history can be written. I deny that such an argument can be maintained. What, after all, is the gist of Irish history from the Norman Invasion to the present time? It is the conflict of two nations, each representing different ideals. It is the conflict between the English, who made the laws for Ireland and tried to mould the people to suit their laws, and the Irish, who resisted the laws imposed on them, and strove to change the laws into a system more in harmony with their own civilisation. It is the story of the war on Irish civilisation by the English, its forcible suppression during centuries, its continual struggle against the imposition of an alien system, and its gradual triumph in the slow establishment of government by Irish ideas. Look back on Irish history, and one cannot fail to mark that conflict raging all through its turbulent course. There is the first invasion of Ireland and the establishment of English rule within the Pale. The settlers are gradually absorbed by their Irish surroundings, and as new settlement after settlement is, made, the aliens yield inevitably to the assimilating powers of Irish civilisation. Attempt after attempt follows to establish English authority and English institutions by every means; all are doomed to failure. Cromwell passes over Ireland with fire and sword and leaves the country devastated; when his strong will is withdrawn, his followers lapse and become like the Irish. There are descendants of the Cromwellians to-day in Galway and Mayo who can speak no English. Within forty or fifty years Ireland recovers and again is conquered and bled and subdued. A century of terrible rigour follows, the final desperate attempt to stamp out the last embers of Irish nationality and Irish ideals. But it all fails. The country recovers. Faithful to their national ideals, the Irish suffered so long only to emerge into a new century, in which by labours, by famine, and by the blood of martyrs they are to come slowly but surely into their own.

The battle of the two nations raged around three principal questions: the religion of Ireland, the land of Ireland, and the government of Ireland. In each case the English strove to establish themselves and their ideas in place of the Irish and their ideas. In those long ages, the Irish never faltered in their hold on their religion; religious freedom was painfully but inevitably won. Never once did they relinquish their claims on the land that had been taken from them; after centuries of suffering they won back their land. They have incessantly demanded their national right of self-government; the last VOL. XLII.-No. 498

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citadel has already fallen. But in the hour of triumph, when the Irish have won back the exercise of their religion, the ownership of their land, and their own national Government, they are perilously near losing the language, and with it the distinctive civilisation, which preserved for them all their ideals. It is a strange irony if, when the Irish nation is about to achieve the last part of its triumphant liberation, it is to yield unresistingly to the alien and conform to his ideals of civilisation. The issue of that question rests with the present generation.

Such is the record of the Irish dead; and the historian who does not recognise this essential character of Irish history cannot write a true history of Ireland. That record may be regarded from any one of three points of view; any of them can produce right history, provided the essential facts and tendencies are recognised. You may hold, for instance, that the Irish are a backward people, and that it is one of the world's tragedies that they refused to submit to English ideas; like Froude, you may regard the Irish as "incurable," and the English as a nobler and wiser race, whose duty it was to subdue a people that cannot govern themselves. You may hold, on the other hand, that Ireland, freed from English interference, is at last on the way to attain that stability in its social and its spiritual life which England and the other countries so badly need at the present time; you may regard England as standing for materialistic, and Ireland for spiritual, ideals. Or you may feel that as a result of all this conflict there have been branded into the Irish character enough of English qualities to complement its own peculiar characteristics, and that this combination of very different characters cannot but be for the good of Ireland. It matters little from which point of view you regard Irish history so long as the actual objective facts are truthfully presented.

Unfortunately, the attitude of each historian generally upsets the balance of his mind in weighing evidence. Hitherto Irish history has been written by almost everybody, from Mrs. Green or John Mitchel to J. A. Froude, to prove some thesis; and the result is a mass of conflicting opinions and statements on almost every important point. Who will undertake a fair estimate of the work of Giraldus Cambrensis, or give us a final statement on the "massacre" of 1641 ? Take John Mitchel's Last Conquest of Ireland, a book which has had enormous influence in this country. It is an elaborate argument, founded on wholly untenable hypotheses. Even Mrs. Green can

hardly be regarded as reliable, though her work is based on deep research. Her materials seem to have been used and selected to illustrate her thesis. But at least her work has had the effect of finally discrediting Froude. Professor Freeman once said of Froude, that when you had read his account of any historical event you knew at least one way in which the event did not happen; and that judgment is certainly borne out by his English in Ireland. Though the result of an exhaustive study of State papers and original documents, it is an amazingly bad piece of historical work. There is hardly a paragraph-I say it deliberately-in the first forty pages of his preliminary chapter (the text on which the remainder of his three volumes is a commentary) that is not a series of demonstrable falsehoods or distortions of truth. The most obvious instance is his repeated use of the word banditti to describe the native Irish, among whom the English settlers were to bring order and peace. Amid the maze of untruth and inaccuracies in Froude's history, there is one sentence at least of penetrating truth. At the beginning of his blood-curdling account of the massacre of 1641 he says, in attacking the general attitude of Catholic and Nationalist historians towards that event: "Not evidence, but sympathy or inclination, determines the historical beliefs of most of us." The statement is true, undeniably and universally true; and it should be printed like a text on the front page of The English in Ireland.

