PART I

INTRODUCTORY

Were mankind murderous or jealous upon you, my brother, my sister?

I am sorry for you, they are not murderous or jealous

upon me,

All has been gentle with me, I keep no account with lamen

tation,

(What have I to do with lamentation?).

WALT WHITMAN.

THE IMPERIAL RELATION

"And there is another great piece of legislation which awaits and should receive the sanction of the Senate I mean the bill which gives a larger measure of self-government to the people of the Philippines. How better, in this time of anxious questioning and perplexed policy, could we show our confidence in the principles of liberty, as the source as well as the expression of life, how better could we demonstrate our own self-possession and steadfastness in the courses of justice and disinterestedness than by thus going calmly forward to fulfill our promises to a dependent people, who will look more anxiously than ever to see whether we have indeed the liberality, the unselfishness, the courage, the faith, we have boasted and professed. I can not believe that the Senate will let this great measure of constructive justice await the action of another Congress."- WOODROW WILSON, December, 1914.

THE PURPOSE OF THE BOOK

FREQUENTLY in speaking about Ireland to

Americans I have discovered that the total effect of lively assertion is to leave them confused and bored. It is largely with the confused and the bored in mind that this book is written. There are many eloquent and thrilling books on Ireland. The national struggle of the Irish people is a fit subject

for warm and persuasive writing. But the desirable object at present seems to me to place Ireland in the clear light where facts can be fairly considered. My aim in this book is to examine the condition of Ireland, to interpret its nationalism, to show the difficulty of its relation with England, to proceed from causes to consequences, and then to remedies. The reader may easily differ from me in the end. He may decide that I disagree with the Tory Englishman because I do not allow for the needs of the empire, or because the past is too much with us, or because I am a particularist in spite of myself. Whatever his verdict on these points, I shall have failed in my object if I have not improved his opportunity of judging the question for himself. According to any democratic or liberal criteria, I consider that Ireland has on its side the durable advocacy of the facts. But facts can never be seen in their relevance unless they are honestly respected, and my chief aim has been to have nationalism supply the incentive for writing rather than the evidence and the arguments submitted for the reader's judgment. Both Englishmen and Irishmen are solemnly involved in the responsibility for Ireland's condition, but it is simple futility to let English patriotism or Irish patriotism dictate the inquiry.

A judicial consideration does, in my opinion, lead to the severest conclusions in regard to the actual government of Ireland, organic as well as functional, present as well as past. I think that it can be proved that the men in power, Englishmen and Anglo-Irishmen, have as a rule failed in the first psychological essential of government, entrance into the genuine will of the governed. They have failed,

for the most part, because they have lacked true
community of interest with Ireland and because they
have never really chosen to share in the universe
of native Irish discourse. Englishmen
Englishmen often will-
ingly admit the "stupidities
stupidities" and "blunders" of
the past that arose from this policy; they have done
this, point by point, for some hundreds of years.
But it is invariably the offences of the past that the
governing class is willing to confess, never the per-
sisting relation from which these offences have un-
failingly sprung and must unfailingly continue to
spring. The offences of the living present are such,
however, that, upholding my faith in the judicial
method, I conceive passing sentence to be part of it.
But while I look to the passing of sentence by fair-
minded men, whether they be Irish or English or
American, it is only because such sentence, passed
for the relief of a people, must involve a wholesome
transfer of power, the essential preliminary to re-
construction. This is not the dictate of simple na-
tionalism. If a writer's approach is unequivocally
nationalistic, he is punitive, goaded by the remorse-
less passion of a Sicilian or a Kentuckian. This is
wholly understandable since, as Justice O. W.
Holmes has defined it, "vengeance, not compensa-
tion, and vengeance on the offending thing, was the
original object" of asserting liability. But, for my
own part, I honestly distrust the retaliatory spirit,
even when it is combined with the nationalistic prin-
ciple. I am afraid of the encouragement that it
offers to the egoism which sleeps so fitfully inside
every nationalistic habit of mind. But apart from
the Irishness of Ireland there is, as I believe, a
problem of human liberation involved in Ireland,

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