The attitude, however, of Catholic Ireland, and the sentiments of the immense majority of the Irish Catholics, must cause painful misgivings in reflecting minds. Their aristocracy, indeed, and their landed gentry have always been loyal and true subjects; they can scarcely be distinguished from their Protestant fellows. The Irish Catholics, too, of the upper middle classes are generally attached to the institutions under which they live; and Catholic Ireland has produced many eminent public servants, and has given splendid ornaments to the Bench and the Bar. But the spirit that prevails among the Irish Catholic lower middle classes, and notably among the masses of the peasantry, and the opinions and feelings they ostentatiously avow, are deeply to be regretted in many respects. Notwithstanding all that has been done for it, and the immense reforms made in its interest, this part of Catholic Ireland is, beyond question, more disaffected and disloyal to the State than it was when O’Connell was its master spirit; it is more hostile to government, law, and the existing order of things. The teaching of the Land and the National Leagues, and of the successor which has taken their place, has penetrated into the Corporations and Local Boards, in which the Catholic Irish are supreme; these assemblies echo with revolutionary and socialistic cries, and denounce the whole system of British rule in Ireland, aiming especially at the Sovereign and those in the highest places. The Irish Catholics, too, in the three provinces of the south, have gained a complete ascendency in county and municipal affairs; their first object has been to exclude the landed gentry from them, and to destroy the influence which belongs to property; and they have exhibited tendencies absolutely opposed to the Constitution to which they owe their authority. The worst symptoms, however, appear in the state of the peasantry; they have obtained advantages of which their fathers never even dreamed; the land system has been turned upside down for their behoof; they have no grievance in landed relations; and yet they remain unfriendly to the State, and show no sign of gratitude. This class contains the multitudes, who for more than twenty years, have allied themselves with a conspiracy against our power in Ireland, and who, at the bidding of designing men, shout treasonable utterances at mob gatherings, and denounce the ‘Saxon’ and ‘landlordism’ with one voice; and though they are a timid and somewhat inert mass, and they would not rise like their fathers in 1798, they would not lift a hand to support our rule were foreign invaders to descend on our shores. This state of opinion, no doubt, is intelligible to the real student of Irish history; the Irish Catholics are a people who have been cruelly wronged; they have only slowly risen out of serf-like thraldom; above all, they have only attained the position they hold in the State after long years of trials, and by giving trouble; they treasure the Celtic traditions of the past; we may regret that they are what they are, but can hardly feel surprise. In other respects, the Irish Catholic masses, especially in a democratic age, must arouse the solicitude of thinkers worthy of the name. Many thousands of them are still illiterate; they are too generally the mere followers of priests and demagogues, tossed hither and thither as their masters direct; they are animated by crude and wild ideas, like the peasantry of France before the Revolution; they have scarcely anything in common with the corresponding class in England, trained for centuries in habits of well-ordered liberty. They form, in a word, a dangerous and easily led democracy; and yet, owing to recent legislation, ever to be deplored, they possess almost a monopoly of political power in Ireland, and have sent representatives to Parliament whose acts are a byword.
