While one may expect the average man to put faith in his country "right or wrong," he has exceeded the bounds of patriotic gregariousness when he asks foreigners to display an identical devotion. The imposition is all the more intolerable when made, not by the plain man in the street, but by intellectuals, professing the use of reason. It is positively revolting to the Irishman who, not being a citizen of those small nations happily outside the dominion of the belligerents, is prohibited from detailed neutral argument in defence of his own position. Denmark can speak through a Georg Brandes, but Ireland may not even quote the Allied press in support of her contentions. The Irish case for neutrality is expurgated of necessity--of military necessity! The possibilities of arriving at any understanding with the Allied countries have, therefore, been seriously hampered, apart altogether from the inherent obstacles to an admission on the part of Anglo-Saxondom that its statecraft is not an admirable combination of the choicest maxims of Holy Writ. Naturally, such conditions have in no wise modified the splendid isolation of Sinn Fein, since they have rendered free intercommunication between Ireland and the outside world impossible. The ultimate issue of this unequal debate, between a gagged nation and one in free possession of innumerable voices, was reached when those who transcended mere discussion interposed with their policy of "shoot: don't argue." The conscription of Irishmen is the logical conclusion to the secular denial by England of the claims of Irish nationality, a denial which has ceased even to be expressed in specific words, so comfortably has it sunk into the English sub-consciousness. This is the negation which underlies all political discussion between English and Irish, and has not a little to say in that futile debate already described. Since the Irishman's premises are not accepted, all his conclusions seem unreasonable to his opponent. Similarly the arguments of the latter; for they rest upon a denial, or, at best, an academic recognition of the fact that Ireland is a nation, with religious, social and cultural traditions as unlike those of England as the economic conditions of the two countries are dissimilar. No agreement is likely when discussion is vitiated by so vital a misunderstanding. Hence the logic of the Imperialists who shoot but don't argue. They know that Ireland is not a colony, and thinking imperially, they are unwilling to concede rights which they grant to their colonial fellow-citizens.