berty. I found it had a
soothing effect on earnest Prohibitionists on the boat to urge, as a
point of dignity and delicacy, that it ought to be given back to the
French, a vicious race abandoned to the culture of the vine. I proposed
that the last liquors on board should be poured out in a pagan libation
before it. And then I suddenly remembered that this Liberty was still in
some sense enlightening the world, or one part of the world; was a lamp
for one sort of wanderer, a star of one sort of seafarer. To one
persecuted people at least this land had really been an asylum; even if
recent legislation (as I have said) had made them think it a lunatic
asylum. They had made it so much their home that the very colour of the
country seemed to change with the infusion; as the bronze of the great
statue took on a semblance of the wearing of the green.

It is a commonplace that the Englishman has been stupid in his relations
with the Irish; but he has been far more stupid in his relations with
the Americans on the subject of the Irish. His propaganda has been worse
than his practice; and his defence more ill-considered than the most
indefensible things that it was intended to defend. There is in this
matter a curious tangle of cross-purposes, which only a parallel example
can make at all clear. And I will note the point here, because it is
some testimony to its vivid importance that it was really the first I
had to discuss on American soil with an American citizen. In a double
sense I touched Ireland before I came to America. I will take an
imaginary instance from another controversy; in order to show how the
apology can be worse than the action. The best we can say for ourselves
is worse than the worst that we can do.

There was a time when English poets and other publicists could always be
inspired with instantaneous indignation about the persecuted Jews in
Russia. We have heard less about them since we heard more about the
persecuting Jews in Russia. I fear there are a great many middle-class
Englishmen already who wish that Trotsky had been persecuted a little
more. But even in those days Englishmen divided their minds in a curious
fashion; and unconsciously distinguished between the Jews whom they had
never seen, in Warsaw, and the Jews whom they had often seen in
Whitechapel. It seemed to be assumed that, by a curious coincidence,
Russia possessed not only the very worst Anti-Semites but the very best
Semites. A moneylend