The only moral commended to the reader is that expressed by Browning in a firm and inevitable line, which has been disastrously forgotten in so many passages of English history:—­

     “It’s fitter being sane than mad.”

I have tried also to convey to him, with what success others must judge, something of the “pride and passion” of Irish nationality.  That is, in truth, the dream that comes through the multitude of business.  If you think that Home Rule is a little thing which must be done in a little way for little reasons, your feet are set on the path to failure.  Home Rule is one of those fundamental reforms that are not achieved at all unless they are achieved greatly.

T.M.K.

December, 1911.

THE OPEN SECRET OF IRELAND

CHAPTER I

AN EXERCISE IN HUMILITY

In order to understand Ireland we must begin by understanding England.  On no other terms will that complex of facts, memories, and passions, which is called the Irish Question, yield up its secret.  “You have always been,” said a Lady Clanricarde to some English politician, “like a high wall standing between us and the sun.”  The phrase lives.  It reveals in a flashlight of genius the historical relations of the two nations.  It explains and justifies the principle adopted as the basis of this discussion, namely, that no examination of the Irish Problem is possible without a prior examination of the English mind.  It used to be said that England dearly loved a Lord, a dictum which may have to be modified in the light of recent events.  Far more than a Lord does the typical Englishman love a Judge, and the thought of acting as a Judge.  Confronted with Ireland he says to himself:  “Here are these Irish people; some maintain that they are nice, others that they are nasty, but everybody agrees that they are queer.  Very good.  I will study them in a judicial spirit; I will weigh the evidence dispassionately, and give my decision.  When it comes to action, I will play the honest broker between their contending parties.”  Now this may be a very agreeable way of going about the business, but it is fatally unreal.  Great Britain comes into court, she will be pained to hear, not as Judge but rather as defendant.  She comes to answer the charge that, having seized Ireland as a “trustee of civilisation,” she has, either through incompetence or through dishonesty, betrayed her trust.  We have a habit, in everyday life, of excusing the eccentricities of a friend or an enemy by the reflection that he is, after all, as God made him.  Ireland is politically as Great Britain made her.  Since the twelfth century, that is to say for a great part of the Middle Ages and for the whole of the modern period, the mind of England and not that of Ireland has been the dominant fact in Irish history.