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Colonies, that in order to achieve legislative freedom for Ireland, they must renounce every principle that repels the great body of the Irish Repealers at home. They are sometimes accused of intending to substitute a republic for the Irish throne of Queen Victoria. It is our ardent desire that Her Majesty should govern Ireland through an Irish Ministry and an Irish Legislature, just as Francis Joseph now governs Hungary through a Hungarian Ministry and a Hungarian Legislature. The Fenians-I speak of the multitude of IrishAmerican emigrants, not of some ten or twelve dishonest leaders—must bear in mind that the Irish Repealers inherit the constitutional principles of 1782, by which the legislative independence of Ireland was combined with untainted loyalty to the sovereign of these realms. Any deviation from these principles must be fatal to an alliance between them and us; fatal to the strength which such an alliance, if wisely formed, would constitute.

Calculated as the Legislative Union is to alienate Irishmen from the English connexion, it is not unnatural that our exiles who have sought refuge in the American Republic from the wrongs inflicted by that measure, should sympathise in the Republican principles of the land of their adoption. But it does not therefore follow that they will not loyally and faithfully adhere to the Royal Constitution of Ireland when the Home Government Bill shall have removed the evil of foreign legislation, and re-established on a stable basis our exclusive right to legislate for our country. Their unanimous support of Mr. Gladstone's Bill sufficiently indicates their sentiments.

English writers have complained that they now have two Irelands to deal with, one on each side of the Atlantic. This is true; and in order that these two Irelands should effectively combine for the recovery of their rights, the Ireland now in exile must carefully shape her course in accordance with the principles and exigencies of the Ireland. at home.*

It is needless to point out the political contingencies in which British statesmen may find it their true policy to give Ireland that contentment which can alone result from our possessing the sole control of our national concerns. Warclouds are blackening in various quarters) of the horizon. It is vitally important to the integrity of the Empire, that in the

*There are also other Irelands growing up in Canada, Australia, and other British colonies.

event of foreign war, Ireland should be the fast and firm friend of England. There is but one way of making her so, and that is by the restoration of her stolen property, her power of self-legislation-in a word, by repealing the Union. All this is of course unpalatable to the English lust of domination. But we in Ireland have our own experience of that domination. In an article on Fenianism in 1867, the Times asserted with sad truth that England "does but hold Ireland in the very hollow of her hand." Much more recently the Economist,* in an article on Secret Societies, repeated the same statement in these words: "It is the English people who hold Ireland."

True we are strangled in the English gripe, and the results of this Imperial pressure are disclosed by the special ⚫ correspondent of the Times, who writes from Cork to that journal on the 23rd of March, 1867. "In the country districts," says the Times correspondent, "the depopulation of Ireland is not brought to one's notice so forcibly as in the towns. The peasant's cabin, when its last occupant has gone across the blue water, is pulled down, and no trace is left that it ever existed. But town dwellings 'to let' and empty shops remain, sad witnesses of a population that has been and is not. To the Irishman this is a trite subject; the English traveller, accustomed at home to the rapid growth of numerous small towns in most of the counties he visits, is startled in this country by the almost uniform decay of towns, both small and great."

Yes; Ireland is held, as the Times says, in the very hollow of the hand of England; and the deadly consequence of that unnatural position appears in the evanishment of her people and in the decay recorded by the Times correspondent. It is well to bear in mind that when we were not held in the hollow of her hand-when, after 1782, we enjoyed for some years the priceless blessing of self-government—every element of national prosperity developed itself with a force which, contrasted with our present degraded and despoiled ccndition, demonstrates the absolute necessity of domestic legislation.

"It is the English people," says the Economist, "who hold Ireland."

This is the explanation of the ulcerated state of Ireland. The English people have no more right to hold Ireland than

* The Economist, quoted in the Irish Times, 1st of July, 1882.

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the French or German people have to hold England. No condition can be more unnatural, more provocative of crime, more prolific of turbulence, more conducive to misery, than that of a nation gripped fast in the talons of another.

The extermination of great masses of the Irish people appears, from time to time, to have been a favourite object of English statesmanship. In the reign of Elizabeth, Lord Deputy Gray so conducted the Government that, as Leland informs us, the Queen was assured "that little was left in Ireland for Her Majesty to reign over but ashes and carcases." ""*

The Government raid on human life is thus described by Mr. Froude :†

"In 'the stately days of great Elizabeth,' the murder of women and children appears to have been the every-day occupation of the English police in Ireland; and accounts of atrocities, to the full as bad as that at Glencoe, were sent in on half a sheet of letter-paper, and were endorsed like any other documents with a brevity which shows that such things were too common to deserve criticism or attract attention."

