the blood and breath out of every interest in the country.  What was meat to England was poison to Ireland, and even honest Englishmen, hypnotised by the economists of the day, were unable to perceive this plain truth.  Let me give another illustration.  The capital exploit of Union Economics was, as has been said, its dealing with the land question, but perhaps its most pathetic fallacy was the policy with which it met the Great Famine.  Now the singular thing about this famine is that during it there was no scarcity of food in Ireland; there was only a shortage of potatoes.

“In 1847 alone,” writes Mr Michael Davitt in his “Fall of Feudalism,” “food to the value of L44,958,000 sterling was grown in Ireland according to the statistical returns for that year.  But a million of people died for want of food all the same.”

The explanation is obvious:  the peasants grew potatoes to feed themselves, they raised corn to pay their rents.  A temporary suspension of rent-payments and the closing of the ports would have saved the great body of the people.  But the logic of Unionism worked on other lines.  The government opened the ports, cheapened corn, and made rents harder to pay.  At the same time they passed a new Coercion Act, and reorganised the police on its present basis to ensure that rents should be paid.  To the wisdom of this policy, history is able to call witnesses by the million—­unhappily however it has to call them from famine graveyards, and the waste womb of the Atlantic.

This essential wrongness of Unionism, so amply illustrated in every year of its working, continues.  But at least, our bluff Englishman urges, the dead past can be suffered to bury those crimes and blunders of Unionism which you have enumerated.  Let us start with a clean slate.  Now, as will have been gathered from a previous chapter, we recognise in this invitation an accent of soundness.  We modern Home Rulers desire above all to be loyal to the century in which we live.  We are sick of that caricature which depicts Ireland as the mad heroine of a sort of perpetual suttee, in which all the interests of the present are immolated on the funeral-pyre of the past.  But let us come closer to things.  How do you clean a slate except by liquidating the debts of which it keeps the record?  The late Vicomte de Vogue wrote an admirable novel, “Les Morts qui Parlent.”  The dead are always speaking; you cannot stop their strong eloquence with a mouthful of clay.  The “business man” thinks no doubt that the Napoleonic War is no more than Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba.  But he pays annual tribute to it, for he has to make annual provision for the L600,000,000 which it added to the National Debt.  And just as Mr Pitt’s foreign policy is in that respect a living reality of our own time, so also, but in a much graver form, are the past depredations and ineptitudes of Unionism living realities in the present economy of Ireland.