"We must take nations as we find them: the Keltoi and the Sakai, always at contrariety, do not seem to have altered in character from the earliest prehistoric reports of old Herodotus even to our own times, more than three thousand years. Racial peculiarities are known to survive the actual transplantation to new lands; see in especial the Irish of America; as the Roman poet has it, 'Those who cross the sea may change their sky, but not their mind.' Therefore it is that a far-seeing and philosophical statesmanship should ever deal specifically--and as if individually--with national character; for example, if we would convert the typical Irish mind from (must we say it?) hatred of England to the love of her, we must commence as we would in domestic life, by somehow managing to please our too sensitive sister, by showing her our sympathies, and by treating her with honour instead of contemptuous indifference; thus investing her with 'the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness.'"
It is a quarter of a century since the writer of this paper published in the course of a book of his, now somewhile out of print ("The Rides and Reveries of Æsop Smith"), the following short chapter, on page 322, here reproduced textually. It was headed "The Unsunned Corner," and runs thus:--
Ireland came upon the _tapis_, and Æsop said, when his turn came to speak: One of my fields, on the wrong slope of a hill-side and surrounded by trees, scarcely ever sees the sun; and by consequence its crops are short when arable, and when in pasture its grass sour, and the hay musty.
And why then, he went on to say, shouldn't Ireland have a palace--a Balmoral at Killarney, or another Osborne at Killiney?
Poor Erin is that unsunned corner of our Empire's field; and it seems a thousand pities that the kingdom of Ireland should be denied some such special royal home as is even found rather superfluously at the camp at Aldershot. What if one of those lovely arbutus-wooded islands at the foot of M'Gillicuddy's Reeks were fitted with a Swiss cottage for the Queen? Or if Bantry Bay supplied its marble for a royal castle near Cape Clear? Or if the railroad to Galway were supplied with a gilt carriage or two to waft Majesty and children to some western palace in Connemara?