these are considerations a little remote from the daily dust of
politics. In the sense in which every life is a failure, and the best
life the worst failure, Ireland is a failure. But in every other sense,
in all that touches the fathomable business of daylight, she has been a
conspicuous success.

A certain type of fanaticism is naive enough to regard the intercourse
of England with Ireland as that of a superior with an inferior race.
This is the sanction invoked to legitimise every adventure in invasion
and colonisation. M. Jules Hormand, who has attempted, in his recent
book, "Domination et Colonisation," to formulate a theory of the whole
subject, touches bed-rock when he writes:

"We must then accept as our point of departure the principle that
there is a hierarchy of races and of civilisations, and that we
belong to the higher race and civilisation.... The essential
legitimation of conquest is precisely this conviction of our own
superiority.... Nations which do not hold this belief, because
incapable of such sincerity towards themselves, should not attempt
to conquer others."

The late Lord Salisbury was grasping at such a justification when he
likened the Irish to Hottentots; it would be a justification of a kind
if it chanced to be validated by the facts. But it does not. There is so
much genuine humour in the comparison that, for my part, I am unable to
take offence at it. I look at the lathe painted to look like iron, and I
set over against him Parnell. That is enough; the lathe is smashed to
fragments amid the colossal laughter of the gods. The truth is that in
every shock and conflict of Irish civilisation with English, it is the
latter that has given way. The obscuration of this obvious fact is