But the more general attitude differs widely from this.  Confronting us with a bluff and not unkindly demeanour, worthy of the nation that invented cold baths as a tonic against all spiritual anguish, the practical, modern Englishman speaks out his mind in straight-flung words and few.  “You fellows,” he says, “brood too much over the past.  After all, this is the twentieth century, not the twelfth.  What does it matter whether my ancestors murdered yours or not?  Both would be dead now in any event.  What does it matter whether yours were the saints and men of letters and mine the savages, or whether the boot was on the other leg?  That’s all over and done with.  Imitate me.  Let bygones be bygones.”

Now this is, in some respects, the authentic voice of health.  Undoubtedly the most characteristic thing about the past is that it is not present, and to lavish on it too tragic and intense a devotion is to love death more than life.  And yet our bluff Englishman can learn in two words how it comes about that his invitation represents a demand for the impossible.  In the first place, the bygones have not gone by.  Our complaint is made not against the crimes of his fathers, who are dead, but against the crimes of himself and his fellows, who are alive.  We denounce not the repealed Penal Laws but the unrepealed Act of Union.  If we recall to the memory of England the systematic baseness of the former, it is in order to remind her that she once thought them right, and now confesses that they were cruelly wrong.  We Irish are realists, and we hold the problems of the present as of more account than any agonies or tyrannies of the past.  But our realism has the human touch in it, and that constitutes the second impossibility in the invitation tendered us. Que messieurs les assassins commencent! The anti-Irish legend is not dead nor even sleeping, nor are the resources of calumny yet exhausted.  An instance is immediately at hand.  I have, at this moment, on my desk a volume lately issued—­“The School History of England.”  It is published by the Clarendon Press, Oxford; Mr Rudyard Kipling contributes twenty-three pieces of verse, and a Mr C. R. L. Fletcher, whose qualifications are not stated, appears to be responsible for the prose.  The book has been praised in most of the papers, and it will no doubt go far.  This is the picture of the coming to Ireland of the Cymro-Frankish adventurers which its pages will imprint on the minds of the youth of England: 

“One event of his reign (Henry II.’s) must not be forgotten, his visit to Ireland in 1171-2.  St Patrick, you may have heard, had banished the snakes from that island, but he had not succeeded in banishing the murderers and thieves who were worse than many snakes.  In spite of some few settlements of Danish pirates and traders on the eastern coast, Ireland had remained purely Celtic and purely a pasture country.  All wealth was reckoned in cows; Rome had never