Why it happened is a question that may be answered more particularly.  It happened because the leader of the Irish Party misrepresented his people in the English House of Parliament.  On the day of the declaration of war between England and Germany he took the Irish case, weighty with eight centuries of history and tradition, and he threw it out of the window.  He pledged Ireland to a particular course of action, and he had no authority to give this pledge and he had no guarantee that it would be met.  The ramshackle intelligence of his party and his own emotional nature betrayed him and us and England.  He swore Ireland to loyalty as if he had Ireland in his pocket, and could answer for her.  Ireland has never been disloyal to England, not even at this epoch, because she has never been loyal to England, and the profession of her National faith has been unwavering, has been known to every English person alive, and has been clamant to all the world beside.

Is it that he wanted to be cheered?  He could very easily have stated Ireland’s case truthfully, and have proclaimed a benevolent neutrality (if he cared to use the grandiloquent words) on the part of this country.  He would have gotten his cheers, he would in a few months have gotten Home Rule in return for Irish soldiers.  He would have received politically whatever England could have safely given him.  But, alas, these carefulnesses did not chime with his emotional moment.  They were not magnificent enough for one who felt that he was talking not to Ireland or to England, but to the whole gaping and eager earth, and so he pledged his country’s credit so deeply that he did not leave her even one National rag to cover herself with.

After a lie truth bursts out, and it is no longer the radiant and serene goddess knew or hoped for—­it is a disease, it is a moral syphilis and will ravage until the body in which it can dwell has been purged.  Mr. Redmond told the lie and he is answerable to England for the violence she had to be guilty of, and to Ireland for the desolation to which we have had to submit.  Without his lie there had been no Insurrection; without it there had been at this moment, and for a year past, an end to the “Irish question.”  Ireland must in ages gone have been guilty of abominable crimes or she could not at this juncture have been afflicted with a John Redmond.

He is the immediate cause of this our latest Insurrection—­the word is big, much too big for the deed, and we should call it row, or riot, or squabble, in order to draw the fact down to its dimensions, but the ultimate blame for the trouble between the two countries does not fall against Ireland.