ranch of
the great human family. They were distinguished from us by more than one
moral and intellectual peculiarity, which the difference of situation
and of education, great as that difference was, did not seem altogether
to explain. They had an aspect of their own, a mother tongue of their
own. When they talked English their pronunciation was ludicrous; their
phraseology was grotesque, as is always the phraseology of those who
think in one language and express their thoughts in another. They were
therefore foreigners; and of all foreigners they were the most hated and
despised: the most hated, for they had, during five centuries, always
been our enemies; the most despised, for they were our vanquished,
enslaved, and despoiled enemies. The Englishman compared with pride his
own fields with the desolate bogs whence the Rapparees issued forth to
rob and murder, and his own dwelling with the hovels where the peasants
and the hogs of the Shannon wallowed in filth together. He was a member
of a society far inferior, indeed, in wealth and civilisation, to the
society in which we live, but still one of the wealthiest and most
highly civilised societies that the world had then seen: the Irish were
almost as rude as the savages of Labrador. He was a freeman: the Irish
were the hereditary serfs of his race. He worshipped God after a pure
and rational fashion: the Irish were sunk in idolatry and superstition.
He knew that great numbers of Irish had repeatedly fled before a small
English force, and that the whole Irish population had been held down
by a small English colony; and he very complacently inferred that he was
naturally a being of a higher order than the Irishman: for it is thus
that a dominant race always explains its ascendency and excuses its
tyranny. That in vivacity, humour, and eloquence, the Irish stand high
among the nations of the world is now universally acknowledged. That,
when well disciplined, they are excellent soldiers has been proved on a
hundred fields of battle. Yet it is certain that, a century and a half
ago, they were generally despised in our island as both a stupid and a
cowardly people. And these were the men who were to hold England down
by main force while her civil and ecclesiastical constitution was
destroyed. The blood of the whole nation boiled at the thought. To be
conquered by Frenchmen or by Spaniards would have seemed comparatively
a tolerable fate. With Frenchmen and Spaniards we had bee