that they may themselves possess culture and produce it.  All culture is national.  It takes its rise in some special people, and reaches its highest form in national character....  Socialism and the national idea are thus not opposed to each other.  Every attempt to weaken the national idea is an attempt to lessen the precious possessions of mankind....  Socialism wants to organise, and not disintegrate, humanity.  But in the organisms of mankind, not individuals, but nations are the tissues, and if the whole organism is to remain healthy it is necessary for the tissues to be healthy....  The peoples, despite the changes they undergo, are everlasting, and they add to their own greatness by helping the world upward.  And so we are at one and the same time good Socialists and good Germans.”

This might almost seem to be a rhapsody, but every movement of continental politics in recent times confirms and enforces its plain truth.  “The spirit of resurgent nationality,” as Professor Bury of Cambridge tells us, “has governed, as one of the most puissant forces, the political course of the last century and is still unexhausted.”  It has governed not only the West but the East; the twain have met in that demand for a constitutional national State which in our day has flamed up, a fire not to be put out, in Turkey, Persia, Egypt.  But it is in Imperial politics that the bouleversement has been most complete.  When critics now find fault with the structure of the Empire they complain not that there is too much Downing Street in it, but that the residual power of Downing Street-is not visible to the naked eye.  To us Irish the blindness of England to the meaning of her own colonial work is a maddening miracle.  A wit of the time met Goldsmith at dinner.  The novelist was a little more disconcerting than usual, a result, let us charitably hope, of the excellence of the claret.  Afterwards they asked his fellow-diner what he thought of the author.  “Well,” he replied, “I believe that that man wrote ‘The Vicar of Wakefield,’ and, let me tell you, it takes a lot of believing.”  Similarly when we in Ireland learn that Great Britain has founded on the principle of local autonomy an Empire on which the sun never sets, we nerve ourselves to an Act of Faith.  It is not inappropriate to observe that a large part of the “founding” was done by Irishmen.

But the point of immediate interest lies in this.  The foolishness of England in Ireland finds an exact parallel, although on a smaller scale and for a shorter period, in the early foolishness of England in her own colonies.  In both cases there is an attempt to suppress individuality and initiative, to exploit, to bully, to Downing Street-ify.  It was a policy of Unionism, the sort of Unionism that linked the destiny of the lady to that of the tiger.  The fruits of it were a little bitter in the eating.  The colonies in which under the Home Rule regime “loyalty” has blossomed like the rose, were in those days most distressingly disloyal.