How to make a House Defensible.

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The defence of Dublin Castle was deemed expedient. Cannon (nine-pounders) were planted, fronting the gates that opened on Cork Hill and Dame Street.

In 1799 the friends of the Irish Constitution issued a weekly journal styled the Anti-Union. In the 31st number an Address to the Irish Grand Jurors tells them that the Union, "if carried, must make perpetual hostility the wretched inheritance of your unhappy posterity."

How truly events have verified this prophecy !

When the EX-FRONTIER MAN wrote the letter from which I have made extracts, Parnell and some of his supporters had just been imprisoned under the Coercion Act. They issued, from their prison, a manifesto requiring the farmers of Ireland to withhold all rents. The call was made in the following words: "The Executive of the National Land League, forced to abandon the policy of testing the Land Act, feels bound to advise the tenant farmers of Ireland from this time forth to pay no rents under any circumstances to their landlords until the Government relinquishes the existing system of terrorism, and restores the Constitutional rights of the people." The names appended to this document were those of Mr. Parnell and six other notable Land Leaguers. The Archbishop of Cashel was shocked at the reckless anti-rent exhortation, and rose from a sick bed to condemn it. The writers apparently calculated on the general obedience of the tenant farmers to their counsel; but very many tenants tendered what they deemed fair rents to their landlords. Some allowance must be made for the natural irritation of men smarting under the infliction of imprisonment; but they might have recollected that if the Government, as they complained, put in practice a system of terrorism, the progress of the Land League had been accompanied by a system of terrorism that consisted in multitudinous outrages on life and property.

The Government appears to have discovered that no benefit was to be obtained by keeping Parnell in jail. He was accordingly released from Kilmainham on the 6th of May, 1882, and speedily resumed his career of agitation. He soon declared that he would not have taken off his coat to work the land question, unless with the ulterior view of recovering the legislative independence of Ireland. That independence is indeed indispensable to our national life, and I have already expressed my regret that he did not, ab initio, concentrate his great abilities on its acquisition. He has

now the support of three provinces, and that of more than half Ulster, and his undoubted strength is emphasized by the rage of the Ulster West-Britons.

Meanwhile the condition of Ireland, strangled in the grip of what is termed the sister kingdom, became more and more deplorable. The newspapers constantly recorded large numbers of evictions, and the ceaseless emigration of our people. The present Earl of Derby is reported to have said. that it would pay England well to advance a large sum of money-I think a quarter of a million-to be expended in shipping off as many of the Irish race as that expenditure would pay for exporting. His lordship does not think the ordinary operation of the Union drives us out of the country fast enough. Yet he, and those who partake his hostility to our people, may be consoled by the progress of depopulation as recorded by the Registrar-General. The following summary of the Registrar's report is taken from the Daily News of the 3rd of April, 1883:

"From the Registrar-General of Ireland's Report we get two remarkable facts-that the efficient working population of Ireland is proportionately 10 per cent. less than in England and Scotland, while the possible mothers are 20 per cent. less. Thus there are very much fewer possible mothers in Ireland than in England and Scotland, and these mothers with their husbands have a much harder task to perform. It is evident from these facts that during the next generation the population of Ireland must diminish at a very rapid rate. Even now the diminution is going on quickly. Thus we find from the Irish Registrar-General's Report for 1881 that, while the excess of births over deaths during the ten years 1871-80 averaged 43,553 per annum, the emigration averaged 62,393 per annum. There was thus a yearly loss of population of nearly 10,000 persons. But in 1881, the excess of births over deaths fell to 35,912, while the emigration rose to 78,417. There was, therefore, a decrease of population of 42,505. Last year the decrease of population exceeded 50,000. In the past two years, consequently, the loss of population exceeded 92,000. As we have already shown, the loss is likely to go on increasing in the future."

The conclusion of the Daily News is a striking illustration of the state of a country deprived for eighty-three years of self-government:

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"It follows from all this that during the next quarter of a century the decrease in the Irish population promises to be

The Question of Repeal Examined.

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very considerable, while it is equally evident that the paucity of effective workers must stand in the way of developing the resources of the country."

The Daily Telegraph of September 12th, 1884, in an article on a paper by M. Kummer, Chief of the Federal Bureau of Statistics at Berne, thus lightly refers to the decay of Ireland after eighty-four years of Union :

"Famine and misery at home, and the prospect of plenty and happiness in new countries, have drained Ireland of many among the best of her people.'

Famine and misery at home! and in a country of natural fertility! Why is this? The Economist supplies the answer in the sentence prefixed as a motto to this chapter: "It is the English people who hold Ireland."

CHAPTER XXXV.

THE QUESTION OF REPEAL EXAMINED.

"Ireland is far too important in itself, and too different in many respects from Great Britain, to allow of its being ruled entirely by the Imperial Parliament. The craving for self-government has become so strong that it cannot be neglected."-RAMSAY'S Political Discourses, p. 325. Edinburgh, 1838.