Conciliation, therefore, as the phrase is, has failed in the case of the greatest part of Catholic Ireland; this remains an alien, even a perilous, element in the State; it is worse than useless to shut our eyes to the truth; the time is still apparently distant when it will become contented and loyal. Presbyterian Ireland is a people of rather more than half a million of souls, almost concentrated within a nook of Ulster; it was rebellious in sentiment a hundred years ago; it is now devotedly attached to the British connection, and has firmly supported the Union during a period of trouble. This community, nevertheless, of artisans and farmers is rather widely separated from the aristocracy in their midst, for the most part English in blood, and of the Anglican faith; and though the Presbyterian farmer has obtained the benefit of the late reforms of land tenure, and has received advantages far in excess of justice, he declares himself to be discontented with his lot, and is clamouring for a vast confiscation of the Irish land in his selfish interest. The Irish Protestants are a population rather larger than the Presbyterians; but they are scattered over all parts of the country; they do not possess the political influence of their distant kinsmen in Ulster. They comprise at least three-fourths of the leading landed gentry, and a considerable number of the better class of farmers; they predominate in the learned professions, and in the higher walks of commerce. But their lower orders feel the loss of the ascendency which was once their birthright; they have been thrust out from corporate and local government; they are isolated amidst a population not in sympathy with them; as a people they can hardly be described as prosperous. As to the Protestant landed gentry, they have for centuries been the most loyal of subjects; it is significant that they have been called the British garrison by the conspirators who seek to overthrow our rule in Ireland; they have given many eminent worthies to the State, and proved their devotion to it at the gravest crises; what they are has been shown in the war in South Africa. At present, however, profound and just discontent has sunk deep into the hearts of this order of men. They are the heirs of conquest and confiscation, it is said; but they were placed in the position they hold by English kings and Parliaments; is that any reason that, within the last half-century, the Nemesis of conquest and confiscation should have been invoked against them, in the Encumbered Estates Act and predatory agrarian laws? They were too much of an exclusive caste, separated from their dependents, and possessing powers over the occupiers of the soil, which were sometimes abused; is that any reason that they should have been deprived of political influence, supplanted by the bureaucratic Castle, changed from owners of their estates into mere pensioners, shut out by the force of law from local and county government? What, however, the Irish landed gentry most deeply feel is that, in the course of the last sixty years, they have been deceived, nay, betrayed, by British statesmen, who, having repeatedly assured them that their position was secure, have sacrificed them when it seemed to suit their purpose.
The Imperial Parliament has, during the last century, had absolute control over the affairs of Ireland. No impartial student of history will deny that it has governed Ireland very much better than her old Parliament could possibly have done, after the dreadful rising of 1798 had literally torn the country to pieces. The large majority of thinking persons have long ago been convinced that the policy of Home Rule, that is, the substitution for the Houses at Westminster of a statutory legislature seated in Dublin, would be disastrous to the Empire and Ireland alike; and that the evils attendant on the present system would be aggravated a hundred-fold by the revolution Mr. Gladstone tried to effect. Nor can it be questioned that the Imperial Parliament has, for a long period, sincerely desired to legislate and rule for the good of Ireland, and has accomplished important Irish reforms, whatever legitimate exceptions may be taken to them. Protestant ascendency and the Established Church have fallen; the law has long been indifferent to Irishmen of all classes; education has been brought home to the mass of the people; the tenure of land has been transformed, unwisely no doubt, but wholly in the interest of the occupiers of the soil. Nevertheless, much that the Imperial Parliament has done, and left undone, in the Victorian era, remains matter of censure and regret; and its Irish administration has been in many respects unfortunate. The neglect to make a provision for the Irish Catholic priesthood, a main object of Pitt and of our best statesmen, when the Anglican Church was disestablished in 1869, was a grave and a calamitous mistake; the attempts that have been made to reform the Irish land system have, with scarcely an exception, been sorry failures; the results have been, in no doubtful sense, deplorable. Few, too, will justify such measures as the establishment in Ireland of household suffrage, that is, giving a monopoly of political power to an ignorant and priest-ridden democracy,[15] and depriving property and intelligence of all influence, or as the handing over county and city government, in three-fourths of Ireland, to much the same classes. Nor are even positive errors such as these the worst, perhaps, that can be laid to the charge of the Imperial Parliament in the conduct of Irish affairs. With rare exceptions, the reforms it has made have been, unhappily, too late, and have been obtained only through menacing popular movements; it has over and over again made Irish questions the mere subjects of the selfish strife of party, with evil consequences for Irish interests; it has occasionally, and even for large spaces of time, shown a marked indifference to reasonable Irish demands; and its administration of Ireland has repeatedly been inconsistent, even contradictory, shortsighted, and feeble. It must be acknowledged, indeed, that the rule of the Imperial Parliament, in the circumstances in which Ireland has been placed, is, from the nature of the case, faulty in many respects; it is that of a dominant assembly practically controlling a subject dependency; and, as we see in the striking instances of Athens and Rome, this kind of government has never been free from great and real objections. This, no doubt, is no reason that we should fly from less to unbearable evils, and adopt the fatal scheme of Home Rule; and the causes that have made our Parliamentary régime in Ireland as defective as it is are evident, and, as I shall point out afterwards, may probably be removed, to some extent at least, without subverting the constitution of these realms. But the broad fact remains, and cannot be concealed; the Imperial Parliament, much as it has done, has not reached the hearts or gained, in any degree, the sympathy of an immense majority of the Irish people.
