ng it to pass that there, at any rate,
it is not true to say that nothing succeeds like success. Hugh O'Neill,
Red Hugh O'Donnell, Owen Roe O'Neill, Sarsfield, Wolfe Tone, Grattan,
the Young Irelanders, O'Connell, Butt, Parnell, not one of these ended
his career amid the glamour of achieved success, and the result of this,
I think, is an irresponsibility which looks not so much to the
probability of the fruition of movements as to their inception; and,
after all, a flash in the pan is apt to do more harm than good.

To this fact I attribute the circumstance that there has always been a
small section of the population to which the ordinary methods of
constitutional agitation have appeared feeble and unavailing, but to
understand to the full the reason for it one must realise that if there
have been three insurrections in the history of the United Parliament,
there has twelve times in the same course of time been famine, that
parent of despairing violence, throughout the country.

The ordinary Englishman seeing in the state a polity maintained by a
long tradition, which has undergone change gradually and in measured
progress, in which agitation, when it has been rife as it was before the
first Reform Bill, has died down on redress of grievances, almost as
soon as it has arisen has no conception of the relative, and indeed
absolute, unstable state of equilibrium in the affairs of Ireland.

The fact that one has to go back to the battle of Sedgemoor for the last
occasion when in anything dignified by a higher name than riot, blood
has been shed in England; the fact that when a retiring English
Attorney-General appointed his son to a third-rate position in the legal
profession an outcry arose in which the salient feature was surprise
that so flagrant a job should have been perpetrated, are indications of
what I mean when I say that English people are in every circumstance of
their outlook precluded from eliminating in their view of Irish affairs
that deep-seated conviction, which in the case of their own country is
founded on indisputable fact, that radical change in the well-ordered
evolution of the State is out of keeping with the sequence which has
hitherto held sway, and in so far as it is so is a thing to be guarded
against and avoided.

In Ireland no one can claim to see a similar gradual metamorphosis in
the light-of the history of the last one hundred, or even fifty, years,
Radicalism, experimentalism, empiricism