These things are not regarded in Ireland, and, in truth, they are not meat for Irish consumption.  Irish judges are presented with white gloves with a regularity which may even be annoying to them, and were it not for political trouble they would be unable to look their salaries in the face.  The Irish Bar almost weep in chorus at the words “Land Act,” and stare, not dumbly, on destitution.  These tales are meant for England and are sent there.  They will cease to be exported when there is no market for them, and these men will perhaps end by becoming patriotic and social when they learn that they do not really command the Big Battalions.  But Ireland has no protection against them while England can be thrilled by their nonsense, and while she is willing to pound Ireland to a jelly on their appeal.  Her only assistance against them is freedom.

There are certain simplicities upon which all life is based.  A man finds that he is hungry and the knowledge enables him to go to work for the rest of his life.  A man makes the discovery (it has been a discovery to many) that he is an Irishman, and the knowledge simplifies all his subsequent political action.  There is this comfort about being an Irishman, you can be entirely Irish, and claim thus to be as complete as a pebble or a star.  But no Irish person can hope to be more than a muletto Englishman, and if that be an ambition and an end it is not an heroic one.

But there is an Ulster difficulty, and no amount of burking it will solve it.  It is too generally conceived among Nationalists that the attitude of Ulster towards Ireland is rooted in ignorance and bigotry.  Allow that both of these bad parts are included in the Northern outlook, they do not explain the Ulster standpoint; and nothing can explain the attitude of official Ireland vis-a-vis with Ulster.

What has the Irish Party ever done to allay Northern prejudice, or bring the discontented section into line with the rest of Ireland?  The answer is pathetically complete.  They have done nothing.  Or, if they have done anything, it was only that which would set every Northerner grinding his teeth in anger.  At a time when Orangeism was dying they raised and marshalled the Hibernians, and we have the Ulsterman’s answer to the Hibernians in the situation by which we are confronted to-day.  If the Party had even a little statesmanship among them they would for the past ten years have marched up and down the North explaining and mollifying and courting the Black Northerner.  But, like good Irishmen, they could not tear themselves away from England, and they paraded that country where parade was not so urgent, and they made orations there until the mere accent of an Irishman must make Englishmen wail for very boredom.

Some of that parade might have gladdened the eyes of the Belfast citizens; a few of those orations might have assisted the men of Derry to comprehend that, for the good of our common land, Home Rule and the unity of a nation was necessary if only to rid the country of these blatherers.