Presbyterian dissenters, also suffering, though in a much slighter measure, from political exclusion, condescended, as the century was drawing to a close, to whisper something about alliance with the Catholics. The English interest, again, and the Irish interest, the two great factions of the dominant race, in their contest for the offices and emoluments of the State, each sought to gain a point against its adversary by tampering with the enemy, whom the one despised and hated as thoroughly as did the other. Slight relaxations were thus obtained by the Irish Catholics in 1774, in 1778, when the English Catholics also were relieved, and in 1782. In 1792, owing partly to the dissensions among the Ascendancy to which I have just referred, and partly, and much more, to the wisdom of Pitt, more important restrictions were removed, and at length in 1793 they nearly all disappeared, those which concerned property long surviving those which were aimed merely at the hostile religion. In the same year also the Catholics were re-admitted to the franchise.

Burke did his best, while he was upon the scene, to accelerate the progress of a large and liberal tolerance. His Letter to Sir Hercules Langrishe (1792), upon the propriety of admitting the Catholics to the elective

franchise, is one of the wisest and most completely satisfactory of all his pieces, so just is its application of history, so enlightened its idea of toleration, so sagacious its comprehension of political conditions and exigencies. Is your government, he asked, likely to be more secure by continuing causes of grounded discontent to two-thirds of its subjects? Will the Constitution be made more solid by depriving this large part of the people of all concern or share in its representation? We did not destroy the Gallican Church settlement in Canada, nor rob the Canadian Catholics of the rights of free subjects. Turn from the remote West to the remote East. The fact that people in India are Mahometans and Hindoos, and that the majority of the Christians are Papists, does not prevent us from undertaking the support of their rights, privileges, laws, and immunities. "Thinking and acting as I have done towards these remote nations, I should not know how to show my face, here or in Ireland, if I should say that all the Pagans, all the Mussulmen, and even all the Papists (since they must form the highest stage in the climax of evil), are worthy of a liberal and honourable condition, except those of one of the descriptions, which forms the majority of the inhabitants of the country in which

you and I were born. If such are the Catholics of Ireland, ill-natured and unjust people, from our own data, may be inclined not to think better of the Protestants of a soil which is supposed to infuse into its sects a kind of venom unknown in other places."

The sequel of the movement does not fall within Burke's period. As he lay dying, he could observe the tide of angry disaffection and confusion rising and swelling in his native country, until before he had been many months dead, it broke in a tumultuous rebellion that was signalized by horrors on the part of the victorious faction, compared with which the cruelties of his thrice execrated foes, the Jacobins, were almost pardonable. He must be deemed happy in having escaped the most hateful and atrocious episode in English history. The English Government had sown the wind, and it reaped the whirlwind. The process which hatched the Protestant monsters of Lord Cornwallis's time was simple. With the sword and the bayonet we founded a Church in robbery and injustice, we set up an aristocracy on spoils torn from the natives, and then we put into their hands a code of laws wicked enough to expel the last spark of virtue and benevolence from the nature of the very best man 1 Works, i. 557-560.

who should have to administer it, or to come within its sphere. If we reflect that this was the seed, we can barely wonder that the fruit has been, and yet remains for us, so passingly bitter.

III. Turning from Ireland to our great dependency in the East, it is easy to see how the circumstances which attended the establishment of English sovereignty in India would affect a statesman of Burke's natural sensibility, profound sympathies with the subjects of government, and active hatred of oppression, injustice, and disorder. Before entering upon a theme of this importance, involving, as it does, a conflict of principle that waxes daily more and more urgent for Englishmen, it is essential that we should settle two fundamental points, or at least, as the next best thing, recognise as clearly as we can that on each of them are held two diametrically opposed sets of views.

First, is it in the present stage of European civilization conducive to the general progress of mankind that any European power should assume the supreme government of a vast nation with traditions of which we are comparatively ignorant, with ancient institutions that it needs a philosopher to explain or to understand, with wants that we can hardly appreciate, with

deep and unalterable peculiarities of character, some of which revolt us, and none of which evoke our sympathy? If we were perfect in probity and virtue, and at the same time adequately armed with intellectual apprehension of the conditions of the problem, and of the means by which to satisfy them, there would be no difficulty in answering the question. It is impossible to conceive a powerful and enlightened people engaging in any nobler task than that of disinterestedly seeking to impart to a less fortunate and more backward race the acquisitions of their own long effort and experience, in all the moral and intellectual agencies for ameliorating human destiny. But as yet we are far removed from a state in which such conduct could be anticipated, and this makes it very much more difficult to strike the balance between the advantages and disadvantages of sovereign relations with inferior peoples. Our dealings with India, for example, originally and until Burke's time, so far from being marked with virtue and wisdom, were stained with every vice which can lower and deprave human character. How long will it take only to extirpate these traditions from the recollection of the natives? The more effectually their understandings are awakened by English efforts, the more vividly will they recognise,