INTRODUCTION

Chapter I
the executive in Ireland

Chapter II
the financial relations between great Britain and Ireland

Chapter III
the economic conditions of Ireland

Chapter IV
the land question

Chapter V
the religious question

Chapter VI
the educational problem

Chapter VII
unionism in Ireland

Chapter VIII
Ireland and democracy

Chapter IX
Ireland and great Britain

Chapter X
conclusion

NOTES

ADDENDUM

     “You desire my thoughts on the affairs of Ireland, a subject
     little considered, and consequently not understood in
     England.”

     —­JohnHELY Hutchinson, Provost of Trinity College, Dublin,
     in a letter written in 1779 to the Lord Lieutenant of
     Ireland.

INTRODUCTION

A decree of Pope Adrian IV., the only Englishman who has sat in the chair of St. Peter, in virtue of the professed jurisdiction of the Papacy over all islands, by a strange irony, sanctioned the invasion of Ireland by Strongbow in the reign of Henry II.  Three years ago I stood in the crypt of St. Peter’s in Rome, and the Englishman who was with me expatiated on the appropriate nature of the massive sarcophagus of red granite, adorned only with a carved bull’s head at each of the four corners, which seemed to him to stand as a type of British might and British simplicity, and in which the sacristan had told us lay all that was mortal of Nicholas Breakspeare.  Seeing that I took no part in this panegyric, he took me on one side and said that he had observed that all the English Protestants to whom he showed that tomb, situated as it is literally ad limina Apostolorum, waxed eloquent, but, on the other hand, the Irish Catholics whom he told that it contained the bones of the dead Pontiff invariably shook their fists at the ashes of the unwitting, but none the less actual, source of their country’s ills.  To this I replied by quoting to him a saying of Robert Louis Stevenson, who as a Scot viewed the matter impartially, and who declared “that the Irishman should not love the Englishman is not disgraceful, rather, indeed, honourable, since it depends on wrongs ancient like the race and not personal to him who cherishes the indignation.”

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