derived immediately from the former?  Had revenge in this instance any other effect than to increase, instead of diminishing, the mass of malice and evil already existing in the world?  The emptiness and folly of retaliation are apparent from every example which can be brought forward.”  Shelley writes much further on retaliation, which he denounces as “futile superstition.”  Simple violence repels every high and generous thinker.  Hear one other, Mazzini:  “What we have to do is not to establish a new order of things by violence.  An order of things so established is always tyrannical even when it is better than the old.”  Let us bear this in mind when there is an act of aggression on either side of the Boyne.  There will not be wanting on the other side a cry for retaliation and “a lesson.”  We shall receive every provocation to give up and acknowledge ancient bitterness, but then is the time to stand firm, then we shall need to practise the divine forbearance that is the secret of strength.

IV

But with only a minority standing to the flag we cry out for some hope of final success.  Men will not fight without result for ever; they ask for some sign of progress, some gleam of the light of victory.  Happily, searching the skies, our eyes can have their reward.  We shall, no doubt, see, outstanding, dark evidence of old animosity; we shall hear fierce war-cries and see raging crowds, but the crowds are less numerous, and the wrath has lost its sting.  Men who raged twenty years ago rage now, but their fury is less real; and young men growing up around them, quite indifferent to the ideal, are also indifferent to the counter cries:  they are passive, unimpressed by either side.  Rightly approached, they may understand and feel the glow of a fine enthusiasm; they are numbered by prejudice, they will become warm, active and daring under an inspiring appeal.  Remember, and have done with despair.  Think how you and I found our path step by step of the way:  political life was full of conventions that suited our fathers’ time, but have faded in the light of our day.  We found these conventions unreal and put them by.  This was no reflection on our fathers; what they fought for truly is our heritage, and we pay them a tribute in offering it in turn our loyalty inspired by their devotion.  But their errors we must rectify; what they left undone we must take up and fulfil.  That is the task of every generation, to take up the uncompleted work of the former one, and hand on to their successors an achievement and a heritage.  Youth recognises this instinctively, and every generation will take a step in advance of its predecessor, putting by its prejudices and developing its truth.  Every individual may know this from his own experience, and from it he knows that those who are now voicing old bitter cries are ageing, and will soon pass and leave no successors.  Not that prejudice will die for ever.  Each new day will