are complimented away to no real fear of injustice or those who work for the de- oppression. The example of struction of the Empire and the Ulster Parliament may the expulsion of the loyal have people from Ireland. There is only one thing to be done, and that is, to die in our boots, resisting to the last." The Great War came, and they assert that in its course their attitude was fully justified. The rebel party treacherously struck at England when she was fighting for her life against Germany in 1916, while Ulster with desperate valour fought for the Empire from the beginning to the end. They were not unmindful of those from Southern and Western Ireland who fought by their side for the liberty of the world, the glorious rivalry of Messines will not lightly be forgotten,-they indeed played a noble part-all the more noble because they were likely to suffer for it on their return to the country they had helped to preserve. Most men would agree that the Ulster leader is preeminently the one intrepid statesman of our time, but everybody does not know that he is one of the most tolerant of men, and absolutely free from any taint of religious and racial bigotry. He is a man who entered on public life with a profound distrust of politics, and has been driven into the hated arena only by the force of circumstances. The minority in Ulster, notwithstanding the cries of ecclesiastical alarmists, have an influence on the Southern Parliament beyond expectation. One thing only is wanting-a great leader. If Southern Ireland could produce another Carson, with the same courage and liberality, the problem of centuries would be within sight of solution. Is there any hope of his coming? None for the present. The dread pestilence must proceed some way further on its course before his coming would be effectual. Moreover, it is difficult to conceive how in the near future he could secure a hearing at all, if he did not begin (more Hibernico) by perverting all the facts in his country's history, and by misrepresenting all that the Imperial Parliament has done for Ireland in recent years. The policy of organised murder now holds the field. It no longer needs to assume any disguises; it does not trouble to cover up its tracks; it speaks in broad daylight in the public streets, in the public conveyances. The mind of the people is benumbed; it has almost ceased to be shocked. The great Church that was once all-powerful looks on stricken with a kind of paralysis. There is no powerful united movement such 88 it put forward when conseription threatened, Its efforts are half-hearted, feeble, and sporadio. The ecclesiastical thun. ders that were so destructive tions. This was no light task. to the secret societies in the There were many Republican Fenian days are never heard idealists who had no sympathy now. Notwithstanding all with plots for the destruction that was going on in Belgium of civilised society, and yet it never denounced pre-Ger- he had a strange compelling manism. Some bishops and power, by which he almost sucmost of the younger clergy oeeded in brigading together openly favour the Republican these discordant elements immovement. But the older and mediately before the Easter wiser clergy are well aware rebellion. Although his doothat they are threatened by a trine was nothing short of portent more terrible than extreme Bolshevism, he had Cromwellian methods or penal not divested himself of religious laws. The coming of James belief at the time of his death. Connolly was an event of But whatever his own personal momentous importance in views may have been, the mamodern Ireland. Gifted with ohine he constructed will turn a mind of great power, he had out a product that may underimbibed from his youth the mine the great fabric of the doctrines of Marxian Socialism Catholic Church in Ireland, in their most extreme form, He was trained in the very same school as Lenin. His unhappy experiences in England and Scotland filled his heart with bitterness and hatred. His writings and speeches are not marked by the mendacity as to facts which usually characterises the propaganda of the popular party in Ireland; but they are remarkable for persistent perversity of reasoning, and exploded economic fallacies run through them all. He had ne respect whatever for the historic objects of Irish veneration; he scorned Sarsfield, Grattan, Flood, O'Connell, and Butt; he pulled down the political saints from their niches and smashed their aureoles he had no patience with the mere rhetorioians. His great aim was to unite the rebel Irish element and the Socialistic labour organisa This would not be an unmixed evil in the eyes of some, who look on the power of the priests as the cause of all Ireland's misfortunes. They know that the systematic inculcation of hatred to England has an evil effect on the country. They cannot understand the conduct of many of the clergy in dealing lightly with crimes that will lower the moral tone of the country for generations. They read with amazement the somewhat mild denunciation of murder in the pastorals, accompanied by comments on woman's dress, and ending in fierce denunciation of military rule. Some of the clergy seem to endorse the oft-repeated falsehood that the coercive measures are the real cause of orime. The very contrary is demonstrable. Under the Birrell régime everything in the strain of latent ferocity that, nature of coercion was swept away. Deadly weapons were allowed into the country without restraint; the Detective Department was weakened and almost disarmed; the Secret Service Fund was praotically abolished; armed men were allowed to drill, and actually to rehearse attacks on the seat of Government; during and at the time of the rebellion unarmed policemen were cruelly