Influences,"[1] which are Nationalist textbooks, and, for quite recent events, on “A Consideration of Ireland in the Nineteenth Century,” by Mr. G. Locker-Lampson, the present Unionist Member for Salisbury.  A strange circumstance; but Ireland, like all countries where political development has been forcibly arrested from without, is a land of unending paradox.  It is only one of innumerable anomalies that Irish Nationalists should use Unionist histories as propaganda for Nationalism; that the majority of Irish Unionists should insist on ignoring all historical traditions save those which in any normal country would long ago have been consigned by general consent to oblivion and the institutions they embody overthrown; and that Unionist writers such as those I have mentioned should be able to reconcile their history and their politics only by a pessimism with regard to the tendencies of human nature in general, or of Irish nature in particular, with which their own historical teaching, founded on a true perception of cause and effect, appears to be in direct contradiction.

The truth is that the question is one of the construction, not of the verification, of facts; of prophecy for the future, rather than of bare affirmation or negation.  No one can presume to determine such a question without a knowledge of how human beings have been accustomed to act under similar circumstances.  Illumination of that sort Irish history and the contemporary Irish problem incontestably need.  The modern case for the Union rests mainly on the abnormality of Ireland, and that is precisely why it is such a formidable case to meet.  For Ireland in many ways is painfully abnormal.  The most cursory study of her institutions and social, economic, and political life demonstrate that fact.  The Unionist, fixing his eyes on some of the secondary peculiarities, and ignoring their fundamental cause, demonstrates it with ease, and by a habit of mind which yields only with infinite slowness to the growth of political enlightenment, passes instinctively to the deduction that Irish abnormalities render Ireland unfit for self-government.  In other words, he prescribes for the disease a persistent application of the very treatment which has engendered it.  Whatever the result, there is a plausible answer.  If Ireland is disorderly and retrograde, how can she deserve freedom?  If she is peaceful, and shows symptoms of economic recuperation, clearly she does not need or even want it.  In other words, if all that is healthy in the patient battles desperately and not in vain, first against irritant poison, and then against soporific drugs, this healthy struggle for self-preservation is attributed not to native vitality, but to the bracing regimen of coercive government.