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[ Aetat. 25-27 ] J O Y C E 257that the modern papacy is as deaf to the Irish cries for help as the medievalpapacy was:Already weakened by their long journey, the cries are nearly spent whenthey arrive at the bronze door. The messengers of the people who neverin the past have renounced the Holy See, the only Catholic people towhom faith also means the exercise of faith, are rejected in favor of messengersof a monarch, descended from apostates, who solemnly apostasizedhimself on the day of his coronation, declaring in the presence of hisnobles and commons that the rites of the Roman Catholic Church are'superstitition and idolatry.' 20Although Joyce had himself left the Church, he continued to denounceall his life the deviousness of Papal policy, which incongruously preferredto conciliate Edward VII rather than to take care of a people of provenCatholic loyalty.In his second article, 'Home Rule Comes of Age,' Joyce gave a surprisinglydetailed history of home rule legislation and of the emasculatedbill then being considered by the House of Lords. He recalled Gladstoneas a hypocrite who pretended an interest in the problem only because heknew that the Lords would reject the Commons' bill. Neither the LiberalParty nor the English Catholics could be trusted; they were as unreliableas the Irish Parliamentarians. As he had said earlier to Stanislaus but nowideclared publicly, the real hope lay in Griffith's Sinn Fein movement, 1with its policy of economic resistance and passive disloyalty to Britishrule. The boycott was the one weapon of which Joyce thoroughly ap- 1proved, especially since it was of Irish manufacture.The third article, 'Ireland at the Bar,' Joyce wrote four months afterhe had written his previous article, and its tone is quite different.* Nevermore Irish than when he attacked his country for attacking itself, hecould not help now invoking its special pathos in the face of Englishoppression. The new article was inspired by the English newspapers' denunciationsof some recent acts of agrarian terrorism in Ireland. Joyceillustrated the inarticulate struggle of his people by recounting the murdertrial 'some years ago' (actually in 1882, the year of his birth) of MylesJoyce. This old man spoke nothing but Irish, and tried desperately todefend his innocence in that language before an uncomprehending judgeand jury, and with an interpreter who made no attempt to render hisstory fairly. 'The figure of this dumbfounded old man, a remnant of acivilisation not ours, deaf and dumb before his judge, is a symbol of theIrish nation at the bar of public opinion.' 21The rare agrarian crimesmust be understood as acts of desperation; Ireland, whatever the Britishjournalists might say, was not a country of louts and savages. To findbrutality one should look not to Irish terrorism but to British mistreat-* He had just written 'The Dead' in the same mood of tenderness. See pp. 252-3 and p.264.