realise this, and at least as many women as men will prefer privation
with self-respect to comfort with contempt. Let us, then, in the name of
our common nature, ask those who have her training in hand, to teach the
woman to despise the man of menial soul and to loathe the luxury that is
his price.


IV


I wish to come to the heroic type of Irish Womanhood. When we need to
hearten ourselves or others for a great enterprise, we instinctively
turn to the examples of heroes and heroines who, in similar difficulties
to ours, have entered the fight bravely, and issued heroically, leaving
us a splendid heritage of fidelity and achievement. It is little to our
credit that our heroes are so little known. It is less to our credit
that our heroines are hardly known at all; and when we praise or sing
of one our selection is not always the happiest. How often in the
concert-hall or drawing-room do we get emotional when someone sings in
tremulous tones, "She is far from the Land." There is a feeling for
poetry in our lives, a feeling that patriotism will not have it, a
melting pity for the love that went to wreck, a sympathy for ourselves
and everybody and everything--a relaxing of all the nerves in a wave of
sentiment. This emotion is of the enervating order. There is no sweep of
strong fire through the blood, no tightening grip on life, no set
resolve to stand to the flag and see the battle through. It is well,
then, a generation that has heard from a thousand platforms, in
plaintive notes, of Sarah Curran and her love should turn to the braver
and more beautiful model of her who was the wife of Tone.