So it happened that Irishmen were invited to share the enthusiasm for an ideal about which they entertained no more illusions, except the one which experience had not had a chance to confirm or dispel. Pseudo-democracy they knew and rejected, as revealed in the light of a spurious political liberty under the control of English Capitalism, but they had not yet been allowed to make the experiment of politico-economic freedom on their own account. Meanwhile, by an amazing inconsequence, the imposition of these pseudo-democratic conditions became the ambition of precisely the most restive and acute critics of the political system upon which those conditions repose. The complete demoralization of the intellectuals by the present war will supply some future critic material for sceptical reflection. In the past, both remote and immediate, the educated have succeeded in differentiating themselves from the mob by refusing, in times of crisis, to be stampeded by appeals to ignorance. But gradually the _Intelligentsia_ had been learning the expediency of attaching themselves to some social or political propaganda until, when the war broke out, they found themselves everywhere imprisoned by the new status they had assumed. They were no longer free to serve their real master, but had sold their intellectual birthright for a mess of official pottage. Their conscripted minds have definitely lowered their prestige, since they have set themselves to bluster and shout across their respective frontiers, in a manner indistinguishable from that of the plain people, without pretensions to mental discipline and rational speech. Though financially strengthened the intellectuals have been bankrupted, as a class, by the war for liberty.