the interaction of the two Nationalist parties upon each other's policy had become more and more marked, though they still maintained to one another an attitude of hostility and contempt. If Sinn Fein seemed to change (at any rate for the time) its policy of strict self-reliance into one of an appeal for outside assistance, the Parliamentary Party had shown a disposition no longer to rely upon appeals to English parties and to the English Parliament but to call upon a wider audience to judge its cause. While they still differed upon nearly every other point, they were agreed in this, that to appeal to the Government of 1917 was a waste of time. The appeal to the Peace Conference was destined to fall upon deaf ears but this was not at the time believed to be possible. The Allied statesmen seemed to be committed beyond any possibility of denial or evasion to "the rights of small nations," "government by the consent of the governed" and other formulae of national freedom. In reply to cynical suggestions that these formulae might possibly be discovered to be (to the regret of their authors) inconsistent with the "realities" of politics, _New Ireland_ simply answered: "We frankly admit that we have faith and hope in the force of the great moral principle of justice to the nations and in its ultimate power of bringing back order to the chaos and tragedy of Europe and of imposing itself upon reactionaries." But as a matter of fact, in spite of the energy with which the idea of an appeal to the Peace Conference was taken up and discussed, in spite even of such sweeping statements as that quoted above from _New Ireland_, Sinn Fein had at most agreed to graft a new and temporary policy on to the old stem. It still inculcated self-reliance, the education of the Irish people in questions of national economics, national finance and national policy: it still urged the employment of all the means which could be employed by Irishmen in Ireland to enforce and secure national independence. The columns of _New Ireland_ itself make this perfectly plain; and even in later references in that paper to the appeal to the Peace Conference and the hopes founded upon it, the editorial language is much less sweeping than when the idea was fresh in its fascination. The concentration of thought upon the Peace Conference was also exercising in another direction a modifying influence upon Sinn Fein. The old idea of the independence of Ireland was being gradually enlarged. It was no longer confined to the purely negative idea of freedom from foreign control: it assumed the more positive form of an Ireland entering its place in a great community of European nations, equally free and mutually dependent, bound to each other for the preservation of liberty and civilization. It was hoped that the appeal to the Peace Conference would result in the recognition of Ireland not merely as a nation to which the Conference was bound to see justice