But the
whole conduct of life, in its gravest and its lightest issues alike, is
a perpetual leap in the dark. Every change of public policy is a raid
across the frontiers of the unknown; or rather, as I prefer to put it,
every fundamental reform is essentially an Act of Faith in to-morrow,
and so it is with Home Rule.
But while none of us can prophesy all of us can conjecture, and in this
case with a great deal of confidence. On the one hand, Ireland is a
country of very definite habits of thought; on the other, her immediate
problems are obvious. These two circumstances facilitate the process
which the learned describe as an attempt to produce the present curve of
evolution into the future. First, then, as to the temper of mind in
which an autonomous Ireland will face the world. The one clear certainty
is that it will not be rhetorical or Utopian. Of all the libels with
which we are pelted the most injurious to our repute is a kindly libel,
that which represents us as a nation of orators. To the primitive Tory
the Nationalist "agitator" appears in the guise of a stormy and
intractable fiend, with futility in his soul, and a College Green
peroration on his lips.
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