etext. The real grievance is
our presence in Ireland at all. If there was a hope that by buying up
the soil and distributing it among the tenantry we could make them, if
not loyal, yet orderly and prosperous, even so the experiment would be
worth trying; but, again, there is no such hope. The Land Bill of 1870
gave the tenants a proprietary right in their holdings. They have
borrowed money on the security of that right at ruinous interest, and
the poorest of them are already sinking under their debts to the local
banker or tradesman. If we make them proprietors to-morrow, their farms
in a few years will be sold or mortgaged. We shall have destroyed one
set of landlords to create another who will not be more merciful."[8]

[Sidenote: Criticism]

The only way of meeting the historical argument, containing as it does
admitted truth, and supported as it is by high authorities, is to survey
the broad phenomena of Irish history, and see what are the inferences
which they warrant.[9] Whoever wishes to derive instruction from the
melancholy history of the kingdom of Ireland must, as has already been
intimated, rid himself from the delusions caused in the domain of
history by personification. He must dismiss the notion that England and
Ireland are persons to be charged with individual and continuous
responsibility for the crimes or follies of past ages. He must check the
natural but misguiding tendency of the human mind to imagine that in
national affairs when anything goes wrong you can always, or indeed
generally, lay your finger upon some definite assignable wrong-doer,
that is, upon some man or some men who can be held responsible for
political calamities or errors, as a murderer may be held guilty of
murder, or a robber of theft. A calm critic should also reflect on the
profound truth of the dictum (attributed by the way to an Irishman) that
"history is at best but an old almanack," and, while not entertaining
any great hope that antiquarian research can afford much direct guidance
as to the proper mode of arranging the future relations between England
and Ireland, remember that the most salutary function of the study of
the past is to tone down those historical animosities which derive their
bitterness from the ignorant habit of trying the actors in bygone scenes
by moral laws to which they are not justly amenable. The moral function
of an historian is to diminish the hatreds which divide nation from
nation and class from