believe the despondent observers who tell me that Ireland is irresistibly drifting to a separation, and a miserable separation, from England. I no more believe the eloquent rhetoricians than I should believe them if they prophesied to me that Scotland, Wales, or Cornwall would have either to be governed as Crown colonies or to be given up. I no more believe the despondent observers than I should believe them if they assured me that Scotland, Wales, or Cornwall were irresistibly drifting to a miserable separation from England. No doubt Ireland presents many and great difficulties, and England has many and great faults and shortcomings. But after all the English people, with its ancient and inbred piety, integrity, good nature, and good humour,' has considerable merits and has done considerable things in the world;-in presence of such terrifying predictions and assurances as those which I have been just quoting, it becomes right and necessary to say so. I refuse to believe that such a people is unequal to the task of blending Ireland with itself in the same way that Scotland, Wales, and Cornwall are blended with us, if it sets about the task seriously.

True, there are difficulties. One of the greatest is to be found in our English habit of adopting a conventional account of things, satisfying our own minds with it, and then imagining that it will satisfy other people's minds also, and may really be relied on. Goethe, that sagest of critics, and moreover a great lover and admirer of England, noted this fault in us. It is good in the English,' says he, 'that they are always for being practical in their dealing with things; aber sie sind Pedanten'-but they are pedants. Elsewhere he attributes this want of insight in the English, their acceptance of phrase and convention and their trust in these, their pedantry in short, to the habits of their public life and to the reign amongst them of party spirit and party formulas. Burke supplies a remarkable confirmation of this account of the matter, when he complains of Parliament as being a place where it is the business of a Minister still further to contract the narrowness of men's ideas, to confirm inveterate prejudices, to inflame vulgar passions, and to abet all sorts of popular absurdities.” The true explanation of any matter is therefore seldom come at by us, but we rest in that account of things which it suits our class, our party, our leaders, to adopt and to render current. We are pedants, as Goethe says; we adopt a version of things because we choose, not because it really represents them; and we expect it to hold good because we wish that it may.

But, it is not your fond desire or mine,' says Burke again, that can alter the nature of things; by contending against which, what have we got, or shall ever get, but defeat and shame?' We shall solve at last, I hope and believe, the difficulty which the state of Ireland presents to us. But we shall never solve it without first understanding it; and we shall never understand it while we pedantically accept whatever accounts of it happen to pass current with our class, or party

or leaders, and to be recommended by our fond desire and theirs. We must see the matter as it really stands, we must cease to ignore, and to try to set aside, the nature of things; by contending against which, what have we got, or shall ever get, but defeat and shame?'

Pedantry and conventionality, therefore, are dangerous when we are in difficulties; and our habits of class and party action, and our, ways of public discussion, tend to encourage pedantry and conventionality in us. Now there are insignificant people, detached from classes and parties and their great movements, unclassed and unconsidered, but who are lovers of their country, of the humane life and of civilisation, and therefore grievously distressed at the condition in which they see Ireland and Irish sentiment, and appalled at the prophecies, they hear of the turn which things in Ireland must certainly take. Such persons who after all, perhaps, are not so very few in numbermay well desire to talk the case over one to another in their own quiet and simple way, without pedantry and conventionality, admitting unchallenged none of the phrases with which classes and parties are apt to settle matters, resolving to look things full in the face and let them pass for what they really are; in order that they may ascertain whether there is any chance of comfort in store, or whether things are really as black and hopeless as we are told. The editor of this Review is a kind and charitable soul, and he is willing to make room, among his statesmen and generals, for an insignificant outsider who proposes only to talk to other insignificant outsiders like himself in a plain way, and to perish in the light, at any rate (if perish we must), and not in a cloud of pedantry. But we must take the benefit of our kind editor's charity when we can, and he insists on extending it to us at this moment, when the Land Bill is not yet made known. However, it is possible that a knowledge of the Land Bill might not much help us; at all events, it is not essential to our purpose, which is to look fairly into the incompatibility, alleged to be incurable, between us and the Irish nation.

