If the anti-conscription movement had not asserted itself pious Liberal phrase-makers would never have believed--British fashion--that any community could actually stand by principles whose statement in England has invariably been a preliminary to their ignominious abandonment. Once again our political realism impinged unpleasantly upon the Anglo-Saxon consciousness, confronting the impotent mourners of theories they were too feeble to defend with the spectacle of a people aroused to fight against the supreme sacrifice demanded by the State of its citizens. The sacred egoism of the individual and of the nation was challenged, and a sacred union was the result, in which Ireland asserted, with uncompromising unanimity, her separate national identity. Characteristically, the professional Protestants kept aloof from this manifestation of liberty, to the bewilderment and shame of certain continental observers, proud of their Calvinistic origins, and surprised to find that, in Ireland, Protestantism is, by definition, antagonistic to the libertarian impulses with which it is associated on the continent of Europe. An aftermath of tragi-comedy followed the religious tension of the anti-conscription demonstrations, when a number of Protestant Irishwomen were contemptuously excluded from the church in which they had intended to associate their prayers with those of their Catholic countrywomen. They discovered that the Church of "Ireland" denied them the elementary right of every Protestant to direct communication with God. The Dean who interposed between heaven and the prayers of the faithful was not, strange to say, invited to enter the communion which teaches the necessity for priestly intercession between man and his Maker. On the contrary, some of the victims of his ecclesiastical and political insolence were more concerned to absolve him from the blame of such an insult than to assert the principle for which Irish Protestants were alleged to be fighting. Such is the dilemma, and such is the quality, of the religion implanted by England in this country, and fostered, like the weakling that it is, in all the peevish selfishness of the spoilt child, eternally exerting the petty tyrannies it imputes to others. The reaction of Anglo-Saxondom to this Irish experiment in the teaching of the Allies has been somewhat similar to that described in the case of Russia, on the analogous occasion of the revolutionary realization of theories reserved for the academic leisure of the English upper classes. Mr. Lloyd George, that distinguished Liberal, was most insistent upon the "moral right" to impose military service upon subject races, his contention was echoed by all "responsible" statesmen, and the lofty example of Austria was cited as a model. This was a daring instance of associating with enemy ideas, only permissible to the chemically pure in heart.