefly of a dislike of the Roman Catholic Church and
an instinctive distrust of the priests of all churches. My father was
an active Unionist, and I have no political opinions of any sort. I am
therefore cut off, both by religion and politics, from any chance of
taking part in Irish affairs. On the other hand I cannot manage to
feel myself an Englishman. Even now, though I have fought in their army
without incurring the reproach of cowardice, I cannot get out of the
habit of looking at Englishmen from a distance. This convinces me that I
am not one of them.

I am thus--Gorman is quite right about this--a man of no country. But I
understand Ascher as well as Gorman does; though I take a different view
of Ascher's ultimate decision.

I met Gorman first on board a Cunard steamer in the autumn of 1913.

I was on my way to Canada. My excuse, the reason I gave to myself for
the journey, was the necessity of looking into the affairs of certain
Canadian companies in which I had invested money. There were rumours
current in England at that time which led me to suspect that the boom in
Canadian securities ha