badly constituted, contains the seeds of its own regeneration,
and, under even moderately favourable circumstances, moves irresistibly
towards freedom. The pity was that circumstances, save for one brief and
invigorating interlude, were persistently unfavourable to Ireland. The
task was enormous, demanding infinitely more self-sacrifice than even
the ablest and most prescient of her Parliamentarians realized. Until it
was too late, in fact, they never awoke to the true nature of the task,
dazzled by illusory victories. Rotten to the core as the Irish
Parliament was, they sought, strengthened by popular influences, to make
it the instrument for freeing Ireland from a paralyzing servitude; and
up to a point they succeeded, but they did not see that the only
security for real and permanent success was to reform the Parliament
itself. There the inveterate spirit of creed and class ascendancy,
resting in the last resort on English military power, survived long
enough to nullify their efforts.

The American Revolution and the Irish revolutionary renaissance--the one
achieved by a long and bitter war, the other without
bloodshed--originated and culminated together, were derived from the
same sources, and ran their course in close connection. In Ireland the
movement was exclusively Protestant, in America unsectarian; but in both
cases finance was the lever of emancipation. America, resenting the
commercial restrictions imposed by the Mother Country, but not, until
passion had obscured all landmarks, contesting their abstract justice,
and suffering no great material harm from their incidence, fought for
the principle of self-taxation--a principle which did, of course,
logically include, as the Americans instinctively felt, that of
commercial freedom. Ireland, harassed by commercial restrictions far
more onerous, naturally regarded their abolition as vital, and the
control of internal taxation as subsidiary. Apart from concrete
grievances, both countries had to fear an unlimited extension of British
claims founded on the all-embracing Declaratory Acts of 1719 and 1766.

Unfortunately for herself, Ireland for seventy years or more had been
steadily supplying America with the human elements of resistance in
their most energetic and independent form, and robbing herself
proportionately Approximately, how many Protestants belonging mainly to
Ulster, whether through eviction from the land, industrial unemployment,
or disgust at socia