-time enough, one would suppose, for commercial recovery-Great Britain has offered to Ireland the best market in the world. She has done more. In her great manufacturing cities, as well as in colonies founded by her, and which Irish enterprise never would have founded, she has given homes and bread to the overflowing millions of the Irish population. She has done this at a heavy cost to herself so far as her own cities are concerned. This is a principal source of the masses of misery and barbarism over which she is now wringing her hands. This it is more than anything else that forbids the British artisan to rise; one bitter reason Great Britain has for desiring, if it were possible, a total separation.

Misgovernment and corruption were the common lot of Europe in the last century, of England under her borough-mongering oligarchy as well as of other countries; and common to all Europe was the reaction produced by the excesses of the French Revolution. England obtained for herself representative government by the Reform Bill of 1832. She extended it in full measure to Ireland, and thereby gave conclusive proof of the absence of any intention to tyrannise. over the sister island. Thenceforth the interests of Ireland were in the keeping of her hundred representatives in the House of Commons. What practical demand for reform did they ever press with anything like unanimity to which Parliament refused to give ear? No Parliament, whether at Westminster or Washington, moves without pressure or without urgent cause. An absolute Government may exercise forethought and plan a paternal policy, a Parliament cannot ; and if the representatives of any interest are inactive, or act only for the purpose of annoyance or obstruction, the interest must suffer, as Scottish interests would if the Scottish members chose to behave like the Irish. Yet Parliament gave Ireland, long before it gave England, a national system of education, which, if the Union were repealed, the priesthood would overturn. It has given her religious equality, while England still has a State Church. It has given her a special and most drastic Land Act. It has also liberally relieved the distress caused from time to time by the growth of her population beyond the means of subsistence, while English distress has been left to shift for itself. The peace which is essential to the development of her resources, and therefore to her prosperity, it cannot give her so long as her people are under the influence of men whose trade is social war. The gift of representative government to people in the state of the Catholic Irish was perhaps premature; herein mischief may have been done, but it was not intentional wrong.

Is there any good reason for believing that, if Great Britain had been out of the question, Irish history would have taken a much better course? The early civilization of Ireland, though most interesting in its way, was merely ecclesiastical, and it was being trampled

down by clan barbarism. Nothing like a national or settled government had been formed. That the native Irish would have given themselves free institutions the whole history of the race to which they belong, as well as every manifestation of their own political character, whether in Ireland or in America, forbids us to believe. They would have given themselves, or rather have allowed to be imposed upon them, political institutions in unison with their religion. That religion would itself have been what it is in Spain or Sicily, untempered by Parliamentary government and national education. In defending the Union, loyal citizens are struggling for Irish liberty, which, if the support of England and Scotland were withdrawn, would in all probability succumb, and be succeeded, not by the larger liberty of a republic, but by a tyranny of dynamiters. The most ardent friends of the present moment admit that the tendency of the Irishman is to something arbitrary, and complain that he is not allowed to gratify his taste. It may be doubted whether, without the Imperial connection, the native Irish would ever have held their land against the advance of the race which came in from the north, and which, however outnumbered, has always proved itself the stronger. It is probable that, like French nationality in Canada, the Celto-Catholic element in Ireland owes its distinctive existence to the sheltering connection with Great Britain.

We are told that the Irish, if they had been free from British influence, would never have endured the existence of an idle aristocracy in their country. Can anything be better attested than the existence in tribal Ireland of a singularly idle, tyrannical, and plundering aristocracy in the persons of the chiefs? Has not this submissiveness remained especially characteristic of the Irish peasantry? Prodigally hospitable, irregular, extravagant, uncertain, vivacious; the chase, the turf, and the bottle divided a great portion of his intellects between them. Such is the portrait drawn by Sir Jonah Barrington of an Irish landlord to whom, according to the same authority, his tenants were devoted.

Absenteeism is a real grievance as well as a great peril, and so far as it arises from the connection of Irish with English estates, it is chargeable to the account of primogeniture and entail, which has been allowed, not from malice, but from Conservatism, to remain the law of the three kingdoms, and are strangely left in existence alongside of agrarian legislation. Let all that justice dictates be said upon this point. And it may be said without assuming that, in an independent Ireland of Roman Catholic Celts, the progress of legislation respecting land would have miraculously anticipated the policy of modern times, and without admitting that a particle of ill-will towards Ireland has had a place in British councils or in any British breast. In truth absenteeism now prevails to a lamentable extent in

the rural districts of England herself. But why have not the Irish members moved in Parliament, and sought at the hands of British Liberals the aid which would undoubtedly have been given? They have always appeared to cherish grievances rather than to be earnestly bent on removing them. Even in the case of the Protestant Establishment they appeared lukewarm, and during many years scarcely moved at all, while they showed something like hostility to the Land Act, though it had been framed on the report of an Irish Commission.

The worst of all absentees have been the wearers of the crown, who by frequent visits to Ireland (where, as often as they did go, they were enthusiastically received) might, as all who know the Irish well agree in saying, have won the hearts of the people, killed disunion, and prevented the demagogue from mounting, as he has mounted, the vacant throne. On this point, too, let the verdict of justice be frankly delivered. So far as the House of Brunswick is concerned, the loss of Ireland would be the punishment of a persistent neglect of duty. But this is not the fault of the British people; it is not a thing upon which freemen care much to dwell, and as the ground for breaking up a great polity it would be absurd.

