England now deplores the low
industrial and commercial state of Ireland, she has only to look over
her own statute-book, and see if ingenuity could have further gone in
the way of discouragement and depression. When we add to these wrongs
the bitter drop of the Irish Church Establishment, it is doubtless clear
that an able advocate could make out a very telling case for the
plaintiff, in that great case of Ireland _vs._ England on which Europe
and America sit as jury.

But it is a singularly inexact notion of the real historical wrongs of
his country which an ordinary Irishman treasures in his heart; in fact,
he has no idea of the real wrongs at all, but of other and quite
imaginary ones. He sets out with the great fallacy that Ireland was at
some indefinite epoch (described as "former times") a wealthy,
prosperous, and united country, and that every declension from those
characteristics is to be laid at the door of English tyranny and
jealousy. When Moore wrote,

"Let Erin remember the days of old,
Ere her faithless sons betrayed her,
When Malachi wore the collar of gold
Which he won from her proud invader,

"When her kings, with their standards of green unfurled,
Led the Red Branch knights to danger,
Ere the emerald gem of the Western world
Was set in the crown of a stranger,"--

when, we say, a man of the world, who afterwards wrote a remarkably
moderate and sensible History of Ireland, wrote nonsense like this, he
was doubtless well aware he was only by poetic license describing what
Irishmen commonly believed about "days of old," and their glorified
circumstances. We once saw an Irish schoolmaster, just one of those who
mould the ideas of the humbler classes, shown into a room furnished with
the usual luxury of a handsome English drawing-room,--books, pictures,
flowers, and china, "an earthly paradise of ormolu." The good man looked
round with great admiration, and then innocently remarked, "Why, this
must be like one of the palaces of our ancient kings!" Here was
precisely the popular Irish idea. Her "ancient king"--who actually lived
in the _wattled_ walls of Tara, enjoying barbarian feasts of beer and
hecatombs of lean kine and sheep--is supposed to have been a refined and
splendid prince, dwelling in ideal "halls," (doubtless compounded out of
the Dublin Bank and Rotunda,) and enjoying the finest music on a
double-action harp. As a fact, there is no evidence whatev