-honoured British precept--that foreigners
should not see for themselves the workings of English rule in
Ireland--finds frequent expression in the Irish State Papers. In
a letter from Dublin Castle of August, 1572, from the Lord Deputy
Fitzwilliam to Burghley Elizabeth's chief Minister, we are told that
the "three German Earls" with "their conductor," Mr. Rogers, have
arrived. The Viceroy adds, as his successors have done up to the
present day: "According to Your Lordship's direction they shall
travell as little way into the cuntry as I can."]

To represent the island as a poverty striken land inhabited by a
turbulent and ignorant race whom she has with unrewarded solicitude
sought to civilise, uplift and educate has been a staple of England's
diplomatic trade since modern diplomacy began. To compel the trade of
Ireland to be with herself alone; to cut off all direct communication
between Europe and this second of European islands until no channel
remained save through Britain; to enforce the most abject political
and economic servitude one people ever imposed upon another; to
exploit all Irish resources, lands, ports, people, wealth, even her
religion, everything in fine that Ireland held, to the sole profit
and advancement of England, and to keep all the books and rigorously
refuse an audit of the transaction has been the secret but determined
policy of England.

We have read lately something of Mexican peonage, of how a people
can be reduced to a lawless slavery, their land expropriated, their
bodies enslaved, their labour appropriated, and how the nexus of this
fraudulent connection lies in a falsified account. The hacenade holds
the peon by a debt bondage. His palace in Mexico City, or on the sisal
plains of Yucatan is reared on the stolen labour of a people whose
bondage is based on a lie. The hacenade keeps the books and debits
the slave with the cost of the lash that scourges him into the fields.
Ireland is the English peon, the great peon of the British Empire.
The books and the palaces are in London but the work and the wealth
have come from peons on the Irish Estate. The armies that overthrew
Napoleon; the fleets that swept the navies of France and Spain from
the seas were recruited from this slave pen of English civilisation.
During the last 100 years probably 2,000,000 Irishmen have
been drafted into the English fleets and armies from a land
purposely drained of its food. Fully the same number, driven by