The whole matter roots in the fact of nationality.  Nationality is to political life what personality is to mental life, the mainspring, namely, of the mechanism.  The two principles of organisation have this in common, that although by, through, and for them the entire pageant of our experience is unfolded, we are unable to capture either of them in a precise formula.  That I am a person I know; but what is a person?  That Ireland is a nation I know; but what is a nation?  “A community of memories and hopes,” says Anatole France; but that applies to a football club.  Something for which a man will die, says Mr T. M. Healy:  but men will die for strange reasons; there was a French poet who shot himself because the trees were always green in the spring and never, for a change, blue or red.  A cultural unit, say the anthropologists; an idea of the divine mind, declare Mazzini and the mystics’ of sociology.  Each of these formulas possesses a certain relative truth, but all of them together come short of the whole truth.  Nationality, which acts better perhaps than it argues, is one of the great forces of nature and of human nature that have got to be accepted.  Nationality will out, and where it exists it will, in spite of all resistance, strain fiercely to express itself in some sort of autonomous government.

German romance depicts for us the misery and restlessness of a man who had lost his shadow.  Catholic theologians—­if the masters of a wisdom too high and too austere for these days may be invoked—­tell us that the departed soul, even though it be in Paradise, hungers with a great desire for the Resurrection that it may be restored to its life-long comrade, the body.

    “The crimson-throbbing glow
    Into its old abode aye pants to go.”

Look again at Ireland and you will discern, under all conflicts, that unity of memory, of will, of material interest, of temperamental atmosphere which knits men into a nation.  You will notice the presence of these characteristics, but it is an absence, a void that will most impress you.  You will see not a body that has lost its shadow, but something more sinister—­a soul that has been sundered from its natural body.  She demands restoration.  She sues out a habeas corpus of a kind not elsewhere to be paralleled.  That is the “Irish Question.”

You may not like this interpretation of things.  It may seem to you fantastic, nasty, perilous to all comfort.  Life often does make on the tender-hearted an impression of coarse violence; life, nevertheless, always has its way.  What other interpretation is possible?  Lancashire, to take any random contrast, is much richer than Ireland in wealth and population; but Lancashire is not a “Question.”  Lancashire is not a “Question” because Lancashire is not a nation.  Ireland is a “Question” because Ireland is a nation.  Her fundamental claim is a claim for the constitutional recognition of nationality.