have grown lax and temporise a little, with more firmness on your part
mingle a little sympathy for them. It is harder to live a consistent
life than die a brave death. Most men of generous instincts would rouse
all their courage to a supreme moment and die for the Cause; but to rise
to that supreme moment frequently and without warning is the burden of
life for the Cause; and it is because of its exhausting strain and
exacting demands that so many men have failed. We must get men to
realise that to live is as daring as to die. But confusion has been made
in our time by the glib phrase: "You are not asked now to die for
Ireland, but to live for her," without insisting that the life shall aim
at the ideal, the brave and the true. To slip apologetically through
existence is not life. If such a mean philosophy went abroad, we would
soon find the land a place of shivering creatures, without the capacity
to live or the courage to die--calamity, surely. All these circumstances
make for the hour of depression; and it may well be in such an hour,
amid apathy and treachery, cold friends and active enemies, with
worn-down frame and baffled mind, you, pleading for the Old Cause, may
feel your voice is indeed a voice crying in the wilderness; and it may
serve till the blood warms again and the imagination recover its glow,
to think how a Voice, that cried in the wilderness thousands of years
ago, is potent and inspiring now, where the voice of the "practical" man
sends no whisper across the waste of years.


XI


What, then, to conclude, must be our decision? To take our philosophy
into life. When we do that generally, in a deep and significant sense
our War of Independence will have begun. Let there be no deferring a