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 is time the English nation at large came to realise the fact that peoples, like individuals, outgrow the period of their tutelage. As the young man of eighteen cannot be expected to stand from his father the hectoring which he took as a matter of course when he was a boy of eight, so a nationality which feels that it has grown competent to take care of itself socially and politically, cannot longer acquiesce in being kept in leading-strings and debarred from following its bent and realising its own modes of life and thought. Political coercion, used against a people like the Irish, can only produce resentment, and, eventually, determined resistance. The first we have already seen bearing its fruits in boycotting and moonlighting outrages, not to speak of the dynamite scare; but it remains yet to be seen whether a stupid prejudice will be fostered to the extent of producing a resistance which would bring in sight disintegration of the Empire such as could not result from a grant even of quite unlimited Home Rule.’

‘What do you allude to as determined resistance, Mr O’Logan?’ asked Mr Bristley—‘civil war?’

‘Civil war? No, sir, foreign war. Civil war would be nonsense between the soldiers of England and the sparse, untrained, almost unarmed Irish peasantry. What I mean, sir, is that where a powder magazine exists, it needs that everybody in the neighbourhood should be unremittingly careful how they carry fire of any sort about near it. If there be one person among the neighbours who is watching his opportunity with a box of cigar-lights, sooner or later he will explode the magazine, let his neighbours be as careful as they may. Europe is still such a magazine, notwithstanding the growing dislike of war and the endeavours which have lately been made by diplomacy to remove the danger of an outbreak. It needs unanimity on the part of all civilised peoples, to back up those endeavours