That Ireland must be involved in any war that Great Britain undertakes goes without saying; but that we should willingly throw ourselves into the fray on the wrong side to avert a British defeat, is the counsel of traitors offered to fools. We must see to it that what Thierry wrote of our fathers is not shamefully belied by their sons. Our "indomitable persistency" has up to this excelled and subdued the unvarying will applied to one unvarying purpose of those who, by dint of that quality, have elsewhere subjugated the universe. We who have preserved through centuries of misery, the remembrance of lost liberty, are not now going to merge our unconquered souls in the base body of our oppressor. One of the few Liberal statesmen England has produced, certainly the only Liberal politician she has ever produced, the late Mr. Gladstone, compared the union between Great Britain and Ireland to "the union between the mangled corpse of Hector and the headlong chariot of Achilles." (1890.) But, while I cannot admit that England is an Achilles, save, perhaps, that she may be wounded like him in the heel, I will not admit, I will not own that Ireland, however mangled, however "the plowers have ploughed upon her back and made long furrows," is in truth dead, is indeed a corpse. No; there is a juster analogy, and one given us by the only Englishman who was in every clime, and in every circumstance a Liberal; one who died fighting in the cause of liberty, even as in life he sang it. Byron denounced the union between England and Ireland as "the union of the shark with its prey." Chapter VIII IRELAND, GERMANY AND THE NEXT WAR In the February, 1913, _Fortnightly Review_, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle at the end of an article, "Great Britain and the Next War," thus appeals to Ireland to recognize that her interests are one with those of Great Britain in the eventual defeat of the latter: "I would venture to say one word here to my Irish fellow-countrymen of all political persuasions. If they imagine that they can stand politically or economically while Britain falls they are woefully mistaken. The British fleet is their one shield. If it be broken Ireland will go down. They may well throw themselves heartily into the common defence, for no sword can transfix England without the point reaching Ireland behind her...." I propose to briefly show that Ireland, far from sharing the calamities that must necessarily fall on Great Britain from defeat by a great power, might conceivably thereby emerge into a position of much prosperity. I will agree with Sir A. Conan Doyle up to this--that the defeat of Great Britain by Germany must be the cause of a momentous change to Ireland: but I differ from him in believing that that change must necessarily be disastrous to Ireland. On the contrary, I believe that the defeat of Great Britain by Germany might conceivably (save in one possible condition) result in great gain to Ireland.