Scotland, through a long course of centuries, had upon the whole maintained her independence. Ireland had been under the mailed heel of England. Scotland had her own Legislative and Executive powers. Our English Executive ruled in Ireland, and directly commanded more than two-fifths of the Parliament by place and pension. In Scotland, Mr. Burton, her latest and most authoritative historian, denies that bribery has been proved. The payments adduced to support the charge scarcely reach a thousand pounds for every hundred thousand spent in Ireland, where there was a vast further mass of bribery through Secret Service money, honours, offices, and commissions. In Scotland, a large independent national party favoured the Union: in Ireland there was no such party. In Scotland the English Government had not the means either to cajole or to intimidate. In Ireland, what was for this purpose a foreign authority arrested independent voting by dismissals from office; foreign hints of favour to Roman Catholics were employed to neutralise the higher opposition, while (witness Lord Cornwallis) plunder, murder, rape, and military violence in every form were used to intimidate the people, and the armed force of the island was raised to a number truly enormous. Scotland, taken at the worst, was like a man who had had a fall in wrestling, but whose general strength was unimpaired: Ireland like one who in his fall had received a mortal shock. For the peers and landlords of the country, who down to the Union had acted in the face of England as the natural leaders of the people, were partly bought over, and partly by the revival of religious bigotry and the attraction of the Imperial centre estranged, even as now we see them estranged, with rare exceptions, from the national sentiment of their countrymen. Scotland retained all the means she had had before of vindicating her national independence. Ireland, united in 1795, was now paralysed by the war of class with class, and of religion with religion. For Ireland, the question all along was a question between her and a foreign country: for Scotland, the controversy was domestic and national throughout. In Scotland the Union was at first the object of a factitious, as well as of a genuine hostility. The Jacobites, representatives of the very men who under the later Stuarts had sought to govern the country by foreign influence, availed themselves of the unpopularity of the Union to swell the chorus against it. Sooner or later, undue depreciation is commonly followed by excess of praise. Gradually it came to be felt in Scotland that enormous benefits had unquestionably followed the Union in the shape of common citizenship and freedom of trade. The Union has now for a century or more had the credit of these benefits, which might perhaps have been conferred without it and other circumstances, among them the vast influence exercised by the Magician of the North,' and the vast extension of popular franchises, have tended to obviate all jealous criticism. Two facts are

beyond dispute. The immeasurable advantage of a moral Union between the two nations has been obtained. And as regards the legislative measure there has been a gradual process of reconciliation visibly at work. It is not necessary to dive further into the future. But turning to the second allegation we are bidden to found our hopes on the expectation that the mind of Ireland will submit to the voice of England given at the General Election of 1886. It is expected that in a matter where Ireland has (so to speak) an integral, and England a partial concern, the people of Ireland will consent to substitute the English conviction for their own, and this although they have the support of Scotland, of Wales, and of a large minority (to say the least) in England itself; even a majority in that part of England where English energy is commonly supposed most to abound. Will this be so? I trust the matter will be seriously examined: for the case will be very serious, if we should build upon this expectation, and then find ourselves disappointed.

Analogy may here afford us a guidance, real if not complete or precise. Does it commonly happen that a smaller country accepts an incorporation, legislation, and administration, which it dislikes, at the wish of a larger country? Belgium did not accept it from Holland; and she succeeded (happily for all) in breaking the law of Europe to sustain her refusal. Holstein did not accept the will of Denmark, nor Lombardy nor Venetia the will of Austria, nor the Ionian Islands the will of England. In all these cases the minor people has heard the voice, has known and felt the pressure of the major; and yet in every instance the No of the weak has prevailed against the Aye of the strong. We are told that the negative in the case of Ireland is to disappear. Can so much as a single instance be quoted where it has been withdrawn?

After 1707, each generation of men, as it rose and lived and passed away, saw the Scottish Union rise in the estimation of the Scottish people. In Ireland the case has been exactly reversed. There is no period, nor any fraction of a period, at which Ireland has ceased to lament the lost charter of her nationality. Down to 1829 she had absolutely no voice in Parliament except a voice that spoke to contradict her heart's desire. She has now acquired one, but it was by slow degrees. The spasmodic effort at a rising in 1803, the ignored Dublin meeting in 1810, the lawful county demonstration in 1820 put down by military force, just served, as we now see, to keep alive her remonstrance. The first sign of national life appeared in the Clare Election of 1828. A fresh access followed the Reform Act of 1832. The short career of Lucas, and the leadership of Butt, produced further developments. Gradually, and most of all under Parnell, she acquired the firmest form of Parliamentary organisation. The sole remaining bar was removed when the narrow franchise opened out into the fulness of national expression under the Act of

