I take it, then, as certain that in the mind of the ordinary British Home Ruler the justification for Home Rule is not administrative but historical.  He pictures Ireland before the English invasion as an organised and independent State, happy in the possession of a native polity which Englishmen have ruthlessly destroyed, now suffering under laws and institutions forced upon her by the conquerors, suitable it may be to men of Anglo-Saxon descent, but utterly alien to the genius and temper of a Celtic population.  To him, therefore, Home Rule presents itself as an act of National restitution.

Personally, I believe this to be a complete misreading of history.  It is not denied—­at least I do not deny—­that both the English and British Governments, in their dealings with Ireland have done many things that were stupid, and some things that were abominable.  But among their follies or their crimes is not to be counted the destruction of any such State as I have described; for no such State existed.  They did not uproot one type of civilisation in order to plant another.  The Ireland with which England had to deal had not acquired a national organisation, and when controversialists talk of “restoring” this or that institution to Ireland, the only institutions that can possibly be “restored” are in their origin importations from England.

This does not, of course, mean that the English were a superior race dealing with an inferior one.  Indeed, there is, in my view, no sharp division of race at all.  In the veins of the inhabitants of these Islands runs more than one strain of blood.  The English are not simply Teutonic—­still less are the Irish Celtic.  We must conceive the pre-historic inhabitants both of Britain and of Ireland as subject to repeated waves of invasion from the wandering peoples of the Continent.  The Celt preceded the Teuton; and in certain regions his language still survives.  The Teuton followed him in (as I suppose) far greater numbers, and his language has become that of a large fraction of the civilised world.  But in no part of the United Kingdom is the Teutonic strain free from either the Celtic or pre-Celtic strain; nor do I believe that the Celtic strain has anywhere a predominance such as that which, speaking very roughly, the Teutonic strain possesses in the East of these Islands, or the pre-Celtic strain in the West.

There is, therefore, no race frontier to be considered, still less is there any question of inferiority or superiority.  The Irish difficulty, historically considered, arises in the main from two circumstances.  The first of these, to which I have just referred, is that when England began to intervene in the welter of Irish inter-tribal warfare, she was already an organised State, slowly working its way through feudal monarchy to constitutional freedom.  The second is that while the religious revolution of the sixteenth century profoundly and permanently affected the larger