day long. He has devised a new policy for Ireland. The
plan is simplicity itself, like all really great plans, and it _must_
succeed. I won't go into it now, because I want you to come up to Dublin
and see O'Dwyer. He tells me that he needs somebody else besides himself
on the staff of the _Croppy_, which, by the way, is to be enlarged and
improved. He wants a man who can write a column a week in Irish, as well
as an article now and then in good strong plain English. I suggested
your name to him, and showed him some of the articles you had written.
He was greatly pleased with the one about O'Dowd's cheap patriotism, and
liked one or two of the others. He just asked one question about you:
"Does Mr. Conneally hate England and the Empire, and everything English,
from the Parliament to the police barrack? It is this hatred which must
animate the work." I said I thought you did. I told him how you had
volunteered to fight for the Boers, and about the day you nearly killed
that blackguard Shea. He seemed to think that was good enough, and asked
me to write to you on the subject. We can't offer you a big salary. The
editor himself is only to get a hundred pounds a year for the present,
and I am guaranteeing another hundred for you. I am confident that I
shan't have to pay it for more than six months. The paper is sure to go
as it never went before, and in a few years we shall be able to treble
O'Dwyer's salary and double yours. Nothing like such a chance has ever
offered itself in Irish history before. Everything goes to show that
this is our opportunity. England is weaker than she has been for
centuries, is clinging desperately to the last tatters of her old
prestige. She hasn't a single statesman capable of thinking or acting
vigorously. Her Parliament is the laughingstock of Europe. Her Irish
policy may be summed up in four words--intrigue with the Vatican. In
Ireland the power of the faithful garrison is gone. The Protestants in
the North are sick of being fooled by one English party after another.
The landlords, or what's left of them, are beginning to discover that
they have been bought and sold. The Bishops, England's last line of
defence, are overreaching themselves, and we are within measurable
distance of the day when the Church will be put into her proper place.
There is not so much as a shoneen publican in a country town left who
believes in the ranting of O'Rourke and his litter of blind whelps.
Ireland is simply c