likeness of qualities, tendencies, and, let us add, even defects, the outcome in all probability of common Celtic blood and similar climatic conditions. The Irish are the French of the West," says M. Daryll; "we feel at once that they are our first cousins.' Priests and peasants, the bourgeoisie and the upper classes, all alike have a place in their hearts for our beloved and unhappy France. Nowhere in the world did our revolutions of 1789 and 1848 awaken wider reverberations than among the people of Ireland; and nowhere have more tears been shed over our reverses. The writer of these lines will never forget how he met one day, amid the ruins of Murrisk Abbey, a Mayo peasant who, after a few words on other matters, began to speak of France and French affairs. His gentle voice became grave as he talked of the war of '70; one might have thought it a thing that had happened yesterday, a calamity that had fallen on his own family, as he said with profound emotion: "We know all about it!" A few years ago, one of my friends, who was travelling in the West of Ireland, met an old countryman who, after some casual remarks, asked in a serious tone of voice: "Well, sir, are the French getting strong?" In 1870-71 such scenes as the following were to be met with in Ireland. A peasant, on the arrival of the weekly newspapers, would sit down under a tree and, putting on his glasses, proceed to read aloud the news of the war to the assembled villagers, whose intense interest might be guessed from the silent tears trickling down their faces, as the sad story was unfolded. France has ever been, for the Irish, "the only sympathetic nation." In spite of our reverses, our intestine struggles, and our present anti-Catholicism (which is bitterly deplored) Ireland still bends her eyes and reaches out her arms towards France. France is to her a sort of Earthly Paradise, a Land of the Free, a chosen place of rural democracy. She rejoices in our joys, weeps over our faults, glories in our glory, and will ever know us as "The Great Nation."

CHAPTER IV.-THE GOVERNMENT

ENGLISH Unionists will tell you with great assurance that the Sister Island is to-day in full enjoyment of just and impartial government. Ireland possesses, according to them, the same free institutions as England. Like England she has her representatives in the Imperial Parliament, which governs the two countries in precisely the same spirit. Ireland has the protection of habeas corpus, she has trial by jury, a permanent judiciary, a system of popular and elective local government, and a guarantee of "equality, parity and simultaneity " of treatment with Great Britain as regards legislation; what more does she want? Nowhere in the world is there such liberty as in Ireland; the Press prints what it pleases, and not one newspaper is seized or prosecuted in a twelve-month. the Irish keep on grumbling it is merely out of habit or hatred. Such is the thesis of Unionism: we have now to determine whether this thesis is in accord with the facts.

If

I. THE REGIME OF THE CONQUEST.

The basis of the political system of Ireland is the Act of Union of 1800. This Act, as we have already pointed out, did not effect a legal assimilation or union of the two countries as regards either the civil law, the judiciary, or the administration. It merely effected a fusion of the Parliaments, or rather it first mutilated the Irish representation and then engulfed it in that of Great Britain. No Irish majority, however great, has since then been anything more than a feeble minority at Westminster. I A phrase of Lord Randolph Churchill in 1886.

Ireland found herself depressed to the status of a negligible fraction of the Imperial system, and her right of representation reduced to a nullity. As is well known, she has fought incessantly through the century for the restoration of her lost autonomy, whether by repeal of the Act of Union, or by the establishment of an Irish Parliament, subject to the supremacy of the Imperial Parliament, with an Irish Executive responsible to it. The former was O'Connell's Repeal Movement, the latter is the modern Home Rule Movement.

The Act of Union left Ireland in a condition of dependence, ruled absolutely by the Garrison, and with all the old abuses hidden under a mask of legality and of constitutional forms. The Viceroy, or Lord Lieutenant, remained as a symbol of this dependence. A Deputy of the Sovereign, playing at sovereignty, he still holds levees, signs proclamations, receives, presides, inaugurates, and maintains his quasi-royal Court, with its population of snobs, parasites, and parvenus. The Westminster Parliament legislates, it is true, for the whole United Kingdom, but in nine cases out of ten the laws passed by Great Britain do not apply to Ireland. Ireland has her own special laws, the character of which has been aptly conveyed by Chief Baron Palles, one of the greatest of Irish judges. "The most you can say for these Acts," he once observed, "is that they are good enough for Ireland, but if they had existed in England they would not have been allowed to remain on the Statute Book for six months." Considered thus in its actual working, the Union is seen to be a Union merely for purposes of parade. It is, in Gladstone's phrase, a "paper-union," or, to adopt more familiar language, a pure farce and fraud. The real truth is that during the great part of the nineteenth century Ireland remained under the regime of the Conquest. She was governed exclusively in the interests of the Garrison. Something very like martial law was almost a matter of course, and coercion was all but permanent. Indeed, there were 87 Coercion Acts in 100

