“In tragic life, God wot,
    No villain need be, passions spin the plot;
    We are betrayed by what is false within.”

Least of all am I to be understood as ascribing to modern Englishmen any sort of planned, aforethought malice in regard to Ireland.  It is what Bacon might have called a mere idol of the platform to suppose that they are filled with a burning desire to oppress Ireland.  The dream of their lives is to ignore her, to eliminate from their calculations this variable constant which sheds bewilderment upon every problem.  Could they but succeed in that, a very Sabbath of peace would have dawned for them.  The modern Englishman is too much worried to plan the oppression of anybody.  “Did you ever,” asked Lord Salisbury on a remembered occasion, “have a boil on your neck?” To the Englishman of 1911—­that troubled man whose old self-sufficiency has in our own time been shattered beyond repair by Boer rifles, German shipyards, French aeroplanes—­Ireland is the boil on the neck of his political system.  It is the one peche de jeunesse of his nation that will not sleep in the grave of the past.  Like the ghost in “Hamlet” it pursues and plagues him without respite.  Shunned on the battlements it invades his most private chamber, or, finding him in talk with friends, shames and scares him with subterranean mutterings.  Is there no way out of a situation so troublesome and humiliating?

There is.  Ireland cannot be ignored, but she can easily be appeased.  The boil is due to no natural and incurable condition.  It is the direct result of certain artificial ligatures and compressions; remove these and it disappears.  This spectre haunts the conscience of England to incite her not to a deed of blood but to a deed of justice; every wind is favourable and every omen.  It is, indeed, true that if she is to succeed, England must do violence to certain prejudices which now afflict her like a blindness; she must deal with us as a man with men.  But is not the Kingdom of Heaven taken by violence?

CHAPTER II

HISTORY

(a) Coloured

Mendacity follows the flag.  There never yet was an invader who did not, in obedience to a kindly human instinct, lie abundantly respecting the people whose country he had invaded.  The reason is very plain.  In all ages men delight to acquire property by expedients other than that of honest labour.  In the period of private war the most obvious alternative to working is fighting, or hiring servants to fight; the sword is mightier than the spade.  If we add that an expedition into a foreign country offers the additional advantages of escape from your exacting creditors, and your still more exacting king, we have something very like the economics of the Invasion of Anywhere in early feudal times.  Had the leaders of these invasions, or rather their clerkly secretaries, written the plain tale of their doings they would have left