The truth about Ireland is simply this:  that the relations between England and Ireland are the relations between two men who have to travel together, one of whom tried to stab the other at the last stopping-place or to poison the other at the last inn.  Conversation may be courteous, but it will be occasionally forced.  The topic of attempted murder, its examples in history and fiction, may be tactfully avoided in the sallies; but it will be occasionally present in the thoughts.  Silences, not devoid of strain, will fall from time to time.  The partially murdered person may even think an assault unlikely to recur; but it is asking too much, perhaps, to expect him to find it impossible to imagine.  And even if, as God grant, the predominant partner is really sorry for his former manner of predominating, and proves it in some unmistakable manner—­as by saving the other from robbers at great personal risk—­the victim may still be unable to repress an abstract psychological wonder about when his companion first began to feel like that.  Now this is not in the least an exaggerated parable of the position of England towards Ireland, not only in ’98, but far back from the treason that broke the Treaty of Limerick and far onwards through the Great Famine and after.  The conduct of the English towards the Irish after the Rebellion was quite simply the conduct of one man who traps and binds another, and then calmly cuts him about with a knife.  The conduct during the Famine was quite simply the conduct of the first man if he entertained the later moments of the second man, by remarking in a chatty manner on the very hopeful chances of his bleeding to death.  The British Prime Minister publicly refused to stop the Famine by the use of English ships.  The British Prime Minister positively spread the Famine, by making the half-starved populations of Ireland pay for the starved ones.  The common verdict of a coroner’s jury upon some emaciated wretch was “Wilful murder by Lord John Russell”:  and that verdict was not only the verdict of Irish public opinion, but is the verdict of history.  But there were those in influential positions in England who were not content with publicly approving the act, but publicly proclaimed the motive.  The Times, which had then a national authority and respectability which gave its words a weight unknown in modern journalism, openly exulted in the prospect of a Golden Age when the kind of Irishman native to Ireland would be “as rare on the banks of the Liffey as a red man on the banks of the Manhattan.”  It seems sufficiently frantic that such a thing should have been said by one European of another, or even of a Red Indian, if Red Indians had occupied anything like the place of the Irish then and since; if there were to be a Red Indian Lord Chief Justice and a Red Indian Commander-in-Chief, if the Red Indian Party in Congress, containing first-rate orators and fashionable novelists, could have turned Presidents in and out; if half the best troops of the