English domination a prospect distasteful to Irishmen and a position injurious to Irish interests. It revived the claim of Ireland to independence, declaring that it was justified alike by history and by the common consent of Europe and America, and as a first step in the assertion of that claim refused for the first time since the Act of Union to send representatives to sit in the English Parliament. The forces which produced so serious an alteration in the attitude of Ireland have been described in the foregoing pages. At the end of the war the only part of Ireland whose political outlook remained unaltered was the Unionist North-east. Upon the indurated surface of its political conscience nothing that had happened either in Ireland or out of it had produced the least effect. Alone in Europe the Ulster Unionist seemed to regard the war as a detachable episode with (so far as he was concerned) no political implications. He adopted the same standpoint, used the same language and expected it to meet with the same approving response from the same people. The changed attitude of other people was attributed by him to treachery, to disloyalty, to lack of fixed principle. By an adroit use of his opportunities during the war he managed to secure his position: he could point to the loyalty alike of those of his political faith who had enlisted and of those who had not enlisted: the former had done their duty to the Empire--the latter had performed their duty to the Government by providing it with a perpetual incentive to the conscription of Ireland. He had collected "pledges" from all who cared to give them that his position would be respected. To rely upon the "pledge" of a politician as a bulwark against the advance of political ideas may seem a somewhat imbecile proceeding: but it was not in his case so imbecile as it looked. He was shrewd enough to see that what European statesmen were doing was not by any means in accordance with what they were saying, and he decided (distrusting "ideas" of all kinds) to stake his future upon the relative permanence of things as they were rather than upon the doubtful advent of things as they ought to be.