for any official who interferes with them will certainly get into hot water. We cannot separate mothers and children in that strange land. We can only return to some of our older historical methods and massacre them together. A small incident within my own short experience, however, illustrated the main point involved here; the sense of a peasant base even of the proletarian attack. And this was exemplified not in any check to Labour, but rather in a success for Labour, in so far as the issue of a friendly and informal debate may be classed with its more solid successes. The business originally began with a sort of loose-jointed literary lecture which I gave in the Dublin Theatre, in connection with which I only mention two incidents in passing, because they both struck me as peculiarly native and national. One concerned only the title of my address, which was ‘Poetry and Property.’ An educated English gentleman, who happened to speak to me before the meeting, said with the air of one who foresees that such jokes will be the death of him, ‘Well, I have simply given up puzzling about what you can possibly mean, by talking about poetry as something to do with property.’ He probably regarded the combination of words as a mere alliterative fantasy, like Peacocks and Paddington, or Polygamy and Potatoes; if indeed he did not regard it as a mere combination of incompatible contrasts, like Popery and Protestants, or Patriotism and Politicians. On the same day an Irishman of similar social standing remarked quite carelessly, ‘I’ve just seen your subject for to-morrow. I suppose the Socialists will reply to you,’ or words to that effect. The two terms told him at once, not about the lecture (which was literary if it was anything), but about the whole philosophy underlying the lecture; the whole of that philosophy which the lumbering elephant called by Mr Shaw the Chesterbelloc laboriously toils to explain in England, under the ponderous title of Distributivism. As Mr Hugh Law once said, equally truly, about our pitting of patriotism against imperialism, ‘What is a paradox in England is a commonplace in Ireland.’ My actual monologue, however, dealt merely with the witness of poetry to a certain dignity in man’s sense of private possessions, which is certainly not either vulgar ostentation or vulgar greed. The French poet of the Pleiade remembers the slates on his own roof almost as if he could count them. And Mr W. B. Yeats, in the very wildest vision of a loneliness remote and irresponsible, is careful to make it clear that he knows how many bean-rows make nine. Of course there were people of all parties in the theatre, wild Sinn Feiners and conventional Unionists, but they all listened to my remarks as naturally as they might have all listened to an equally incompetent lecture on Monkeys or on the Mountains of the Moon. There was not a word of politics, least of all party politics, in that particular speech; it was concerned with a tradition in art,