other. But if the bootmaker were to insist on having his finger in the
farmer's pie, the pie, destined for the bootmaker's own appetite, would
not be improved. If he were to insist on applying to the living cow
those processes which he applies with such success to the dead leather,
the cow would suffer and ultimately there would be no boots. Generally
speaking, each of us improves his own business by declining to mind
anybody else's. Home Rule will give England precisely this chance of
sticking to her last. To Ireland it will come with both hands full of
new opportunities and new responsibilities.

To realise that the national idea in Ireland arouses an emotion, at once
massive, intense, and enduring, is to understand many derivative
riddles. We are all familiar with the complaint that there is in Ireland
too much politics and too little business. Of course there is, and not
only too little business but too little literature, too little
philosophy, too little social effort, too little fun. We Nationalists
have grasped this better and proclaimed it more steadily than any
Unionist. There is as much truth in saying that life begins where
politics end, as in saying that love begins where love-making ends.
Constitutional freedom is not the fifth act of the social drama in
modern times, it is rather the prologue, or, better still, the theatre
in which other ideas that move men find an arena for their conflict.
Ireland, a little exhausted by her intense efforts of the last thirty
years, does assuredly need a rest-cure from agitation. But this healing
peace is itself a gift of autonomy. A tooth-ache concentrates the whole
mind on one particular emotion, which is a bad thing, and breeds
profanity, which is worse. But it is idle to tell a man with a
tooth-ache that what he needs in his life is less cursing and more
business. He cannot work effectively so long as he suffers; the only way
to peace is to cure the tooth-ache. And in order to get rid of politics