This conclusion, indeed, has been made only too manifest, if we look back at the history of Ireland within living memory. The Catholic Association defied the Imperial Parliament, and was supreme in four-fifths of Ireland, from 1824 to 1829; O’Connell, in 1843, rallied the Irish Catholic millions to the cause of the Repeal of the Union, that is, to the subversion of British rule from the Giant’s Causeway to Cape Clear. Home Rule became a popular cry when proclaimed by Butt; Parnell soon rose to the head of an Irish faction, which deliberately tried to paralyse and cross Parliament, and to make its sway in Ireland of no avail and contemptible. The Land League and the National League were essentially conspiracies of foreign origin, and they appealed to socialistic greed in a season of distress; but their chief object was to annihilate British power in Ireland; they had the support of huge Catholic masses; they returned to Parliament a band of more than eighty men, one of whose purposes was to checkmate its authority. Too much is not to be made of these movements; three-fourths at least of the Irish community have repeatedly been led away by able but unscrupulous leaders, and rush into courses to which they are not earnestly inclined; but these unquestionable facts assuredly prove that the institutions under which they exist are not acceptable to the great body of the people of Ireland. This attitude has been displayed with marked and too plain significance, within a period, as it were, of yesterday. The United Irish League fills the place of the Land and the National Leagues; it is a conspiracy against the State, like its forerunners; it aims ultimately at the same objects; its organisation and machinery are the same; it seeks to establish its domination by similar methods. It is, no doubt, less formidable than the Land and the National Leagues; it has received little support from America, and has no one to compare with Parnell at its head; but it has sent more than three-fourths of the representatives of Ireland into the House of Commons; and these have combined to put in force the arts of obstruction with an audacity, a perseverance, and a measure of success, perhaps never so conspicuous before. Its authority is less far-reaching than that of its predecessors; but it has established a reign of tyranny in not a few counties; it is largely backed by the Irish priesthood and by much the greatest part of Catholic Ireland; and its leaders boast, not without truth, that, disloyal as many of their utterances are, they are completely in accord with popular sympathies. The acts and the speeches, indeed, of these men have never been more unequivocal than within the last two or three years;[16] yet almost everywhere they obtain the applause and the support of the multitude. An Irish contingent was sent to fight for the Boers; the war in South Africa was yelled at, at huge public meetings, as an odious instance of English tyranny and crime; every reverse that befell our arms was welcomed; the Irish masses, especially of late, have made a display of their antipathy to, and hatred of, the State. There was an outbreak of disloyal rioting in Dublin at the Diamond Jubilee; but for the accident of the Spanish War there would have been a great commemoration of the rebellion of 1798; even the visit of the late Queen to Ireland was made an occasion for seditious speeches; if her death was very generally mourned, public bodies were found to refuse an expression of regret.
