The Open Secret of Ireland

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es of escape from your exacting creditors, and your still more exacting king, we have something very like the economics of the Invasion of Anywhere in early feudal times. Had the leaders of these invasions, or rather their clerkly secretaries, written the plain tale of their doings they would have left some such record as this: "There were we, a band of able-bodied, daring, needy men. Our only trade was war; our only capital our suits of armour, our swords and battle-axes. We heard that there was good land and rich booty to

eral-and the observation extends to our own time-that the moment an invader discovers that he is the trustee of civilisation he is irretrievably lost to the truth. He is forced by his own pose to become not an unprincipled liar, but that much more disgusting object, a liar on principle. He is bound, in order to legitimise his own position, to prove that "the natives" are savages, living in a morass of nastiness and ignorance. All facts must be adapted to this conclusion. The clerks, having made this s

scholarship. The real crime of the fabulists lies in this, that their tainted testimony constituted for honest Englishmen the only information about Ireland easily obtainable. The average Englishman (that is to say, the forty millions of him who do not read learned books of any kind) comes to the consideration of contemporary Ireland with a vision distorted almost beyond hope of cure. The treasured lies of seven hundred years are in his heart to-day. For time runs against the cause of truth as well as with it. Once create a Frankenstein of race hatred, and he will gather strength in going. The chronicler's fable of this centu

r father. I will first search for my handkerchief, for I perceive that we are going to weep." In precisely such a mood of deliberate melancholy does the sentimentalist address himself to the Confiscations and the Penal Laws. He is ready to praise without stint any Irish leader who happens to be sufficiently dead. He is ready to confess that all his own British forerunners were abominable blackguards. He admits, not only with candour but even with a certain enthusiastic remorse, that England oppressed Ireland in every phase of their re

speaks out his mind in straight-flung words and few. "You fellows," he says, "brood too much over the past. After all, this is the twentieth century, not the twelfth. What does it matter whether my ancestors murdered yours or not? Bo

Laws but the unrepealed Act of Union. If we recall to the memory of England the systematic baseness of the former, it is in order to remind her that she once thought them right, and now confesses that they were cruelly wrong. We Irish are realists, and we hold the problems of the present as of more account than any agonies or tyrannies of the past. But our realism has the human touch in it, and that constitutes the second impossibility in the invitation tendered us. Que messieurs les assassins commencent! The anti-Irish legend is not dead nor even sleeping, nor are the resources of

ettlements of Danish pirates and traders on the eastern coast, Ireland had remained purely Celtic and purely a pasture country. All wealth was reckoned in cows; Rome had never set foot there, so there was a king for every day in the week, and the sole amusement of such persons was to d

ind him soon became "as wild and ba

to the youth of these countries as an aid towards the consolidation of the Empire. It is a case not merely of the poisoning of a well, but of the poisoning of a great river at its source. The force of cowardice can no farther go. So long as it goes thus far, so long as the Froudes find Fletchers to echo them, Irishmen will inevitably "brood over the past." We do not share the cult of ancestor-worship, but we hold the belief that the Irish nation, like any other, is an organism endowed with a life in some sort continuous and repetitive of its origins. To us it does matter something whether our forerunners were

ry 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 bu

shadows when all y

shadows, the King

te 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

ior race. This is the sanction invoked to legitimise every adventure in invasion and colonisation. M. Jules Hormand, who has attem

g to the higher race and civilisation.... The essential legitimation of conquest is precisely this conviction of our own superiority...

ilisation with English, it is the latter that has given way. The obscuration of this obvious fact is probably to be ascribed to the military successes of the Norman, or rather the Cymro-Frankish invaders. If we were the higher race why did we not put them out? Replying on the same plane of thought we observe that if they were the higher race they would have put us down. But a more detailed assignment of qualities between the two peoples is possible. In general it may be said that the two stood on much the same level of mentality,