er hard upon our particular sympathisers, who did not
triumph. When England exults in Lincoln's victory over his foes, she is
exulting in his victory over her own friends. If her diplomacy continues
as delicate and chivalrous as it is at present, they may soon be her
only friends. England will be defending herself at the expense of her
only defenders. But however this may be, it is as well to bear witness
to some of the elements of my own experience; and I can answer for it,
at least, that there are some people in the South who will not be
pleased at being swept into the rubbish heap of history as rebels and
ruffians; and who will not, I regret to say, by any means enjoy even
being classed with Fenians and Sinn Feiners.

Now touching the actual comparison between the conquest of the
Confederacy and the conquest of Ireland, there are, of course, a good
many things to be said which politicians cannot be expected to
understand. Strange to say, it is not certain that a lost cause was
never worth winning; and it would be easy to argue that the world lost
very much indeed when that particular cause was lost. These are not days
in which it is exactly obvious that an agricultural society was more
dangerous than an industrial one. And even Southern slavery had this one
moral merit, that it was decadent; it has this one historic advantage,
that it is dead. The Northern slavery, industrial slavery, or what is
called wage slavery, is not decaying but increasing; and the end of it
is not yet. But in any case, it would be well for us to realise that the
reproach of resembling the Confederacy does not ring in all ears as an
unanswerable condemnation. It is scarcely a self-evident or sufficient
argument, to some hearers, even to prove that the English are as
delicate and philanthropic as Sherman, still less that the Irish are as
criminal and lawless as Lee. Nor will it soothe every single soul on the
American continent to say that the English victory in Ireland will be
followed by a reconstruction, like the reconstruction exhibited in the
film called 'The Birth of a Nation.' And, indeed, there is a further
inference from that fine panorama of the exploits of the Ku-Klux Klan.
It would be easy, as I say, to turn the argument entirely in favour of
the Confederacy. It would be easy to draw the moral, not that the
Southern Irish are as wrong as the Southern States, but that the
Southern States were as right as the Southern Irish. But upon t