The social amenities do this.  Their Excellencies have gone, but they do not forget.  There is a warm word of thanks for recent hospitality.  Perhaps the mayor has a daughter about to be married, or a son has died; it is remembered, and the cordial congratulation or gracious sympathy comes duly under the great seal.  What surly man would resent sympathy?  And so, the strength of the old warrior is sapped; the web is woven finely; in its secret net the Castle has its man.  You who have exercised yourselves in Dublin recently over mayoral doings, note all this—­not to the making light of any man’s surrender, but to the true judging of the event, its deeper significance and danger.  Whoever fails must be called to account.  When a man takes a position of trust, influence, and honour, and, whatever the difficulty, abandons a principle he should hold sacred, he must be held responsible.  A battle is an ordeal, and we must be stern with friend and foe.  But there is something more sinister than the weakness of the man:  remember the net.

VI

The concrete case makes clear the principle in question.  The man whom we have seen go down would have been safe if he had to fight no battle but one he could face with all his true friends, and in the open light of day.  Having to fight a secret battle was never even considered:  threats direct or vague or subtle, blandishments, cajolery, graciousness, patronage, flattery, plausible generalities, attacks indirect and insidious—­all coming without pause, secret, silent, tireless.  He who is to be proof against this, and above threat or flattery, must have been disciplined with the discipline of a life that trains him for every emergency.  You cannot take up such a character like a garment to suit the occasion:  it must be developed in private and public by all those daily acts that declare a man’s attitude, register his convictions, and form his mind.  It gives its own reward at once, even in the day where nothing is apparently at stake; where men scramble furiously over the petty things of life; for he who sees these things at their proper value is unruffled.  His composure in all the fury has its own value.  But the mind that held him so, by the very act of dismissing something petty, gets a clearer conception of the great things of life; by intuition is at once awake to a hovering and fatal menace to individual or national existence, unseen of the common eye; and in that hour proves, to the confusion of the enemy, clear, vigorous and swift.  Let us, then, for this great end note what is the secret of strength.  Not alone to be ready to stand in with a host and march bravely to battle—­the discipline that provides for this is great and valuable and must be always observed and practised.  This gives, however, only the common courage of the crowd, and can only be trusted on an even field where the chances of war are equal.  But when there is a struggle to restore freedom, where