market for them, and these men will perhaps end by becoming patriotic
and social when they learn that they do not really command the Big
Battalions. But Ireland has no protection against them while England can
be thrilled by their nonsense, and while she is willing to pound Ireland
to a jelly on their appeal. Her only assistance against them is freedom.

There are certain simplicities upon which all life is based. A man finds
that he is hungry and the knowledge enables him to go to work for the
rest of his life. A man makes the discovery (it has been a discovery to
many) that he is an Irishman, and the knowledge simplifies all his
subsequent political action. There is this comfort about being an
Irishman, you can be entirely Irish, and claim thus to be as complete
as a pebble or a star. But no Irish person can hope to be more than a
muletto Englishman, and if that be an ambition and an end it is not an
heroic one.

But there is an Ulster difficulty, and no amount of burking it will
solve it. It is too generally conceived among Nationalists that the
attitude of Ulster towards Ireland is rooted in ignorance and bigotry.
Allow that both of these bad parts are included in the Northern outlook,
they do not explain the Ulster standpoint; and nothing can explain the
attitude of official Ireland _vis-a-vis_ with Ulster.

What has the Irish Party ever done to allay Northern prejudice, or bring
the discontented section into line with the rest of Ireland? The answer
is pathetically complete. They have done nothing. Or, if they have done
anything, it was only that which would set every Northerner grinding his
teeth in anger. At a time when Orangeism was dying they raised and
marshalled the Hibernians, and we have the Ulsterman's answer to the
Hibernians in the situation by which we are confronted to-day. If the