; but all are seriously
considering the probability of its being so. And herein lay especially
the horrible folly of our Black-and-Tan terrorism over the Irish people.
I have noted that the newspapers told us that America had been chilled
in its Irish sympathies by Irish detachment during the war. It is the
painful truth that any advantage we might have had from this we
ourselves immediately proceeded to destroy. Ireland _might_ have put
herself wrong with America by her attitude about Belgium, if England had
not instantly proceeded to put herself more wrong by her attitude
towards Ireland. It is quite true that two blacks do not make a white;
but you cannot send a black to reproach people with tolerating
blackness; and this is quite as true when one is a Black Brunswicker and
the other a Black-and-Tan. It is true that since then England has made
surprisingly sweeping concessions; concessions so large as to increase
the amazement that the refusal should have been so long. But
unfortunately the combination of the two rather clinches the conception
of our decline. If the concession had come before the terror, it would
have looked like an attempt to emancipate, and would probably have
succeeded. Coming so abruptly after the terror, it looked only like an
attempt to tyrannise, and an attempt that failed. It was partly an
inheritance from a stupid tradition, which tried to combine what it
called firmness with what it called conciliation; as if when we made up
our minds to soothe a man with a five-pound note, we always took care to
undo our own action by giving him a kick as well. The English politician
has often done that; though there is nothing to be said of such a fool,
except that he has wasted a fiver. But in this case he gave the kick
first, received a kicking in return, and _then_ gave up the money; and
it was hard for the bystanders to say anything except that he had been
badly beaten. The combination and sequence of events seems almost as if
it were arranged to suggest the dark and ominous parallel. The first
action looked only too like the invasion of Belgium, and the second like
the evacuation of Belgium. So that vast and silent crowd in the West
looked at the British Empire, as men look at a great tower that has
begun to lean. Thus it was that while I found real pleasure, I could not
find unrelieved consolation in the sincere compliments paid to my
country by so many cultivated Americans; their memories of homely