It is
even more absurd to expect her to glow with gratitude.
You muddled our whole system of transportation; your muddle stands
to-day in all its ruinous largeness unamended, and, it may be, beyond
amendment. You muddled the Poor Law; and, in the workhouses which you
thrust upon us, 8000 children are year by year receiving on their lives
the brand of degradation. You marred education, perverting it into a
discipline of denationalisation, and that virus has not yet been
expelled.
What economic, what intellectual problem in Ireland have you not marred
and muddled, England, my England (as the late Mr W.E. Henley used to
say)? You have worsened the maledictions of the Bible. The sins of
_your_ fathers will lie as a _damnosa haereditas_, a damnable heritage,
upon the mortgaged shoulders of _our_ children. It is better, as Plato
taught, to suffer injustice than to inflict it. In the light of that
ethical principle you are long since judged and condemned. But with the
customary luck of England you are allowed what others were not allowed,
the opportunity of penitence and reform.
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