ng reproach. When I hear surprise
expressed by Englishmen at the fact that England is not loved in Ireland
I wonder at the deep-seated ignorance of the mutual feelings which have
so long subsisted, one side of which one may find expressed in the
literature of England, from Shakespeare's references to the "rough,
uncivil kernes of Ireland" down to the contemptuous sneers of Charles
Kingsley, that most English of all writers in the language, each of whom
provides, as I think, a sure index to the feelings of his contemporaries
and serves to illustrate the inveterate sentiment of hostility,
flavoured with contempt, which, as Mr. Gladstone once said, has from
time immemorial formed the basis of English tradition, and in regard to
which the _locus classicus_ was the statement of his great opponent,
Lord Salisbury, that as to Home Rule the Irish were not fit for it, for,
he went on to say, "nations like the Hottentots, and even the Hindoos,
are incapable of self-government."

A cynical Irish Secretary once asked whether the Irish people blamed the
Government for the weather; but it must be conceded that the mode of
government made the Irish people more dependent than otherwise they
would have been on climatic conditions, for this reason, that the margin
between their means and a starvation wage was extremely small, and thus
it was that in the middle of the century an act of God brought
sufferings in its train, the results of which have not yet been effaced.
Through it all the country was governed not in the interests of the
majority, but according to the fiat of a small minority kept in power by
armed force, not by the use of the common law, but of a specially
enacted coercive code applicable to the whole or any part of the country
at the mere caprice of the chief of the Executive. The record, it must
be admitted, is not edifying. Irish history, one may well say, is not of
such a nature as to put one "on the side of the angels." Lecky's
"History of the Eighteenth Century" has made many converts to Home Rule,
and I venture to think that when another Lecky comes to write of the
history of the nineteenth century the converts which he will make will
be even more numerous.

Among the anomalies of Irish government there is none greater than that
of the Executive, the head of which is the Viceroy. The position of
this official is very different from that of the governor of a
self-governing colony. If the Viceroy is in the Cabinet hi