Irish administration, I have remarked, is in many respects faulty; this is mainly because it is dependent on British parties; it fluctuates as one or the other prevails in Parliament. It sometimes represents completely opposite principles; besides, as Lord-Lieutenants and Chief Secretaries usually hold office for a short time only, they are tempted to adopt a hand-to-mouth policy, and to govern with little thought of the morrow. A marked change, however, has, in the course of time, passed over the ordinary system of administration carried on at the Castle. The aristocracy and the leading Irish gentry had still, even at the beginning of the Victorian age, much influence in directing local affairs; their authority was not nearly as great as it had been; but they were still looked up to and consulted by the central government. This state of things has long ago ceased to exist; this order of men has long ago lost all political, and nearly all social, power; it has been superseded by a bureaucratic régime, depending mainly on paid officials and police, which rules Ireland from the Castle, with little external support. This mode of government is imposing and apparently strong; but it is essentially weak, and has little real hold on the country; the information, with which it is amply supplied, is often false, and occasionally causes grave mistakes; it forms an administrative system resembling that of the old centralised monarchy of France, of which Tocqueville has exposed the defects and the vices. Under this régime, however, the law of the land has certainly been vindicated more successfully than had been the case before; the Government has acquired decidedly increased power in dealing with disorders dangerous to the State, and perhaps in holding the scales of justice even between divided classes; it has not diminished the strife of hostile Irish factions, but it has maintained order more completely than of old; and this unquestionably is a great advantage, and a real set-off against some mischiefs and failures. It would be untrue to assert that this system of rule has been the paramount and even a main cause of the great decline in agrarian crime and trouble which Ireland has happily witnessed of late years; other and far more potent causes have concurred; but it may fairly be said that it has contributed to it. It would, however, be a complete mistake to suppose that agrarian disorder, even in its worst aspects, has become permanently a thing of the past in Ireland, or that this destructive curse of Irish social life has not immense influence even at this moment, though its outward manifestations have been greatly changed. It was, so to speak, only yesterday that, under the auspices of the Land and the National Leagues, there was the most frightful outbreak of agrarian crime that had been seen since the great tithe conflict; it assumed the proportions, in fact, of a horrible servile war; and shallow, indeed, the understanding must be which imagines that this state of things can never recur. If open agrarian disorder, too, has been largely diminished, the spirit of agrarian disorder is still strong; and it is doing infinite mischief in many parts of Ireland. Steadily adhering to the precepts laid down by Parnell, the United Irish League has brought the detestable system of ‘boycotting’ to a hideous perfection in several counties; whole districts are subject to this secret but villainous tyranny; the results are seen in numbers of derelict farms, in hundreds of victims writhing under ever-present terror, in an infamous interference with trade and industry. This malignant influence is more or less felt through nearly the whole of the southern provinces, and even to a considerable extent in Ulster; it should be added that the United Irish League, for the present, discourages active agrarian crime, though its agents hold this force in reserve; it believes it can compass its ends without making use of this weapon.[17]
A few words must be said, in this short survey, on the organisations that uphold the Christian faith in Ireland. The disestablished Anglican Church has certainly made progress in spiritual life; it has more moral and even, perhaps, social influence than when it was an appurtenance of the Erastian Castle. It has been admirably administered and ruled; the uses of adversity have been sweet to it, and it has been successfully launched on its new career; this is a strong proof of the inherent energy and capacity of the Anglo-Protestant Irish people. Very different, too, from what had been expected, moderation and wisdom prevail in its councils; its clergy are sincerely pious, but not given to extreme doctrines; its members are for the most part free from the narrow sectarian views which had formerly, not without reason, been laid to their charge. Its funds, amassed by good management, are, for the present, ample; but the rapid impoverishment of the landed gentry, the class from which it chiefly obtains support, and the confiscation with which they are threatened, no doubt expose it to future dangers; and it must always be the Church of a small minority, surrounded by influences hostile to it, but a Church which the State is bound to protect. The Presbyterian Church of Ireland has but little changed; it has felt the effect of the great religious movement, which has stirred the Three Kingdoms in the last half-century, and it is less rationalistic than it once was; but it is still what it always was, a powerful centre of the faith of John Knox, with