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.
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