ing. They accepted responsibility for the
efficient working of institutions thus placed in their keeping by the
highest constitutional Authority in the British Empire, although they
had never asked for them, and still believed that the system they had
been driven to abandon was better than the new; and they opened this
fresh chapter in their history in firm faith that what had received so
striking a token of the Sovereign's sympathy and approval would never be
taken from them except with their own consent.

FOOTNOTES:

[104] See Letter from Mr. Lloyd George to Mr. Bonar Law, published in
the Press on November 18th, 1918.

[105] Precisely twenty-four months later this outrage was committed by
Mr. Lloyd George himself, with the concurrence of Mr. Austen
Chamberlain.

[106] _Ante_, p. 248.

[107] See _ante_, p. 51.

[108] _The Morning Post_, June 23rd, 1921.

[109] See _ante_, Chapter XVIII.

APPENDIX A

NATIONALIST LETTER TO PRESIDENT WILSON

To THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

SIR,

When, a century and a half ago, the American Colonies dared to assert
the ancient principle that the subject should not be taxed without the
consent of his representatives, England strove to crush them. To-day
England threatens to crush the people of Ireland if they do not accept a
tax, not in money but in blood, against the protest of their
representatives.

During the American Revolution the champions of your liberties appealed
to the Irish Parliament against British aggression, and asked for a
sympathetic judgment on their action. What the verdict was, history
records.

To-day it is our turn to appeal to the people of America. We seek no
more fitting prelude to that appeal than the terms in which your
forefathers greeted ours:

"We are desirous of possessing the good opinion of the virtuous and
humane. We are peculiarly desirous of furnishing you with the true
state of our motives and objects, the better to enable you to judge
of our conduct with accuracy, and determine the merits of the
controversy with impartiality and precision."

If the Irish race had been conscriptable by England in the war against
the United Colonies is it certain that your Republic would to-day
flourish in the enjoyment of its noble Constitution?

Since then the Irish Parliament has been destroyed, by methods described
by the greatest of British statesmen as those of "black-guardism and
baseness."