the revolutionist thought that he, above all
men, must appeal to the highest motive, be guided by some ideal principle,
be a little like Cato or like Brutus, and he had lived to see the change
Dostoievsky examined in _The Possessed_. Men who had been of his
party--and oftener their sons--preached assassination and the bomb; and,
worst of all, the majority of his countrymen followed after constitutional
politicians who practised opportunism, and had, as he believed, such low
morals that they would lie, or publish private correspondence, if it might
advance their cause. He would split every practical project into its
constituent elements, like a clerical casuist, to find if it might not
lead into some moral error; but, were the project revolutionary, he would
sometimes temper condemnation with pity. Though he would cast off his
oldest acquaintance did he suspect him of rubbing shoulders with some
carrier of bombs, I have heard him say of a man who blew himself up in an
attempt to blow up Westminster Bridge, "He was not a bad man, but he had
too great a moral nature for his intellect, not that he lacked intellect."
He did not explain, but he meant, I suppose, that the spectacle of
injustice might madden a good man more quickly than some common man. Such
men were of his own sort, though gone astray, but the constitutional
politicians he had been fighting all his life, and all they did displeased
him. It was not that he thought their aim wrong, or that they could not
achieve it; he had accepted Gladstone's Home Rule Bill; but that in his
eyes they degraded manhood. "If England has been brought to do us justice
by such men," he would say, "that is not because of our strength, but
because of her weakness." He had a particular hatred for the rush of
emotion that followed the announcement of Gladstone's conversion, for what
was called "The Union of Hearts," and derided its sentimentality; "Nations
may respect one another," he would say, "they cannot love." His ancestors
had probably kept little shops, or managed little farms in County
Tipperary, yet he hated democracy, though he never used the word either
for praise or blame, with more than feudal hatred. "No gentleman can be a
socialist," he said, and then, with a thoughtful look, "He might be an
anarchist." He had no philosophy, but things distressed his palate, and
two of those things were International propaganda and the Organised State,
and Socialism aimed at both, nor could