The Mali Nationalists have been giving a grand popular reception
to the Count de Flavigny and other French visitors sent over to thank the Irish for the aid of the Ambulance Corps, and for their strong sympathy with the cause of France. Perhaps no people in Europe sympathized so deeply with France—the mob in Cork, for example, on one occasion threatening to out the telegraph wires if they brought such unpleasant intelligence—and they have made of the reception almost a triumphal progress. The people assembled at all the stations between Cork and Dublin, the corporations Freseuted addresses, and the visitors were reminded in a hundred anaguiloquent speeches of the ancient friendship between France and Ireland, which after all was not nearly so close as that between France and Scotland. The object of all this, of course, is to show that England has been labouring for four years for an utterly ungrateful people, who would prefer, if they had the choice, sub-
jection to France to partnership with Great Britain. Fortunately these outbursts of hostility do not come' from the Irish people, but only from a section which finds iu a splendid, though unfounded traditiou—Frauce having habitually used and betrayed Ireland— an imaginative relief from the sordid' squalor of its daily life. "Man liveth not by bread alone," and we must not grudge the Irish the legends of which our own populace is so utterly devoid.
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