other dethroned and
banished in favour of a Dutch prince. Of romantic loyalty to the person
of a sovereign they find no trace or hint in the modern period. Lost
causes and setting suns, whatever appeal they may have made to Ireland,
do but rarely fire with their magical glimmer the raw daylight of the
English political mind. As for that more facile, after-dinner
attachment, in which it is charged that we do not join with sufficient
fervour, it seems to us always fulsome, and often mere hyprocrisy. In
the development of English ceremonial, "God Save the King!" gets to the
head of the toast-list only when the king has been thoroughly saved from
all the perils and temptations incidental to the possession of power. So
long as he claims any shred of initiative his English subjects continue
in a perpetual chafe and grumble of disloyalty; as soon as the Crown has
been rasped and sand-papered down to a decorative zero their loyalty
knows no bounds.

The simple and honourable truth is that all through her history England
strove after national freedom, and declined to be quiet until she got
it. There could not be a better statement of the methods which she
employed than Mr Rudyard Kipling's:

"Axe and torch and tumult, steel and gray-goose wing,
Wrung it, inch and ell, and all, slowly from the King."

It is, of course, a pity that the liberty thus established was better
fitted for the home market than for export. But this does not affect the
fact that, at the end of the process, the English people were in the
saddle. But the Irish people are not in the saddle, they are under it.
Indeed, the capital sin of Dublin Castle is that it is a bureaucracy
which has seized upon the estate of the people. In Ireland, under its
_regime_, the nation has had as much to say to its own public policy as
a Durbar-elephant has to say to the future of India. There is just this
difference in favour of the elephant: at least he has riot to pay for
the embroidered palanquins, and the prodding-poles, of his riders. We
are all agreed that loyalty is a duty. It is the duty of every
government to be loyal to the welfare, the nobler traditions, the
deep-rooted ideals, the habit of thought of its people. It is the duty
of every government to be loyal to the idea of duty, and to that austere
justice through which the most ancient heavens abide fresh and strong.
And until these prime duties have been faithfully performed, no
government need expect an