cheers,] each with a corporate consciousness of its own.

The Recognition of Nationality.

Belgium, Holland, and Switzerland and the Scandinavian countries,
Greece, and the Balkan States, they must be recognized as having exactly
as good a title as their more powerful neighbors--more powerful in
strength and in wealth--exactly as good a title to a place in the sun.
[Prolonged cheers and some laughter.] And it means, finally, or it ought
to mean, perhaps by a slow and gradual process, the substitution for
force, for the clash of competing ambition, for grouping and alliances
and a precarious equipoise, the substitution for all these things of a
real European partnership, based on the recognition of equal right and
established and enforced by a common will. [Cheers.] A year ago that
would have sounded like a Utopian idea. It is probably one that may not
or will not be realized either today or tomorrow. If and when this war
is decided in favor of the Allies, it will at once come within the
range, and, before long, within the grasp of European statesmanship.
[Cheers.] I go back for a moment, if I am not keeping you too long, ["Go
on,"] to the peculiar aspects of the actual case upon which I have
dwelt, because it seems to me that they ought to make a special appeal
to the people of Ireland. Ireland is a loyal country, [cheers,] and she
would, I know, respond with alacrity to any summons which called upon
her to take her share in the assertion and the defense of our common
interests. But, gentlemen, the issues raised by this war are of such a
kind that, unless I mistake her people and misrepresent her history,
they touch a vibrating chord both in her imagination and in her
conscience. How can you Irishmen be deaf to the cry of the smaller
nationalities to help them in their struggle for freedom [cheers]
whether, as in the case of Belgium, in maintaining what she has won, or
as in the case of Poland or the Balkan States in regaining what they
have lost or in acquiring and putting upon a stable foundation what has
never been fully theirs?

The Appeal to Ireland.

How again can you Irishmen--if I understand you--sit by in cool
detachment and with folded arms while we, in company of our gallant
allies of France and Russia, are opposing a worldwide resistance to
pretensions which threaten to paralyze and sterilize all progress and
the best destinies of mankind? [Cheers.] During the last few weeks Sir
John French and his heroi