tions to which I refer are different. They are reasoned and proved by experience, like Emerson's. They are not derived from the mere size and wealth of the empire, though the benignity of time to England is in itself influential. Nor do these feelings depend on the impressiveness of force majeure, on the one hand, or the fairy tale of Pax Britannica, on the other. The languor of a peerage long installed, the dignity of the law lords, the timbre of society, the cut of clothes, the acolyte strictness of servants, the art of garden parties - these may engage some people, but what the sane American sees to admire in England is something that springs out of a depth and reliability of character which is not less proclaimed by the superb and massive achievement of English law than by the sustained glory of English literature. No one who has mingled in this procession of a people's consciousness can fail to find in it a greatness of reception and a greatness of response of spirit. As the bells of Oxford chime their varied music, so the tongues of English literature sing many different tunes; but at the heart of them there is the unison of something deep and generous, something well sent and well found. To reconcile the experiences of English literature, not to speak of personal English contacts, with the theory of a purely malignant policy in Ireland is a psychological somersault the intelligent American is not prepared for. He may admit that some of the most famous Englishmen have been Scotch, Welsh and Irish; he may agree that along with stout English honesty and simplicity and courage there go a stiff legalism, a resolute selfpreference, a disinclination to think for the other

man. But, agree or not, the evidence on the side of fairness of honesty, sobriety and industry is altogether too stupendous not to make a race composed wholly of Richard the Thirds seem incredible and laughable. It may be granted that layers of evidence have to be penetrated before the American grasps the paradox of Anglo-Irish history; but the solution of that paradox is never diabolism. The American is absolutely sound in the instinct which compels him to reject the wholesale indictment of England.

The wholesale indictment of Ireland belongs in the same psychological category. Everyone knows, of course, the compensatory account of Irish grandeur and glory that has squared the patriotic balance. The technical names of this sort of idyl are sunburstery and raimeis (rawmaish). "Our poor people," said John Mitchel, "were continually assured that they were the finest peasantry in the world -'A One among the nations.' They were told that their grass was greener, their women fairer, their mountains higher, their valleys lower, than those of other lands; - that their 'moral force' (alas!) had conquered before, and would again: that next year would be the Repeal year: in fine, that Ireland would be the first flower of the earth and

first gem of the sea. Not that the Irish are a stupid race, or naturally absurd; but the magician bewitched them to their destruction." The origin of this Irish bombast is far from obscure: it was generated to meet the conquerors' version of the conquered. Englishmen, it may be admitted, had not failed to paint the Irish portrait. We know how Texas feels about Mexico. The Texan is a eulogist

of the Mexican compared with Milton describing the Irish; and nothing is more astonishing, as I hope to show later on, than the unobstructed flow of this early prejudice down to the present time. Mixed up as it is with a strong feeling about the papists, it is to be disclosed today not only in East Anglia and Ulster but in Back Bay, well-named, and up and down the Connecticut Valley. The commonplaces of such wholesale indictment go quite contrary to the commonplaces of political science. They violate everything we know about human educability and governmental institutions and race culture. Yet in spite of the invincible lessons of sociology and psychology lessons which the country of the melting pot really does lay store by — we find assumptions deeply discreditable to Irish character, especially as regards truthfulness and reliability and honesty and industry, firmly implanted in the popular mind.

It may easily be held true that there is an aboriginal Irishman exactly like the Punch cartoon of the Irishman. It may be quite true that the Irish believe in priests and fairies and machine-politicians, instead of Mary Baker Eddy and secret remedies" and the direct primary. But the way to judge the Irish, like the way to judge the English, is to disregard as completely as possible those explanations which, pretending to be supported on a last ultimate elephant of fact, are really part of the universal art of self-deception. The experienced woman suffragist will know precisely what I mean. There were few men, twenty years ago, who were not ready to expound the eternally valid reasons against women's ever voting, whenever the male was asked to re

apportion political power. A great deal of Irish controversy has turned on just this kind of prejudice. There are volumes of English speeches to show why the Irish are not "fit" for self-government, speeches amusingly illustrated with shillelaghs and pigs. There are columns of English print to indicate that the Irish are beyond discipline and self-control and initiative- though of course they make excellent soldiers, where discipline and control and the rest are not undesirable. It does not matter that these self-defeating arguments have long since been analyzed and tabulated by social science, that the reasons why they are used are quite as clearly intelligible as the reasons why little boys scrawl dirty words on blank walls. The kind of people who believe in the wholesale indictment of a race do not care. They cling hard to their archaic practice, let who will be clever. At the moment, at any rate, it is only necessary to note their existence, and to assert the probability that their method leads nowhere, that it has no virtue in it, that it is bred in the lairs of instinct.

Many people who rise clear above prejudice cannot help feeling that the Irish question is largely a sentimental question. The war may disclose unexpected differences between Britons and Irish nationalists. It may show an astonishing vitality in nationalist sentiment. Yet the governments that have dealt with Bohemia and Armenia and Russia and Poland have shown what ruthlessness can really be, and beside such ruthlessness the indignities to Irish nationalism seem scarcely worth recording. In the dim past, perhaps, there were crimes and blunders, but we are compelled to deal with the

present, and the hardships of Ireland in the twentieth century afford nothing like the physical enslavement and degradation which are still the iron rule under dynastic empires. This is a common point of view, but no more common today than it was forty years ago, and nearly forty years ago Matthew Arnold addressed himself to it in a manner that is still irreproachable. So long as the overwhelming issue of self-government is not confronted, it is corrupting sophistry to talk of the "dim" past and ancient 'grievances." Such sophistry does not survive the critical examination of Matthew Arnold. "We

shall solve at last, I hope and believe," said Matthew Arnold, "the difficulty which the state of Ireland presents to us. But we shall never solve it without first understanding it; and we shall never understand it while we pedantically accept whatever accounts of it happen to pass current with our class, or party, or leaders, and to be recommended by our fond desire and theirs. We must see the matter as it really stands; we must cease to ignore, and to try to set aside, the nature of things; 'by contending against which, what have we got, or shall ever get, but defeat and shame'?"

It is with this desire to promote understanding that I have followed Matthew Arnold's good example in going back beyond the immediate past. Arnold was aware that this practice was seriously discouraged. Moreover, "the angry memory of conquest and confiscation" had no peculiar attraction for his fine and urbane spirit. But his intelligence assured him that until anger was dried up at its source, as it had been in the case of "the Frankish conquest of France, the Norman conquest of Eng