The prevailing tone of sentimental idealism in international affairs is, therefore, unpropitious to those who, like the Russians and the Irish, insist upon interpreting _au pied de la lettre_, the pious phrases which adorn the discourses of altruistic statesmen. Be the victims of oppression only far enough away from immediate Allied control, then their wrongs bedim the eyes of the professors of Liberty, whose vision becomes too blurred to distinguish the close presence of political phenomena which demand attention. In consequence, Ireland's movement of self-assertion did not receive the good press which the occasion might normally have warranted. America, though neutral at the time, denounced the "disloyalty" of Sinn Fein in the best Colonial style, leaving to the American-Irish the hyphenated distinction, shared with their American-German fellow-citizens, of displaying a very natural sympathy with their kin in "the old country." The racial ties of these two sections of Americans were, until intervention replaced benevolent neutrality, the only evidence of resistance to that anglicization of Allied opinion which has already been noted. Once, however, Dr. Wilson had declared his intention of making the world safe for democracy, repressive measures soon eliminated those manifestations of opinion. They had been denounced, but tolerated, only so long as it was legally impossible to suppress freedom of speech without injuring the interests of the highly articulate Allies and their friends. The unsophisticated Irishman in the United States had to reconcile himself to the paradox of the American denunciation of the Easter Week Rising, as if the analogous revolt of the founders of that great plutocratic Republic had not differed only in so far as it was successful. The American separatists were alike untroubled by the representations of the unionistic minority, and the preoccupation of England with the war against her commercial rival of the period. But the Irish separatists made not even a romantic appeal to a people whose appetite for uplifting sentiment may be gauged by their profound conviction that the "moral leadership of the world" had been thrust upon them, after the outbreak of war, by an appreciative Destiny. It is true that, during the two years when this particular megalomania possessed the soul of America, her energies were exclusively concentrated upon the supply of munitions of war, with occasional humanitarian homilies, addressed to the Hun, and emphatic protests against the Allied blockade, which was denounced as illegal and unjust, but has become much more stringent under Wilsonian auspices. It is hard to decide which of these two not wholly unrelated phenomena is the greater tribute to the triumph of Anglo-Saxon culture; America's condemnation of the Irish Republicans as "traitors," or her reinforcement, when a belligerent, of blockade measures previously described as indefensible. II REALISM IN IRISH POLITICS