Machiavelli's crime is not for the sentiments he entertained but for
writing them down luminously and forcibly--in other words, for giving
the show away.

Think of Macaulay's "horror and amazement," and read this further in the
same essay: "Every man who has seen the world knows that nothing is so
useless as a general maxim. If it be very moral and very true it may
serve for a copy to a charity boy." So the very moral and the very true
are not for the statesman but for the charity-boy. This perhaps may be
defended as irony; hardly, but even so, in such irony the character
appears as plainly as in volumes of solemn rant. To us it stands out
clearly as the characteristic attitude of the English Government. The
English people are used to it, practise it, and will put up with it; but
the Irish people never were, are not now, and never will be used to it;
and we won't put up with it. We get calm as old atrocities recede into
history, but to repeat the old cant, above all to try and sustain such
now, sets all the old fire blazing--blazing with a fierceness that will
end only with the British connection.


IV


Not many of us in Ireland will be deceived by Macaulay, but there is
danger in an occasional note of writers, such as Bernard Shaw and Stuart
Mill. Our instinct often saves us by natural repugnance from the
hypocrite, when we may be confused by some sentiment of a sincere man,
not foreseeing its tendency. When an aggressive power looks for an
opening for aggression it first looks for a pretext, and our danger lies
in men's readiness to give it the pretext. Such a sentiment as this from