pen de choses quand elles ne sont pas soutenus par les
moeurs."--Ibid.


"What does Ireland want now; what would she have more?" asked Pitt of
Grattan at the dinner table of the Duke of Portland in 1794, and
Englishmen have echoed and re-echoed the question throughout the century
which has elapsed. The mode in which it is asked reminds me, I must
confess, of that first sentence in Bacon's Essays--"What is truth? said
jesting Pilate, and would not wait for an answer."

When, at the end of the nineteenth century, the nations of Europe
devoted themselves to a retrospective study of the progress which the
passing of a hundred years had brought in its train, Ireland alone was
unable to join in the chorus of self-congratulation which arose on every
side.

To her it was the centenary of the great betrayal to which, as a
distinguished writer has said, the whole of her unbribed intellect was
opposed, and which formed the climax to a century of suffering. The
ancients who held that when ill-fortune befell their country the gods
must be asleep would have said so, I have no doubt, of Ireland at the
end of the eighteenth century. The people, in a phrase which has become
historic, had put their money on the wrong horse in their devotion to
the Stuart cause, but, more than this, while they thereby earned the
detestation of the Whigs, they were not compensated for it by the
sympathy of the Tories, who feared their Catholicism even more than they
liked their Jacobitism. In this way the country fell between two stools,
and was not governed, even as English Statesmen professed to govern it,
as a dependency, but rather it was exploited in the interest of the