a communion of strong democratic sympathies. The Catholic Church of Ireland still rests on the old foundations; but it is hardly the unshaken structure it was in the last generation. Its material resources have enormously increased; its fine edifices spread over the land; it still exercises immense influence over probably nine-tenths of Catholic Ireland. But a party has been growing up within it which resents, and has even defied, its pretensions; and though the power it possesses is, in the main, beneficent in the extreme, this has too often been abused in the domain of politics, and especially of late in Irish landed relations. The priesthood still largely direct their flocks, but they are more dependent on them than they once were; had it been otherwise, they would have hardly conformed to the bidding of the Land and the National Leagues, as unhappily they did in too many instances. Their leading men perceived from the first that these conspiracies were destructive of their moral influence; and had the whole body of the clergy received a just provision from the State, it would all but certainly have condemned the methods of the Leagues as these were decisively condemned by Rome. For the rest, the Catholic Church of Ireland is no friend of Protestant England, and of many of the institutions that exist in Ireland; but this has been inevitable from the events of Irish history; and whatever may be said, it has been essentially an ally of the State, by reason of its great religious authority. And if properly understood, it is a mighty conservative power, which ought if possible to be won over to the side of order and law; this is an ample, if there were no other, reason that statesmen should comply with its most reasonable demand, and remove the grievance, in high Catholic education, that only blind bigotry can deny.
The administration of justice in Ireland is better, on the whole, than it was in the early Victorian era. It is not only that the law’s delay has been to a considerable extent, remedied, as it has been, in England, by an improved procedure. Traces of Protestant ascendency were to be seen on the Irish Bench sixty years ago, though these were evanescent and few; such a trial as that of O’Connell in 1844, marked by partiality and even by wrong, would be simply impossible at the present time. Trial by jury, however, in Ireland too often reflects the animosities and prejudices of class, and is liable to grave perversion and errors; it is sometimes necessary, in causes where religious or political feeling is engaged, to make a careful selection in forming juries, in order that common right should be done; this inevitable, but invidious, process, held up to execration by the name of ‘packing,’ is certainly a matter that causes regret. The fairness seen in the administration of the law in Ireland has been strikingly illustrated of late years; leaders and agents of the Land and the National Leagues have had to answer for their offences in the inferior courts; but despite rabid clamour against what is called ‘coercion,’ the conduct of these inquiries has not been really impugned. A laudable attempt, however, to make the magisterial bench more popular, has lately placed on it an order of men, of whom some have abused their power; these instances, nevertheless, have not been frequent; the experiment cannot be pronounced a failure. The intellect of Ireland is not so fruitful as it was in the generation before the union; she has no political thinkers to be named with Burke, no writer of fiction equal to Maria Edgeworth, no dramatist to be compared to Sheridan, no orators who have reached the heights of eloquence reached by Grattan, Curran, Plunket, and other glories of her defunct Parliament. But there has been progress in this respect within the last sixty years; Ireland cannot boast of such public men as O’Connell, Sheil, and even Spring Rice; but she possesses Dufferin in the diplomatic sphere, and Lecky, and one or two others of repute in that of letters; she has only recently lost Lord Cairns and Lord Russell. The improvement of primary education in Ireland has been immense; the land is full of elementary schools, which, in the last generation, were, comparatively, very few, and though a considerable part of the population is still illiterate, the greater part, whose fathers were sunk in ignorance, has felt the good influence of the light of knowledge. High education, too, has advanced in Ireland; Trinity College is greater than before as a place of learning; if two of the Queen’s Colleges have certainly failed, the Royal University has been, in a sense, successful. But, as I shall point out, in subsequent pages, University education in Ireland remains defective; a University for the Irish Catholic upper middle class is a requirement rightly demanded from Parliament. As for Irish secondary education, it is still backward, but there is hope of improvement in this respect; the general standard of Irish education, it should be added, is, except at Trinity College, low, though this has been inevitable if we look back at the events of history. Irish opinion generally still embodies the deep-seated animosities and strife of race and faith, at least as fully as it ever did; with few exceptions this appears in the tone of the newspaper press. The utterances of many of the self-styled ‘Nationalist’ journals have been far more hostile to the State, and are conceived in a much worse spirit, than those of the same class of journals in O’Connell’s day.
