cratic class does not firmly protest against the unfair treatment of Irish Catholicism because it is nervous about the land; our middle class does not firmly insist on breaking with the old evil system of Irish landlordism because it is nervous about Popery.

And even if the middle class were to insist on doing right with the land, it would be of no use, it would not reconcile Ireland, unless they can also be brought to do right with religion. It is very important to keep this in full view. The land question is the question of the moment. Liberals are fond of saying that Mr. Gladstone's concessions will remove Irish discontent; even the Pall Mall Gazette, the most serious and clear-minded of the exponents of Liberal ideas talks as if a good Land Bill would settle everything. It will not; and it is deceiving ourselves to hope that it will. The thing is to bring Ireland to acquiesce cordially in the English connexion. This can be done only by doing perfect justice to Ireland, not in one particular matter only, but in all the matters where she has suffered great wrong. Miss O'Brien quotes an excellent saying of Fox's: 'We ought not to presume to legislate for a nation in whose feelings and affections, wants and interests, opinions and prejudices, we have no sympathy.' It is most true; and it is of general application. Mr. Bright is said to be desirous of dealing thoroughly with the Irish Land Question. With the wants and interests of the Irish people in this matter, even with their feelings and affections, opinions and prejudices, he is capable of sympathy. But how as to their wants and interests, feelings and affections, opinions and prejudices, in the matter of their religion? When they ask to have their Catholicism treated as Anglicanism is treated in England, and Presbyterianism is treated in Scotland, is Mr. Bright capable of sympathy with them? If he is, would he venture to show it if they made their request? I think one may pretty well anticipate what would happen. Mr. Carvell Williams would begin to stir, Mr. Jesse Collings would trot out that spavined, vicious-eyed Liberal hobby, expressly bred to do duty against the Irish Catholics: The Liberal party has emphatically condemned religious endowment ;-and I greatly fear that Mr. Bright would pat it approvingly.

'Sir, it is proper to inform you, that our measures must be healing.' Who but a pedant could imagine that our disestablishment of the Irish Church was a satisfaction of the equitable claims of Irish Catholicism upon us? that it was healing? By this policy, in 1868, the Liberal Ministry resolved to knit the hearts of the empire into one harmonious concord; and knitted they were accordingly.' Parliament and public of pedants! they were nothing of the kind, and you know it. Ministers could disestablish the Irish Church because there was among the Nonconformists of England and Scotland an antipathy to religious establishments; but justice to Irish Catholicism, and equal treatment with Anglicanism in England

and Presbyterianism in Scotland, they could not give, because of the. bigotry of the English and Scotch of the middle class. Do you suppose that the Irish Catholics feel any particular gratitude to a Liberal Ministry for gratifying its Nonconformist supporters, and giving itself the air of achieving a grand and genial policy of conciliation,' without doing them real justice? They do not, and cannot; and your measure was not healing. I think I was the only person who said so, in print at any rate, at the time. Plenty of people saw it, but the English are pedants, and they thought that if we all agreed to call what we had done a grand and genial policy of conciliation,' perhaps it would pass for being so. But it is not your fond desire nor mine that can alter the nature of things.' At present I hear on all sides that the Irish Catholics, who, to do them justice, are quick enough, see our 'grand and genial' act of 1868 in simply its true light, and are not grateful for it in the least.

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Do I say that a Liberal Ministry could, in 1868, have done justice to Irish Catholicism, or that it could do justice to it now? Go to the Surrey Tabernacle,' say my Liberal friends to me; 'regard that forest of firm, serious, unintelligent faces uplifted towards Mr. Spurgeon, and then ask yourself what would be the effect produced on all that force of hard and narrow prejudice by a proposal of Mr. Gladstone to pay the Catholic priests in Ireland, or to give them money for their houses and churches, or to establish schools and universities suited to Catholics, as England has public schools and universities suited to Anglicans, and Scotland such as are suited to Presbyterians. What would be Mr. Gladstone's chance of carrying such a measure?' I know quite well, of course, that he would have no chance at all of carrying it. But the English people are improvable, I hope. Slowly this powerful race works its way out of its confining ruts, and its clouded vision of things, to the manifestation of those great qualities which it has at bottom-piety, integrity, good-nature, and good-humour. Our serious middle class, which has so turned a religion full of grace and truth into a religion full of hardness and misapprehension, is not doomed to lie in its present dark obstruction for ever, it is improvable. And we insignificant quiet people, as we had our consolation from perceiving what might yet be done about the land, when rhetoricians were startling us out of our senses, and despondent persons were telling us that there was no hope left, so we have our consolation, too, from perceiving what may yet be done about Catholicism. There is still something in reserve, still a resource which we have not yet tried, and which classes and parties amongst us have agreed never to mention, but which in quiet circles, where pedantry is laid aside and things are allowed to be what they are, presents itself to our minds and is a great comfort to us. And the Irish too, when they are exasperated by the pedantry and unreality of the agreement, in England, to pass

off as 'a great and genial policy of conciliation' what is nothing of the kind, may be more patient if they know that there is an increasing number of persons over here who abhor this make-believe and try to explode it, though keeping quite in the background at present, and seeking to work on men's minds quietly rather than to bustle in Parliament and at public meetings.

