complaint that there is in Ireland
too much politics and too little business. Of course there is, and not
only too little business but too little literature, too little
philosophy, too little social effort, too little fun. We Nationalists
have grasped this better and proclaimed it more steadily than any
Unionist. There is as much truth in saying that life begins where
politics end, as in saying that love begins where love-making ends.
Constitutional freedom is not the fifth act of the social drama in
modern times, it is rather the prologue, or, better still, the theatre
in which other ideas that move men find an arena for their conflict.
Ireland, a little exhausted by her intense efforts of the last thirty
years, does assuredly need a rest-cure from agitation. But this healing
peace is itself a gift of autonomy. A tooth-ache concentrates the whole
mind on one particular emotion, which is a bad thing, and breeds
profanity, which is worse. But it is idle to tell a man with a
tooth-ache that what he needs in his life is less cursing and more
business. He cannot work effectively so long as he suffers; the only way
to peace is to cure the tooth-ache. And in order to get rid of politics
in Ireland, you must give Ireland Home Rule.

CHAPTER V

THE RAVAGES OF UNIONISM (I)

Ireland, as we have seen, has had the misfortune to provoke many worthy
writers to a sad debauch of sentimentalism. It has pleased their fancy
especially to picture her as a sphinx, mysterious, elusive, inscrutable.
It is impossible to govern her, declare these theorists, because it is
impossible to understand her. She is the _femme incomprise_ of modern
politics. Her temperament is a magnet for disaster, her soul a sanctuary
of inviolable secrets. So runs the rhapsody, and many of my own
countrymen have thought it good strategy to accept and exploit it. They
have this to urge, indeed, that failure to make oneself understood is
commonly regarded as a sign of the superior mind. Lord Rosebery, for
example, has told us that he himself, for all his honey-dropping tongue,
has never been properly understood. And Hegel, the great German
philosopher, who was so great a philosopher that we may without
impropriety mention his name even in the brilliant vicinage of the Earl
of Midlothian, used to sigh: "Alas! in the whole of my teaching career I
had but one student who understood my system, and he mis-understood it."
This is all very well in its way, and a cl