and to solve the Irish Question, she
must begin by breaking the hard shell of her individualism, and trying
to think herself into the skin, the soul, and the ideals of the Irish
nation.

Now the English reader is after all human. If he has endured so far the
outrage on his most sacred prejudices perpetrated in this chapter he
must at this moment be hot with resentment. He must feel as if,
proposing to his imagination Pear de Melba, he had in truth swallowed
sand. Let me end with a more comfortable word. We have seen that Irish
history is what the dramatists call an internal tragedy, the secular
disclosure and slow working-out of certain flaws in the English
character. I am not to be understood as ascribing horns to England and a
halo to Ireland. We Irish are not only imperfect but even modest; for
every beam that we detect in another eye we are willing to confess a
mote in our own. The English on the other hand have been not monsters or
demons, but men unstrung.

"In tragic life, God wot,
No villain need be, passions spin the plot;
We are betrayed by what is false within."

Least of all am I to be understood as ascribing to modern Englishmen any
sort of planned, aforethought malice in regard to Ireland. It is what
Bacon might have called a mere idol of the platform to suppose that they
are filled with a burning desire to oppress Ireland. The dream of their
lives is to ignore her, to eliminate from their calculations this
variable constant which sheds bewilderment upon every problem. Could
they but succeed in that, a very Sabbath of peace would have dawned for
them. The modern Englishman is too much worried to plan the oppression
of anybody. "Did you ever," asked Lord Salisbury on a remembered
occasion, "have a boil on your neck?" To the Englishman of 1911--that
troubled man whose old self-sufficiency has in our own time been
shattered beyond repair by Boer rifles, German shipyards, French
aeroplanes--Ireland is the boil on the neck of his political system. It
is the one _peche de jeunesse_ of his nation that will not sleep in the
grave of the past. Like the ghost in "Hamlet" it pursues and plagues him
without respite. Shunned on the battlements it invades his most private
chamber, or, finding him in talk with friends, shames and scares him
with subterranean mutterings. Is there no way out of a situation so
troublesome and humiliating?

There is. Ireland cannot be ignored, but she can easily be appeased.