sacrificed everything for Home Rule, even their own profoundly national emotion of contempt. For the sake of Home Rule, or the solemn promise of Home Rule, they kept such men in power; and for their reward they found that such men were still in power; and Home Rule was gone. What I mean about the Nationalist Party, and what may be called its prophetic shadow of the Sinn Fein mistake, may well be symbolised in one of the noblest figures of that party or any party. An Irish poet, talking to me about the pointed diction of the Irish peasant, said he had recently rejoiced in the society of a drunken Kerry farmer, whose conversation was a litany of questions about everything in heaven and earth, each ending with a sort of chorus of ‘Will ye tell me that now?’ And at the end of all he said abruptly, ‘Did ye know Tom Kettle?’ and on my friend the poet assenting, the farmer said, as if in triumph, ‘And why are so many people alive that ought to be dead, and so many people dead that ought to be alive? Will ye tell me that now?’ That is not unworthy of an old heroic poem, and therefore not unworthy of the hero and poet of whom it was spoken. ‘Patroclus died, who was a better man than you.’ Thomas Michael Kettle was perhaps the greatest example of that greatness of spirit which was so ill rewarded on both sides of the channel and of the quarrel, which marked Redmond’s brother and so many of Redmond’s followers. He was a wit, a scholar, an orator, a man ambitious in all the arts of peace; and he fell fighting the barbarians because he was too good a European to use the barbarians against England, as England a hundred years before had used the barbarians against Ireland. There is nothing to be said of such things except what the drunken farmer said, unless it be a verse from a familiar ballad on a very remote topic, which happens to express my own most immediate feelings about politics and reconstruction after the decimation of the great war. The many men so beautiful And they all dead did lie: And a thousand thousand slimy things Lived on, and so did I. It is not a reflection that adds any inordinate self-satisfaction to the fact of one’s own survival.