Sinn Féin succeeds Sinn Féin; one egoism has aroused another, and England now faces in Ireland the projection of her own spirit. Just as British policy has served only England's interests, so Ireland has learnt to think first of herself, having never seen her enemy give one thought even to fair play, as between country and country. Whatever claims the British Empire may have upon the gratitude or self-interest of other peoples, it has none on Ireland, which has not yet been allowed, as the phrase goes, to be just before she is generous. The sacred egoism of nations, so commendable when urging them to fight for their national existence--and even aggrandisement--against the Hun, is unfavourably regarded in all other circumstances. Neither Russia nor Greece has been pardoned a natural impulse towards self-preservation. Only great Powers are allowed to think of their own welfare; small nations are denied the luxury, except on specified conditions. Yet, in spite of brute force, and perhaps because of it, the smaller nationalities persist in a tenacious selfishness, without which they must abandon the struggle for life. Editors of military age, who are too proud of their verbiage to fight, may lament the shame of a people incapable of the noble altruism which fights for the Sacred Treaties. Even if a miracle of democracy in the Allied ranks had not come to give us those shreds of the truth behind the war, Ireland would still remain unconscious of her shameless soullessness. Strong in the sacred egoism of Sinn Féin, the Irish nation is convinced that only in his own country can an Irishman usefully engage in the struggle for freedom. Flanders, Gallipoli, and Mesopotamia are not milestones on the road which leads to the liberation of at least one forgotten small nationality.
If the anti-conscription movement had not asserted itself pious Liberal phrase-makers would never have believed--British fashion--that any community could actually stand by principles whose statement in England has invariably been a preliminary to their ignominious abandonment. Once again our political realism impinged unpleasantly upon the Anglo-Saxon consciousness, confronting the impotent mourners of theories they were too feeble to defend with the spectacle of a people aroused to fight against the supreme sacrifice demanded by the State of its citizens. The sacred egoism of the individual and of the nation was challenged, and a sacred union was the result, in which Ireland asserted, with uncompromising unanimity, her separate national identity. Characteristically, the professional Protestants kept aloof from this manifestation of liberty, to the bewilderment and shame of certain continental observers, proud of their Calvinistic origins, and surprised to find that, in Ireland, Protestantism is, by definition, antagonistic to the libertarian impulses with which it is associated on the continent of Europe. An aftermath of tragi-comedy followed the religious tension of the anti-conscription demonstrations, when a number of Protestant Irishwomen were contemptuously excluded from the church in which they had intended to associate their prayers with those of their Catholic countrywomen. They discovered that the Church of "Ireland" denied them the elementary right of every Protestant to direct communication with God. The Dean who interposed between heaven and the prayers of the faithful was not, strange to say, invited to enter the communion which teaches the necessity for priestly intercession between man and his Maker. On the contrary, some of the victims of his ecclesiastical and political insolence were more concerned to absolve him from the blame of such an insult than to assert the principle for which Irish Protestants were alleged to be fighting. Such is the dilemma, and such is the quality, of the religion implanted by England in this country, and fostered, like the weakling that it is, in all the peevish selfishness of the spoilt child, eternally exerting the petty tyrannies it imputes to others.