If we examine the condition of Ireland, as a whole, we see that there has been some material progress, but with retrogression in important respects; and if a certain measure of good has been done, great wrong and evil have been accomplished, in the principal and the most far-reaching of her social relations. Her moral and political progress has been at least doubtful; notwithstanding immense and searching reforms, the mass of the population is more disaffected than of old; discontent largely pervades the classes most loyal to the State; if the mere power of government has increased, its beneficent influence is but little recognised; the great body of the community maintains a hostile attitude. The crooked has not been made straight in Ireland, nor the rough places plain; a state of society exists, in which, as the Greek poet said, ‘the fountains flow backwards, and things are out of joint.’ An old order has nearly passed away; but the new order that is replacing it is but of little promise; a type of society has been well-nigh broken up, but a strong and solid type is not being formed in its stead; at all events, in the phrase of Bacon, the time is still distant ‘when the strings of the Irish harp will all be in tune;’ many respond to the player’s hand in discord. ‘The Constitution in Ireland,’ Peel once exclaimed, ‘is not the British Constitution, but its ghastly image;’ let us see what it is in Ireland at the present time. The Sovereign is, in England, a main pillar of the State; he is a great political and social force; the Monarchy is enthroned in the heart of the nation. In Ireland he is almost an unknown name, associated with not a few evil memories; his influence, which ought to be immense over a Celtic race, has never made itself sensibly felt. In England Parliament responds to the national will, and has gathered the reverence of ages around it; in Ireland it is a foreign and alien assembly, with which the mass of the people has no sympathy. In England the aristocracy is at the head of public affairs, leads society, commands universal respect; in Ireland it has lost all authority; has no weight in the National Councils; has no popular support, is even disliked at the Castle. In England the middle class is enormously strong, and is the best bulwark of order and law; in England the democracy is almost wholly free from revolutionary ideas, as regards property, and seeks reforms by constitutional methods. In Ireland, it is unhappily quite otherwise; the middle class is comparatively weak, and, in its lower strata, is opposed to the existing order of things; the democracy is an easily led multitude, ready at its leaders’ bidding to rush into socialistic courses. In England, too, the Commonwealth is completely secure; in Ireland there is literally no Commonwealth; and such organisations as the Land, the National, and the United Irish Leagues, are dangerous symptoms of a kind of Jacobin antipathy to the State. The words of Peel are still unhappily true; but painful as the contrast he pointed out is, even this is not the worst circumstance in the present condition of Irish affairs. What, I think, most alarms a reflecting mind, is the restlessness that pervades the mass of the people, an eagerness for some undefined change, a demand for the universal spoliation of a class, a sense of insecurity spreading far and wide, a neglect of the pursuits of calm industry in the hope of what a revolution may effect, an instability in the social fabric from top to bottom. The agitation, the disorder, and, I will add, the vicious legislation of late years, will, however, largely explain these phenomena.