"In reality, the central system is nearly allied to despotism, as the local is to liberty; but so far as they can be distinguished, they lend a mutual assistance. As centralisation leads to despotism, so despotism to centralisation; and as love of the soil prompts to self. government, so self-government to love of the soil."-Ibid., p. 343.

"It was idle to talk to Ireland of the word' Union,' since there could be no such thing as a real Union on an equal footing between two countries so disproportionate and unequal. Could the Irish believe that in this connexion they were to have an equal voice in legislating for England as the English had in legislating for Ireland? -Speech of RIGHT HON. C. J. Fox, at the "Crown and Anchor," 7th May, 1800.

I SHALL now attempt an exposition of the great question which, ever since 1800, has kept the minds of the people of Ireland in a state of chronic excitement, and which has now enlisted the solemn attention of Mr. Gladstone's Government.

There is no topic on which such utter ignorance prevails in England as on the Repeal of the Union. There is no political question that has been more systematically misrepresented by almost the whole newspaper press of that kingdom. The prevalent English notion seems to be that Repeal means

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all sorts of Irish turbulence and riot, mob-domination and universal anarchy; total separation from England and all her civilising" influences, and a return to antediluvian barbarism. This notion floats vaguely through the English brain; for our British censors are in general content with denouncing our claims with fierceness, or dismissing them with scorn. An impartial examination of the merits of the case appears to be the last thing that occurs to their minds. Repeal has been assailed from the throne. Parliamentary majorities have scouted it. Ministers have declared that a civil war would be preferable to the concession of the measure. And a late reverend divine protested it ought only to be encountered with grape-shot and canister.

Yet, despite this storm of hostility, the Irish people still persevere in their demand; because they know they are in the right, and they know that the success of their just claim is vitally essential to the welfare of their country.

Ireland is sufficiently great to require the exclusive care and attention of a Legislature of her own.

Let us now examine what are the merits of the case for the Repeal of the Union, and the restoration of the Irish Parliament.

The people of Ireland seek to rescind a statute which was passed against the consent of the whole nation-Orangemen and all-and of which the operation was to extinguish their resident Parliament.

From the earliest period of the connexion of the islands under Henry II., the King's Irish subjects enjoyed a Parliament distinct from, and perfectly independent on, the Parliament of England.* Some efforts on the part of England to usurp jurisdiction over the Irish subjects in the reign of King Henry VI., elicited from the Irish Parliament, in the thirty-eighth year of that monarch's reign, a full and unequivocal declaration of its own independence.t That Parliament declared

* "The statute 2 Richard III. chap. viii., recites as follows: "Que le Statute de Henry Fitz-Emprice' (Henry II.) 'ordeine pour la eleccion del gouvernor,' etc., had made several regulations for sup plying occasional vacancies in that office; it then proceeds to amend the same. Here, therefore, we have an evidence of a purely legis. lative enactment of primary importance made in Ireland, arranging the executive government itself, and coeval with the supposed conquest of the kingdom."-MONCK MASON'S Essay on the Constitution and Antiquity of Parliament in Ireland, p. 3. Dublin, 1820.

Leland's "History of Ireland," vol. ii. p. 42.

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"That Ireland is, and always has been, incorporated within itself by ancient laws and customs, and is only to be governed by such laws as by the Lords and Commons of the land in Parliament assembled have been advised, accepted, affirmed, and proclaimed; that by custom, privilege, and franchise, there has ever been a royal seal peculiar to Ireland, to which alone the subjects are to pay obedience; that this realm hath also its constable and marshal, before whom all appeals are finally determinable; yet, as orders have of late been issued under another seal, and the subjects summoned into England to prosecute their suits before a foreign jurisdiction, to the great grievance of the people, and in violation of the rights and franchises of the land; they enact that for the future no persons shall be obliged by any commandment under any other seal than that of Ireland to answer any appeal or any other matter, out of said land; and that no officer to whom such commandment may come shall put the same into execution under penalty of forfeiture of goods and chattels, and 1,000 marks, half to be paid to the King, and the other half to the prosecutor; and further, that all appeals of treason in Ireland shall be determined before the constable and marshal of Ireland, and in no other place."

It is impossible to express more distinctly and unequivocally legislative independence than it is expressed in the language of the Irish Parliament, 38 Henry VI. The reader will observe also, that the statute recites and establishes the fact that our distinct independence was then no new claim, but had existed as of right from the earliest periods in the words of the Act, "it always had been." It is as explicit on the question of final jurisdiction as Henry Grattan or Daniel O'Connell could be.

It may be objected, firstly, that the Irish Parliament of Henry VI. was the Parliament only of a portion of the Irish people of that portion which was of English descent, and of those aboriginal Irish who had then combined with the English settlers. I reply, that if the Parliament of a part of the nation had distinct independence, it certainly did not lose that independence by extending its legislative power over the whole island. It surely did not forfeit its rights by enlarging the area of its jurisdiction. It surely did not lose its privileges because it at length embraced within its sway the whole Irish nation. If its independence was distinct and undoubted when it was only the Parliament of a part of the nation, that independence must have necessarily been

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