in this country—­as to which was the right way or the wrong way of conducting affairs at the front.  When a man feels that his feet are freezing, when he is standing in heavy rain for a whole night with no shelter, and when next morning he tries to cook a piece of scanty food over the scanty flame of a brazier in the mud, he perhaps sits down for a few minutes in the day’s dawn and takes up an old newspaper, and finds speeches and leading articles from time to time which tell him that apparently everything is going wrong, that the Ministers who are at the head of affairs in this country, upon whom he is depending, are not really men with their hearts in the work, but are really more or less callous and calculating mercenaries, who are not directing affairs in the best way, but are simply anxious to maintain their own salaries.  I say that when speeches and articles of that kind are found in the newspapers they are calculated, if anything is or can be so calculated, to depress the men who are at the front.”

Then came a few words in praise of the Irish troops and in deprecation of the failure to recognize some of their services; a confident assurance that, “whether they are remembered or not,” the Sixteenth Division would do their duty, with an equal assurance that the Ulster men would do as well as they—­and he reached to his conclusion: 

“Since I went out there I found that the common salutation in all circumstances is one of cheer.  If things go pretty well and the men are fairly comfortable, they say ‘Cheer O!’ If things go badly, and the snow falls and the rain comes through the roof of a billet in an impossible sort of cow-house, they say ‘Cheer O!’ still more.  All we want out there is that you shall adopt the same tone and say ‘Cheer O!’ to us.”

It is not too much to say that this speech was received with a cry of gratitude all over the country and throughout the Army.  It said what badly needed to be said, and said it with a freshness and a dash that came superbly from a company commander in his fifty-fourth year.  It was the best service that had yet been rendered to John Redmond’s policy.  Everybody quite naturally and simply accepted the Nationalist Irishman as the spokesman for all the troops who were actually in the line.  Mr. Walter Long, always a generous and candid human being, was quick to give voice to this feeling: 

“The honourable and gallant member for East Clare has been in conflict, not only with one particular political party, but during the greater part of his career with every party in turn, and has engaged in bitter controversy with them.  Does anybody doubt the fact that when war was declared one great factor in the mind of the Emperor responsible for this war was that dissension would paralyse the hands of Great Britain?  Ireland, whatever may have been our differences in the past, and whatever may be our differences in happier days again when we are at peace, everybody must feel