Lord Salisbury’s Ministry came into office, six years ago, at the head of the most powerful majority that had been returned to the House of Commons since the great Reform era. The time was singularly opportune to consider the state of Ireland, and to deal with the Irish questions that required sound and wise treatment. The Opposition was paralysed by a rout at the polls; the National League conspiracy showed few signs of life; the ‘Nationalist’ party was rent asunder; the community was more quiescent than it had been for years. It would be unfair to deny that, since it acquired power, the Government has been beset by many and grave obstacles in legislating on domestic subjects; it has been encompassed by a sea of foreign troubles; it has had to conduct the protracted war in South Africa. It would be absurd, too, to expect that it could, once for all, have placed Irish affairs permanently on a secure basis; this can only be the result of the wisdom of years aided by the healing influence of time. But it has disappointed enlightened Irish opinion; it has not done, or even tried to do, what it might have accomplished. Undoubtedly parts of its policy have been good; it has effected something, if not much, in developing the material resources of the west of Ireland, and in mitigating the danger and the stress of Irish poverty; it has carried on the excellent work of Mr. Arthur Balfour in this respect; the Department of Agriculture it has lately formed will, not improbably, be of real use in promoting industry and self-reliance among the peasantry, on the principles advocated, a century and a half ago, by Berkeley. But commendation, I think, must here end; the Government, I believe, has made grave mistakes; it has assuredly not successfully dealt with the great ‘Case of Ireland,’ greater now than in the days of Molyneux and Swift. It has not reduced the excessive representation of Ireland in the House of Commons; until this is done the Union will not be secure. It has disregarded the verdict of the important Commission which has declared that Ireland has been immensely overtaxed for years; here it defies universal Irish opinion; and having pledged itself to make a further inquiry, it has not hitherto taken a step to redeem its pledge. It is divided on the question of high education in Ireland, and professes that this must be an ‘open question,’ as if this was not unwise and perilous; and though it has appointed a Commission to report on the subject, Catholic Ireland very possibly may not obtain the place of learning which it is entitled to demand. Above all, on the capital question of the Irish land, the Government has certainly all but ignored the recommendations of a Commission chosen by itself, and has refused to lessen the injustice proved to have been done wholesale; like its predecessors, in the case of the Encumbered Estates Act, it is still bent on agrarian legislation that has done infinite mischief. Its administration, too, up to this has not been successful; it has allowed the United Irish League to grow up and to gain strength, with far-spreading evil results; its conduct of Irish affairs has been weak and empirical, and notably marked by false optimistic fancies. Of late there has been improvement in this respect; we can only hope it will not be abortive.
‘In this gigantic body,’ Macaulay exclaimed fifty-seven years ago, ‘there is one vulnerable part near the heart.’[18] The Empire has expanded into ampler proportions than those described by the orator; its subject kings, dominations, princedoms, powers, above all, its myriads of many races and tongues, are united by far more durable ties than those which held it together in a generation that has passed away. Four years ago, Canada sent messengers from her great lakes, Hindustan representatives of her ancient dynasties, the great island continent envoys from her free nations, to do homage to Queen Victoria; the pageant, gathered ‘within London’s streaming roar,’ was a magnificent spectacle of world-wide loyalty. England has seen another and a still more wonderful sight; the martial sons of our great self-governing colonies have flocked in thousands to do battle in her cause, in the distant and ill-known wastes of South Africa; in a long, bloody, and sometimes disastrous conflict, they have proved themselves to be worthy companions in arms of the offspring of the soldiery of Blenheim and Waterloo; they have fought and bled for England as if she was their common country. But Ireland, as regards the mass of the people, has, on both occasions, stood sullenly aloof; her heart has gone out in sympathy with the Boers; she remains, for the most part, hostile to our rule and disloyal. It is mere foolishness to shut our eyes to plain facts; still more so to join in the false pæans of interested partisans, and ignorant scribblers, who announce that because Ireland is, on the surface, comparatively at peace, she is in every sense a contented or a happy land, free from grave elements of political and social danger. She is still the ‘vulnerable part at the heart of the Empire;’ the spectre at the great national festival; the warning token, as in the case of the Oriental despot, that human grandeur and power are, in the nature of things, mortal. She is still, as she was in the day of Spenser, a malign influence across the path of our greatness, a riddle difficult to understand and interpret; the many problems she still presents to the statesman are perplexing in the extreme, and await solution. That any policy will suddenly remove the many evils apparent in her organic structure is a delusion a rational mind rejects; the deep-seated ills in that distempered frame may never be completely and finally cured. Something effectual, nevertheless, may, I think, be done; I proceed to examine, in the following chapters, the ‘Present Irish Questions’ that confront our rulers; and to consider what the amending hand may accomplish.