The ruling fallacy of the English mind on these matters consists in the assumption that the mere repeal of an old oppression restores a people to the status quo ante.  In the case of Ireland the old oppressions have not been repealed except in two or three points, but even if they had been wholly cancelled it would be absurd to expect immediate recovery from their effects.  If you have been beating a man on the head with a bludgeon for half an hour, and then leave off, there is no sense in saying to him:  “There, I have given over bludgeoning you.  Why on earth don’t you get up, and skip about like me?” If you have been robbing a man’s till for ten years, and then decide—­by the way you have not yet decided—­to leave off, there is no sense in saying to him:  “Why the devil are you always hard up?  Look at me doing the same sort of business as you on absolutely equal terms, and I’m able to keep two motor-cars and six servants.”  But that is precisely what is said to us.  You are eternally expecting from Ireland new miracles of renaissance.  But although she does possess recuperative powers, hardly to be paralleled, even she must have time to slough the corruptions of the past.  You cannot, as some Englishmen imagine, cancel six centuries before breakfast.  Your Penal Laws, for instance, have been long since struck out of the Statute Book, but they have not yet been eliminated from social habitudes or from certain areas of commercial life.

You began to tax Ireland beyond her capacity in 1801, and you are still overtaxing her.  In the interval you withdraw from her economic life a tribute of not less than L325,000,000.  You broke her industrial tradition, injured her credit, depressed her confidence.  You forced upon her a fiscal system devised to suit your needs in utter contempt of hers.  To clean that slate you must first, by some measure of restitution, clean your conscience.  And when that has been done you will have to wait for the curative effects of time to undo the Economics of Unionism.

You suffered landlordism to devastate Ireland unchecked.  The capital that should have gone to enrich and develop the soil was squeezed out of it in rack-rents, largely absentee.  The whole agricultural economy of the country was stricken with a sort of artificial anaemia.  Then very late in the day you enact in shreds and fragments a programme of reform proposed half a century before by the leaders of the Irish people.  To-day rural Ireland is convalescent, but it is absurd to rate her if she does not at once manifest all the activities of robust health.  It is even more absurd to expect her to glow with gratitude.

You muddled our whole system of transportation; your muddle stands to-day in all its ruinous largeness unamended, and, it may be, beyond amendment.  You muddled the Poor Law; and, in the workhouses which you thrust upon us, 8000 children are year by year receiving on their lives the brand of degradation.  You marred education, perverting it into a discipline of denationalisation, and that virus has not yet been expelled.