far too beneficent to waste on things outside the ambit of our own immediate life.  If they are wise they will come to Irish history as to a school, and they will learn one lesson that runs through it like the refrain of a ballad.  A very simple lesson it is, just this:  Ireland cannot be put down.  Ireland always has her way in the end.  If the opposite view is widely held the explanation lies on the surface.  Two causes have co-operated to produce the illusion.  Everybody agrees that Great Britain has acted in a most blackguardly fashion towards Ireland; everybody assumes that blackguardism always succeeds in this world, therefore Ireland is a failure.  The only flaw in this syllogism is that it is in direct conflict with every known fact.  For the rest we have to thank or blame the sentimentalism of Mr Matthew Arnold.  His proud but futile Celts who “went down to battle but always fell” have been mistaken for the Irish of actual history.  The truth is, of course, that the phrase is in the grand manner of symbolism.  When Ecclesiastes laments that the eye is not filled with seeing nor the ear with hearing we do not argue him deaf and blind; we take his words as a proclamation of that famine and fierce appetite of the spirit which has created all the higher religions.  Ireland agrees with Ecclesiastes.  Perceiving that there is in matter no integral and permanent reality she cannot be content with material victories; her poets are subtle in what a French writer styles the innuendoes by which the soul makes its enormous claims.  The formula of her aspiration has been admirably rendered by the late Mrs Nora Chesson: 

    “He follows after shadows when all your chase is done;
    He follows after shadows, the King of Ireland’s son.”

Were I to read the poem, of which these lines are the motif, to certain genial Englishmen of my acquaintance they would observe that the gentleman in question was a “queer cove, staying up late at night and catching cold, and that no doubt there was a woman in the case.”  But these are considerations a little remote from the daily dust of politics.  In the sense in which every life is a failure, and the best life the worst failure, Ireland is a failure.  But in every other sense, in all that touches the fathomable business of daylight, she has been a conspicuous success.

A certain type of fanaticism is naive enough to regard the intercourse of England with Ireland as that of a superior with an inferior race.  This is the sanction invoked to legitimise every adventure in invasion and colonisation.  M. Jules Hormand, who has attempted, in his recent book, “Domination et Colonisation,” to formulate a theory of the whole subject, touches bed-rock when he writes: