twelve days before Armageddon. We were committed to the monstrous doctrine that only through the criminal madness of civil war could the political future of Ireland be settled. Women, or some women, were already at guerilla war with men, or with some men, and the failure to find a way out was a grave reproach to statesmanship. Perhaps our most damning defect of that vanished time before the war was our entire lack of the sense of proportion. All the little fishes of controversy talked like whales. The galled jade did not wince, it trumpeted and charged like a wounded bull-elephant. If you put another penny on the income tax the rich howled out in chorus that Dick Turpin had got himself into the Exchequer, that all industry would come to an end, that the stately homes of England would fall into decay, and that all capital would emigrate to Kamchatka. If a bilious works manager spoke crossly to a similarly indisposed Trade Union workman, there was grave danger that in a week we should have a national crisis and a national strike.
The scene has changed. There must be many a man who, looking out on the spectacle of blood and disaster which now passes for Europe, exclaims: "If I had only known!" There is many a home, deep in the mourning of this titanic tragedy, in which they sigh: "If we could only bring back that 1914 in which we were not wise!"
These are not vain regrets; they have the germ
