field for partisan bias which Irish history presents, the amount of
ground common to writers of all shades of political opinion is now
astonishingly large. The result, I think, is due mainly to the good
influence of that eminent historian and Unionist politician, the late
Professor Lecky. Indeed, an advocate of Home Rule, nervously suspicious
of tainted material, could afford to rely solely on his "History of
Ireland in the Eighteenth Century," "Leaders of Public Opinion in
Ireland," and "Clerical Influences,"[1] which are Nationalist textbooks,
and, for quite recent events, on "A Consideration of Ireland in the
Nineteenth Century," by Mr. G. Locker-Lampson, the present Unionist
Member for Salisbury. A strange circumstance; but Ireland, like all
countries where political development has been forcibly arrested from
without, is a land of unending paradox. It is only one of innumerable
anomalies that Irish Nationalists should use Unionist histories as
propaganda for Nationalism; that the majority of Irish Unionists should
insist on ignoring all historical traditions save those which in any
normal country would long ago have been consigned by general consent to
oblivion and the institutions they embody overthrown; and that Unionist
writers such as those I have mentioned should be able to reconcile their
history and their politics only by a pessimism with regard to the
tendencies of human nature in general, or of Irish nature in particular,
with which their own historical teaching, founded on a true perception
of cause and effect, appears to be in direct contradiction.

The truth is that the question is one of the construction, not of the
verification, of facts; of prophecy for the future, rather than of bare
affirmation or negation. No one can presume to determine such a question
without a knowledge of how human beings have been accustomed to act
under similar circumstances. Illumination of that sort Irish history and
the contemporary Irish problem incontestably need. The modern case for