CORRESPONDENCE.

IRELAND'S MANHOOD.

Pro THE EDITOR or THE " SPECTATOE."] Bra,—It is England's tragedy that Ireland continually forces her into a position in which justice seems oppression, and clemency weakness. It is Ireland's tragedy that, while she rarely fails to make party-political capital out of the subsequent situation, she invariably fails to win national benefit. And never has this truth been so amply demonstrated as during the past ten years, during which Ireland, holding all the trumps, has yet lost the odd trick.

• The reason for this lies, I think, in her introspection, the turning inward of her eyes upon herself. Her children stand, as it were, with their backs to the sea, and their eyes bent intently upon the deep dark pool of the Bog of Allen—the pool which reflects Ireland, and Ireland, and Ireland yet again. Consequently she has lost her international imagination (a man who retains it is called a West Briton and despised accordingly). She cannot visualize her neigh- bours, or if she sees them at all, sees them through highly coloured emerald glasses.

For Ireland there is only one nation, and that does not exist! Eigland is alternately feared and despised; among a certain section—unhappily predominant for the moment—she is cordially disliked. Moderate people who, for their sins, accept civic responsi- bility, are forced to listen in Board room and Committee to impas- sioned speeches in which King George figures grotesquely as a " foreign King," and in which England is held solely responsible for all our sins, our sorrows, and our failures. Is Ireland riven by political hatreds? Blame England. Are our workhouses vilely administered? It is England's fault. Is there corruption in our midst? England bribes us. The string is twanged from generation to generation, and the note stifles our consciences and stops our ears. Our political chemists make "England's responsibility " into appetizing tabloids which we swallow with childlike docility. They are easily digested tabloids, but they ruin the sight. After a few doses we see ourselves in a mist of injured innocence, and Ireland through a golden veil of " ifs " and " when.." For Ireland is the nation which never grew up. Indeed, I think she is not the Little Old Woman of the poet's vision at all, but a lusty, self-willed, egotistical boy, who has never been disciplined, is conscious of his strength but does not know how to use it, resents restraint but will never do anything worth while till he has been forced to submit to it. He needs very firm and judicious handling, but for ten years he has been fed on sops; he has become the en/ant gdfi of Europe. But the spoiling process is not complete; there is still time to repair the error, only now the difficulties have increased enormously, terribly, for the boy has become sullen, he refuses any longer to be coaxed.

This, then, is the situation in Ireland to-day, a situation that is the inevitable outcome of the ineptitude, laissez-faire. and criminal mismanagement of recent government. It is banal to say that the National Volunteers should have been placed under military dis- cipline at once upon the outbreak of the war : every one knows it. It is equally banal to say that Mr. Redmond's offer of the Volun- teers for home defence (again the inevitable egotism, the lack of international imagination) was a fine histrionic effort, but had no real authority behind it. The split in the Volunteer ranks which immediately followed was a vivid danger-signal, the importance of which only a Chief Secretary failed to appreciate. Did even Mr. Redmond realize its full significance in those heated August days, I wonder? Did he guess that through the flash we would see that he only " led " Ireland as long as he chose a path down which she was willing to follow, or that before long he would stand before her, his power broken, his prestige almost gone, reaping the harvest of enmity to England and of national self-centredness which he and his fellow-politicians had sown?

The exquisite irony of a situation in which a Government called for recruits to fill the ranks of the Army while the manhood of Ireland openly armed and drilled in order to attack the Govern- ment was lost on most of us. Perhaps that was because voluntary recruiting was meeting with a fair measure of success, although many of the speakers on recruiting platforms were men without experience of public speaking, without influence, without imagina- tion, and, worst of all, without any real sympathy with the class they appealed to. If you want to win an Irishman you must touch his imagination; but, as we have seen, of international imagina- tion he, to a great extent, has none. He cannot, as a rule, weep for the sorrows of Belgium; he is too busy brooding over his own "wrongs." But the spirit of adventure still lives in him, and he loves a fight for its own sake, and goes happily into it often careless of which side he is on. Elderly gentlemen who dine well are not the best exponents of Romance, so we need not blame them if they found their task rather bewildering. In one district a personally

unpopular individual preached all his recruiting sermons on the text, " If you don't go now of your own free will, you'll be forced

to go later on, and then you'll be a jolly sight worse off "; and an active member of another local Committee told me that few if any recruits were enrolled at meetings. " The sergeants get the men quietly afterwards in the villages."

The spirit of Romance calls to men across the worst political muddles, and I dare to suggest that had Ireland been unarmed at

the beginning of the war the best of her manhood would even now be in France. But Romance in Volunteer's uniform was knocking at her door, and the untamed boy in her opened the door and let Romance and Rebellion in. If it is true that it was the rebellion which killed recruiting in Ireland, then it is equally true that it was the possibility of rebellion which prepared it for its death- blow. Mr. Redmond daring the Government to introduce conscrip- tion calls for a renewal of this defunct method. " Conscription."

he cries, " would be resisted in every village in Ireland," and not the less so because he and his party have been prophesying and advertising that resistance for over a year, and because people

openly say that the giving in of the Sinn Fein arms was a farce, and that the villages are still full of rifles and ammunition. If the priests and politicians come out even now on recruiting plat-

forms it is possible that the voluntary system may yet be a success.

There are men in Ireland to-day, who are neither priests nor politicians, who might save the situation, but they are silent, they

hate the mire of party politics, and—God forgive them I—those who should hiie been the last to do so have made the question of recruiting a party-political question.

And so once more we find the old situation in which justice looks like oppression and generosity like weakness. If England bad

spared Connolly and Pearce, Sinn Fein would have said she was afraid; she was just, and Sinn Fein nurses its sullen wrath. The Irish Times and other similar organs may cry to our young msn to save us from international disgrace, but in Ireland's present mood they cry in vain. The men simply do not care. That is the truth which rides high above the land. Sinn Fein Ireland, the

dominant Ireland at the moment, is in a mood of the most reckless indifference; she is gazing hypnotically at her own reflection in the pool; she is angered and sullen; above all, she is indifferent. The wild ungoverned boy in her is enraged, and he will kick his owa

house to pieces rather than give in. Some day, perhaps, a man will arise in Ireland who will lead and not be led, who will turn Ireland's face away from that stagnating pool out over the sea to the broader vision, the wider horizons, the fuller life. But until that day comes those who love her best can only stand aside and grieve. The devils of Sinn Fein (" For Ourselves ") have taken possession of her, she is rushing headlong to destruction, and she