civilization contained in their virile Christianity. An Irish American priest, Father Shealy, puts the case this way: "The one awful failure to a nation is to fall from her ideals, to give up striving, to sell her soul to power and avarice or aught that serves the sordid sway of pride and passion. That, indeed, is failure which succeeds at the price of virtue and honor. "Ireland might have been rich and favored. She might have merged her identity and her faith in an alien empire and alien worship. But she fought and died; she starved and agonized; and in defeat she has conquered. Her spirit still lives on." II UNDYING NATIONHOOD UPPOSE that the well-prepared SUPE invasion of France in those weeks following August 1, 1914, had not been turned back at the battle of the Marne, and that the blond superman of the north had come to possess and permanently rule over the fair fields of France. In the course of a century the German schoolmaster might be teaching Europe that this great conquest was the triumph of the civilization of the Elbe and the Vistula over the disorganized civilization of the Seine,-Teutonic effi ciency prevailing as a question of superior Kultur over Gallic individualism and decadence. Let the centuries roll on, and how the past glories of the conquered fade and are obliterated under the mastership of those who are making history,-and writing it! "Where, to-day, are the great cities of antiquity?" exclaimed an Irish orator,-"perished so utterly that it is doubtful whether they ever existed." A thousand years hence, Napoleon might be a legend, Austerlitz or Jena smiled at as myths, and the salons of Paris and the art galleries of Versailles as forgotten as "the harp that once thro' Tara's halls the soul of music shed." How easily might the theory come to prevail among the dominant Ger |