"Did you ever," asked Lord Salisbury on a remembered occasion, "have a boil on your neck ?" To the Englishman of 1911--that troubled man whose old self-sufficiency has in our own time been shattered beyond repair by Boer rifles, German shipyards, French aeroplanes--Ireland is the boil on the neck of his political system.

It is the one _peche de jeunesse_ of his nation that will not sleep in the grave of the past.

Like the ghost in "Hamlet" it pursues and plagues him without respite.

Shunned on the battlements it invades his most private chamber, or, finding him in talk with friends, shames and scares him with subterranean mutterings.

Is there no way out of a situation so troublesome and humiliating?
There is.