Even to talk of the people inhabiting an island quite near to us, and which we have possessed ever since the twelfth century, as a distinct nation from ourselves, ought to sem strange and absurd to. us; as strange and absurd as to talk of the people inhabiting Brittany as a distinct nation from the French. However, we know but too well that the Irish consider themselves a distinct nation from us, and that some of their leaders, upon this ground, claim for them a parliament, and even an army and navy, and a diplomacy, separate and distinct from ours. And this, again, ought to seem as strange and absurd as for Scotland or Wales or Cornwall to claim a parliament, an army and navy, and a diplomacy, distinct from ours; or as for Brittany or Provence to claim a parliament, an army and navy, and a diplomacy, distinct from those of France. However, it is a fact that for Ireland such claims are made, while for Scotland, Wales,

Cornwall, Brittany, and Provence, they are not. That is because Scotland, Wales, and Cornwall are really blended in national feeling with us, and Brittany and Provence with the rest of France. And it is well that people should come to understand and feel that it is quite incumbent on a nation to have its parts blended together in a common national feeling; and that there is insecurity, and reason for mortification and humiliation, if they are not. At last this, at least, has been borne in upon the mind of the general public in England, which for a long while troubled itself not at all about the matter,that it is a ground of insecurity to us, and a cause of mortification and humiliation, that we have so completely failed to attach Ireland. I remember when I was visiting schools in Alsace twenty years ago, I noticed a number of points in which questions of language end religion seemed to me likely to raise irritation against the French government, and to call forth in the people of Alsace the sense of their separate nationality. Yet all such irritating points were smoothed down by the power of a common national feeling with France; and we all know how deeply German and Protestant Alsace regretted, and still regrets, the loss of her connexion with France Celtic and Catholic. Undoubtedly this does great honour to French civilisation and its attractive forces. We, on the other hand, Germanic and Protestant England, we have utterly failed to attach Celtic and Catholic Ireland, although our language prevails there, and although we have no great counter-nationality on the borders of Ireland to compete with us for the possession of her affections, as the French had Germany on the borders of Alsace.

England holds Ireland, say the Irish, by means of conquest and confiscation. But almost all countries have undergone conquest and confiscation; and almost all property, if we go back far enough, has its source in these violent proceedings. People, however, go about their daily business, gradually things settle down, there is well-being and tolerable justice, prescription arises, and nobody talks about conquest and confiscation any more. The Frankish conquest of France, the Norman conquest of England, came in this way, with time, to be no longer talked of, to be no longer even thought of.

The seizure of Strasburg by France is an event belonging to modern history; it was a violent and scandalous act, but it long ago ceased to stir resentment in a single Alsatian bosom. The English conquest of Ireland took place little more than a century after the Norman conquest of England. But in Ireland it did not happen that people went about their daily business, that their condition improved, that things settled down, that the country became peaceful and prosperous, and that gradually all remembrance of conquest and confiscation died out. On the contrary, the conquest had again and again to be renewed, the sense of prescription, the true security of all property, never arose. The angry memory of conquest and confisca

tion, the ardour for revolt against them, continued to burn, and burns still; the present relations between landlord and tenant in Ireland offer only too much proof of it.

But this is only saying over again that England has failed to attach Ireland. We must ask, then, what it is which makes things, after a conquest, settle peaceably down, what makes a sense of prescription arise, what makes property secure and blends the conquered people into one nation with the conquered. Certainly we must put, as the first and chief causes, general well-being, and justice. Never mind how misery arises, whether by the fault of the conquered or by the fault of the conqueror, its very existence prevents the solid settlement of things, prevents the dying out of desires for revolt and change. Now let us consult the testimonies from Elizabeth's reign, when the middle age had ended and the modern age had begun, down to the present time. First we have this picture of Irish misery by the poet Spenser :

Out of every corner of the woods and glens they came creeping forth upon their hands, for their legs could not bear them; they looked like anatomies of death, they spake like ghosts crying out of their graves; they did eat the dead carrions, happy where they could find them, yea, and one another soon after, insomuch as the very carcases they spared not to scrape out of their graves; and if they found a plot of water-cresses or shamrocks there, they flocked as to a feast for the time, yet not able long to continue these withal; that in short space there were none almost left.

