England had been either; she would do well to
hold to her ancient allegiance.

It was true that Ireland had been betrayed by the Liberal promise of
Home Rule--but the men who betrayed her were the Marconi men! Redmond
had made the great mistake of his career when from motives of
patriotism for Ireland he had helped the party hacks of the
Government Committee to whitewash these men, who had gone on to
betray Ireland as they were then betraying England. England too
needed Home Rule. England too needed deliverance from her "degenerate
and unworthy governing class."

There are a few pages in _Irish Impressions_--now out of print-which
find their place here in illustration of what he meant by his
championship of nationality:

A brilliant writer . . . once propounded to me his highly personal
and even perverse type of internationalism by saying, as a sort of
unanswerable challenge, "Wouldn't you rather be ruled by Goethe than
by Walter Long?" I replied that words could not express the wild love
and loyalty I should feel for Mr. Walter Long, if the only
alternative were Goethe. I could not have put my own national case in
a clearer or more compact form. I might occasionally feel inclined to
kill Mr. Long; but under the approaching shadow of Goethe, I should
feel more inclined to kill myself. That is the deathly element in
denationalisation; that it poisons life itself, the most real of all
realities. . . .

Some people felt it an affectation that the Irish should put up their
street signs in Gaelic but G.K. defended it. "It is well to remember
that these things, which we also walk past every day, are exactly the
sort of things that always have, in the nameless fashion, the
national note."

It is this sensation of stemming a stream, of ten thousand things
all pouring one way, labels, titles, monuments, metaphors, modes of
address, assumptions in controversy, that make an Englishman in
Ireland know that he is in a strange land. Nor is he merely
bewildered, as among a medley of strange things. On the contrary, if
he has any sense, he soon finds them united and simplified to a
single impression, as if he were talking to a strange person. He
cannot define it, because nobody can define a person, and nobody can
define a nation. He can only see it, smell it, hear it, handle it,
bump into it, fall over it, kill it, be killed for it, or be damned
for doing it wron