If you have been beating a man on the head
with a bludgeon for half an hour, and then leave off, there is no sense
in saying to him: "There, I have given over bludgeoning you. Why on
earth don't you get up, and skip about like me?" If you have been
robbing a man's till for ten years, and then decide--by the way you have
not yet decided--to leave off, there is no sense in saying to him: "Why
the devil are you always hard up? Look at me doing the same sort of
business as you on absolutely equal terms, and I'm able to keep two
motor-cars and six servants." But that is precisely what is said to us.
You are eternally expecting from Ireland new miracles of renaissance.
But although she does possess recuperative powers, hardly to be
paralleled, even she must have time to slough the corruptions of the
past. You cannot, as some Englishmen imagine, cancel six centuries
before breakfast. Your Penal Laws, for instance, have been long since
struck out of the Statute Book, but they have not yet been eliminated
from social habitudes or from certain areas of commercial life.
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