years. The severity of the Acts, especially of the earlier, deserves a special word. The Act of 1800 removed the decisions of the Courts Martial from any sort of review by the ordinary courts. The Act of 1817 gave the justices, in other words, the landlords, jurisdiction to try without appeal and to condemn to seven years' transportation any person in a disturbed district who was adjudged to be "idle and disorderly," especially anyone found in possession of arms, or in a tavern or public-house after nine o'clock in the evening; and these provisions were revived in the middle of the century by Sir Robert Peel.2 At the uprise of Parnellism, in the year 1881, a Liberal Government passed a Coercion Act authorising the Executive to commit to prison, for an indefinite period, and without trial, any person who could be regarded as an object of "legitimate suspicion."3 An Act of 1882 gave the police in disturbed districts power to make domiciliary visits at night, and to arrest any person found outside his own home. It further established special courts of summary jurisdiction, which were at once popularly christened, by a reminiscence of Cromwellian days, the “Slaughter Houses."4 The Conservatives then tried their hand at Coercion. In 1887 Mr. Balfour carried the perpetual Crimes Act,5 which, although less drastic than its predecessors, enabled him to proceed against five thousand persons in three years. People were sent to prison for shouting "Hurrah for Gladstone!" and for whistling "Harvy Duff " within hearing of the police. A little girl of twelve was convicted of having obstructed the Sheriff's bailiffs in the course of a seizure, and a little

2 At the beginning of the 19th century whipping was still the punishment prescribed in many Acts, and was of daily application. "I have known men," said O'Connell," whipped almost to death.” Cf. T. P. O'Connor, Parnell Movement, Ch. II. C. G. Duffy, Four Years of Irish History, P. 55-56.

3 Act of March 2nd, 1881.

4 Prevention of Crime (Ireland) Act, July 12th, 1882.

5 50 and 51 Vic., c. 20 (July 19th, 1887). Trial by Jury was superseded in the case of certain offences by trial by Resident Magistrate. The Lord Lieutenant was given power to proclaim disturbed districts and dangerous associations, etc.

boy of intimidation; it was found that he had looked at a policeman" with a humbugging sort of a smile! "6 And every measure of coercion produced the same effect on Ireland, the effect which a red rag produces on a bull. The victims of the government were acclaimed as martyrs ; political prisoners became popular heroes, and the more notable of them were returned to Parliament.

Coercion finds in corruption an efficient ally in the government of Ireland. It even stoops on occasion, especially from 1870 onwards, to the use of conciliationsugar-plums alternating with the stick, and cuffs with kisses. Conciliation, corruption, coercion, there you have the three ingredients of Irish government. They call for expert hands in the compounding, and more than one Chief Secretary has lost his post through a blunder in the quantities. Governments live purely from hand to mouth, with no continuity of effort, and no settled aim. While pandering to the Nationalists they divide their ranks, and sow amongst them distrust and dissension. Appeal is made to the appetite of the Garrison for places and honours. The trimmers are won over and the swashbucklers kept in hand by that species of gratitude which has been described as an expectation of favours to come. "Political jobbery is almost as flourishing in the beginning of the twentieth as at the end of the eighteenth century."7 Public policy is a perpetual see-saw, and Castle government sways from side to side under the pressure of events, satisfying neither the "rebels " nor the "loyalists." It has no friends save those who hold or hunger for places; and succeeds, with all its juggleries, only in being at the same time very tyrannical and very weak, in a country which stands pre-eminently in need of a government at once just and strong, and strong because just.

6 Davitt, Fall of Feudalism, p. 526. In 1902 there was another campaign of coercion, although on a much reduced scale. In 15 years 1,600 persons were condemned to the degrading punishment of hard labour under the Act of 1887.

7 T. W. Russell, Ireland and the Empire, p. 6.