English domination over Ireland, how many millions it is inclined to pay, not in order to save the social system which has grown up under its fostering care, but to help that precious child of its parental nurture to die easy? Any further prolongation of existence for that system no one now seems to predict, and hardly any one longer ventures to insinuate that it deserves." "This is something gained. The state of Ireland--not the present state merely, but the habitual state--is hitherto the most unqualified instance of signal failure which the practical genius of the English people has exhibited. We have had the Irish all to ourselves for five hundred years. No one has shared with us the privilege of governing them, nor the responsibilities consequent on that privilege. No one has exercised the smallest authority over them save by our permission. They have been as completely delivered into our hands as children into those of their parents and instructors. No one has ever had the power to thwart our wise and benevolent purposes; and now, at the expiration of nearly one-third of the time which has elapsed since the Christian era, the country contains eight millions, on their own showing, of persecuted innocents, whom it is the sole occupation of every English mind to injure and disparage; on ours (if some of our loudest spokesmen are to be taken as our representatives) of lazy, lawless savages, whose want of industry and energy keeps them ever on the verge of starvation; whose want of respect for life and property makes it unsafe for civilized beings to dwell among them. England unanimously repudiates the first theory; but is the other much less disgraceful to us? An independent nation is, in all essentials, what it has made itself by its own efforts; but a nation conquered, and held in subjugation ever since it had a history, is what its conquerors have made it, or have caused it to become. Yet this reflection does not seem to inspire Englishmen generally with any feeling of shame. The evils of Ireland sit as lightly on the English conscience as if England had done all which the most enlightened and disinterested benevolence could suggest for governing the Irish well, and for civilizing and improving them. What has ever yet been done, or seriously attempted, for either purpose, except latterly, by taking off some of the loads which we ourselves have laid on, history will be at a loss to determine."[141]