And yet our bluff Englishman can learn in two
words how it comes about that his invitation represents a demand for the
impossible. In the first place, the bygones have not gone by. Our
complaint is made not against the crimes of his fathers, who are dead,
but against the crimes of himself and his fellows, who are alive. We
denounce not the repealed Penal Laws but the unrepealed Act of Union. If
we recall to the memory of England the systematic baseness of the
former, it is in order to remind her that she once thought them right,
and now confesses that they were cruelly wrong. We Irish are realists,
and we hold the problems of the present as of more account than any
agonies or tyrannies of the past. But our realism has the human touch in
it, and that constitutes the second impossibility in the invitation
tendered us. _Que messieurs les assassins commencent!_ The anti-Irish
legend is not dead nor even sleeping, nor are the resources of calumny
yet exhausted. An instance is immediately at hand. I have, at this
moment, on my desk a volume lately issued--"The School History of
England.
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