in Ireland, you must give Ireland Home Rule.




CHAPTER V

THE RAVAGES OF UNIONISM (I)


Ireland, as we have seen, has had the misfortune to provoke many worthy
writers to a sad debauch of sentimentalism. It has pleased their fancy
especially to picture her as a sphinx, mysterious, elusive, inscrutable.
It is impossible to govern her, declare these theorists, because it is
impossible to understand her. She is the _femme incomprise_ of modern
politics. Her temperament is a magnet for disaster, her soul a sanctuary
of inviolable secrets. So runs the rhapsody, and many of my own
countrymen have thought it good strategy to accept and exploit it. They
have this to urge, indeed, that failure to make oneself understood is
commonly regarded as a sign of the superior mind. Lord Rosebery, for
example, has told us that he himself, for all his honey-dropping tongue,
has never been properly understood. And Hegel, the great German
philosopher, who was so great a philosopher that we may without
impropriety mention his name even in the brilliant vicinage of the Earl
of Midlothian, used to sigh: "Alas! in the whole of my teaching career I
had but one student who understood my system, and he mis-understood it."
This is all very well in its way, and a climate of incomprehension may
suit orators and metaphysicians admirably; but it will not do for
politics. The party or people that fails to make its programme
understood is politically incompetent, and Ireland is assuredly safe