mal-nutrition, from all revolutionary desires. They envy the impunity with which scandals, whose publication would elsewhere inspire assassination, if not revolution, may be revealed in the reports of Royal Commissions, without provoking more than a few columns of newspaper summary and comment. But these benighted foreigners know the temper of their own populations too well not to pay them at least the compliment of being afraid to provoke popular fury. Blue Books and parliamentary questions are not yet universally accepted substitutes for democratic control. The Irish people have more wisely adopted the ancient device, _oderint, dum metuant_, as the more intelligent attitude of a people towards its rulers, who have essayed in vain the process of demoralization so effective elsewhere. In Ireland alone the familiar ostentatious displays of Blue Book liberty fail in their purpose of disarming criticism, and consigning vital questions to an oblivion of official words. The capacious and retentive Irish memory actually feeds on those indigestible slices of British freedom, whose price and mode of distribution render them inaccessible to the vast majority of taxpayers at whose expense these sepulchres of truth are constructed. The effect of such serious attention to utterances designed as soporifics is a profound contempt for precisely that democratic virtue which has excited the admiration of certain foreigners, so consoling to the Anglo-Saxon sense of superiority. When the Irish-Irelander learns of England's claim to be the leader of democratic progress in Europe, and finds that claim endorsed by apparently disinterested critics, his instinctive movement is one of revulsion from all implied in the laudation. If English rule involves the acceptance of the democratic ideal, then he rejects the ideal, for he knows that its irradiations have not lightened his political darkness, and its practical workings have effected the ruin of his country. If democratization be synonymous with anglicization, Ireland begs to be excused. She is, therefore, thrown back upon herself, brooding and indifferent to the issues which convulse the peoples for whom the problems of the war have a definite meaning. This scepticism, however, does not bring Ireland into contact with any current of internationalism, based upon a conviction of economic evil existing in all capitalistic countries alike. The egoism of Sinn Fein determines the Irish attitude towards the war. "Ourselves alone," not German gold, determines Ireland's foreign policy. III THE SPLENDID ISOLATION OF SINN FEIN