Page:The ways of war - Kettle - 1917.pdf/46

 putting the case of Ireland in his own inimitable way.

In 1912 he was one of the first prominent men identified with the foundation of the National Volunteers. A passage taken from an article written for the Daily News on the Volunteers has now a poignant interest—

"The impulse behind the new departure is not that of the swashbuckler or the fire-eater. Ancient Pistol has no share in it. In no country is the red barbarism of war as a solvent of differences more fully recognised than in Ireland. In no other is the wastage of the public substance on vast armaments more strongly condemned on grounds alike of conscience and intelligence. If Ireland has a distinguished military tradition, she has another tradition to which she holds more proudly, that of peace and culture. In her golden age she, unique in Europe, wrought out the ideal of the civilisation-state as contrasted with the brute-force state. She never oppressed or sought to destroy another nation. What she proposes to herself now is not to browbeat or dragoon or diminish by violence the civil or religious liberty of any man—but simply to safeguard her own."

It is this man who speaks thus proudly of Ireland's noble tradition of peace and culture, this man to whom war was "red barbarism," who found it necessary to quit his own assured path "of peace and culture" and, with only the qualifica