s they
twitter and flutter from tree to tree. The logical difficulty of
answering these questions is connected with an old story about Charles
the Second and a bowl of goldfish, and with another anecdote about a
gentleman who was asked, 'When did you leave off beating your wife?' But
there is something analogous to it in the present discussions about the
forces drawing England and America together. It seems as if the
reasoners hardly went far enough back in their argument, or took
trouble enough to disentangle their assumptions. They are still moving
with the momentum of the peculiar nineteenth-century notion of progress;
of certain very simple tendencies perpetually increasing and needing no
special analysis. It is so with the international _rapprochement_ I have
to consider here.

In other places I have ventured to express a doubt about whether nations
can be drawn together by an ancient rumour about races; by a sort of
prehistoric chit-chat or the gossip of the Stone Age. I have ventured
farther; and even expressed a doubt about whether they ought to be drawn
together, or rather dragged together, by the brute violence of the
engines of science and speed. But there is yet another horrible doubt
haunting my morbid mind, which it will be better for my constitution to
confess frankly. And that is the doubt about whether they are being
drawn together at all.

It has long been a conversational commonplace among the enlightened that
all countries are coming closer and closer to each other. It was a
conversational commonplace among the enlightened, somewhere about the
year 1913, that all wars were receding farther and farther into a
barbaric past. There is something about these sayings that seems simple
and familiar and entirely satisfactory when we say them; they are of
that consoling sort which we can say without any of the mental pain of
thinking what we are saying. But if we turn our attention from the
phrases we use to the facts that we talk about, we shall realise at
least that there are a good many facts on the other side and examples
pointing the other way. For instance, it does happen occasionally, from
time to time, that people talk about Ireland. He would be a very
hilarious humanitarian who should maintain that Ireland and England have
been more and more assimilated during the last hundred years. The very
name of Sinn Fein is an answer to it, and the very language in which
that phrase is spoken. Curran and Shei