The persistence of race in Ireland was no less remarkable than the triumph of its name. There are some who profess to distinguish the Iberians. We know that successive streams of immigrants, Danes, Normans, English, French, have been merged in the commonwealth. But the Registrar-General gives, in spite of outgoings of the Celtic and incomings of Teutonic peoples, an overwhelming majority of men of Celtic blood and name—a majority which is in fact less than the truth, owing to the continual change during centuries of Celtic into English surnames. But it is not on purity of race that Ireland, any more than other countries, would rely. Difference in blood was recognised, but it was not held a bar to patriotism. Ireland was the common country to which all races who entered it were bound by every human interest. It had a unity of its own, which as “the Pale” shrank and the sense of country deepened, laid hold on the minds of the later as of the earlier inhabitants. Belfast Orangemen indeed, as “the loyalists of Ireland,” accepted the doctrine in 1886 that a Parliament in Dublin chosen by the whole Irish people “must be to them a _foreign_ and _alien_ assembly.” It was the echo of an old fiction. We know that the ascendency of a constantly recruited English group, above all of safe men born in England and consequently held worthy of trust there, was for seven centuries the favourite dream of English politicians; and that it invariably failed before the broader and humaner influences that move communities of men dwelling side by side under the equal heavens. Faithful citizens of Norman or English stock did brave service for their country: “Ireland-men” they called themselves, or “commonwealth men,” or “good ‘country men’ as they would be gloriously termed.” What name indeed is there for men of Ireland to take unless they frankly own their country? The term chosen for them by _The Times_: “The British Colony on the other side of St. George’s Channel” will scarcely endure. Mr. Balfour is probably the last statesman to press a claim to ascendency in the partial favour of Great Britain for a selected group, “who, of all others in the United Kingdom, surely deserve the protection of England and Scotland.” It is a curious return in these days of equal citizenship to the tyrannical distinctions of the middle ages—“wild Irish our enemies, Irish rebels, and obedient English,” who had varying claims on the dominating race according to their deserts.