nothing to civilisation except a loathsome science of sensuality, and the taint of decay was in his bones.  In the days of Spion Kop the Boer was an unlaundered savage, fit only to be a target for pig-stickers.  His ignorance seemed the most appalling thing in the world until one remembered his hypocrisy and his cowardice.  The newspaper which led the campaign of denigration against France has come to another view.  Its proprietor now divides his time between signing L10,000 cheques for triumphant French aviators, and delivering speeches in which their nation is hailed as the pioneer of all great ideas.  As regards the Boers, the same reversal of the verdict of ten years ago has taken place.  The crowd which in 1900 asked only for a sour appletree on which to hang General Botha, adopts him in 1911 as the idol of the Coronation.  At this progress towards sanity we must all rejoice.  But most of all we have to ask that these two sinister pageants of race hatred shall not be suffered to dissolve without leaving some wrack of wisdom behind.  Writers on psychology have made many studies of what they call the collective illusion.  This strange malady, which consists in all the world seeing something which in fact does not exist, wrought more potently on the mind of England than did reason and justice in the Home Rule controversies of 1886 and 1893.  What has occurred may recur.  And since we are to speak here with all the candour of private conversation I confess that I cannot devise or imagine any specific against such a recurrence except an exercise in humility of the kind suggested by Mr Chesterton.  My own argument in that direction is perhaps compromised by the fact that I am an Irishman.  Let us therefore fall back on other testimony.  Out of the cloud of witnesses let us choose two or three, and in the first place M. Alfred Fouillee.  M. Fouillee is a Platonist—­the last Platonist in Europe—­and consequently an amiable man.  He is universally regarded as the leader of philosophy in France, a position not in the least shaken by Bergson’s brief authority.  In a charming and lucid study of the “Psychology of the Peoples of Europe” Fouillee has many pages that might serve for an introduction to the Irish Question.  The point of interest in his analysis is this:  he exhibits Irish history as a tragedy of character, a tragedy which flows with sad, inevitable logic from a certain weakness which he notes, not in the Irish, but in the English character.

“‘In the eyes of the English,’ says Taine who had studied them so minutely, ’there is but one reasonable civilisation, namely their own.  Every other way of living is that of inferior beings, every other religion is extravagant.’  So that, one might add, the Englishman is doubly personal, first as an individual and again as a member of the most highly individualised of nations.  The moment the national interest is involved all dissensions cease, there is on the scene but one single man,