Looking back, it seems to me strange that one should have been so engrossed in any preoccupation as in reality to ignore the vast and imminent possibilities.

Yet, after all, I believe my case was typical of many.

For us Irish, this was the crucial point, the climax of a struggle which had been intense and continuous now for a period of four years--which in its wider sense had gone on, with ebb and flow, yet always in progress during the whole adult lifetime of our leader and his principal colleagues.

For more than us, for scores of Labour men and Liberals, it had become almost a fixed belief that European war was only a nightmare of the imagination.

War in the Balkans, war possibly in the East of Europe, we could think of; but war flinging the complex organization, so potent yet so delicate, of great and fully civilized States into the melting-pot--that we never really believed in.