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ment are, therefore, intrusted not to those persons only who have given proof of energy and ability, but to those who by birth and station are raised above the temptations of self-interest.

Strength brings security, and security negligence. Civilization and prosperity introduce luxurious habits and extravagant expenditure. The high persons and privileged classes to whom the care of the Commonwealth has been intrusted forget their duties in their pleasures. They believe that the State exists only for themselves. They pass unequal laws, and the people are oppressed, and clamor naturally to share the powers which can be no longer trusted in the old hands.

Hence come reforms and revolutions, the shaking off of rulers who have become incompetent and mischievous. The change is called progress, and is admired and applauded as some grand political achievement, a thing excellent in itself, an entrance into a new era of universal happiness. Many times in the world's history these glorious hopes have been entertained, but always to be disappointed. Only at critical moments, when some patent wrong has to be redressed, will the better kind of men leave their proper occupations to meddle with politics. The peasant and the artisan, the man of business and the man of science, all of all sorts who are good in their kind, give themselves to their own work, caring only to do well what nature has assigned to them to do. The volunteer politicians in every class, those who put themselves forward in elections to choose or to be chosen, are usually the vain, the restless, the personally ambitious; and therefore the same causes which undermine aristocracies destroy even more rapidly popular governments.

Democracies are proverbially short-lived. They can destroy class privileges, they can overthrow institutions, but their function ends in destruction; and when the generations pass away which, under a sterner system, had learnt habits of self-command, and could therefore for a time dispense with control, they pass away to give place usually to despotism. Private character degenerates. Individuals forget their country to care only for themselves, and therefore dwindle to their personal level. The men of the first French Revolution and the American Revolution were greater than any which either country has produced in the days of universal suffrage, equality, and miscalled liberty.

The aristocracy in these islands lost the confidence of the people in the last century. Their power and privileges have melted from them and are still melting, and we have again committed ourselves to the enthusiastic beliefs of which the Dungannon resolutions were no more than a crude expression. We have a new philosophy to gild a phenomenon which would look less pretty were its character confessed. Once more we have made an idol of spurious freedom, and we are worshipping it duly with unflinching devotion and the inexorable logic of faith. Universal happiness waits to appear where the rights of man shall have been completely recognized. Battle after battle is fought and won. Paradise is still unattained, but we do not doubt the truth of our theory; we conclude only that the process of destruction is incomplete. The enemy still lets, and will let, till he be taken out of the way. When all men shall be free to think, free to speak, free to act at their own secret wills, and prejudice and tyranny cease to interfere with them, then

at length the universal brotherhood will be a fact, and misery will cease out of the land. All men are by nature equal and free. All men being free have a right to share in the making of the laws. Being alike interested in the results, we assume that they will choose the best representatives to make them, and will become themselves elevated and ennobled in the exercise of their lofty prerogative. The propositions are as false as the anticipation is delusive. Men are not equal, but infinitely unequal. No man is free by nature, and becomes free only by the discipline of submission, by learning to command himself, or by submitting to be commanded by others. The multitude, who are slaves of their own ignorance, will choose those to represent them who flatter their vanity or pander to their interest. Emancipation from authority cannot elevate, but can only degrade those who are not emancipated by nature and fact.

False though it be, however, in its principles, the philosophy of progress pushes its way toward its goal with unflinching confidence and logical coherence. That which is unsound must fall before it; that which is untrue must be seen to be false; that which is unjust must perish. Then at length the wheel will have come full round, and finding ourselves not in Paradise at all, but sitting in arid desolation amidst the wrecks of our institutions, we shall painfully wake from our dream and begin again the long toil of reconstruction.

The history of Ireland in the concluding years of the last century forms a remarkable episode in this yet uncompleted drama. The degeneracy of authority which precipitates civil convulsions had developed itself in Ireland more rapidly than in the rest of the

empire. The executive government was unequal to the elementary work of maintaining peace and order. The aristocracy and legislature were corrupt beyond reach of shame. The gentry had neglected their duties till they had forgotten that they had duties to perform. The peasantry were hopelessly miserable; and finding in the law not a protector and a friend, but a sword in the hands of their oppressors, they had been taught to look to crime and rebellion as the only means of selfdefense. Never anywhere were institutions more ripe for destruction than those which England had planted in the unfortunate island which to their common misfortune nature had made part of her dominions. For ten years the Irish people had been fed, chameleonlike, with promises of immediate redemption. The Parliament had achieved its, independence. Volunteer battalions had celebrated the triumph with the music of musketry and cannon. Platform and newspaper and flying placard had echoed and repeated the florid rhetoric of Grattan and his friends. Liberty had not prevented rents from rising, landlords from multiplying whiskey stills, or whiskey stills and middlemen and tithe proctors from driving the people into lower depths of misery and madness. The most enthusiastic patriots were inclining to lie down and despair, when before the astonished eyes of Ireland, as of all Europe, rose the portent of the French Revolution, preaching on scaffold and at cannon's mouth the long waited for emancipation of mankind. Young Ireland, fed from boyhood on Grattan's declamation, passionately believing in freedom, and mad with disappointment at the failure of the Constitution of ' 82, responded with ecstasy. The cause of Ireland's as of all other misery, was the tyranny of classes who, by chicanery

and fear, had made the masses of mankind their slaves. France was pointing the way for all who had hearts to follow. Grattan had obtained the independence of Parliament; the independence was a shadow without political equality. Let Irishmen recover their personal rights, and independence would become a fact, and the long-waiting era of blessedness would at last arrive. The soil was unequally prepared. The Catholic religion assimilates ill with visions of political liberty, and except occasionally and for immediate objects disclaims connection with theories to which it is naturally an enemy. The special grievances of which Irish Catholics complained might incline them, however, to make common cause with those whose aim was universal emancipation. Meanwhile the northern Presbyterians were hereditary republicans. Smarting with the additional wrongs which had been inflicted on them in Ireland, they had sympathized ardently with the revolt of the American colonies, and in the American success they had seen an earnest of the ultimate success of their principles. They had furnished the strength of the Volunteer movement, they had been clamorous for Parliamentary reform, and though baffled so far, had lost no atom of their faith. or their enthusiasm. No less strong were the liberal emotions of the rising generation of educated Irish gentlemen. Trinity College was a hot-bed of liberal sentiment. Every clever Irish lad was a born orator, and the orator everywhere is the natural champion of wild imaginations. Among the lawyers, the younger men of business, the aspiring tradesmen, the men of letters, the poets, the artists, the feeling was the same. Grattan was the universal idol, while in the lower stratifications, among the houghers and the tarring

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