Before, then, we adopt the tremendous alternative of either governing Ireland as a Crown colony or casting her adrift, before we afflict ourselves with the despairing thought that Ireland is going inevitably to confusion and ruin, there is still something left for us. As we pleased ourselves with the imagination of Lord Coleridge and Mr. Samuel Morley, and other like men of truth and equity, going as a Commission to Ireland, and enabling us to break with the old evil system as to the land by expropriating the worst landlords, and as we were comforted by thinking that though this might be out of the question at present, yet perhaps, if everything else failed, it might be tried and succeed, so we may do in regard to Catholicism. We may please ourselves with the imagination of Lord Coleridge and the other Mr. Morley, Mr. John Morley, and men of like freedom with them from bigotry and prejudice, going as a Commission to Ireland, and putting us in the right way to do justice to the religion of the mass of the Irish people, and to make amends for our abominable treatment of it under the long reign of the Penal Code-a treatment much worse than Louis the Fourteenth's treatment of French Protestantism, and maintained without scruple by our religious people, while they were invoking the vengeance of heaven on Louis the Fourteenth, and turning up their eyes in anguish at the ill-usage of the distant negro. And here, too, though to carry a measure really healing may be out of the question at present, yet perhaps, if everything else fails, such a measure may at last be tried and succeed.

But it is not yet enough, even that our measures should be healing; 'the temper, too, of the Irish must be managed, and their good affections cultivated.' If we want to bring them to acquiesce cordially in the English connexion, it is not enough to make well-being general and to do justice, we and our civilisation must also be attractive to them. And this opens a great question, on which I must say something hereafter. For the present I have said enough. When a good-natured editor, with all kinds of potentates pressing to speak in his Review, allows an insignificant to talk to insignificants, one should not abuse his kindness.

MATTHEW ARNOLD.

IN the November number of this Review I took the liberty of drawing the attention of its readers to the extremely critical state of affairs with regard to the transaction of business in Parliament. I tried to point out that the art of wasting time was be come a kind of profession, and that no time was to be lost if that assembly, on whose wisdom and foresight everything depends, was to be saved from inevitable decline and disgrace. I do not think that any one took the trouble to reply to me; I was unanswered and unheeded. Every one must, one would think, have foreseen the inevitable attempt to defeat the Irish Coercion Bill, but nobody seemed to think the matter worth a thought. I confess that I fully expected that before entering on the discussion of such a measure the Government would have taken some pains to place the House on a level with the other states of Europe and America; and would not have rushed into an ignoble and hopeless quarrel, from which they had nothing to expect but defeat. I was not at all surprised to see that the whole of the month of January was wasted, without any perceptible progress being made: the result appeared to me perfectly certain beforehand. All the methods which the ingenuity of every country but our own has devised to check the practice of speaking against time lay before the Government, they had nothing to do but to take their choice; they did choose at last, and, as it seems to me, they chose very unfortunately. They had recourse to the last and worst resource of a defeated and dispirited party—that is, a despotism-resting on what was sure to prove, and has actually proved, a vain hope, that they could avoid the delays which the introduction of new rules and the passing them though the House were sure to involve, the Government hit upon what I must consider the unhappy device of establishing two states, one of quiet and one of emergency, leaving the latter to be ruled by laws which the Speaker alone was authorised to make, without even consulting Parliament, and for which he alone was responsible. Let us look at this proceeding from a legal point of view. There is no doubt that the House of Commons possesses the power to make laws for its own guidance, for the power has been freely executed for six centuries; it is surely a very bold, nay, I will say a very rash, experiment, to tamper with constitutional arrangements of such elaborate

completeness and such venerable antiquity. The right of regulating its own proceedings is undoubtedly in the House of Commons, but where are we to find the right to delegate this right to another body, or to a single person? Can any case be imagined to which the maxim Delegatus non potest delegare could be more properly applied than the case where a great and ancient assembly breaks through the practice and traditions of many centuries in order to strip itself of one of its noblest prerogatives, the right of regulating its own proceedings, in favour of a single man who is to issue these laws without being obliged to consult any one as an alternative to the existing law; for whose laws no one but himself is responsible, and for the revocation of whose laws or their correction, as far as I can see, no provision whatever is made?

An old proverb says that it is a miserable servitude where law is vague or uncertain. Look at the state to which the House of Commons has reduced itself! It has two laws, and can never be certain under which it has to live. Most men find it hard enough to make themselves acquainted with one law, but it is hard indeed to have to reckon with two, and not two running side by side, like law and equity, but one at the shortest notice and for the most inconceivable reasons superseded by the other. We have been accustomed in times of emergency to submit to certain restrictions on our liberty, which vanished in easier times; but to find ourselves in time of peace living under two laws alternately is a trial which I believe no nation except ourselves has ever been called upon to endure, much less has imposed on itself.

We are really practising a course of proceeding-allowance being made for the difference of manners and institutions-not unlike the course adopted by the Romans when the Consul was directed to take care that the city should receive no damage; and just as this violent invasion of the law paved the way for the ruin of the Republic, so these newly instituted invasions of the law and practice of Parliament have an obvious tendency to weaken and shatter our ancient constitution, and to rend the House of Commons, on which our liberties rest, into disorderly fragments, instead of welding this great assembly into one harmonious and compact whole. It is the nature of all great assemblies to split and subdivide themselves into factions. Which is the better citizen-he who bears with patience the evils of the Commonwealth and seeks for remedies within the Constitution, or he who, unable to endure with patience the checks and disappointments of public life, seeks to indemnify himself for his mortification by violent measures, which tear up old landmarks, and are the usual forerunners of further and worse change? It is hard to prove a negative, but I believe you may ransack the history of England since the Conquest without finding anything like a precedent for the recent proceedings in the House of Commons. War and treason and violence you will find in abundance, but a deliberate act, by which any community of free Englishmen