thlessly destroyed, now suffering under
laws and institutions forced upon her by the conquerors, suitable it may
be to men of Anglo-Saxon descent, but utterly alien to the genius and
temper of a Celtic population. To him, therefore, Home Rule presents
itself as an act of National restitution.

Personally, I believe this to be a complete misreading of history. It is
not denied--at least I do not deny--that both the English and British
Governments, in their dealings with Ireland have done many things that
were stupid, and some things that were abominable. But among their
follies or their crimes is not to be counted the destruction of any such
State as I have described; for no such State existed. They did not
uproot one type of civilisation in order to plant another. The Ireland
with which England had to deal had not acquired a national organisation,
and when controversialists talk of "restoring" this or that institution
to Ireland, the only institutions that can possibly be "restored" are in
their origin importations from England.

This does not, of course, mean that the English were a superior race
dealing with an inferior one. Indeed, there is, in my view, no sharp
division of race at all. In the veins of the inhabitants of these
Islands runs more than one strain of blood. The English are not simply
Teutonic--still less are the Irish Celtic. We must conceive the
pre-historic inhabitants both of Britain and of Ireland as subject to
repeated waves of invasion from the wandering peoples of the Continent.
The Celt preceded the Teuton; and in certain regions his language still
survives. The Teuton followed him in (as I suppose) far greater numbers,
and his language has become that of a large fraction of the civilised
world. But in no part of the United Kingdom is the Teutonic strain free
from either the Celtic or pre-Celtic strain; nor do I believe that the
Celtic strain has anywhere a predominance such as that which, speaking
very roughly, the Teutonic strain possesses in the East of these
Islands, or the pre-Celtic strain in the West.

There is, therefore, no race frontier to be considered, still less is
there any question of inferiority or superiority. The Irish difficulty,
historically considered, arises in the main from two circumstances. The
first of these, to which I have just referred, is that when England
began to intervene in the welter of Irish inter-tribal warfare, she was
already an organised State, slowly wor