sm—It is a little surprising to think that " Hibernicus " should have found so much space in your already precious pages. Since his veiled remarks call forth some kind of answer, 1 should like to recommend that he should sit before a map of the British Isles, and as dispassionately as he is able, to meditate upon it, There he would sec something that might be staggering to the aspirations of the more intransigent Irish politician. On the right he would behold a great and prosperous nation waging a struggle against a front stretching from the Arctic Circle down to the Spanish frontier, with not a small portion of the sympathies .of most civilised lands throughout the world behind it, and on the left a small country impoverished by a crabbed and evirated political ideology of its own maintaining a fantastic so-called neutrality or nonbelligerence against its natural defenders.
" Hibernicus " might also with profit read the letter of St. Augustine to Marcellinus (Ep. ad. Marcellinum (138) ii, 9 (A.D. 412), in which he discusses the precept of Christ " Not to resist evil." Sr. Augustine writes: " Without giving more elaborate answers, we may proceed so far as to say that great empires like the Republic of Rome (and here I make bold to include also the British Commonwealth of Nations) have been governed and aggrandised from insignificance and poverty to greatness and opulence by men who when they had suffered wrong would rather pardon than punish their offender."
Lest the above should be considered a contemptuous tilt against the Irish people, let me hasten to say that next to my own fellow-countrymen I entertain only the warmest affection for that people, but it
(Continued at foot of next column).