by a
hundred fights, ranging from Venezuela to the Soudan in search of
battlefields, making allies of every kind of foreign potentate, from
President Cleveland to the Mahdi, from Mr. Kruger to the Akhoom of Swat,
but looking with suspicion on every symptom of an independent national
movement in Ireland; masters of the language of hate and scorn, yet
mocked by inevitable and eternal failure; winners of victories that turn
to dust and ashes; devoted to their country, yet, from ignorance of the
real source of its malady, ever widening the gaping wound through which
its life-blood flows. While I recall these scenes, there rises before my
mind the picture vividly drawn by Miss Lawless of their prototypes, the
'Wild Geese,' who carried their swords into foreign service after the
final defeat of the Stuarts:--

War-battered dogs are we,
Fighters in every clime,
Fillers of trench and of grave,
Mockers, bemocked by Time;
War-dogs, hungry and grey,
Gnawing a naked bone,
Fighting in every clime
Every cause but our own.[15]

Irishmen have been long in realising that the days of the 'Wild Geese'
are over, and that there are battles for Ireland to be fought and won in
Ireland--battles in which England is not the enemy she was in the days
of Fontenoy, but a friend and helper. But there will be little gain in
replacing the traditional conception of England as the inexorable foe by
the more modern conception, which threatened to become traditional in
its turn, of England as the source of all prosperity and her favour as
the condition of all progress in Ireland. In the recent Land Conference
I recognise something more valuable even than the financial and
legislative results which flowed from it, for it showed that the
conception of reliance upon Irishmen in Ireland, not under some future
and problematical conditions, but here and now, for the solution of
Irish questions, is gaining ground among us. If this conception once
takes firm hold, as I think it is beginning to do, of the Nationalist
party in Ireland, much of the criticism of this chapter will lose its
meaning. The mere substitution of a positive Irish policy for a negative
anti-English policy will elevate the whole range of Nationalist
political activity in and out of Ireland. And I am certain that if the
ultimate goal of Nationalist politics be desirable, and continue to be
desired, it will not be rendered more difficult, but on the contrary