Excerpt from Ireland a Study in Nationalism

IT is a plain fact, apparent to every one, that the affairs of Ireland have come to a climax in the past year. At the time this book was finished, June, 1918, I believed that Irish afiairs pivoted on the Rebellion of 1916, that the Rebellion had greatly in vigorated the national will; but I had no idea that the object of the Rebellion, an Irish Republic, was so soon to be a concrete popular ideal. Of this fact there can now be no doubt whatever. The Irish in Ireland did not support the Rebellion at large. Neither did the Irish in America. But the reaction of Britain on the Rebellion fired the will and the imagination of Irishmen and Irishwomen every where. An Irish Republic, absolutely independent of Britain, is definitely established as the irredu cible minimum on which the great majority of the Irish people have set their hearts. Victory may come soon or it may come late; that depends on cir cumstances. The open object of national Ireland remains. This object is not home rule or fiscal au tonomy or administration with a nationalist per sonnel or dominion semi-independence. Much less is it federation. All these propositions have had something to be said for them; but their time is past. The Irish people have deliberately committed them selves to their ultimate aspiration. That is, absolute independence. They want an Ireland just as free of foreign sovereignty and foreign rule as the United States is. They want it without any soften ing of their meaning or any blinking of the national minorities in Ulster or scattered through the rest of Ireland. They want formal international recog nition of their status as a distinct people, a people with special problems and special needs, with geographic entity and historic continuity. They want it on the very principles promulgated by responsible British and American statesmen during the late war. These principles they were urged to consider as binding and sacred. They do consider them bind ing and sacred. They ask and demand that they now be applied to Ireland.

About the Publisher

Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com

This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.