constituted for honest Englishmen the only information about Ireland easily obtainable.  The average Englishman (that is to say, the forty millions of him who do not read learned books of any kind) comes to the consideration of contemporary Ireland with a vision distorted almost beyond hope of cure.  The treasured lies of seven hundred years are in his heart to-day.  For time runs against the cause of truth as well as with it.  Once create a Frankenstein of race hatred, and he will gather strength in going.  The chronicler’s fable of this century becomes the accredited historical fact of the next.  Give it what billiard-players call “legs” enough and it will mature into a tradition, a proverb, a spontaneous instinct.  There is a whole department of research concerned with the growth of myths, stage by stage, from a little nebulous blotch into a peopled world of illusion.  The strange evolution there set forth finds an exact parallel in the development of English opinion on Ireland.  And, indeed, the more you study “the Irish Question,” as it is envisaged by the ruling mind of Great Britain, the more conscious are you of moving in the realm not of reason but of mythology.

All this will seem obvious even to the point of weariness.  But it is of interest as furnishing a clue to the English attitude towards Irish history; I should rather say attitudes, for there are two.  The first is that of the Man of Feeling.  His mode of procedure recalls inevitably an exquisite story which is to be found somewhere in Rousseau.  During country walks, Jean Jacques tells us, his father would suddenly say:  “My son, we will speak of your dear, dead mother.”  And Jean Jacques was expected to reply:  “Wait, then, a moment, my dear father.  I will first search for my handkerchief, for I perceive that we are going to weep.”  In precisely such a mood of deliberate melancholy does the sentimentalist address himself to the Confiscations and the Penal Laws.  He is ready to praise without stint any Irish leader who happens to be sufficiently dead.  He is ready to confess that all his own British forerunners were abominable blackguards.  He admits, not only with candour but even with a certain enthusiastic remorse, that England oppressed Ireland in every phase of their relations.  Then comes the conclusion.  So terrible have been the sins of his fathers that he feels bound to make restitution.  And in order to make restitution, to be kind and helpful and remedial, he must retain the management of Irish affairs in his benevolent hands.  In order to expiate the crimes of the past he must repeat the basal blunder that was the cause and source of them.  For this kind of sympathy we have only to say, in a somewhat vulgar phrase, that we have no use whatever.  The Englishman who “sympathises” with Ireland is lost.