“Don’t you feel the quality of this struggle is spiritual? Don’t you feel something hard and pointed like a sword blade there, though covered with the rust of every vile passion?”
“If there was nothing of the spirit here, could men be brought to contend so long and so furiously?” he answered. “But what are we to do with these passions, evil as well as good, that we have raised in the name of idealism? Nothing that has been created can die.” He peered out between the chimneys.
“Look down there,” I said. “Fear and hate and a certain exaltation. Of course, in this struggle Sinn Fein has the exhilaration of the small man against the big man. However right the big man may be, he cannot have much zest in an unequal show.”
Then it was that 47 became like a prophet on the housetops.
“Truth! Truth! Who shall find truth in all this untruth? One begs and begs for bread, and receives always a stone. Lies, lies, lies! Who can get at the truth now? Can it ever be found? I am tired of stones. Who will give me bread?
“No man down there wants the truth; no man down there would listen to the truth; one wishes to shout his case louder than the other, that is all. The people lie, the papers lie—it is lies, all lies!”
“And this thing which makes men mad is called patriotism,” I said.
He turned round from gazing at the city. “There you have it. There is one voice speaking the truth. Patriotism, how it limits a man, in judgment, in sincerity, in his horizon.
“Nowadays, can nationalism be other than a rather poor thing? It was useful in the past, but it was only a stepping stone to better things. First individual against individual, then family against family, then tribe warring against tribe, nation striving against nation. Only to-day the inspiration that all nations may be bound together. Has man been deceived? Can nationalism and patriotism after all be false gods?”
I, harking back to his cry of “lies, all lies,” interjected: “Here is the truth spoken by Loyalist and Republican in the golden age before all men were liars: