It is doubly dangerous seeing that these children will soon grow up to learn that the Great Charter, which is held to justify all these tumultuous proceedings, has never even to our own day been current law in Ireland.

You introduce them to the Wars of the Roses as a model of peaceful, constitutional development; to the slaying of Edward II., Richard II., and I know not how many more as object-lessons in the reverence which angry Englishmen accord to an anointed king when they really dislike him.

Later centuries show them one Stuart beheaded outside his own palace, another dethroned and banished in favour of a Dutch prince.

Of romantic loyalty to the person of a sovereign they find no trace or hint in the modern period.

Lost causes and setting suns, whatever appeal they may have made to Ireland, do but rarely fire with their magical glimmer the raw daylight of the English political mind.