Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III Agitators NO CAUSE nor country has ever been so unfortunate in its champions as Ireland. Conscienceless agitators seem to thrive and grow fat, inventing and expatiating upon wrongs and cruelties perpetrated upon the Emerald Isle. One is often led to wonder what crimes the dear old sod could have been guilty of, to have foisted upon her as defenders, such moral imbeciles, such marvellous exponents of antediluvian morality as these spell-binders prove themselves for the most part to be. For grotesque exaggeration and misrepresentation; for picturesque fluency in mistate- ment and distortion of facts, these men are surely the blue-ribbon product of all the ages. It is difficult to understand and harder to explain the phenomenon; but it seems reasonably certain that men of the Sinn Fein type, like the Germans become paranoic, especially, when they catch a glimpse of the ' flag that braved a thousand years, the battle and the breeze.' Ethically and psychologically, like the Prussian, they are true morans and seem to think the situation demands and justifies the unlimited use of slander and falsehood. Why the cause of Ireland should attract this typeof propaganda and propagandist, it is difficult to say. One is at times compelled to think that they are as short on mentality as on morality else why should they put forward charges of cruelty and oppression on the part of England towards Ireland, so manifestly false, that almost invariably they convey their own denial. Thinking people by them, are compelled to feel that Britannia's course must be reasonably fair and just or her critics would not need to fabricate the vitriolic nonsense they pour upon her devoted head. No cause is ever permanently advanced in this way, and one does not know what to marvel at most, ? the br...