murdered in the public streets. Coercive measures were only adopted as necessity required, and so far have failed to keep up with the advance of barbarous erime. But when all is said, no wise man can contemplate without dismay the authority of the Catholic Church falling into decrepitude and contempt. Many of the elergy fearlessly denounce orime; all of them inculcate Christian doctrines. It was neteworthy that a constable who was recently mortally wounded by a treacherous shot in the back, when returning from Mass, prayed to the end for the forgiveness of his murderers. A faith that produces an example of this kind is not to be disparaged, even if the conduct of its ministers is disappointing, and in some respects deplorable, If the restraints imposed by the Church become weak and obsolete, nothing remains for Ireland but red revolution and anarchy. Underlying the many good and attractive qualities in Irish nature, there is a if unbridled, might soon make the name of Ireland a horror in the mouth of civilised mankind. Every effective influence for good must be encouraged and developed so far as possible. But the damage is not to be ignored. Nothing is so contagious as the leprosy of Bolshevism. Men wondered when they beheld the great German High Seas Fleet on its way to a disgraceful surrender. This was not brought about by any want of courage on the part of the men, or by any failure on the part of the Government to maintain it with material and supplies. We now know that the beaten Russian, working in conjunction with the Socialistic defeatists, managed to inject the Teutonio victor with the loathsome malady from which he suffers himself. To Germany it was the end of all things: the end of her pride and the extinetion of all hope of recovery in the near future. The older clergy are well aware that the unclean_thing_exists among the people, and that there are some among them who are secretly trying to foster its growth. Meanwhile the so-called war goes on, and it is hard to see how it can be checked while the people are held down by terror. But the end is coming, and with certainty. The destiny of all murderous secret societies is self-destruction: they begin to murder one another. Things will sometimes go wrong, suspicions will manifest themselves, the suspected man will be done away with for the sake of the general safety. Those who are so lost to all sense of right as to murder innocent people are prepared on the slightest suspicion to murder a comrade. The doom of such societies in Sicily, in France, in America, or elsewhere has always been the same. So will it be in Ireland. Many of those who started the mad rebellion of 1916 were wild idealists. They hoped to create a new heaven and a new earth; they now see that they have created a new hell in a country that for the time being has become a lake of oruelty and demoralisation, It is impossible to think that this state of things can go on much longer. There is already a passionate desire for peace, a disgust at the continual shedding of blood, and a longing to see the end of the tyranny that can effect nothing but the permanent dishonour and degradation of an ancient race. ARCTURUS. SUNDAY IN EXILE. I LOOK from an upper window of my house over the valley. Below me lie ordered terraces. Dark-green plantations of coffee and orchards of "kath" break the monotony of the ripening barley. Thick hedges of cactus show where narrow lanes wind in and out among the cultivation. Away to the left runs the highread, with its constant stream of white-clad passers-by, its convoys of coffee-laden donkeys, and now and again a string of slow-moving supercilious camels. In the centre of the picture lies the city, tightly packed within its russet walls. Three of its gates are visible from my window, each teeming with life as the water-carriers come and go, or a chief with his retinue passes. Here and there a modern white building stands out with startling prominence, and a totally fiotitious appearance of size lent to it by its pigmy neighbours, Splashes of colour are given by the huge flag which flaps lazily above the Italian Consulate, and the Abyssinian tricolor dominating the town from the roof of the Palace. For it is at an Abyssinian landscape that I am looking, and the day is Sunday, when we fly our flags to the glory of God and the magnification of our respective governments. People at home have vague impressions of what Abyssinia is like, and certainly Harar with its valley, which lies spread before me, is unlike anything they imagine. Indeed, it is not really Abyssinia at all, but an ancient Arab city now ruled by the Abyssinians. Domesticity is the keynote of the landscape-a landscape which would rejoice the heart of the advocate of "three aores and a cow." The day is glorious, so I take my stick and, faithful to home traditions, sally forth for my Sunday afternoon's walk. Just beyond my garden wall runs a stream. As it passes my gate it is an insignificant trickle down a gutter by the roadside. Fifty yards lower it has played a surprising trick in carving out for itself a deep oleft in the middle of the road. This sudden antic has been too much for some poor donkey, whose half picked bones lie at the bottom, while the stream, as it drops over the edge, chuckles maliciously at the success of its practical joke. Leaving the stream on my left, I enter a narrow lane hedged by tall Euphorbia cactus and flowering briers. Luckily I know my way, for every few yards is a turning leading to a cul-de-sac in the front yard of a native house. From these come shrill sounds of domestic argument or the indolent thrumming of a onestringed lute, where a contented Abyssinian, mellowed by his Sabbath flagon of Tej, suns himself in his porch. To |