In Mr. Prendergast's "Cromwellian Settlement," the author says: "Ireland now lay void as a wilderness. Fivesixths of her people had perished."

In the gracious reign of Queen Victoria more than three millions of the Irish race have been got rid of between 1846 and 1885. This is being held in the very hollow of the hand of England. The diminution still goes on; and so long as we enjoy that affectionate pressure, the same result may be expected. The modus operandi has indeed been changed from ancient times. In the days of Elizabeth and Cromwell there were sanguinary raids against the people, and troops were employed in destroying the green corn and carrying off the cattle in order to starve out the Irish race. The people perished because their means of support were destroyed or abstracted. And the people of our own time perish or emigrate precisely because their means of support are taken away from them-not, indeed, by the coarse, rude methods of a former age, but by the equally effectual methods devised by modern statesmanship. The Union, with its

* Leland, book iv. chap. 2.

+ See his article in Fraser's Magazine for March, 1865, "How Ireland was Governed in the Sixteenth Century." + Page 146.

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consequent drain of Irish wealth in absentee taxes and absentee rental, and its destruction of the nascent manufacturing industries of Ireland by irresistible British competition, achieves the thinning out of our race which was formerly wrought by the sword. It deprives Ireland of the means of supporting the Irish; and it thus effectually replaces the murderous policy of Elizabeth and Cromwell. The work once performed by military violence is now accomplished by an economic process, and under legal, peaceful, and constitutional forms.

An Irishman who believes in the retributive justice of Providence may well be excused for doubting if such a system of iniquity is destined to be perpetual. Quousque, Domine, quousque?

CHAPTER VII.

THE EMANCIPATION STRUGGLE.

"I think the character of the Irish Protestants not radically bad; on the contrary, they have a considerable share of good-nature. If they could be once got to think the Catholics were human creatures, and that they lost no job by thinking them such, I am convinced they would soon, very soon indeed, be led to show some regard for their country."-EDMUND BURKE.

DURING the struggle for Emancipation it must often have sorely galled the Catholic leaders to encounter the patronising condescension of Protestant nobodies, who took airs of protection and arrogated high consideration in virtue of being emancipators. Prompt payment in servility was expected for the assuasive courtesies which seemed to claim a measureless superiority over the Catholic protégés on whom they were bestowed. "We have now shaken off our chains," said Sheil after Emancipation; "and one of the blessings of freedom is release from petty and contemptible political patronage. If a Protestant vouchsafed to be present at any of our meetings, it was, 'Hurrah for the Protestant gentleman! Three cheers for the Protestant gentleman! A chair for the Protestant gentleman!' And this subserviency, readily tendered by some, was perhaps the most provoking small nuisance of our grievances."

A species of humiliating advocacy consisted in alleging

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that although the religion of the Papists was damnable, idolatrous,. diabolical, degrading, and so forth, yet its wretched votaries might be safely admitted to political equality, inasmuch as the preponderating Protestant strength of the Empire would always avail to counteract any mischief that might be devised by the Papists. Nay, Emancipation might possibly be instrumental in converting the Papists to a purer faith; inasmuch as their legal disqualifications rendered perseverance in Popery a point of honour with its professors, whereas admission to equality of privilege would remove the suspicion which might otherwise attach to their motives in conforming to Protestantism.

Among the parliamentary advocates of Emancipation who took the occasion of supporting the Catholic claims to vituperate the Catholic religion was Mr. Perceval. He delivered a speech in which the ultra-virulent abuse of Catholicity was only to be equalled by the language of some orator at Exeter Hall, on a grand anti-Papal field-day; at the same time recommending the repeal of all disqualifying laws as conducive to the religious enlightenment of the Catholics. It scarcely needs be said that advocates of Mr. Perceval's class were among the politicians who would have clogged Emancipation with the royal veto on the appointment of Catholic Bishops. On this one point—that is, in supporting the veto-the illustrious Grattan went wrong. Mr. Daniel Owen Maddyn, in a work on Irish politics, upbraids O'Connell with having "laboured to make the venerable Grattan as unpopular as possible."

The accusation, when translated into the language of simple truth, merely means that Mr. O'Connell, with characteristic sagacity, opposed every scheme of accompanying Emancipation with measures calculated to secularise the Catholic Church in the slightest degree, or to bind up the priests in the trammels of the State. Grattan would have taken Emancipation, though encumbered with the veto; and although a Roman Catholic may condemn such a policy, yet he scarcely can blame Grattan for adopting it. Grattan was a Protestant, and, of course, could not fairly be expected to possess the watchful solicitude for the independence of Catholic spiritualities which should animate an intelligent Catholic, anxious as well for the religious interests of his Church as for the political freedom of his countrymen. truth, the only point on which O'Connell differed from Grattan was the question of the veto.

In