Unfortunately for Ireland, sentimentalism has become so fashionable in international politics, that realism, whether in thought or action, is abhorrent to minds soothed with sonorous phrases, and but dimly conscious of the facts behind the words. The mirage of glory not only obscures the material horror of war, but it conduces to a certain impatience of ideas which are not coloured by the prevalent megalomania of idealism. The Irishman who dares to bring forward the case of his own country in discussion with belligerents is regarded as an inferior egotist, whose vision is so warped and limited that he cannot realize the great issues at stake. Otherwise intelligent men talk to him of the German hegemony of Europe and, by extension, of the world, with a seriousness differing from that of the Pan-German League only in its abhorrence of that incredible ambition. The rhetorical exuberances of Teutonic chauvinists are accepted as plain statements of policy by those who would not listen to their own Jingoes. The actual, or contemplated, depredations of one imperialism are not contrasted with those of another, but are used as a foil to the liberal and progressive aspirations of outraged political virtue. An inability to take either party at their own estimate is nevertheless comprehensible in a people whose scepticism of Liberalism is equalled by a corresponding doubt as to the possible differentiation of two imperialisms. Acute and not wholly orthodox exponents of the British international point of view have expended much ingenuity in finding a formula expressing the conscious or sub-conscious sense of rectitude which pervades the Englishman in this debate with Ireland. Britain is depicted by these critical friends as a well-meaning, if blundering, commercialist, whose imperial adventures, like the amorous adventures of races unblessed by puritan _Kultur_, must be regarded as venial sins. British imperialism, they say, is not deliberate and systematic; it aims at no hegemony, and is thereby innocent of those evils which the "free peoples of the world" are invited to destroy. As we have the testimony of several hundred years of Anglo-Irish history in refutation of this comfortable illusion, it is enough to say, for the present, that the matter presents itself with no such simplification to the Irish mind. Consequently, viewed in the light of this _Herrenmoral_, so natural in an imperial race, international events take on a significance wholly incomprehensible to the unfortunate victims of a transfigured and transcendental commercialism. Ireland, therefore, can neither understand nor make herself understood, so long as discussion is confined to the unrealities of international politics. She is obliged to grasp with pathetic gratitude at the straws of comfort blown in her direction by the winds of the European debate, wherein she serves the purposes of _tu quoque_ repartee.