These extracts are taken from Irish History and Irish Character, which was published in 1861.  But in 1867 Mr. Goldwin Smith wrote a series of letters to the Daily News, which were republished in 1868 under the title of The Irish Question; and these letters form, perhaps, the most statesmanlike and far-seeing pronouncement that has ever been made on the Irish difficulty.

In the preface Mr. Goldwin Smith begins: 

“The Irish legislation of the last forty years, notwithstanding the adoption of some remedial measures, has failed through the indifference of Parliament to the sentiments of Irishmen; and the harshness of English public opinion has embittered the effects on Irish feeling of the indifference of Parliament.  Occasionally a serious effort has been made by an English statesman to induce Parliament to approach Irish questions in that spirit of sympathy, and with that anxious desire to be just, without which a Parliament in London cannot legislate wisely for Ireland.  Such efforts have hitherto met with no response; is it too much to hope that it will be otherwise in the year now opening?"[46]

The only comment I shall make on these words is:  they were penned more than half a century after Mr. Pitt’s Union, which was to shower down blessings on the Irish people.

Mr. Goldwin Smith’s first letter was written on the 23rd of November, 1867, the day of the execution of the Fenians Allen, Larkin, and O’Brien.  He says—­

“There can be no doubt, I apprehend, that the Irish difficulty has entered on a new phase, and that Irish disaffection has, to repeat an expression which I heard used in Ireland, come fairly into a line with the other discontented nationalities of Europe.  Active Fenianism probably pervades only the lowest class; passive sympathy, which the success of the movement would at once convert into active co-operation, extends, it is to be feared, a good deal higher.

“England has ruin before her, unless she can hit on a remedy, and overcome any obstacles of class interest or of national pride which would prevent its application, the part of Russia in Poland, or of Austria in Italy—­a part cruel, hateful, demoralizing, contrary to all our high principles and professions, and fraught with dangers to our own freedom.  Our position will be worse than that of Russia in this respect, that, while her Poland is only a province, our Fenianism is an element pervading every city of the United Kingdom in which Irish abound, and allying itself with kindred misery, discontent, and disorder.  Wretchedness, the result of misgovernment, has caused the Irish people to multiply with the recklessness of despair, and now here are their avenging hosts in the midst of us, here is the poison of their disaffection running through every member of our social frame.  Not only so, but the same wretchedness has sent millions of emigrants to form an Irish nation in the United States, where the Irish are a great political power, swaying by their votes the councils of the American Republic, and in immediate contact with those Transatlantic possessions of England, the retention of which it is now patriotic to applaud, and will one day be patriotic to have dissuaded.