NOTES 439 



treat Ulster as a separate unit would not suit the Sinn Feiners, 

 for there is a loyal majority in Ulster. The suggestion is 

 therefore again made, as in Silesia, that Ulster should poll by 

 districts, and a piebald map has been published in the London 

 newspapers showing the probable results of such a poll. In 

 most parts of Ulster the Protestants are in a majority ; but in 

 two counties certainly, and in two more possibly, a careful 

 dissection would show certain districts that are predominantly 

 Catholic, and others that are predominantly Protestant. A 

 division on these lines would achieve the Sinn Fein purpose — 

 the disappearance of Ulster as a unit ; but it would put nothing 

 in its place save a series of weak and discordant districts, 

 nominally independent, but, in fact, subject to pressure from 

 a greater neighbour. 



In no sense of the word can this be called statecraft ; nor 

 is it intended to be. It is a means of insinuating anarchy 

 into an ordered State. If that is the art of politics, the onlooker 

 can only regret that it is a bastard art, and not a science. 



Scientific thought, we believe, would approach this subject 

 from an altogether different angle. An individual being is an 

 organism whose purposive actions are directed to the advantage 

 of that organism. A family, a society, and a State are aggrega- 

 tions of individuals united by the ties of race, interest, and 

 geography ; but together they form a more complex organism. 

 A family may sometimes quarrel, but the tie of blood remains ; 

 a society may sometimes be shaken by the conflict of parties, 

 but its underlying unity must remain. If it does not, the State 

 disappears, and the society becomes a mere mob. The more 

 highly organised unit is dissolved into a series of disorganised 

 individuals, and politics destroys itself by the application of 

 its own false maxims. 



It is not by such means that civilisation has been built up 

 in the past. Man has reached his present status because he 

 has understood how to subordinate the individual to the 

 society, and the smaller society to the greater one. The Roman 

 Republic began on the Tiber, but it conquered or absorbed its 

 neighbours because its political sense was more advanced than 

 that of the Etruscans or the Celts who surrounded it. Had 

 self-determination controlled the policy of the Roman Senate, 

 there would have been no need for Gibbon to write the Decline 

 and Fall of the Roman Empire, for the Roman Empire would 

 never have come into being at all. Its decline began when that 

 great monument of human organisation relaxed its hold on the 

 central sovereignty, and two associated governments divided 

 the control of East and West. 



The last seven years have shown on how fragile a base 

 European civilisation stands. The nineteenth century was 



