This certainly does not indicate a very exalted idea of the valour of the Orangeist forces on the part of the southern populations. But that does not mean that no other sugar plums shall be exchanged. In all civil wars such pleasantries take place, yet they do not prevent rivers of blood being shed. One fact alone is beyond doubt, that the Orange organization has immense ramifications among the regular troops, and is openly favoured by General Wolseley; that a large number of retired officers have entered it; that one would perhaps find it difficult to find one among the Queen’s regiments ready to fire on the loyalists, and that the most ardent partisans of Home Rule hesitate to grant to the Irish Parliament the faculty of raising an armed force. In conclusion, the last word in Ulster may very well be said by the Orangemen. CHAPTER XVII. LEX LICINIA. It would have been pleasant to conclude these pages without recording too harsh a judgment against England, one of the two or three nations for ever dear to the thinker; one of those who possess a brain of her own, not merely a chain of nervous nodosities presiding over the organic functions; one of those who lead the Human Race along the hard road where it toilingly drags its miseries and delusions. It would have been pleasant at least to find some kind of extenuating circumstances for the attitude she maintains doggedly towards Ireland. But this is sheer impossibility. All that can be pleaded on behalf of England is that she is truly unconscious of the wrong she has been doing for centuries, and that she firmly believes herself to have acted within her rights. Nations, still more than individuals, are the slaves of their temperament, of their faults and their qualities. Shall we call the tiger a murderer, or reproach vultures because they feed on human flesh? They obey their instincts, and merely follow the dictates of nature. So it is with nations. Considered no longer in the individuals that compose it, or in the intellectual _élite_ that speaks in its name, but in the fifteen or twenty generations that have woven the woof of its annals, a people is an irresponsible and blind organism, fatefully obeying its impulses, be they noble or base. Try to talk with a Protestant landlord about the wrongs and grievances of Ireland. He will tell you in all good faith that the Irish alone are to blame. Ignorant, slothful, given to drink, sly and cunning, a nation of liars,—weak, in a word, and vanquished beforehand,—this is the verdict he pronounces on them from the height of his respectable rent-roll. If they have failed in the struggle for life, it is because they came into it badly armed and unprepared. So much the worse for them,—let them make way for the stronger ones! Such is the theory.