to the scholars, if you will; let it be marshalled as a
multitudinous and coloured pageant, to incite imaginations and inspire
literature. Such is our desire, but when we read the clotted nonsense of
persons like Mr Fletcher we can only repeat: _Que messieurs les
assassins commencent_!

For the purpose of this inquiry it is inevitable that some brief account
should be rendered of the past relations between England and Ireland.
The reader need not shrink back in alarm; it is not proposed to lead him
by the reluctant nose through the whole maze and morass of Irish
history. The past is of value to political realists only in that residue
of it which survives, namely, the wisdom which it ought to have taught
us. Englishmen are invited to consider the history of Ireland solely
from that point of view. They are prayed to purge themselves altogether
of pity, indignation, and remorse; these are emotions far too beneficent
to waste on things outside the ambit of our own immediate life. If they
are wise they will come to Irish history 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 but always fell" have been mistaken for the Irish
of actual history. The truth is, of course, that the phrase is in the
grand manner of symbolism. When Ecclesiastes laments that the eye is not
filled with seeing nor the ear with hearing we do not argue him deaf
and blind; we take his words as a proclamation of that famine and fierce
appetite of the spirit which has created all the higher religions.
Ireland agrees with Ecclesiastes. Perceiving that there is in matter no
integral and permanent reality she cannot be content with material
victories; her poets are subtle in what a French writer styles the
innuendoes by which the soul makes its enormous claims. The formula of