Page:The ways of war - Kettle - 1917.pdf/28

 common dangers shared and suffering endured on a European battleground, there would issue a United Ireland. For this he counted much on "the brotherhood that binds the brave of all the earth." "There is a vision of Ireland," he wrote in 1915, "better than that which sees in it only a cockpit, or eternal skull-cracking Donnybrook Fair—a vision that sees the real enemies of the nation to be ignorance, poverty, disease; and turning away from the ashes of dead hatreds, sets out to accomplish the defeat of these real enemies. Out of this disastrous war, we may pluck, as France and Belgium have plucked, the precious gift of national unity."

In one of my letters he writes—

"One duty does indeed lie before me, that of devoting myself to the working out of a reconciliation between Ulster and Ireland. I feel God speaking to our hearts in that sense out of this terrible war."

In his Political Testament he makes a dying plea for the realisation of his dream.

"Had I lived I had meant to call my next book on the relations of Ireland and England: The Two Fools: A Tragedy of Errors. It has needed all the folly of England and all the folly of Ireland to produce the situation in which our unhappy country is now involved.

"I have mixed much with Englishmen and with Protestant Ulstermen, and I know that there is no