some such record as this:  “There were we, a band of able-bodied, daring, needy men.  Our only trade was war; our only capital our suits of armour, our swords and battle-axes.  We heard that there was good land and rich booty to be had in Anywhere; we went and fought for it.  Our opponents were brave men, too, but badly organised.  In some places we won.  There we substituted our own law for the queer sort of law under which these people had lived; when they resisted too strongly we had, of course, no option but to kill them.  In other places we got mixed up completely by alliances and marriages with the old stock, and lived most agreeably with them.  In others again the natives killed us, and remained in possession.  Such was the Invasion of Anywhere.”

But (I had almost said unhappily) the invaders were not content with having swords, they had also consciences.  They were Christians, and thought it necessary to justify themselves before the High Court of Christian Europe.  Consequently the clerks had to write up the record in quite a different fashion.  They discovered that their bluff, hard-bitten, rather likeable employers, scarcely one of whom could read or write, had really invaded Anywhere as the trustees of civilisation.  Now it may be said in general—­and the observation extends to our own time—­that the moment an invader discovers that he is the trustee of civilisation he is irretrievably lost to the truth.  He is forced by his own pose to become not an unprincipled liar, but that much more disgusting object, a liar on principle.  He is bound, in order to legitimise his own position, to prove that “the natives” are savages, living in a morass of nastiness and ignorance.  All facts must be adapted to this conclusion.  The clerks, having made this startling discovery, went on to supplement it by the further discovery that their masters had invaded Anywhere in order to please the Pope, and introduce true religion.  This second role completes the dedication of the invaders on the altar of mendacity.  It was Leo XIII. himself who, with that charming humour of his, deprecated the attitude of certain a priori historians who, said he, if they were writing the Gospel story would, in their anxiety to please the Pope, probably suppress the denial of Peter.

These things which might have happened anywhere did, in fact, happen in Ireland.  Out of the footprints of the invaders there sprang up a legion of fictionists, professional cooks of history.  Beginning with Giraldus Cambrensis they ought to have ended, but, as we shall see, did not end with Froude.  The significance of these mercenaries of literature can hardly be exaggerated; it is not too much to say that they found Ireland a nation, and left her a question.  It is not at all that they put on record the thing that was not as regards the events of their own period.  That might be and has been amended by the labours of impartial scholarship.  The real crime of the fabulists lies in this, that their tainted testimony