sorry for his former manner of predominating, and proves it in some
unmistakable manner--as by saving the other from robbers at great
personal risk--the victim may still be unable to repress an abstract
psychological wonder about when his companion first began to feel like
that. Now this is not in the least an exaggerated parable of the
position of England towards Ireland, not only in '98, but far back from
the treason that broke the Treaty of Limerick and far onwards through
the Great Famine and after. The conduct of the English towards the Irish
after the Rebellion was quite simply the conduct of one man who traps
and binds another, and then calmly cuts him about with a knife. The
conduct during the Famine was quite simply the conduct of the first man
if he entertained the later moments of the second man, by remarking in a
chatty manner on the very hopeful chances of his bleeding to death. The
British Prime Minister publicly refused to stop the Famine by the use of
English ships. The British Prime Minister positively spread the Famine,
by making the half-starved populations of Ireland pay for the starved
ones. The common verdict of a coroner's jury upon some emaciated wretch
was "Wilful murder by Lord John Russell": and that verdict was not only
the verdict of Irish public opinion, but is the verdict of history. But
there were those in influential positions in England who were not
content with publicly approving the act, but publicly proclaimed the
motive. The _Times_, which had then a national authority and
respectability which gave its words a weight unknown in modern
journalism, openly exulted in the prospect of a Golden Age when the kind
of Irishman native to Ireland would be "as rare on the banks of the
Liffey as a red man on the banks of the Manhattan." It seems
sufficiently frantic that such a thing should have been said by one
European of another, or even of a Red Indian, if Red Indians had
occupied anything like the place of the Irish then and since; if there
were to be a Red Indian Lord Chief Justice and a Red Indian