English character, to suppose them base and inhuman is patently absurd. The experiment seduced them, as it has seduced every other empire that countenanced enslaving colonization.

It is easy, now, to say that the English came under a religious cloak on a secular expedition, and so abused the Irish confidence. But, while this betrayal occurred, it does not exculpate the Irish. It is simple and beautiful to put one's fate in the hands of Providence, to regard one's armed visitors as ambassadors of the divine. But this world, as the church well knows, is a theatre of war, not a young ladies' seminary. The English violated Irish independence. Their initial insincerity is still a living and potent tradition. But it never would have occurred but for Ireland's dependence on Rome a political naïveté, a political ineptitude.

Up to a certain point, then, Ireland's fortune was the fortune of war. In Ireland's history it is known that self-seeking was the general rule, and that the strong men sought to overcome, and did overcome, their weaker brethren, and treated them with no particular sweetness or reasonableness. Personal aggrandizement was considered just as fair then, in the military sphere, as it is now, in the economic sphere, and the man who could not fight was regarded as a dastard, a fool or a saint. The Irish were not saints. Neither were they dastards. But they allowed an enemy to entrench itself in their midst, to whom they had to give in, or from whom they had to stand out a problem as bitter as death, and incurred in immaturity.

In electing to stand out, the Irish proved their vitality and incivility. It was a serious course to

pursue, fraught with permanent consequences in body and spirit. A great statesmanship could have redeemed it, time after time, an ability in the English to sacrifice their own ambitions and to bend all their talents to reconstruction. But through centuries of rule the English lacked the disinterestedness of statesmanship. Resenting Ireland's incivility, they started on the doomed policy of coercion, leaving exploitation unremitted. Before long, a grievance was established of the bitterest kind, which now makes old England, like a reformed seducer in one of Hardy's novels, wish that the victim and responsibility for the victim, were buried at the bottom of the sea. The measure of the wrong done to Ireland is the hatred of Ireland generated in the heart of the English and Anglo-Irish governing class.

THE WAR OF CHICANE

So far I have had little need to mention religion. The worst difficulty of ruling Ireland often appears to be religious, but the religious virus did not occasion difficulty from the beginning because as the Protestant Edmund Burke irrefutably explained,

the spirit of the popery laws, and some even of their actual provisions, as applied between Englishry and Irishry, had existed in that harassed country before the words Protestant and papist were heard of in the world." Burke recognized the evils of the colonization of Ireland, and the bending of "law" to that end.

"All the penal laws of that unparalleled code of oppression," Burke continues, "which were made after the last event, were manifestly the effects of national hatred and scorn towards a conquered

people; whom the victors delighted to trample upon, and were not at all afraid to provoke. They were not the effect of their fears but of their security. They who carried on this system looked to the irresistible force of Great Britain for their support in their acts of power. They were quite certain that no complaints of the natives would be heard on this side of the water with any other sentiments than those of contempt and indignation. Their cries served only to augment their torture. Machines which could answer their purposes so well must be of an excellent contrivance. Indeed, in England, the double name of the complainant, Irish and papists (it would be hard to say which singly was the most odious) shut up the hearts of everyone against them. Whilst that temper prevailed, and it prevailed in all its force to a time within our memory, every measure was pleasing and popular, just in proportion as it tended to harass and ruin a set of people who were looked upon as enemies to God and man; and, indeed, as a race of bigoted savages who were a disgrace to human nature itself."

With the advent of William of Orange, the oppressed became fully identified with Catholicism, and thereafter the animus of Irish life was virulently sectarian. Those who explain everything by innate characteristics may see something more than accident in the Catholicism of the common Irish; the whole history of Ireland will even seem hideously appropriate taken in the light of " the ungodly ethics of the papacy, the Inquisition, the Casuists." But it is pardonable to return to Edmund Burke before admitting this easy reflex from continental history. Burke proclaimed in one phrase what the microscope

of Lecky's long history has corroborated, that "it is injustice, and not a mistaken conscience, that has been the principle of persecution." "From what I have observed," Burke amplified, "it is pride, arrogance, and a spirit of domination, and not a bigoted spirit of religion, that has caused and kept up those oppressive statutes."

In his famous letter to Sir Hercules Langrishe, written from Beaconsfield in 1792, Burke summed up the character of the ferocious penal laws that ground the common Irish into slaves, in the eighteenth century. "You hated the old system as early as I did," Burke said to this Protestant advocate of Catholic enfranchisement. "Your first juvenile lance was broken against that giant. I think you were even the first who attacked the grim phantom. You have an exceedingly good understanding, very good humour, and the best heart in the world. The dictates of that temper and that heart, as well as the policy pointed out by that understanding, led you to abhor the old code. You abhorred it, as I did, for its vicious perfection. For I must do it justice: it was a complete system, full of coherence and consistency; well digested and well composed in all its parts. It was a machine of wise and elaborate contrivance; and as well fitted for the oppression, impoverishment, and degradation of a people, and the debasement in them of human nature itself, as ever proceeded from the perverted ingenuity of man."

The "principles of the Revolution" of 1688, as Burke well knew, were declared to preclude Catholic citizenship; as the principles of the United Kingdom have since so steadily been declared to preclude

home rule. Burke scorned the dishonesty of this subterfuge. "To insist on everything done in Ireland at the Revolution, would be to insist on the severe and jealous policy of a conqueror, in the crude settlement of his new acquisition, as a permanent rule for its future government. The Protestants settled in Ireland consider themselves in no other light than that of a sort of colonial garrison, to keep the natives in subjection to the other state of Great Britain. The whole spirit of the revolution in Ireland, was that of not the mildest conqueror. In truth, the spirit of those proceedings did not commence at that era, nor was religion of any kind their primary object. . . . The true revolution to you, that which most intrinsically and substantially resembled the English revolution of 1688, was the Irish revolution of 1782," when the Irish volunteers procured Grattan's independent parliament.

Catholicism did not start the Irish conflict, but when the common Irish remained Catholic, it gave the garrison a fulcrum for Irish persecution. Sir Hercules Langrishe and his friends enabled the better-off Catholics to vote in 1793, but the Catholics were not emancipated at the union, and the broken pledge of Pitt was not redeemed till poor Wellington had to placate O'Connell in 1829. One can guess the size of the "commodious bugbear," the pope, by recollecting that Wellington himself was immediately accused of "insidious designs to introduce popery "; and, on the field of Battersea, fought an exceedingly comic duel with Lord Winchelsea, to avenge the slander. "Wellington fired wide, Winchelsea in the air, and an apology was given in writing on the ground and publicly "— an apology which