According to precedent, well-established if not wise, no discussion of political Ireland must end without some observations on “loyalty.”  The passion of the English people for assurances on this point is in curious contrast with their own record.  It is not rhetoric, but crude history, to say that the title-deeds of English freedom are in great part written in blood, and that the seal which gave validity to all the capital documents was the seal of “treason.”  No other nation in the world has so clearly recognised and so stoutly insisted that, in the ritual game of loyalty, the first move is with governments.  With that premised, the difference between the two countries is very simple.  England has developed from within the type of government that her people want.  She expresses satisfaction with the fact.  This is loyalty.  Ireland, on the contrary, has had forced on her from without a type of government which her people emphatically do not want.  She expresses dissatisfaction with the fact.  This is disloyalty.  Loyalty, in brief, is the bloom on the face of freedom, just as beauty is the bloom on the face of health.

If we examine the methods by which England attained her very desirable position we are further enlightened.  It is a study admirably adapted to inculcate liberty, not at all so well adapted to inculcate “loyalty.”  The whole burden of English history is that, whenever these two principles came in conflict, every man in England worth his salt was disloyal even to the point of war.  Whenever the old bottle was recalcitrant to the new wine of freedom it was ignominiously scrapped.  A long effort has been made to keep Irish history out of our schools in the interests of “loyalty.”  But it is English history that ought to be kept out, for it is full of stuff much more perilous.  You teach Irish children the tale of Runnymede, covering with contempt the king of that day, and heaping praise on the barons who shook their fists under his nose.  This is dangerous doctrine.  It is doubly dangerous seeing that these children will soon grow up to learn that the Great Charter, which is held to justify all these tumultuous proceedings, has never even to our own day been current law in Ireland.  You introduce them to the Wars of the Roses as a model of peaceful, constitutional development; to the slaying of Edward II., Richard II., and I know not how many more as object-lessons in the reverence which angry Englishmen accord to an anointed king when they really dislike him.  Later centuries show them one Stuart beheaded outside his own palace, another dethroned and banished in favour of a Dutch prince.  Of romantic loyalty to the person of a sovereign they find no trace or hint in the modern period.  Lost causes and setting suns, whatever appeal they may have made to Ireland, do but rarely fire with their magical glimmer the raw daylight of the English political mind.  As for that more facile, after-dinner attachment, in which it is charged that we do not join with sufficient