Welsh Journals

book is a slightly odd, though often illuminating, study of souls and emotions in a vacuum, and as such is likely to appeal more to the specialist than to the general reader. DOROTHY MARSHALL Cardiff THE IRISH QUESTION 1840-1921. By Nicholas Mansergh. Allen and Unwin, 1965. Pp. 316. 42s. The passing years increase, rather than diminish, our interest in the 'Irish Question'; for we cannot come to terms with the Victorians without trying to explain their greatest failure, to understand and to do right by that country which Gladstone called 'the minister of God's retribution upon cruel and inveterate and but half-atoned injustice' (and he wrote this in 1845). It was a failure all the more glaring in the century in which the Imperial Parliament, again and again, had conceded self-government to the new states within the Empire; indeed, Gladstone spoke less than the truth in introducing the first Home Rule Bill, when he asked 'that in our own case we should practise what we have so often preached namely that the concession of local self-government is not the way to sap or impair, but the way to strengthen and consolidate unity'. Professor Mansergh's book, a revised and greatly enlarged edition of his Ireland in the Age of Reform and Revolution, published in 1940, is, as he says, 'a series of essays in political and historical analysis' and does not claim to be a systematic history of the Irish Question. Would that it were! None the less, it has much to say that is not only well worth saying but is said gracefully and succinctly. It has about it the same largeness of mind as characterises J. L. Hammond's Gladstone and the Irish Nation, to which it pays deserved tribute; and it has the further merit of looking at old matters from new points of vantage. Four main themes can be discerned. Ireland is seen in the context of Europe. To visitors and critics such as de Beaumont, de Tocqueville, Cavour, Mazzini, Nassau Senior, Mill, and, from a different angle, Engels and Marx, Ireland was another European nation struggling to be free, and Britain was judged in Europe by its response to Ireland's claim. Gladstone, alone of British statesmen in his 'European sense' (and hence his conflict with 'the firm and fixed ideas of the English ruling class'), alone perceived this and asked for the removal of Irish grievances so that 'we may be able to look our fellow Europeans in the face'. The second theme, the justice of Ireland's claim to nationality, is not really discussed except in relation to Mazzini's writings on Ireland. Douglas Hyde, in 1892, observed that Ireland had 'lost the notes of nationality, our language and customs', and founded the Gaelic League to remedy the deficiency, though he underestimated its political character. Professor Mansergh has much