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Updated: October 22, 2025
"The gigantic game of bluff" as the Ulster preparations were termed had won outright. The political gamesters, who would not surrender an inch to Ulster when it could be negotiated with, were now willing to surrender everything, including the principle of an indivisible Irish nationhood.
There was much to be done in this direction. The iron of slavery had very nearly entered our souls. Centuries of landlord oppression, of starvation, duplicity and Anglicisation had very nearly destroyed whatever there was of moral virtue and moral worth in our nature. The Irish language our distinctive badge of nationhood had almost died upon the lips of the people.
To me it means the sickling over a robust nationhood with the yellowing hue of a dollar democracy, the yellowing hue of gnashing social jealousy, the yellowing hue of moral putridity and decadence and rot. Hitherto every man has stood on his own legs in Canada.
Its root is the conception of nationality, that is of a people consciously united by race, language, and culture; and from this springs the larger conception of nationhood, that is of a nationality possessing its own political institutions, governed by its own consent, and co-extensive with its natural boundaries.
Then, too, there was the old colonialism, the habits of thought acquired under different conditions, which, by force of momentum, persisted after these conditions had passed away. Though Canada had ceased to be a 'possession' and was emerging into nationhood, she awoke but slowly to the idea of taking up her own burden of defence. There was the lack of any pressing danger.
It may be that those who had reviled him and cast the wounding word against him had then their moment of regret and the wish that what had been heatedly spoken might be unsaid, but those who loved him and who were loyal to the end found no consolation beyond this, that they had stood, with leal hearts and true, beside the man who had found Ireland broken, maimed and dispirited and who had lifted her to the proud position of conscious strength and self-reliant nationhood.
The more advanced Mahomedans had been stirred by the revolutionary upheaval in Constantinople to seek contact with the Turkish Nationalist leaders who now ruled the one great Mahomedan power in the world, and they learnt from them to read into British foreign policy a purpose of deliberate hostility to Islam itself inspired by dread of the renewed vitality it might derive from the returning consciousness in many Mahomedan countries of their own independent nationhood.
The old regime and old politics naturally find allies in the press which, having been so venal in the past, finds it difficult to turn to honest journalism. The venality of the press in Balkan countries is a characteristic which does more harm to nationhood in these parts than is understood.
Sovereignty and independence, however, are not, as we have seen, essential to full nationhood, provided the nation possesses a certain amount of "home-rule" and regards the government under which it lives as a true expression of its genius and will.
The resistance put up for nearly three years by two small South African Republics, strong chiefly in their indomitable pride of nationhood, seemed to have strained the resources even of the British Empire, and Japan, an Asiatic power only recently emerged from obscurity, had just proved on land and sea that an Asiatic nation in possession of her national independence could equip herself to meet and overcome one of the greatest of European powers one whose vast ambitions constituted in the eyes of generations of British statesmen a grave menace to the safety of India itself.
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