"LEST WE FORGET!" 247

Clare; the Fenians or Republican Brothers who took fearful
oaths and plotted in every part of the world and even invaded
Canada from the United States; the invisible dynamiters and
"Manchester martyrs" who swung from the English gallows
tree for murder and arson were the terror and bugbear of the
respectable English in the prosperous middle years of Queen
Victoria's reign.

In vain did a just Gladstone sternly and righteously offer up
the Irish Church to an ungrateful Irish priest and peasant. In
vain did successive governments vote grants to Catholic colleges
and pass land reform acts to protect the Irish tenant. Between
the English humanitarian and the credulous, priest-led Paddy
whom he wished to befriend and civilise a great gulf was fixed.
The former did his best to believe in the existence of a body of
loyal, respectable and peace-loving Irish ready to enrol as special
constables against the Fenians, whose bloody and senseless
doings outraged the peace and fair name of their country. Such
Irishmen did exist, but they were Orangemen: black, Protestant
Ulstermen from the grim North—an object of detestation to
every southern Irish patriot.

The Irish wished to avenge themselves on the English. The
English wished to let bygones be bygones and, though they
would never admit they were in the wrong, to make amends for
the past by making the Irish comfortable. The Irish did not
want to be comfortable. They wanted to make the English
uncomfortable. Above all they wanted to be rid of the English
and their benevolent, insulting ministrations: they wanted to
be free. The English could not afford to let the Irish be free.
Ireland lay across England's lifeline. An Ireland in the hands
of a stranger might one day mean death for England.

All "through the middle years of the century a new Ireland
was waking. Among a little minority in Dublin it was an
Ireland of poets and scholars fired by a passionate dream of their
country's future. Celtic Ireland, the Poland of the Western world;
would be a nation once more. For the great majority, the motive
power was a dull and sullen hatred: an angry resolve that spread
in aimless trickles of murder and outrage over a dark, haunted
land. They could do nothing without a leader. And a nation
born of a long line of degraded, landless, persecuted peasants-
feckless, cynically jesting and despairing—bred rebels more
readily than leaders.