KATHARINE.  But will it?

PARNELL.  Why?  Don’t you believe that Ireland will be free some day?

KATHARINE.  I did when she chose you for her leader.

PARNELL (bitterly).  A dead leader, one whom she can’t hurt, may do better for her.

KATHARINE.  Don’t say “dead”!

PARNELL.  I shan’t be alive in twenty years, my dear.  And it may take all that.

KATHARINE.  Without you it will take more.

PARNELL.  It won’t be “without me.”  That’s what I mean.  They may beat me to-day; but I shall still count.  Think of all Ireland’s failures!  Grattan’s Parliament counts; “Ninety-eight” counts; Fitzgerald counts; O’Connell counts; her famines, her emigrations, her rebellions—­all count.

KATHARINE.  Does Butt count?

PARNELL.  He wasn’t a failure:  he didn’t try to do anything.  If Ireland needs more failures, to make a case for her conviction, shall I grudge mine?  Yes, all her failures count:  they get into the blood!  Why, even the silly statues in her streets mean more than statues can mean here.  Prosperity forgets; adversity remembers.  Even hatred has its use:  it grips, and drives men on.

KATHARINE.  Did you need—­hatred, to do that for you?

PARNELL.  Yes:  till I got love!...  Reason, conviction aren’t enough.  Morley said a good thing the other day.  The English, he said, meant well by Ireland:  but they didn’t mean it much.

KATHARINE.  I suppose that’s true of some?

PARNELL.  Quite true:  and what is the most that it amounts to?  Compromise.  Morley’s an authority on compromise.  And yet I like him:  I get on with him.  But he’s too thick with Gladstone to be honest over this.  Curious his having to back the conventions, eh?

KATHARINE.  Why does he?

PARNELL.  Because the political salvation of his party and its leader comes before Ireland.  He means well by her:  but he doesn’t mean it so much as all that.  Still he’s the only one of them who doesn’t pretend to look on me as a black sheep.  He too has to work with his material.  That’s politics.  The Nonconformist conscience means votes—­so it decides him:  just as the priests decide me....  They would decide him in any case, I mean.  And so-so it goes on....  “Look here upon this picture, and on this”:  Ireland trying to please England; England trying, now and then, to please Ireland!  I don’t know which is the more ludicrous; but I know that both equally must fail.  And they’ve got to see it!—­and some day they will.  It won’t be “Home Rule” then....

(So for a while he sits and thinks, his hand in hers.  Then he resumes.)

My ruin?  What would my ruin matter anyway?  Put it, that the making public of our claim—­our right to each other—­is to be allowed by any possibility to affect the cause of a nation—­the justice of that cause:  doesn’t that fact, if true, show that the whole basis of the political principles they have so boasted, and on which we have so blindly relied, was utterly and fantastically false and rotten?  Haven’t we, providentially, given the world the proof that it needed of its own lie?