The Irish standard., 1919-02-15
A Leader Whose Genius Has Trans.
formed The Irish Situation in
Few Years.
(From Current Opinion)

1
CFrom Current Opinion)
A capacity for the quiet manage,
ment of emotional men and women,
never before displayed so complete
ly by any Irish leader, and a born
mathematician's sense of proportion
applied to politics afford the combina-
ton that seems to explain the career
Of Eamonn de Valera to mystified
London newspapers. He is a man of
genius, however misapplied, II We are
ito be guided by the London News,
while the Manchester Guardian thinks
that anywhere but in Ireland he would
now be statesman in reasonable Of
flee, swaying the destinies of his coun.
try. In a period that he remains still
character, unfamiliar and mysterious.
he has converted an obscure and pro-
scribed revolutionary society into the
dominant Irish political party. He has
routed the entrenched leadership of
the Redmonds and the billions, the
O'Briens and the Devlins all COM
bined. He has revolutionized the
attitude of the Roman Catholic
hierarchy, at one time openly hostile
to him. He has composed feud after
feud within his following through his
perfect sympathy with Irish human
Nature and rare comprehension of
it's merits and defects. Results Of
this sort, as the Liberal Manchester
organ remarks, are never achieved
by mediocrities, and those British
newspapers which at first hailed de
Valera as an interloper and foreign
er, coming from nowhere and rep.
resenting nothing, are now inclined
to agree that humiliating as it must
be to the politicians in London, he
has matched his wits against theirs
and made even the great Lloyd
George, to say nothing of Sir Edward
Carson, seem a trifle inefficient by
comparison.
The mystery in which the name and
the career of de Valera are involved
include his present whereabouts. No.
body seems to know definitely, so rig
i'd is the Irish censorship, whether he
is in Jail or out of 1t or just what part
of Ireland he calls home. The prison
experiences of the past four or five
porary says, and he now looks, with
his lined and pinched face, somewhat
older than his thirty-seven years. He
is fine looking still, says the Lon
don News, altho he was never hand
some, like Parnell in his prime, or
aristocratically elegant, like the mar
tyr Emmett. Nature seems to have
given him the heavy build of O'Con-
nell, but he has not grown fat, like
that lberator. The wide open eyes
of de Valera, set far apart, are large
and staring, forming an essential fea-
ture of the physiognomical impression
as a whole. The lips are firm and
compressed in repose. The nose is
slightly hawklike and the skin by its
swarthiness reveals the Iberian de.
scent. The father of de Valera is un-
derstood to have been political ref
ugee from Spain when he met and
married the Irish girl who was to be-
come the mother of the Sim Fein
hero.
The little boy received the name Of
Edmond in baptism, not Eamonn. He
learned to lisp the English tongue in
America. When he first arrived in
Bruree in county Limerick he was only
six. He spoke Spanish and French
from childhood and in Ireland he
learned to ride like centaur and to
swim and to shoot. He was educated
at big school near the college of
Blackjack. His mother despised the
English all her life and from the first
he was passionately Irish, with a
strong tendency to play with tin SOL
diers. He must have the linguistic
gift, for it is affirmed that he could
speak Gaelic with fluency when he was
only twelve. His mathematical genius
the most astonishing of his endow-
ments-disclosed itself when he was
seventeen and he thought at one time
of becoming an astronomer. Before
he had passed on to the college Of
Blackrock he was applying mathemati-
cal formulas to every conceivable
problem. His sense of proportion and
of order, his foresight, his construc-
tiveness, his ability to plan far ahead,
are aspects, to all who know him, of
his mathematical genius. He was a
successful tutor in consequence and
he astonished the examiners, when ap-
plying for his degree, with abstruse cal
culations of planetary weights that re.
vealed no error at any stage of intri.
cate computations that filled reams of