“I had to cancel leave all round,” he explained, as we left our dismantled house for dinner at the Eclectic. “Now that the peace-treaty’s out of the way, the government is looking for fresh triumphs. Happy thought: an Irish policy! I felt it was time for us to define our attitude.” “Hasn’t it been defined for us,” I asked, “by the impetuous gentleman who invented ‘self-determination’? What’s good enough for Czecho-Slovakia should be good enough for Ireland.” “How do you propose to apply it?,” he asked. Literally, I told him: by electing a constituent assembly on universal suffrage and then by enforcing on all Ireland whatever constitution the assembly framed. “But that,” said my father-in-law, who had invited himself to dine with us, “means coercing Ulster.” As I felt we could hardly have too many opinions in our symposium, I urged Frank Jellaby and Carstairs to join us; and every party was represented by the time that Roger Dainton pulled a chair to the end of the table. “I detest coercion,” I said; “but, if it has to be applied, I’d sooner coerce the few than the many. Because ministers refused to coerce Ulster in 1913, the rest of Ireland has been coerced ever since. And I never know why a thing should be called coercion in one country and ‘maintaining law and order’ in every other.” Having propounded my own policy, I was free to listen while others propounded theirs. Our speeches, at this date, would make melancholy reading, for every one said precisely what was expected of him and precisely what he had said a hundred times before. Writing now at two years’ remove, I believe and hope that Ireland is on the road to a settlement; and this dinner two years ago lingers in my recollection as one more heart-breaking proof that, if the Irish were incapable of governing themselves, the English were no less incapable of governing them. Crawleigh, a former viceroy; John Carstairs, a retired diplomat; my uncle and Dainton, Jellaby and I, with some hundred years of parliamentary experience between us, all talked with the white-hot irreconcilability of Capulets and Montagues. It was this temper, I reminded myself from time to time, that kept me exiled from the County Kerry: it was this temper that tore me from Barbara’s side. In the years that followed, when I tried to mark the rock on which my life split, I always thought of this fatuous debate and of the pale, angry faces round our echoing table. It was something, I suppose, that no one prayed for a new Cromwell, though I attribute this moderation to a doubt whether even Cromwell could now “reconquer” Ireland and to a fear that those who had drawn the sword might be the first to perish by the sword. In the last six years Ireland had made the dire discovery that the north had won an advantage by threats of violence and that, if the south wished to redress the balance, it must employ the same means.