The Days of a Man 1914 



The in- Chesterton, an adroit and versatile maker of para- 



compar doxes, an intense democrat with imperialistic lean- 



*rto ings, a Liberal and a Catholic, hating the Prussians 



in order to admire them and at times admiring them 



in order to hate them. 



My own contribution naturally concerned the 

 Balkans, particularly the dangers arising from the 

 mistakes of the Treaty of London and the mutila- 

 tions due to the Treaty of Bucharest. Leaving then 

 Old Jordan's, we motored into Wales, where I settled 

 my wife and her companions at Bettws-y-coed, a 

 very pretty village "in the woods," while Robert 

 Young, Holman, and I made a hasty but informing 

 tour of Ireland. 



During our eleven days' trip we visited in turn 

 Dublin, Drogheda, Belfast, Londonderry, and 

 Omagh, interviewing all sorts of people with a view 

 to learning the temper of the country. Our reception 

 was everywhere friendly, and from many sources we 

 secured frank statements of opinion. 1 



Dublin Dublin is a very slow city, one of the most sluggish 

 for its size in the United Kingdom. With many 

 elegant buildings, it has also the most hopeless slums 

 in Europe broad streets of old stone houses, once 

 fine but now crowded with drunken men, slatternly 

 women, and dirty-faced children. "Liberty Hall," 

 a forlorn "outpost of freedom" in their midst, was 

 the chief local center of revolt against British law. 



1 Of the following account, written in 1919, certain paragraphs appeared in 

 Sunset for May of that year. The distressing incidents which followed in 1920 

 I do not venture to discuss. 





