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This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated.1891 Excerpt: ... I refuse to believe that such a people is unequal to the task of blending Ireland with itself in the same way that Scotland, Wales, and Cornwall are blended with us, if it sets about the task... More

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated.1891 Excerpt: ... I refuse to believe that such a people is unequal to the task of blending Ireland with itself in the same way that Scotland, Wales, and Cornwall are blended with us, if it sets about the task seriously. True, there are difficulties. One of the greatest is to be found in our English habit of adopting a conventional account of things, satisfying our own minds with it, and then imagining that it will satisfy other people's minds also, and may really be relied on. Goethe, that sagest of critics, and moreover a great lover and admirer of England, noted this fault in us. 'It is good in the English,' says he, 'that they are always for being practical in their dealings with things; aber sie sindPedanten,--but they are pedants.' The pedant is he who is governed by phrases and does not get to the reality of things. Elsewhere Goethe attributes this want of insight in the English, their acceptance of phrase and con vention, and their trust in these,--their pedantry in short,--" to the habits of our public life, and to the reign amongst us of party spirit and party formulas. Burke supplies a remarkable confirmation of this account of the matter, when he complains of Parliament as being a place where it is 'the business of a Minister still further to contract the narrowness of men's ideas, to confirm inveterate prejudices, to inflame vulgar passions, and to abet all sorts of popular absurdities.' The true explanation of any matter is therefore seldom come at by us, but we rest in that account of things which it suits our class, our party, our leaders, to adopt and to render current. We adopt a version of things because we choose, not because it really represents them; and we expect it to hold good because we wish that it may. But, 'it is not your fond desire or mine,' sa...

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