him, and tumbles his faithfullest worshippers in the sand of their own amphitheatre.  Yet, so it is.  The Confederate General, seeing victory suddenly snatched from his hands, and not for the first time, by Meagher’s Brigade, exclaimed in immortal profanity:  “There comes that damned Green Flag again!” I have often commended that phrase to Englishmen as admirably expressive of the historical role and record of Ireland in British Politics.  The damned Green Flag flutters again in their eyes, and if they will but listen to the music that marches with it, they will find that the lamenting fifes are dominated wholly by the drums of victory.

CHAPTER IV

THE OBVIOUSNESS OF HOME RULE

Ireland, then, has made it her foible to be not only right but irresistible in her past demands.  What is it that she now claims, and on what grounds?  She claims the right to enter into possession of her own soul.  She claims the toga virilis, and all the strengthening burdens of freedom.  Now it is difficult to represent such a demand in terms of argument.  Liberty is no mere conclusion of linked logic long-drawn out:  it is an axiom, a flaming avatar.  The arguments by which it is defended are important, but they bear to it much the same relation that a table of the wave-lengths of various rays of light bears to the immediate glory of a sunrise.  There is another obstacle.  Self-government, like other spiritual realities, say love or civilisation, is too vast, obvious, and natural to be easily imprisoned in words.  You are certainly in love; suppose you were suddenly asked “to state the case” for love?  You are probably civilised; suppose you were suddenly asked “to state the case for civilisation”?  So it is with the Home Rule idea.  To ask what is the gate of entrance to it is like asking what was the gate of entrance to hundred-gated Thebes.  My friend, Mr Barry O’Brien, in lecturing on Ireland, used to begin by recounting a very agreeable and appropriate story.  A prisoner on trial was asked whether he would accept for his case the jury which had tried the last.  He objected very vehemently.  “Well, but,” said the Judge, “what is the nature of your objection?  Do you object to the panel or to the array?” “Ah!” replied the traverser, “if you want to know, I object to the whole damned business.”  That is approximately our objection to the present system of government in Ireland.  But let me attempt to group under a series of somewhat arbitrary headings the “case for Home Rule,” that is to say, the case for applying to Ireland the plain platitudes of constitutional freedom.