To be loyal to his cause is the finest tribute that can be paid to any man.  And since loyalty to the Irish cause has been the great virtue of Irishmen through all history, it is time to have some clear thinking as to who are the Irish rebels and who the true men.  When a stupid Government, grasping our reverence for fidelity, tried to ban our heroes by calling them felons, it was natural we should rejoin by writing “The Felons of our Land” and heap ridicule on their purpose.  But once this end was achieved we should have reverted to the normal attitude and written up as the true Irish Loyalists, Brian the Great, and Shane the Proud, the valiant Owen Roe and the peerless Tone, Mitchel and Davis—­irreconcilables all.  When men revolt against an established evil it is their loyalty to the outraged truth we honour.  We do not extol a rebel who rebels for rebellion’s sake.  Let us be clear on this point, or when we shall have re-established our freedom after centuries of effort it shall be open to every knave and traitor to challenge our independence and plot to readmit the enemy.  Loyalty is the fine attribute of the fine nature; the word has been misused and maligned in Ireland:  let us restore it to its rightful honour by remembering it to be the virtue of our heroes of all time.  In considering it from this view-point we shall find occasion to touch on delicate positions that have often baffled and worried us—­the asserting of our rights while using the machinery of the Government that denies them, the burning question of consistency, our attitude towards the political adventurer on one hand, and towards the honest man of half-measures on the other.  Loyalty involves all this.  And it shows that the man who revolts to win freedom is the same as he who dies to defend it.  He does not change his face and nature with the changing times.  He is loyal always and most wonderfully lovable, because in the darkest times, when banned as wild, wicked and rebelly, he is loyal still as from the beginning, and will be to the end.  Yes, Tone is the true Irish Loyalist, and every aider and abettor of the enemy a rebel to Ireland and the Irish race.

II

When you insist on examining the question in the light of first principles your opportunist opponent at once feels the weakness of his position and always turns the point on your consistency.  It is well, then, in advance to understand the relative value and importance of argument as argument in the statement of any case.  A body of principles is primarily of value, not as affording a case that can be argued with ingenuity, but as enshrining one great principle that shines through and informs the rest, that illumines the mind of the individual, that warms, clarifies and invigorates—­that, so to speak, puts the mind in focus, gets the facts of existence into perspective, and gives the individual everything in its right place and true proportion.