The Bridgeport times and evening farmer., 1919-04-09

in favor of separation from the Brit ish Crown.
 What is going to be done about it? From this distance, and in the light
 of those ideals for which, ostensibly, the Entente Allies and America have fought and won the most terrible war
 in history, the answer would seem fairly simple.
 1 Give Ireland what she wants and what she has voted for
 The diplomats and politicians do not see the problem in any such simple terms; and there are a great many ieeply interested parties who have a worl to say. They speak of Ulster, of l religious differences, of the abs1lrditv l of an Irish Republic off the shores of England; and soon we are landed in the spiders web of British policy in 1 Ireland.
 1 But frankly. is there not a sense in
 which the British are proud of their tradition of failure in Ireland; and do not these psychological factors often determine policy? It is such a com plete and amazing failure that the brltlSh seem to cherish it as one of thelr most priceless records; the last tliihg they seem willing to forego is 1 the opportunity to fail in Ireland 1t IS failure which reflects great credit on some of the oldest and best | known of British chara cteristics And i m the last analysis. may it not be this jealousy for a long and consistent fra oltlon which lies at the bottom of England's stubborn efforts to refuse | a logical solution of the Irish prob- 1 lem? Surely, otherwise, some straioht- forward and candid statesman with sense of humor would long ago have s,,-rj
 Gord1an knot and set Ireland free The real issue, of course. is whetber or not Ireland has a separate cu1t7,re from that of England, as a, basis for I1ndepenGence. Space does not permit 1 a discussion of the case for Irish c11l- ture; but no sane man who reads his Irish history and knows his Ireland can doubt the existence of a funda- mental native culture in that devoted land.
 The whole Sim Fein movement has been dedicated to the revival of this culture. That is what Sim F7ein stands for; and the elections prove the issue. There is no 'conapa risor with America at the time of the Civil war The South possessed no such separate culture, in the basic historic sense; there may have been the be- s1nnlngs of culture, but fifty wears nave served to eradicate every diff
 ference between the South and the North.
 Five hundred years have not served 10 merge the Irish culture with the English, and at the end of bitter centuries Ireiani demands her inde-
 pendence as fiercely as she did on the day when first she passed under the hand of the conqueror
 It is when We look a the coming world-struggle between the economic and the political formulas, however, that the most interesting phase of the
 present Irish revolution appears The Sim Fein movement is not a Bolshevist movement, we are told;
 yet no one seems to know precisely what Bolshevist movement is The fact seems to be that the Sim Fein leaders of Ireland recognize
 very clearly the power of the economic formula. Through the development
 of their cooperative societies, and
 through the remarkable political
 writings of their Cooperative leaders,
 they have come to understand the
 weakness of the old parliamentary
 system.
 To be sure, the first steps in the for nation of the new Irish Republic were