The political case in favour of what is called the Irish Revolution has been formally presented in the shape of a list of grievances by a very able and a very sympathetic hand. It amounts simply to a deficiency of the popular element in local government. This deficiency exists in England also, and for both countries it was about to be supplied by a Local Government Bill when the attempt of the Irish to wreck the Legislature began. The political agitation has no deep root except in agrarian discontent; the Irish tenant wants to become owner of the land and pay no rent; for the refinements of political mechanism, central or local, he cares about as much as he does for the refinements of art or mathematics.

Another indictment is social. It is said that Irish genius has not been honoured by England. When you cite a long list of Irishmen who have received the highest honours of the Church, the State, the army, and the literary world, the reply is that these men cannot have been genuine Irishmen since they did not hate England. The Indian service abounds with Irishmen, while Irish dynamiters are yelling for the overthrow of the Indian Empire. In every appanage of British greatness Irishmen as well as Scotchmen fully share. It is called a social crime in us to laugh at the comic Irishman, as though the chief portrayers of that popular character had not been Edgeworth, Moore, and Lever. In former days no doubt Englishmen, Scotchmen, and Irishmen cherished stupid antipathies against each other. But in the present day does an Irishman suffer

any disparagement in British society on account of his blood? Neither at Eton nor at Oxford, both pretty good mirrors of any social prejudice that may exist, do I remember that there was the slightest feeling against the Irish. I should say they were rather favourites at both. When Irishmen butcher the husband before the face of the wife, beat out the brains of an innocent boy in his mother's arms, shoot women, cut off the udders of cows, blow up railway trains with dynamite, and openly applaud in public meetings the most barbarous and dastardly kinds of murder, remarks are made, and if remarks were not made their absence would be the most cutting of insults, since it would imply that such things, when done by Irishmen, were a matter of course. Who are they that brand the Irish race with infamy by proclaiming it to be a race of assassins? Who but the orators of Irish dynamite conventions?

It is pronounced offensive to call the native Irish Celts, though the most patriotic historians of France boast the Celtic origin of the French nation, and anthropometric science, with a severe air, comes forward to prove that all of us are Celts or none. Has anthropometric science discovered that Irish is not a Celtic language, and that there is no affinity between the native Irishman and the Breton? Has it found out that unchanged abode and continuity of institutions are no evidence of descent? Is it true that the leaders of the Irish race are not Celts? The Celt has always been apt to borrow leaders from other races. Both in Ireland and in the Scottish Highlands clans seem to have accepted Norman chiefs. Messrs. Parnell, Sexton, and Biggar are, as their names show, men of British race traducing their own blood. Of Normans there are probably few left anywhere they have shared the general fate of dominant and non-industrial races. But I do not want to insist on the point of ethnology, much less to support the harsh theory, which I am as far as possible from holding, of indelible peculiarities of race. Race has played a part in history, and has largely drawn with it religion. But, if it is preferred, let us call Leinster, Munster, and Connaught Roman Catholic provinces, provided we may do so without being accused of insulting the Roman Catholic Church. Some term or phrase we must have to mark succinctly the contrast between the three provinces which are the scene of disaffection, and Ulster, which, to the chagrin of the disunionist party alike in Ireland and England, disunion has just invaded in vain. Some term or phrase we must have to enable us to expose the fallacy of calling the three provinces Ireland, and their disunionism the Irish cause. Ulster, Protestant as none can deny, and Teutonic so far as her general character and her political affinities are concerned, stands in her prosperity and her attachment to the Union an insurmountable objection to the theory that British connection is the source of all the evil. The difference

between the northern and the southern Irishman, and between the ways in which they respectively prosper, is not less striking in the New World than it is in the Old. What is certain is that the southern Irishman has retained the political character of his tribal state, and has brought it with him unimpaired to the Western Hemisphere. The Englishman and the Scotchman are citizens. The Irish peasant is not a citizen; he is a clansman still. His objects are not political but tribal; they are the aggrandisement of his clan, the appropriation to it of a full share of the spoils, and the prosecution of the clan feud against England. His vote he uses as his ancestors used their skenes. His Church is the religious bond by which the members of his clan are held together. I speak of the class of Irishmen who fill the ranks of Fenianism. We have Irishmen in Canada and the United States of a different class, who are as worthy citizens as any in the world. But the Irishmen of that class following the lead of William Tweed and his fellows have loaded American cities with debt and filled American politics with influences for which Americans are not grateful. They showed their social tendencies by trooping behind the slave-owners who gave the North up to them for pillage, and in America they have been the cruel enemies and oppressors of the negro, their treatment of whom I confess, when I first became acquainted with it on the spot, let in new light upon my mind. Their excitable temperament, and their liability to be hurried by it into crime, does not desert them in their new abode. In the Draft riots at New York a mob mainly composed of Irishmen not only committed widespread havoc, but murdered negroes, cruelly beat old negro men and women, set fire to a negro orphan asylum, tied a negro to a tree and roasted him alive. Yet the negroes were not landlords; they were an unoffending and helpless race. The English labourers under Joseph Arch carried through their agitation without committing a single crime. Let anthropometric science explain to us these facts.

How is it, then, that the Irish hate the English? Mainly because hatred of the English is assiduously instilled into them through the press and from the platform by agitators who subsist on the quarrel, whose hearts are steeped in venom, and who shrink from no sort of falsehood. Because by these men, who alone have the ear of the people, an utterly calumnious picture of the acts, character, and intentions of the British people is every day presented to the Irish mind. The Irish are told that the British Government "impales puling infants on its bayonets," "racks venerable priests," and "when sword and fire have failed, deliberately calls in famine to complete the work." These monstrous lies the people read and believe, while they read nothing on the other side. This, I say, is the chief source of Irish animosity against the English people of the