Civilization is always putting people into positions where no one can remain good except by becoming heroically virtuous. No one expected our Irish landlords to be heroes. For one thing they had no country. England disowned them and they disowned Ireland. There are so many bad angels that one needs all the good angels to fight against them, and one of these good angels has always been for Irishmen a love of his native land. The Englishman is proud of his empire on which the sun never sets. The good Irishman loves Ireland as in Shakespeare's day the Englishman loved England, affection not vanity the essence of the relation. The historic sense, which is so fatally lacking in America, abounds among the Irish peasants when they gather in their cottages and talk together and scheme, and hope intensifies this affection. The American, like the Englishman, is very proud of his vast country, its wealth and its millions of people. The Irishman has nothing to boast of except that his country's history is sorrowful and lovable. In life there are a few great rhythms; there is friendship and domestic affection, and conjugal love and the feeling of a youth for a maiden; sovereign over all is patriotism, compared to which internationalism is cold and abstract like a mathematical formula, intelligible only to the ideologue, who is himself a bloodless person, a Rousseau dropping his five children into the foundling basket. I think the Irishman, unspoiled by too much contact with the Englishman, has the charm of being natural. Sir Walter Scott, after making amusing comparisons between him and the English and the Scotch, wrote that, given his chance, the Irishman would be 'the best of the triune.' Of course it was this naturalness, this constant and most potent spontaneity that won the heart of the great writer. It is our second thoughts that lead us astray; first thoughts in conduct are right, as Blake says they are in art.