Just as good people thought they could easily make Ireland protestant if only she could be got within earshot of evangelical truth, so statesmen expected that a few clauses on a parchment would suffice to root out at a stroke the inveterate habits and ideas of long generations.
Morley draws a parallel between misguided religious efforts and the political attempts to reform Ireland.
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Yet he had prepared this document for the very purpose of tempting France into a declaration of war.
A rendering less apt for this occasion finds favour with some scholars, that true virtue can never be restored to those who have once fallen away from it.
It is a case so to speak of “limited liability.” We are bound in honour—you cannot put a legal construction upon it—to see in concert with others that these arrangements are maintained.
For this line of contention he was called an “unpatriotic trumpet of disaster,” and other names commonly bestowed on all men in all countries who venture to say that what chances for the hour to be a popular war is a blunder.
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