A doctor who attended on him during his last hours says that Connolly received the sentence of his death quietly.  He was to be shot on the morning following the sentence.  This gentleman said to him: 

“Connolly, when you stand up to be shot, will you say a prayer for me?”

Connolly replied: 

“I will.”

His visitor continued: 

“Will you say a prayer for the men who are shooting you?”

“I will,” said Connolly, “and I will say a prayer for every good man in the world who is doing his duty.”

He was a steadfast man in all that he undertook.  We may be sure he steadfastly kept that promise.  He would pray for others, who had not time to pray for himself, as he had worked for others during the years when he might have worked for himself.

CHAPTER XII.

The Irish questions.

There is truly an Irish question.  There are two Irish questions, and the most important of them is not that which appears in our newspapers and in our political propaganda.

The first is international, and can be stated shortly.  It is the desire of Ireland to assume control of her national life.  With this desire the English people have professed to be in accord, and it is at any rate so thoroughly understood that nothing further need be made of it in these pages.

The other Irish question is different, and less simply described.  The difficulty about it is that it cannot be approached until the question of Ireland’s freedom has by some means been settled, for this ideal of freedom has captured the imagination of the race.  It rides Ireland like a nightmare, thwarting or preventing all civilising or cultural work in this country, and it is not too much to say that Ireland cannot even begin to live until that obsession and fever has come to an end, and her imagination has been set free to do the work which imagination alone can do—­Imagination is intelligent kindness—­we have sore need of it.

The second question might plausibly be called a religious one.  It has been so called, and, for it is less troublesome to accept an idea than to question it, the statement has been accepted as truth—­but it is untrue, and it is deeply and villainously untrue.  No lie in Irish life has been so persistent and so mischievous as this one, and no political lie has ever been so ingeniously, and malevolently exploited.

There is no religious intolerance in Ireland except that which is political.  I am not a member of the Catholic Church, and am not inclined to be the advocate of a religious system which my mentality dislikes, but I have never found real intolerance among my fellow-countrymen of that religion.  I have found it among Protestants.  I will limit that statement, too.  I have found it among some Protestants.  But outside of the North of Ireland there is no religious question, and in the North it is fundamentally more political than religious.