er trade with India, and
nearly twice as large as that with Canada or Australia. And while these
surprising figures are far from indicating the existence of a sound
economic structure in Ireland, none the less, the industrial expansion
that will follow Home Rule may be expected to alter the character rather
than to diminish the value of the goods interchanged. For if the
development of textile, leather, shipbuilding, and other manufactures
lessens the British import under these heads into Ireland, it will
increase that of coal, iron, steel, and machinery. And Ireland, without
trenching on the needs of her home market, is capable of much more
intensive exploitation as a food-exporting country. Economically the two
nations are joined in relations that ought to be relations of mutual
profit, were they not eternally poisoned by political oppression. With
this virus removed, the natural balance of the facts of nature will
spontaneously establish itself between the two countries.

The true desire of all the loud trumpeters of "loyalty" is, as it
appears to me, of a very different order. What they really ask is that
Ireland should begin her career of autonomy with a formal act of
self-humiliation. She may enter the Council of Empire provided that she
enters on her knees, and leaves her history outside the door as a
shameful burden. This is not a demand that can be conceded, or that men
make on men. The open secret of Ireland is that Ireland is a nation. In
days rougher than ours, when a blind and tyrannous England sought to
drown the national faith of Ireland in her own blood as in a sea, there
arose among our fathers men who annulled that design. We cannot
undertake to cancel the names of these men from our calendar. We are no
more ashamed of them than the constitutional England of modern times is
ashamed of her Langtons and De Montforts, her Sidneys and Hampdens. Our
attitude in their regard goes beyond the reach of prose, and no adequate
poetry comes to my mind. The Irish poets have recently been so busy
compiling catalogues of crime, profanity, and mania for the Abbey
Theatre that they have not had time to attend to politics; and in
attempting to suggest the spirit that must inform the settlement between
Ireland and England, if out of it is to spring the authentic flower of
loyalty, I am reluctantly compelled to fall back on a weaker brother,
not of the craft:

Bond, from the toil of hate we may not cease:
Free,