t of his successful effort
was recalled to England. Still, though recruiting slackened, the
cause of the Allies remained in Ireland the popular cause and the
Easter Rising was the work only of a handful of men. Its immediate
cause was the fact that although the Home Rule Bill had been passed
and was on the Statute Book its operation was again deferred. All
Irishmen saw this as a breach of faith yet the majority were not at
that time behind the rising. The severity of its repression turned
it almost overnight into a national cause and erected yet another
barrier against friendship between England and Ireland.

For this friendship Chesterton longed ardently and worked
passionately, nor did he believe the barriers insurmountable. He even
held that there was between the people of the two countries a natural
amity. "There is something common to all the Britons, which even
Acts of Union have not torn asunder. The nearest name for it is
insecurity, something fitting in men walking on cliffs and the verge
of things. Adventure, a lonely taste in liberty, a humour without
wit, perplex their critics and perplex themselves. Their souls are
fretted like their coasts."* The Irish and the English had suffered
oppression at the same hands--those of the rulers of England. If
Prussian soldiers had been used against Irish peasants, so too had
they been used against English Chartists. A typical Englishman,
William Cobbett, had suffered fine and long imprisonment because of
his protest against the flogging of an English soldier by a German
mercenary.

[* _A Short History of England_, p. 7.]

"Telling the truth about Ireland," wrote Chesterton, "is not very
pleasant to a patriotic Englishman; but it is very patriotic."* For
the lack of the essential patriotism of admitting past sin the rulers
of England were perpetuating an evil that many of them sincerely
desired to end. For this was a case where the right road could only
be found by retracing the steps of a long road of wrong.

[* _The Crimes of England_, p. 57.]

Before the end of the war G.K. visited Ireland and in the book that
he wrote after this visit may be found his best analysis of all this
matter. Ireland, he believed, was making a mistake in not throwing
herself into the cause of the defeat of Germany, not because she owed
anything to England but because of what Prussia was and of what
Europe meant. Ireland had been the friend of France and the enemy of
Prussia long before