was, so unhappily circumstanced, that at that time its misery was necessary to our happiness and its slavery to our freedom.”  For insolence this would be hard to beat.  Let it be noted well.  It is the philosophy of the “Predominant Partner.”  If he had thanked God for having our throats to cut, and cut them with loud gratitude like Cromwell, a later generation would be incensed.  But this other attitude is the gall in the cup.  Macaulay is, of course, shocked by Machiavelli’s “Prince.”  In his essay on Machiavelli we read:  “It is indeed scarcely possible for any person not well acquainted with the history and literature of Italy to read without horror and amazement the celebrated treatise which has brought so much obloquy on the name of Machiavelli.  Such a display of wickedness, naked, yet not ashamed, such cool, judicious, scientific atrocity, seemed rather to belong to a fiend than to the most depraved of men.”  But, later, in the same essay, is a valuable sidelight.  He writes of Machiavelli as a man “whose only fault was that, having adopted some of the maxims then generally received, he arranged them most luminously and expressed them more forcibly than any other writer.”  Here we have the truth, of course not so intended, but evident:  Machiavelli’s crime is not for the sentiments he entertained but for writing them down luminously and forcibly—­in other words, for giving the show away.

Think of Macaulay’s “horror and amazement,” and read this further in the same essay:  “Every man who has seen the world knows that nothing is so useless as a general maxim.  If it be very moral and very true it may serve for a copy to a charity boy.”  So the very moral and the very true are not for the statesman but for the charity-boy.  This perhaps may be defended as irony; hardly, but even so, in such irony the character appears as plainly as in volumes of solemn rant.  To us it stands out clearly as the characteristic attitude of the English Government.  The English people are used to it, practise it, and will put up with it; but the Irish people never were, are not now, and never will be used to it; and we won’t put up with it.  We get calm as old atrocities recede into history, but to repeat the old cant, above all to try and sustain such now, sets all the old fire blazing—­blazing with a fierceness that will end only with the British connection.

IV

Not many of us in Ireland will be deceived by Macaulay, but there is danger in an occasional note of writers, such as Bernard Shaw and Stuart Mill.  Our instinct often saves us by natural repugnance from the hypocrite, when we may be confused by some sentiment of a sincere man, not foreseeing its tendency.  When an aggressive power looks for an opening for aggression it first looks for a pretext, and our danger lies in men’s readiness to give it the pretext.  Such a sentiment as this from Mill—­on “Liberty”—­gives the required opening:  “Despotism is a legitimate