1st correction.

Created on .

Friedrich Engels

[From the Fragments on the “History of Ireland”]

Written late May to mid-July 1870.

From the manuscript.

The English have known how to reconcile people of the most diverse races to their rule. The Welsh, who hold so strictly to their nationality and language, have become completely fused with the British Empire. The Scottish Celts, though rebellious until 1745 and since then almost exterminated first by the government and then by their own aristocracy, do not think of rising. The French of the Norman Islands, even during the great Revolution, fought furiously against France. And even the Frisians of Heligoland, sold by Denmark to England, are content with their lot, and it might be a long time before even the laurels of Sadowa and the achievements of the North German Confederation awaken in them the cry of pain for union with the great fatherland. Only with the Irish have the English not been able to cope. The enormous elasticity of the Irish race is to blame. After the most cruel oppression, after every attempt at extermination, the Irish stood up again in a short time stronger than ever before; indeed, they drew their main strength from the foreign garrison imposed on them for their oppression; in two generations, often in one, the strangers had become more Irish than the Irish themselves, *Hiberniores ipsis Hibernis*; and the more they adopted the English language and forgot the Irish, the more Irish they became.

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The bourgeoisie turns everything into a commodity, hence also historiography. It belongs to its nature, to its conditions of existence, to falsify all commodities: it falsified historiography. And that historiography is paid best which is best falsified in the sense of the bourgeoisie. Teste |attested by| Macaulay, who is therefore also the unsurpassed model of the clumsier G. Smith.

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The agrarian murders in Ireland cannot be suppressed,
because
and
as long as
they are the only effective means against the extermination of the people by the landlords. They
help
, therefore they continue and will continue despite all coercive laws. Quantitatively they fluctuate like all social phenomena; they can even become epidemic under circumstances where they occur on quite insignificant occasions. The epidemic can be suppressed, but not the disease itself.