Could
they but succeed in that, a very Sabbath of peace would have dawned for
them. The modern Englishman is too much worried to plan the oppression
of anybody. "Did you ever," asked Lord Salisbury on a remembered
occasion, "have a boil on your neck?" To the Englishman of 1911--that
troubled man whose old self-sufficiency has in our own time been
shattered beyond repair by Boer rifles, German shipyards, French
aeroplanes--Ireland is the boil on the neck of his political system. It
is the one _peche de jeunesse_ of his nation that will not sleep in the
grave of the past. Like the ghost in "Hamlet" it pursues and plagues him
without respite. Shunned on the battlements it invades his most private
chamber, or, finding him in talk with friends, shames and scares him
with subterranean mutterings. Is there no way out of a situation so
troublesome and humiliating?
There is. Ireland cannot be ignored, but she can easily be appeased. The
boil is due to no natural and incurable condition. It is the direct
result of certain artificial ligatures and compressions; remove these
and it disappears.
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