Prussia was to him the enemy of peace and civilisation. In almost his last letter, he again emphasises this.
“Unless you hate war, as such, you cannot really hate Prussia. If you admit war as an essential part of civilisation, then what you are hating is merely Prussian efficiency.”
And with this mission of universal peace mingled his dream of a reconciled Ulster. He knew that there was no abiding cause of disunion between North and South, and hoped that out of common dangers shared and suffering endured on a European battleground, there would issue a United Ireland. For this he counted much on “the brotherhood that binds the brave of all the earth.” “There is a vision of Ireland,” he wrote in 1915, “better than that which sees in it only a cockpit, or eternal skull-cracking Donnybrook Fair—a vision that sees the real enemies of the nation to be ignorance, poverty, disease; and turning away from the ashes of dead hatreds, sets out to accomplish the defeat of these real enemies. Out of this disastrous war, we may pluck, as France and Belgium have plucked, the precious gift of national unity.”
In one of my letters he writes—
“One duty does indeed lie before me, that of devoting myself to the working out of a reconciliation between Ulster and Ireland. I feel God speaking to our hearts in that sense out of this terrible war.”
In his Political Testament he makes a dying plea for the realisation of his dream.
“Had I lived I had meant to call my next book on the relations of Ireland and England: The Two Fools: A Tragedy of Errors. It has needed all the folly of England and all the folly of Ireland to produce the situation in which our unhappy country is now involved.
“I have mixed much with Englishmen and with Protestant Ulstermen, and I know that there is no real or abiding reason for the gulfs, salter than the sea, that now dismember the natural alliance of both of them with us Irish Nationalists. It needs only a Fiat Lux, of a kind very easily compassed, to replace the unnatural by the natural.
“In the name, and by the seal of the blood given in the last two years, I ask for Colonial Home Rule for Ireland—a thing essential in itself and essential as a prologue to the reconstruction of the Empire. Ulster will agree.
“And I ask for the immediate withdrawal of martial law in Ireland, and an amnesty for all Sinn Fein prisoners. If this war has taught us anything it is that great things can be done only in a great way.”