not an essential part of Celtic nature.
Has not the Irish Celt, he asks, achieved distinguished success in every
country of Europe but his own? The state in which he is to be found in
Ireland to-day must be, therefore, accounted for on some other theory
than the inherent good-for-nothingness of his nature. "The sluggish,
well-meaning mind of the English nation," he continues, "so willing to
do its duty, so slow to discover that it has any duty to do, is now
perforce rousing to ask itself the question, after five centuries of
English domination over Ireland, how many millions it is inclined to
pay, not in order to save the social system which has grown up under its
fostering care, but to help that precious child of its parental nurture
to die easy? Any further prolongation of existence for that system no
one now seems to predict, and hardly any one longer ventures to
insinuate that it deserves."

"This is something gained. The state of Ireland--not the present state
merely, but the habitual state--is hitherto the most unqualified
instance of signal failure which the practical genius of the English
people has exhibited. We have had the Irish all to ourselves for five
hundred years. No one has shared with us the privilege of governing
them, nor the responsibilities consequent on that privilege. No one has
exercised the smallest authority over them save by our permission. They
have been as completely delivered into our hands as children into those
of their parents and instructors. No one has ever had the power to
thwart our wise and benevolent purposes; and now, at the expiration of
nearly one-third of the time which has elapsed since the Christian era,
the country contains eight millions, on their own showing, of persecuted
innocents, whom it is the sole occupation of every English mind to
injure and disparage; on ours (if some of our loudest spokesmen are to
be taken as our representatives) of lazy, lawless savages, whose want of
industry and energy keeps them ever on the verge of starvation; whose
want of respect for life and property makes it unsafe for civilized
beings to dwell among them. England unanimously repudiates the first
theory; but is the other much less disgraceful to us? An independent
nation is, in all essentials, what it has made itself by its own
efforts; but a nation conquered, and held in subjugation ever since it
had a history, is what its conquerors have made it, or have caused it to
become. Yet thi