The ideal history of Ireland is yet to be written. We cannot say that Miss Maxwell has brought us any nearer to it. Anyone in Ireland, however, who writes a book about Ireland deserves much credit and is likely to receive little encouragement. Miss Maxwell deserves all praise for her enterprise, But there are two somewhat harsh conclusions I feel obliged to state before I finish. First, this Short History is intended for general use as a text-book in schools, and a cheap edition of it is issued for sixpence as a school history. I have endeavoured to show, I hope without any ill-feeling, that the history of Ireland as written in this little book is inadequate and misleading, and written altogether from the point of view of the English in Ireland. Now, if (as is generally admitted) it is important that the national history of a country be taught widely and well in all its schools, then in justice to my argument I must express my hope that Miss Maxwell will soon write a second and different book which may supersede the present one.

Secondly, if I am right in assuming that Miss Maxwell's book, with all its limitations, represents the Irish history that is taught in Trinity College-and I do not in any special way blame Miss Maxwell for following the Trinity tradition-then, most emphatically, the History School of Trinity is unworthy of that University. So long as Irish history is taught only as a branch of English history, and taught as it is written in this little book, Trinity must necessarily remain out of touch with the rest of the country, and will deserve to be regarded as one of the few survivals of the English settlement in Ireland.

D. R. G.

CHRISTMAS NIGHT

THE Lord our God most holy
In lodging mean and lowly
Is born to bring us mirth,
His peace our sovran moly
Against the woes of earth.

No armies went before Him,
No angel hosts adore Him,

No courtiers tend Him there:
His servant she that bore Him,
His guard St. Joseph's care.

On manger-straw He lieth
In baby-wise He crieth

And maketh tender moan:

The Mother Maid replieth,

"My Son! My Love! My Own!"

Cry on, sweet Babe, and lure us;
With bonds of love secure us,
That none from Thee depart;
In fortress firm secure us-
The fortress of Thy Heart.

J. W. A.

CHE

CHRISTMAS MASS AT SEA

By REV. W. J. LOCKINGTON, S.J.

HRISTMAS EVE! A tumbling mass of whirling waters, cold and grey beneath a leaden sky! Mist-capped waves swirl leaping to the bending cloud. Misery, desolation and death, it is a world where all is cold and dreary, like unto the soul from which charity has gone.

Grey above and grey below and flying spume between, save where the waves, white-toothed, snarl through the gloom. Gripped by the stormfiend, they rise and shriek and fallemblems of spirits passion-tossed. Seemingly everchanging, ever striving, yet ever the same, they leap to the whip of the wind as the unwilling willing soul to passion.

The wind shrieks harshly across desolate space and the sea moans its monotonous answer. Along the hollows of the deep it rushes in thundertones, or bursts in evil gusts mid leaping wave-tops, lashing till they scream again.

Into this scene of turmoil steals our vessel-a wraith of black amid a world of grey. Over the sea road, alone, she slowly forges forward, creeping through fog and fighting cold wind and grey wave, telling of strength full resolute in a world of gloom and shadow.

Leaping in mad haste, with her white teeth bared in anger, the sea mouths frantically our adamantine armour. Foiled and baffled, she turns upon herself, and mountain leaps on mountain; in thundercrash they meet with giant blow, and on the impact one dissolves and dies, while the shrieking wind leaps at the haughty victor and in fierce fury tears his crown and flings it in shower of spume and spray across the murkiness to strike our ship invincible. Buffeted by watery hills that rise impetuous in her path, no peril affrights her. Ocean in her mountain might leaps high in gloom before her, striving to draw her to her black heart below. Creeping, always creeping, with the insistence of fate, she ascends the sloping wall of water; ever mounting, dauntless she climbs, until triumphantly she glides above the summit, and Ocean, in abasement, falls at her feet. Pressed by roaring rush of air, invisible tide of mighty power, she steals