are not for the statesman but for the charity-boy. This perhaps may be
defended as irony; hardly, but even so, in such irony the character
appears as plainly as in volumes of solemn rant. To us it stands out
clearly as the characteristic attitude of the English Government. The
English people are used to it, practise it, and will put up with it; but
the Irish people never were, are not now, and never will be used to it;
and we won't put up with it. We get calm as old atrocities recede into
history, but to repeat the old cant, above all to try and sustain such
now, sets all the old fire blazing--blazing with a fierceness that will
end only with the British connection.

IV

Not many of us in Ireland will be deceived by Macaulay, but there is
danger in an occasional note of writers, such as Bernard Shaw and Stuart
Mill. Our instinct often saves us by natural repugnance from the
hypocrite, when we may be confused by some sentiment of a sincere man,
not foreseeing its tendency. When an aggressive power looks for an
opening for aggression it first looks for a pretext, and our danger lies
in men's readiness to give it the pretext. Such a sentiment as this from
Mill--on "Liberty"--gives the required opening: "Despotism is a
legitimate mode of government in dealing with Barbarians, provided the
end be their improvement"; or this from Shaw's preface to the Home Rule
edition of "John Bull's Other Island": "I am prepared to Steam-roll
Tibet if Tibet persist in refusing me my international rights." Now, it
is within our right to enforce a principle within our own territory, but
to force it on other people, called for the occasion "barbarians," is
quite another thing. Shaw may get wrathful, and genuinely so, over the
Denshawai horror, and expose it nakedly and vividly as he did in his
first edition of "John Bull's Other Island," Preface for Politicians;
but the aggressors are undisturbed as long as he gives them pretexts
with his "steam-roll Tibet" phrase. And when he says further that he is
prepared to co-operate with France, Italy, Russia, Germany and England
in Morocco, Tripoli, Siberia and Africa to civilise these places, not
only are his denunciations of Denshawai horrors of no avail--except to
draw tears after the event--but he cannot co-operate in the civilising
process without practising the cruelty; and perhaps in their privacy the
empire-makers may smile when Shaw writes of Empire with evident
earnestness as "a name th