【正文】 n revolt, thegovernment had never sent Irish regiments to Ireland), and behindthis barrier stood the crowd of citizens. In the decoratedbalconies were the officials and their wives, the unionistemployees and their wives, the tourists and their wives. When theprocession appeared, the people in the balconies began to shoutgreetings and wave their handkerchiefs. The Queen39。 and whenthe carriage passed, they followed it with ambiguous glances.This time there were no bombs or cabbage stalks, but the oldQueen of England entered the Irish capital in the midst of asilent people. The reasons for this difference in temperament, which has nowbee a monplace of the phrasemakers of Fleet Street, are inpart racial and in part historical. Our civilization is a vastfabric, in which the most diverse elements are mingled, in whichnordic aggressiveness and Roman law, the new bourgeoisconventions and the remnant of a Syriac religion are reconciled.In such a fabric, it is useless to look for a thread that mayhave remained pure and virgin without having undergone theinfluence of a neighbouring thread. What race, or what language(if we except the few whom a playful will seems to have preservedin ice, like the people of Iceland) can boast of being puretoday? And no race has less right to utter such a boast than therace now living in Ireland. Nationality (if it really is not aconvenient fiction like so many others to which the scalpels ofpresentday scientists have given the coup de grace) must findits reason for being rooted in something that surpasses andtranscends and informs changing things like blood and the humanword. The mystic theologian who assumed the pseudonym ofDionysius, the pseudoAreopagite, says somewhere, 39。 they were received by some nativetribes, and in less than a year, the English King Henry IIcelebrated Christmas with gusto in the city of Dublin. Inaddition, there is the fact that parliamentary union was notlegislated at Westminster but at Dublin, by a parliament electedby the vote of the people of Ireland, a parliament corrupted andundermined with the greatest ingenuity by the agents of theEnglish prime minister, but an Irish parliament nevertheless.From my point of view, these two facts must be thoroughlyexplained before the country in which they occurred has the mostrudimentary right to persuade one of her sons to change hisposition from that of an unprejudiced observer to that of aconvinced nationalist. On the other hand, impartiality can easily be confused with aconvenient disregard of facts, and if an observer, fullyconvinced that at the time of Henry II Ireland was a body torn byfierce strife and at the time of William Pitt was a venal andwicked mess of corruption, draws from these facts the conclusionthat England does not have many crimes to expiate in Ireland, nowand in the future, he is very much mistaken. When a victoriouscountry tyrannizes over another, it cannot logically beconsidered wrong for that other to rebel. Men are made this way,and no one who is not deceived by selfinterest or ingenuousnesswill believe, in this day and age, that a colonial country ismotivated by purely Christian motives. These are forgotten whenforeign shores are invaded, even if the missionary and the pocketBible precede, by a few months, as a routine matter, the arrivalof the soldiers and the uplifters. If the Irishmen at home havenot been able to do what their brothers have done in America, itdoes not mean that they never will, nor is it logical on the partof English historians to salute the memory of George Washingtonand profess themselves well content with the progress of anindependent, almost socialist, republic in Australia while theytreat the Irish separatists as madmen. A moral separation already exists between the two countries. Ido not remember ever having heard the English hymn 39。s see at Strasbourg for five years until,feeling that he was near his end (according to his Dauphin) hewent to live in a hut at the place where criminals were put todeath and where later the great cathedral of the city was built.St. Verus became champion of the cult of the Virgin Mary inFrance, and Disibod, bishop of Dublin, travelled here and therethrough all of Germany for more than forty years, and finallyfounded a Benedictine monastery named Mount Disibod, now calledDisenberg. Rumold became bishop of Mechlin in France, and themartyr Albinus, with Charlemagne39。altro, che ne39。Holy Isle39。The Royal Journey39。s consort as though he were anabdicated German prince, amusing themselves by imitating the wayhe was said to lisp English, and greeting him exuberantly with acabbage stalk just at the moment when he set foot on Irish soil. The Irish attitude and the Irish character were antipathetic tothe queen, who was fed on the aristocratic and imperialistictheories of Benjamin Disraeli, her favourite minister, and showedlittle or no interest in the lot of the Irish people, except fordisparaging remarks, to which they naturally responded in alively way. Once, it is true, when there was a horrible disasterin county Kerry which left most of the county without food orshelter, the queen, who held on tightly to her millions, sent therelief mittee, which had already collected thousands of poundsfrom benefactors of all social classes, a royal grant in thetotal amount of ten pounds. As soon as the mittee noticed thearrival of such a gift, they put it in an envelope and sent itback to the donor by return mail, together with their card ofthanks. From these little incidents, it would appear that therewas little love lost between Victoria and her Irish subjects, andif she decided to visit them in the twilight of her years, such avisit was most certainly motivated by politics. The truth is that she did not e。 and ifParnell was a thorn in the Eng