what they did. They made inquiry into wrong and redressed it. But
you, it seems, can only feel sore and angry that intolerable
conditions imposed by your laws were not borne in patience and
silence. For what party do you speak? What political ideal inspires
you? When an Irishman has a grievance you smite him. How differently
would you have written of Runnymede and the valiant men who rebelled
when oppressed. You would have made heroes out of them. Have you
no soul left, after admiring the rebels in your own history, to
sympathize with other rebels suffering deeper wrongs? Can you not
see deeper into the motives for rebellion than the hireling reporter
who is sent to make up a case for the paper of a party? The best
men in Ulster, the best Unionists in Ireland will not be grateful
to you for libeling their countrymen in your verse. For, let the
truth be known, the mass of Irish Unionists are much more in love
with Ireland than with England. They think Irish Nationalists are
mistaken, and they fight with them and use hard words, and all the
time they believe Irishmen of any party are better in the sight of
God than Englishmen. They think Ireland is the best country in
the world to live in, and they hate to hear Irish people spoken of
as murderers and greedy scoundrels. Murderers! Why, there is more
murder done in any four English shires in a year than in the whole
of the four provinces of Ireland! Greedy! The nation never
ccepted a bribe, or took it as an equivalent or payment for an
ideal, and what bribe would not have been offered to Ireland if it
had been willing to forswear its traditions.

I am a person whose whole being goes into a blaze at the thought
of oppression of faith, and yet I think my Catholic countrymen more
tolerant than those who hold the faith I was born in. I am a
heretic judged by their standards, a heretic who has written and