Page:Roger Casement - The crime against Ireland and how the war may right it.djvu/63



It is only the truth that wounds. An Irishman to-day in dealing with Englishmen is forced, if he speak truly, to wound. That is why so many Irishmen do not speak the truth. The Irishman, whether he be a peasant, a farm laborer, however low in the scale of Anglicization he may have sunk is still in imagination, if not always in manner, a gentleman.

The Englishman is a gentleman by chance, by force of circumstance, by luck of birth, or some rare opportunity of early fellowship. The Irishman is a gentleman by instinct and shrinks from wounding the feelings of another man and particularly of the man who has wounded him. He scorns to take it out of him that way. That is why the task of misgoverning him has been so easy and has come so naturally to the Englishman. One of the chief grievances of the Irishman in the middle ages was that the man who robbed him was such a boor. Insult was added to injury in that the oppressor was no knight in shining armor, but a very churl of men; to the courteous and cultured Irishman a "bodach Sassenach" a man of low blood, of low cunning, caring only for the things of the body, with no veneration for the things of the spirit—with, in fine, no music in his soul. The things that the Irishman loved he could not conceive of. Without tradition or history himself he could not comprehend the passionate attachment of the Irishman to both, and he proceeded to wipe both out, so far as in him lay, from off the map of Ireland and from out the Irishman's consciousness.

Having, as he believed, with some difficulty accomplished his task, he stands to-day amazed at the result. The Irishman has still a grievance—nay, more, Ireland