Now these things are repeating themselves with an enormous reality in
the Irish Revolution. You will not be able to make a Party System out of
the matter. Everybody is in revolt; therefore everybody is telling the
truth. The Nationalists will go on caring most for the nation, as Danton
and the defenders of the frontier went on caring most for the nation.
The priests will go on caring most for religion, as Robespierre went on
caring most for religion. The Socialists will go on caring most for the
cure of physical suffering, as Marat went on caring most for it. It is
out of these real differences that real things can be made, such as the
modern French democracy. For by such tenacity everyone sees at last that
there is something in the other person’s position. And those drilled in
party discipline see nothing either past or present. And where there is
nothing there is Satan.
For a long time past in our politics there has not only been no real
battle, but no real bargain. No two men have bargained as Gladstone and
Parnell bargained--each knowing the other to be a power. But in real
revolutions men discover that no one man can really agree with another
man until he has disagreed with him.