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