I know very well the risk I run, in citing all these precedents and parallels, of seeming to justify, or at all events to palliate, Irish lawlessness.  But I am not doing anything of the kind.  I am trying to illustrate a somewhat trite remark which I recently made:  “that government is a very practical business, and that those succeed best in it who bring least sentiment or enthusiasm to the conduct of their affairs.”  The government of Ireland, like the government of all other countries, is a piece of business—­a very difficult piece of business, I admit—­and therefore horror over Irish doings, and the natural and human desire to “get even with” murderers and moonlighters, by denying the community which produces them something it would like much to possess, should have no influence with those who are charged with Irish government.  It is only in nurseries and kindergartens that we can give offenders their exact due and withhold their toffee until they have furnished satisfactory proofs of repentance.  Rulers of men have to occupy themselves mainly with the question of drying up the sources of crime, and often, in order to accomplish this, to let much crime and disorder go unwhipped of justice.

With the state of mind which cannot bear to see any concessions made to the Irish Nationalists because they are such wicked men, in which so many excellent Englishmen, whom we used to think genuine political philosophers, are now living, we are very familiar in the United States.  It is a state of mind which prevailed in the Republican party with regard to the South, down to the election of 1884, and found constant expression on the stump and in the newspapers in what is described, in political slang, as “waving the bloody shirt.”  It showed itself after the war in unwillingness to release the South from military rule; then in unwillingness to remove the disfranchisement of the whites or to withdraw from the carpet-bag State governments the military support without which they could not have existed for a day; and, last of all, in dread of the advent of a Democratic Federal Administration in which Southerners or “ex-rebels” would be likely to hold office.  At first the whole Republican party was more or less permeated by these ideas; but the number of those who held them gradually diminished, until in 1884 it was at last possible to elect a Democratic President.  Nevertheless a great multitude witnessed the entrance into the White House of a President who is indebted for his election mainly to the States formerly in rebellion, with genuine alarm.  They feared from it something dreadful, in the shape either of a violation of the rights of the freedmen, or of an assault on the credit and stability of the Federal Government.  Nothing but actual experiment would have disabused them.