Then, a hundred and forty years later, we have another picture of Irish misery, a picture drawn by the terrible hand of Swift. He describes the miserable dress and diet and dwelling of the people, the general desolation in most parts of the kingdom.' He says:

Some persons of a desponding spirit are in great concern about the aged, diseased, or maimed poor; but I am not in the least pain upon that matter, because it is very well known that they are every day dying and rotting by cold and famine, and filth and vermin, as fast as can be reasonably expected.

And again :

I confess myself to be touched with a very sensible pleasure when I hear of a mortality in any country parish or village, where the wretches are forced to pay, for a filthy cabin and two ridges of potatoes, treble the worth; brought up to steal or beg, for want of work; to whom death would be the best thing to be wished for, on account both of themselves and the public.

Next, after the lapse of a hundred and fifty years more, coming down to our own day, we have this sentence, strong and short, from Colonel Gordon :

The state of our fellow-countrymen in the south-west of Ireland is worse than that of any people in the world-let alone Europe.

I say, where there is this misery going on for centuries after a conquest, acquiescence in the conquest cannot take place; a sense of permanent settlement and of the possessors' prescriptive title to their

property cannot spring up, the conquered cannot blend themselves into one nation with their conquerors. English opinion attributes Irish misery to the faults of the Irish themselves, to their insubordination, to their idleness and improvidence, and to their Popish religion. However the misery arises, there cannot, as I have already said, be fusion and forgetfulness of past violences and confiscations while it lasts. Still, if it is due to the faults of the Irish, it is in curing faults on their side that we have to seek the remedy, not in curing faults of our own.

Undoubtedly the native Irish have the faults which we attribute to them and a good many more besides. Undoubtedly those AngloIrish, who lead them, too often superadd to the passionate unreason of the natives our own domestic hardness and narrow doggedness, and it makes a very unpleasant mixture. Undoubtedly it is not agreeable to have people offering to fly like wolves at your throat-these people knowing, at the same time, that you will not put out your full strength against them, and covering you on that account with all the more menace and contumely. England must often enough be disposed to answer such assailants gruffly, to vow that she will silence them once for all, and to ejaculate, as Cæsar did when he threatened to silence the tribune Metellus: And when I say this, young man, to say it is more trouble to me than to do it.' Were there ever people, indeed, who so aggravated their own difficulties as the Irish people, so increased the labour and sorrow of him who toils to find a remedy for them? Always ready to react against the despotism of fact,'so their best friend among their French kinsmen describes them. 'Poor brainsick creatures!'--a sterner critic among these kinsmen says-poor brainsick creatures, distraught with misery and incurable ignorance! by inflaming themselves against the English connexion, by refusing to blend their blood, their habits, their hopes, with those of the leading country, they are preparing for themselves a more miserable future than that of any other people in Europe.' It seems as if this poor Celtic people were bent on making what one of its own poets has said of its heroes, hold good for ever: They went forth to the war, but they always fell.

All this may be very true; but still we ought to know whether the faults and misery of the Irish are due solely to themselves, and all we can do is to hold down the poor brainsick creatures and punish them--which, to say the truth, we have done freely enough in the past; or whether their state is due, in whole or in large part, to courses followed by ourselves, and not even yet discontinued by us altogether, in which it may be possible to make a change.

Now, I imagine myself to be at present talking quietly to openminded, unprejudiced, simple people, free from class spirit and party spirit, resolved to forswear self-delusion and make-believe, not to be pedants, but to see things as they really are. Such people will be