IRELAND’S DISEASE. IRELAND’S DISEASE NOTES AND IMPRESSIONS BY PHILIPPE DARYL _THE AUTHOR’S ENGLISH VERSION_ LONDON GEORGE ROUTLEDGE AND SONS BROADWAY, LUDGATE HILL GLASGOW AND NEW YORK 1888 LONDON BRADBURY, AGNEW, & CO., PRINTERS, WHITEFRIARS. PREFACE. These pages were first published in the shape of letters addressed from Ireland to _Le Temps_, during the summer months of 1886 and 1887. A few extracts from those letters having found their way to the columns of the leading British papers, they became the occasion of somewhat premature, and, it seemed to the author, somewhat unfair conclusions, as to their general purport and bearing. A fiery correspondent of a London evening paper, in particular, who boldly signed “J. J. M.” for his name, went so far as to denounce the author as “an ally of the _Times_, in the congenial task of vilifying the Irish people by grotesque and ridiculous caricatures,” which charge was then summarily met as follows:— _To the Editor of the PALL MALL GAZETTE._ SIR,— Let me hope, for the sake of “J. J. M.’s” mental condition, that he never set eyes upon my Irish sketches in _Le Temps_, about which he volunteers an opinion. If, however, he has actually seen my prose in the flesh, and he still clings to his hobby that I am hostile to the Irish cause or unsympathetic with the Irish race, why then I can only urge upon his friends the advisability of a strait waistcoat, a brace of mad doctors, and an early berth in a lunatic asylum. I never heard in my life of a sadder case of raving delusion. Yours obediently, PHILIPPE DARYL. PARIS, _September 18, 1887_. Thus ended the controversy. There was no reply. Allowance should be made, of course, for the natural sensitiveness of Irishmen on everything that relates to their noble and unhappy country. But, what! Do they entertain, for one moment, the idea that everything is right and normal in it? In that case there can be no cause of complaint for them, and things ought to remain as they are. All right-minded people will understand, on the contrary, that the redress of Irish wrongs can only come out of a sincere and assiduous exposure of the real state of affairs, which is not healthy but pathological, and, as such, manifests itself by peculiar symptoms. However it may be, a natural though perhaps morbid desire of submitting the case to the English-reading public was the consequence of those exceedingly brief and abortive polemics.