All these circumstances make for the hour of depression; and it may well be in such an hour, amid apathy and treachery, cold friends and active enemies, with worn-down frame and baffled mind, you, pleading for the Old Cause, may feel your voice is indeed a voice crying in the wilderness; and it may serve till the blood warms again and the imagination recover its glow, to think how a Voice, that cried in the wilderness thousands of years ago, is potent and inspiring now, where the voice of the "practical" man sends no whisper across the waste of years.
XI What, then, to conclude, must be our decision?
To take our philosophy into life.

When we do that generally, in a deep and significant sense our War of Independence will have begun.

Let there be no deferring a duty to a more convenient future.

It is as possible that an opening for freedom may be thrust on us, as that we shall be required to organise a formal war with the usual movements of armies; in our assumptions for the second, let us not be guilty of the fatal error of overlooking the first.

As in other spheres, so in politics we have our conventions; and how little they may be proven has been lately seen, when England went through a war of debate,[Footnote: Debate over House of Lords.] largely unreal, over her constitution and her liberties, even while foreign wars and complications were still being debated; and in the middle of it all, suddenly, from a local labour dispute, putting by all thought of the constitution, feeling as comparatively insignificant the fear of invasion, all England stood shuddering on the verge of frantic civil war;[Footnote: The Railway strike.] and all Ireland, when the moment of possible freedom was given, when England might have been hardly able to save herself, much less to hold us--Ireland, thinking and working in old grooves, lay helpless.