She comes to answer the charge that, having seized Ireland as a "trustee of civilisation," she has, either through incompetence or through dishonesty, betrayed her trust.

We have a habit, in everyday life, of excusing the eccentricities of a friend or an enemy by the reflection that he is, after all, as God made him.

Ireland is politically as Great Britain made her.

Since the twelfth century, that is to say for a great part of the Middle Ages and for the whole of the modern period, the mind of England and not that of Ireland has been the dominant fact in Irish history.
This state of things--a paradox in action--carries with it certain metaphysical implications.

The philosophers tell us that all morality centres in the maxim that others are to be treated as ends in themselves, and not as instruments to our ends.