The will to preserve her nationality motived her whole life, especially in the modern period.  The declared dream of Grattan was, as we have seen, to transform a Protestant colony into an Irish nation.  Wolfe Tone confessed the same inspiration; Emmet’s speech from the dock was that and nothing else.  It was the whole of Davis in thought, and of O’Connell in action.  Isaac Butt yielded to its fascination, and found for it the watchword, Home Rule.  It was formulated by Parnell in a speech the capital passage of which forms the inscription on his monument.  It echoes and re-echoes through the resolutions of every meeting, and constitutes for many orators their total stock of political ideas.  It provides the title of the Irish delegation to Parliament, and is endorsed at General Election after General Election by a great and unchanging majority.  A people such as this is not to be exterminated.  An ideal such as this is not to be destroyed.  Recognise the one, sever the ligatures that check the free flow of blood through the veins of the other, and enrich your federation of autonomous peoples with another rich individuality.  Imitate in Ireland your own wisdom in dealing with the Colonies, and the same policy will bear the same harvest.  For justice given the Colonies gave you friendship, as for injustice stubbornly upheld they had given you hatred.  The analogy with Ireland is complete so far as the cards have been played.  The same human elements are there, the same pride, the same anger, the same willingness to forget anger.  Why should the augury fail?

I can hear in imagination the sniff of the unimaginative reader; I can figure to myself his instant dismissal of all these considerations as “sentiment.”  Let the word stand, coloured though it is with associations that degrade it.  But is “sentiment” to be ignored in the fixing of constitutions?  Ruskin asks a pertinent question.  What is it after all but “sentiment,” he inquires, that prevents a man from killing his grandmother in time of hunger?  Sentiment is the most respectable thing in human psychology.  No one believes in it more thoroughly than your reactionary Tory.  But he wears his heart on his sleeve with a difference.  He is so greedily patriotic that he would keep all the patriotism in the world to himself.  That he should love his country is natural and noble, a theme so high as to be worthy of Mr Kipling or even Mr Alfred Austin himself.  That we should love ours is a sort of middle term between treason and insanity.  It is as if a lover were to insist that no poems should be written to any woman except his mistress.  It is as if he were to put the Coercion Act in force against anyone found shedding tears over the sufferings of any mother except his mother.  In fact it is the sort of domineering thick-headedness that never fails to produce disloyalty.