As a mystery—and all mysteries are power—it had never appealed to me. As a means of urging the laws of the country in such direction as one was pleased to consider for that country’s good, it did once seem to me to be invaluable. I know by now what a hopeless fallacy that is. But at that time, nursing a political conviction that Home Rule would be good for Ireland as a people, much as I am led to believe food is good to a starving man, or a sense of religion to a drifting woman, I listened to the eloquent appeal of a canvasser for a Unionist candidate.
When he had finished telling me much more than either of us knew about Tariff Reform, and had built such a Navy before my eyes as would have frightened the whole German Government and any single English ratepayer out of their wits, I asked him what the Unionist candidate felt about Home Rule.
“Home Rule?” said he, carefully—“You approve of Home Rule?”
I walked gently and easily into the canvasser’s trap.
“You don’t denationalise a country,” said I, “because you conquer it. You can’t cut the soul out of Ireland any more than you can wash a nigger white. You can only boycott it. You can only paint a nigger. But boycotting won’t starve the soul of any nation. If it can’t get food for itself from the nation’s stores, it will still live, feeding from the country-side on the wild herb of endurance. But there is that which you can do. You _can_ boycott it.”
“And you think that Home Rule will encourage the development of the Irish people?” said he.
I admitted that the idea had occurred to me.
“Well, Mr. —— is quite of your way of thinking,” he replied.
“He would support it with his vote in the House?” said I.
And so I should, had I not gone to one of his meetings in the Town Hall. He, too, spoke eloquently about Tariff Reform and a Navy that would keep our country what it was; but in the midst of it, a cockney voice endeavoured to heckle him from the back of the hall.
“’Ow about ’Ome Rule?” shouted the voice.
The Unionist candidate had been heckled before.
“How about it?” he asked sharply, like the crack of a pistol.
“Are you going to let the Roman Catholics get the ’old in Ireland?”
“And make them a menace to England, too—do you think it’s likely?” replied the candidate.