Perceiving that there is in matter no integral and permanent reality she cannot be content with material victories; her poets are subtle in what a French writer styles the innuendoes by which the soul makes its enormous claims.

The formula of her aspiration has been admirably rendered by the late Mrs Nora Chesson: "He follows after shadows when all your chase is done; He follows after shadows, the King of Ireland's son." Were I to read the poem, of which these lines are the motif, to certain genial Englishmen of my acquaintance they would observe that the gentleman in question was a "queer cove, staying up late at night and catching cold, and that no doubt there was a woman in the case." But these are considerations a little remote from the daily dust of politics.

In the sense in which every life is a failure, and the best life the worst failure, Ireland is a failure.

But in every other sense, in all that touches the fathomable business of daylight, she has been a conspicuous success.
A certain type of fanaticism is naive enough to regard the intercourse of England with Ireland as that of a superior with an inferior race.
This is the sanction invoked to legitimise every adventure in invasion and colonisation.

M.Jules Hormand, who has attempted, in his recent book, "Domination et Colonisation," to formulate a theory of the whole subject, touches bed-rock when he writes: "We must then accept as our point of departure the principle that there is a hierarchy of races and of civilisations, and that we belong to the higher race and civilisation....