M.F.J.  McD.

Goldsmith Building, Temple.

CHAPTER I

THE EXECUTIVE IN IRELAND

     “La ‘Garnison’ a occupee le pays sans le ‘gouverner,’ ou en ne
     le gouvernant que de son propre interet de classe:  son
     hegemonie a ete toute sa politique.”

     —­L.  Paul-Dubois, L’Irlande Contemporaine, 1907.

“A regarder de pres on percoit pourtant que cette imitation Irlandaise de la justice brittanique n’en est sur bien des points qu’une assez grossiere caricature, ce qui prouve une fois de plus que les meilleures institutions ne vaient que ce que valent les hommes qui les appliquent, et que les lois sent pen de choses quand elles ne sont pas soutenus par les moeurs.”—­Ibid.

“What does Ireland want now; what would she have more?” asked Pitt of Grattan at the dinner table of the Duke of Portland in 1794, and Englishmen have echoed and re-echoed the question throughout the century which has elapsed.  The mode in which it is asked reminds me, I must confess, of that first sentence in Bacon’s Essays—­“What is truth? said jesting Pilate, and would not wait for an answer.”

When, at the end of the nineteenth century, the nations of Europe devoted themselves to a retrospective study of the progress which the passing of a hundred years had brought in its train, Ireland alone was unable to join in the chorus of self-congratulation which arose on every side.

To her it was the centenary of the great betrayal to which, as a distinguished writer has said, the whole of her unbribed intellect was opposed, and which formed the climax to a century of suffering.  The ancients who held that when ill-fortune befell their country the gods must be asleep would have said so, I have no doubt, of Ireland at the end of the eighteenth century.  The people, in a phrase which has become historic, had put their money on the wrong horse in their devotion to the Stuart cause, but, more than this, while they thereby earned the detestation of the Whigs, they were not compensated for it by the sympathy of the Tories, who feared their Catholicism even more than they liked their Jacobitism.  In this way the country fell between two stools, and was not governed, even as English Statesmen professed to govern it, as a dependency, but rather it was exploited in the interest of the ruling caste with an eye to the commercial interests of Great Britain in so far as its competition was injurious.  Religious persecution, aiming frankly at proselytism, and restrictions imposed so as to choke every industry which in any way hit English manufactures were the keynotes of the whole policy, and in the pages of Edmund Burke one may find a more searching indictment of English rule in Ireland in the eighteenth century than any which has since been drawn up.