es for Irish intellect to express-itself worthily in active
life--and this, I take it, is part of what the Nationalist leaders wish
to achieve--meets with the same difficulty. The lack of initiative and
shrinking from responsibility, the moral timidity in glaring contrast
with the physical courage--which has its worst manifestation in the
intense dread of public opinion, especially when the unknown terrors of
editorial power lurk behind an unfavourable mention 'on the paper,'
are, no doubt, qualities inherited from a primitive social state in
which the individual was nothing and the community everything. These
defects were intensified in past generations by British statecraft,
which seemed unable to appreciate or use the higher instincts of the
race; they remain to-day a prominent factor in the great human problem
known as the Irish Question--a factor to which, in my belief, may be
attributed the greatest of its difficulties.

It is quite clear that education should have been the remedy for the
defects of character upon which I am forced to dwell so much; and I
cannot absolve any body of Irishmen, possessed of actual or potential
influence, of failure to recognise this truth. But here I am dealing
only with the political leaders, and trying to bring home to them the
responsibility which their power imposes upon them, not only for the
political development but also for the industrial progress of their
followers. They ought to have known that the weakness of character which
renders the task of political leadership in Ireland comparatively easy
is in reality the quicksand of Irish life, and that neither
self-government nor any other institution can be enduringly built upon
it.

The leaders of the Nationalist party are, of course, entitled to hold
that, in existing political conditions, any non-political movement
towards national advancement, which in its nature cannot be linked, as
the land question was linked, to the Home Rule movement constitutes an
unwarrantable sacrifice of ends to means. And so holding, they are
further entitled to subject any proposal to elevate popular thought, or
to direct popular activities, to a strict censorship as to its remote as
well as to its immediate effect upon the electorate. I know, too, that
it is held by some thinking Nationalists who take no active part in
politics that the politicians are justified on tactical grounds in this
exclusive pursuit of their political aims, and in the me