In the same way Mr. Chart, in his study of Irish life during the dark years after the Union--years of acute suffering, hunger, disillusionment and despair--discovers “a sullen discontent which, as usually happens in Ireland, broke out occasionally into acts of lawlessness and barbarity,” as if some special form of iniquity had its home in Ireland. At a time when the whole people in England were in a turmoil of revolt, on the verge of revolution, he mourns “the fatal Irish tendency to rush into extremes,” and that magistrates and police had to accustom “a hot-headed and violent-tempered race to curb itself within legal limits”--as if this was an unusual fact, peculiar to this one race of the world, predestinate to evil. It would seem that in Ireland alone it is not safe to give any man “full and unconstrained control over his personal and political enemies,” and therefore “Ireland is no country for a volunteer police.” I suppose there is not another history in the world in which this free slinging of blame and advice is continuously kept up at so fine a pitch. If a problem in Irish life lifts its head, some puzzling fact or tendency that demands explanation, a stone is ready in the orthodox historian’s sling: the dilemma is ended by one of the useful words--“primitive,” “tribal,” “kerne,” “nomad,” “barbarous,” “Celtic.” By constant reiteration I fancy writer and reader now scarcely notice them, so much have they become the symbols of Irish history, and so deeply have they sunk into the public mind. Thus the stream of calumny still flows on. The latest voice from Trinity College, that of Professor Mahaffy, in his Introduction to the third volume of the “Georgian Society,” is of the old familiar type. It should be, he explains, “the interest and duty” of historians to maintain certain desirable opinions--this, according to Dr. Mahaffy, adds to their credibility. Once more, therefore, we have from him “the elements of primeval savagery which still existed in the Irish people, and which they had in common with almost all primitive races and societies” (and this by the way, in the 18th century, after six hundred years of English compulsion). How well we know the old battered and time-exhausted phrase! Of course we have again our old friend, the story of O’Cahan sitting with the naked women, served up as the ever-repeated type of all the generations of Irish in their habitual squalor. For, we are told, “since the earliest times the greater part of the Irish ... have not found any discomfort in squalor.” But for English law this singular people would apparently never put on clothes at all, winter or summer, good or bad weather, in any northern gale from the Arctic ice. Ulstermen now-a-days are certainly a degenerate race in physical endurance. It is interesting to follow this story of O’Cahan.