No pity can be made welcome which is ostentatiously mingled with
contempt. It is quite true, to our minds, that during the last
fifty years England has supplied the Irish with a better
government than the Irish could provide for themselves within the
next century at least.

There is no doubt of the substantial value of the English connection
to Ireland _now_; but there is just as little that in the past
history of this connection there is reason enough for Irish
suspicion and dislike. The tenacity of the Irish memory, too, is one
of the great political defects and misfortunes of the race.
Inability to forget past "wrongs" in the light of present
prosperity, is a sure sign of the absence of the political sense;
and that the Irish are wanting in the political sense no candid man
can deny. That they are really still, to a considerable extent, in
the tribal stage of progress, there is little doubt. But they are
surrounded by ideas, and institutions, and influences which make it
useless to try to raise them out of that stage by the "imperial"
method of government, or, in other words, by trying to persuade them
that they have richly deserved all their misfortunes, and that the
best thing they can do is to let a superior race mould their
destinies. If it were possible for Englishmen to be a little more
patient with their weaknesses, to yield a little more to the
childish vanities and aspirations which form the nearest approach
they have yet made to a feeling of nationality, and take upon
themselves in word as well as in deed their share of the horrible
burdens of Irish history, it would do more toward winning them Irish
confidence than anything Americans are ever likely to say.