Yet all the wicked things that the atrocity was intended to exterminate are still alive and possibly stronger than they were in the twelfth century. Roman Catholicism is as strong as ever, the language still lives, and there has been a special revival of it within the last two years. The most wonderful part of all is that the Irishman is still alive, still an Irishman with children and grandchildren. He still loves his country, still loves independence and home rule, is still carrying on what you call guerilla tactics; and this very summer made a special outburst of guerillaism in the British parliament itself in the very heart of London. What does all this show? Simply that the spirit of independence, the natural nation-forming instinct of human beings, when once aroused, is usually inextinguishable except by the annihilation of every individual; and that this is a provision of nature for the formation of human societies in the world. Secondly that men will fight longer and more desperately for justice or against injustice than they will fight for money. It has been the consciousness of eternal justice that has kept the Irish and Armenians going for seven hundred years, that inspired the Netherlands to resist the Spaniard for eighty years, that kept your ancestor fighting for seven years and determined Washington to resort to "predatory" war rather than yield to the "benevolence and good government" of England. Justice is far superior to philanthropy, charity, "the white man's burden" or any other pious hypocrisy or fraud that the villainy of man has invented. It is more important than, and it must precede both morals and good government. After you have been just to a people you may begin to preach to them. Good government as well as agricultural, commercial and industrial prosperity, have been rendered impossible in Ireland for centuries because there has been no justice to the native and patriotic party among the people. Justice can purify most of the international horrors of the world far better than "benevolence." We are on the whole more just than other nations. We founded ourselves upon justice, upon the doctrine that a naturally separated people had a right to their independence, that all men were politically equal and equal before the law, and that no government could be just that did not rest on the consent of the governed. These doctrines are the highest development of justice that has been wrought out in the past and by that great movement called the Reformation. But England has never accepted them.