To annex Ireland would be, as a military measure, once command of the seas was gained, a comparatively easy task. No practical resistance to one German army corps even could be offered by any force Ireland contains, or could of herself, put into the field. No arsenal or means of manufacturing arms exists. The population has been disarmed for a century, and by bitter experience has been driven to regard the use of arms as a criminal offence. Patriotism has been treated as felony. Volunteers and Territorials are not for Ireland. To expect that a disarmed and demoralized population who have been sedulously batoned into a state of physical and moral dejection, should develop military virtues in face of a disciplined army is to attribute to Irishmen the very qualities their critics unite in denying them. "The Irishman fights well everywhere except in Ireland," has passed into a commonplace: and since every effort of government has been directed to ensuring the abiding application of the sneer, Englishmen would find, in the end, the emasculating success of their rule completely justified in the physical submission of Ireland to the new force that held her down. With Great Britain cut off and the Irish Sea held by German squadrons, no power from within could maintain any effective resistance to a German occupation of Dublin and a military administration of the island. To convert that into permanent administration could not be opposed from within, and with Great Britain down and severed from Ireland by a victorious German navy, it is obvious that opposition to the permanent retention of Ireland by the victor must come from without, and it is for this international reason that I think a German annexation of any part of a defeated United Kingdom need not be seriously considered. Such a complete change in the geography of Europe as a German-owned Ireland could not but provoke universal alarm and a widespread combination to forbid its realization. The bogey that Ireland, if not John Bull's other island, must necessarily be somebody else's other island will not really bear inspection at close quarters.