little considered, and consequently not understood in
England."

--JOHN HELY HUTCHINSON, Provost of Trinity College, Dublin,
in a letter written in 1779 to the Lord Lieutenant of
Ireland.

INTRODUCTION

A decree of Pope Adrian IV., the only Englishman who has sat in the
chair of St. Peter, in virtue of the professed jurisdiction of the
Papacy over all islands, by a strange irony, sanctioned the invasion of
Ireland by Strongbow in the reign of Henry II. Three years ago I stood
in the crypt of St. Peter's in Rome, and the Englishman who was with me
expatiated on the appropriate nature of the massive sarcophagus of red
granite, adorned only with a carved bull's head at each of the four
corners, which seemed to him to stand as a type of British might and
British simplicity, and in which the sacristan had told us lay all that
was mortal of Nicholas Breakspeare. Seeing that I took no part in this
panegyric, he took me on one side and said that he had observed that all
the English Protestants to whom he showed that tomb, situated as it is
literally _ad limina Apostolorum_, waxed eloquent, but, on the other
hand, the Irish Catholics whom he told that it contained the bones of
the dead Pontiff invariably shook their fists at the ashes of the
unwitting, but none the less actual, source of their country's ills. To
this I replied by quoting to him a saying of Robert Louis Stevenson, who
as a Scot viewed the matter impartially, and who declared "that the
Irishman should not love the Englishman is not disgraceful, rather,
indeed, honourable, since it depends on wrongs ancient like the race and
not personal to him who cherishes the indignation."

* * * * *

The great tendency which has been so marked a feature of Irish life in
the course of the last decade to turn the attention of the people
towards efforts at self-improvement and the development of self-reliance
without regard to English aid, English neglect, or English opinion,
excellent though it has been in every other respect, has had this one
drawback--that there has grown up a generation of Englishmen,
well-intentioned towards our country, to whom the problems of Irish
Government are an unknown quantity. The ignorance of Irish affairs in
England is due partly to ourselves, but also to a natural heedlessness
arising from distance and preoccupation with problems with which
Englishmen are more intimately conce