the end of the world we are, of course, in warm agreement.  But if Mr Smith has entered public affairs in pursuit of static formulae for dynamic realities, if he wants things fixed and frozen and final, he has come to the wrong world to gratify such desires.  And even if he were to go to the next, he would have to be very careful in choosing his destination, for all the theologians tell us that, in Heaven, personalities continue to grow and develop.  In fact, if anybody wants “finality,” I am afraid that we can only recommend him to go to Hell.  As for the world, in which we live, it is a world of flux.  Physicists allow the earth a long road to travel before it tumbles into dissolution, and seers and prophets of various kinds foretell an equally long cycle of development for human nature, as we now know it.  The fate of all our present political combinations is doubtful, and no nation has received absolute guarantees for its future.  An All-Europe State with its capital at London, a Federation of the World with its capital at Dublin, a Chinese Empire with its capital at Paris—­these are all possibilities.  Australia may be annexed by Japan, Canada by the United States, or vice versa; South Africa may spread northwards until it absorbs the Continent, or shrink southwards until it expires on the point of the Cape.  The Superman may, as I am informed, appear on the stage of history at any moment, and make pie of everything.  And not one of these appalling possibilities disturbs Mr Smith in the least.  But he is going to vote against justice for Ireland unless we can promise him that throughout all the aeons, as yet unvouchsafed, and to the last syllable of recorded time, her political destiny is going to be in all details regulated by the Home Rule Bill of 1912.  This is not an intelligent attitude.

Of course the real innuendo is that we in Ireland are burning to levy war on Great Britain, and would welcome any foreign invasion to that end.  On these two points one is happy to be able to give assurances, or rather to state intentions.  As for foreign invasion, we have had quite enough of it.  It is easier to get invaders in than to get them out again, and we have not spent seven hundred years in recovering Ireland for ourselves in order to make a present of it to the Germans, or the Russians, or the Man in the Moon, or any other foreign power whatever.  The present plan of governing Ireland in opposition to the will of her people does indeed inevitably make that country the weak spot in the defences of these islands, for such misgovernment produces discontent, and discontent is the best ally of the invader.  Alter that by Home Rule, and your cause instantly becomes ours.  Give the Irish nation an Irish State to defend, and the task of an invader becomes very unenviable.  As for levying war on Great Britain, we have no inclination in that direction.  The best thought in Ireland has always preferred civilisation to war, and we have no wealth to waste on expensive