ut, is a land of unending paradox. It is only one of innumerable
anomalies that Irish Nationalists should use Unionist histories as
propaganda for Nationalism; that the majority of Irish Unionists should
insist on ignoring all historical traditions save those which in any
normal country would long ago have been consigned by general consent to
oblivion and the institutions they embody overthrown; and that Unionist
writers such as those I have mentioned should be able to reconcile their
history and their politics only by a pessimism with regard to the
tendencies of human nature in general, or of Irish nature in particular,
with which their own historical teaching, founded on a true perception
of cause and effect, appears to be in direct contradiction.

The truth is that the question is one of the construction, not of the
verification, of facts; of prophecy for the future, rather than of bare
affirmation or negation. No one can presume to determine such a question
without a knowledge of how human beings have been accustomed to act
under similar circumstances. Illumination of that sort Irish history and
the contemporary Irish problem incontestably need. The modern case for
the Union rests mainly on the abnormality of Ireland, and that is
precisely why it is such a formidable case to meet. For Ireland in many
ways is painfully abnormal. The most cursory study of her institutions
and social, economic, and political life demonstrate that fact. The
Unionist, fixing his eyes on some of the secondary peculiarities, and
ignoring their fundamental cause, demonstrates it with ease, and by a
habit of mind which yields only with infinite slowness to the growth of
political enlightenment, passes instinctively to the deduction that
Irish abnormalities render Ireland unfit for self-government. In other
words, he prescribes for the disease a persistent application of the
very treatment which has engendered it. Whatever the result, there is a
plausible answer. If Ireland is disorderly and retrograde, how can she
deserve freedom? If she is peaceful, and shows symptoms of economic
recuperation, clearly she does not need or even want it. In other words,
if all that is healthy in the patient battles desperately and not in
vain, first against irritant poison, and then against soporific drugs,
this healthy struggle for self-preservation is attributed not to native
vitality, but to the bracing regimen of coercive government.

This train of argume