l would no more have dreamed of
uttering the watchword of 'Repeal' in Gaelic than of uttering it in
Zulu. Grattan could hardly have brought himself to believe that the real
repeal of the Union would actually be signed in London in the strange
script as remote as the snaky ornament of the Celtic crosses. It would
have seemed like Washington signing the Declaration of Independence in
the picture-writing of the Red Indians. Ireland has clearly grown away
from England; and her language, literature, and type of patriotism are
far less English than they were. On the other hand, no one will pretend
that the mass of modern Englishmen are much nearer to talking Gaelic or
decorating Celtic crosses. A hundred years ago it was perfectly natural
that Byron and Moore should walk down the street arm in arm. Even the
sight of Mr. Rudyard Kipling and Mr. W. B. Yeats walking down the street
arm in arm would now arouse some remark.

I could give any number of other examples of the same new estrangement
of nations. I could cite the obvious facts that Norway and Sweden parted
company not very long ago, that Austria and Hungary have again become
separate states. I could point to the mob of new nations that have
started up after the war; to the fact that the great empires are now
nearly all broken up; that the Russian Empire no longer directs Poland,
that the Austrian Empire no longer directs Bohemia, that the Turkish
Empire no longer directs Palestine. Sinn Fein is the separatism of the
Irish. Zionism is the separatism of the Jews. But there is one simple
and sufficing example, which is here more to my purpose, and is at least
equally sufficient for it. And that is the deepening national difference
between the Americans and the English.

Let me test it first by my individual experience in the matter of
literature. When I was a boy I read a book like _The Autocrat of the
Breakfast-Table_ exactly as I read another book like _The Book of
Snobs_. I did not think of it as an American book, but simply as a book.
Its wit and idiom were like those of the English literary tradition; and
its few touches of local colour seemed merely accidental, like those of
an Englishman who happened to be living in Switzerland or Sweden. My
father and my father's friends were rightly enthusiastic for the book;
so that it seemed to come to me by inheritance like _Gulliver's Travels_
or _Tristram Shandy_. Its language was as English as Ruskin, and a great
deal more E