"In no country ought such a system to be tolerated--least of all in Ireland, where--it ought not, it cannot be disguised--there still exists the antagonism between the English government and the thoughts and feelings and sentiments of the nation. I would not write the truth if I did not say, that any one who knows Irish affairs must expect the administration of such a system to be anti-national. He would be informed, without surprise, that from the lessons of history there was carefully excluded all that would remind Irishmen of their distinctive nationality--that the whole tone and tendency of the literature were English--and that, in drawing up the lesson-books in which Irish children are to be taught, Englishmen and Scotchmen were the only persons worthy of the confidence of the Irish National Board. "I am content to be accounted of narrow and provincial feelings when I thus point to the anti-national character of the system. From the invasion of Henry II. to the present time, English rulers have been engaged in one device or another to destroy the distinctive nationality of Irishmen. The attempt is as unwise as it is unjust. It can only be effected by the destruction of public spirit and the demoralization of the country. The empire in which we are associated gains no more by the destruction of the individual nationality of its component parts, than society would gain by the destruction of all distinctive character in those who compose it. If even the Irish people are to be taught to love England, they must be taught to love Ireland first, and to feel that there is no inconsistency between the most intense Irish feeling and attachment to the empire of which Ireland forms a part. There is a waste of energy in every attempt to extirpate national prejudices and feelings, which makes the attempt a blunder as well as a crime. Russia has not yet Russianized Poland, and the Irish are as far from being West Britons as they were in the days of James I.