banished the snakes from that island, but he had not succeeded in
banishing the murderers and thieves who were worse than many
snakes. In spite of some few settlements 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 drive off each
other's cows and to kill all who resisted. In Henry II.'s time this
had been going on for at least seven hundred years, and during the
seven hundred that have followed much the same thing would have
been going on, if the English Government had not occasionally
interfered."

The English whom Henry II. left behind him soon became "as wild and
barbarous as the Irishmen themselves."

Oxford, the home of so many other lost causes, apparently aspires to be
also the home of the lost cause of mendacity. The forcible-feeble malice
of Mr Fletcher calls for no serious discussion; submit it to any
continental scholar, to any honest British scholar, and he will ask
contemptuously, though perhaps with a little stab of pain, how the name
of Oxford comes to be associated with such wicked absurdities. Every
other reference to Ireland is marked by the same scientific composure
and balanced judgment. And this document, inspired by race hatred, and
apparently designed to propagate race hatred, is offered 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 turbulent savages, destitute of all
culture, or whether they were valiant, immature men labouring through
the twilight of their age towards that dawn which does not yet flush our
own horizon. But we are far from wishing that dead centuries should be
summoned back to wake old bitterness that ought also to be dead. Hand
history over