1884. Between 1874 and 1885 the small phalanx gradually, as one seat after another was opened and refilled, acquired solidity and strength. At every stage, as the obstructions to national utterance have been removed, the voice has become more and more clear and loud. As the popular representation has become a reality, it has been more and more decisively shown that the removal of such grievances, as to our eye were impalpable and salient, was not enough. That a people is the best judge of its own internal wants; that the Irish for this purpose are a people; that whatever power is added to the national stock by improved education, by extended franchises, or by even the humbler forms of local government, will all run into the one channel of steady, undying demand for the restoration of the national life by reviving, in Ireland's ancient capital, the management of Irish affairs. Some may even hold it to be most happy that the demand, as it has become sonorous, has also become by careful definition, in their view, both determinate and safe.

It seems then that the expectation which we are told to entertain is an expectation in defiance of all analogy elsewhere, and of a course of indications on the spot regularly progressive and entirely consentient through three generations of men. While as regards the comparison with Scotland, it stands thus: The one Union steadily rose in the estimation of the people; the other has witnessed a continual rise of the forces arrayed against it.

The sum then of the matter, so far as the scope of the present paper is concerned, appears to be this. As a general rule of politics, when public attention has been effectually directed to some measure or system, and the question arises whether it shall be continued or abrogated, those who defend it very commonly do it on some or all of the following pleas. That it is economical, a matter of no insignificant concern. That it conduces to the honour of the country, and advances its reputation in the judgment of the world. That it gives solid and general satisfaction to the people. That the removal of it would be a measure of disturbing and revolutionary tendency; or that it promotes the efficient working of our governing institutions. Now, when we test the present methods for governing Ireland by these criteria, the result is as follows. First, that it is governed at a cost civil and military which, if applied to the empire generally, not even the wealth of Great Britain could sustain. Next, that we have banished the sons of Ireland wholesale, in this and in preceding generations, to other lands kindlier to them than their own, and the seed thus sown broadcast has grown up into so many centres of adverse foreign opinion; while more generally I believe that from the whole compass of foreign literature it is impossible to cull a single witness in our favour. Next that, instead of giving satisfaction to the populations of the two islands, every man on this side the water is discontented with the present relations, while

Ireland regards them with a sentiment for which simple discontent is too weak a word. Further, that under the name of a conservative resistance we are defending innovation, while the whole object of the Irish is to restore the tradition of their fathers; and that by promoting absenteeism, we estrange in sympathy, and too often in person also, from Ireland the most responsible of its citizens, the natural leaders of society, and the proper checks upon all violent and disorganising tendencies. And lastly, that by blocking the way with Irish business we have effectually hindered the progress of British legislation, and have now, while saddling our Parliament with intolerable labours, fallen into arrears which are also felt to be intolerable. These are propositions which in their essence turn upon fact rather than opinion, and which are severed by a pretty clear line from the more hotly debateable portions of the subject. And the question I ask is, What are the compensations which we either have received, or can rationally hope to receive, for these grave and serious mischiefs? Are discontent and discredit, penalty in treasure and in the stoppage of good laws, commodities so precious, that the people of England will make further efforts and sacrifices in order to their perpetuation? Is there not a real problem before us? and will not the political genius of this nation, which in every other quarter has, by the removal of discontent, strengthened and not relaxed the bonds of Empire, show the world, in the only case that still remains unprovided for, that, by carefully acting on the same principles in appropriate form, we may be enabled to bring about the same beneficent results?

W. E. GLADSTONE.

SCIENTIFIC AND PSEUDO-SCIENTIFIC

REALISM.

NEXT to undue precipitation in anticipating the results of pending investigations, the intellectual sin which is commonest and most hurtful to those who devote themselves to the increase of knowledge is the omission to profit by the experience of their predecessors recorded in the history of science and philosophy. It is true that, at the present day, there is more excuse than at any former time for such neglect. No small labour is needed to raise oneself to the level of the acquisitions already made; and able men who have achieved thus much know that, if they devote themselves body and soul to the increase of their store, and avoid looking back with as much care as if the injunction laid on Lot and his family were binding upon them, such devotion is sure to be richly repaid by the joys of the discoverer and the solace of fame, if not by rewards of a less elevated character.

So, following the advice of Francis Bacon, we refuse inter mortuos quærere vivum; we leave the past to bury its dead, and ignore our intellectual ancestry. Nor are we content with that. We follow the evil example set us, not only by Bacon but by almost all the men of the Renaissance, in pouring scorn upon the work of our immediate spiritual forefathers, the schoolmen of the middle ages. It is accepted as a truth which is indisputable, that, for seven or eight centuries, a long succession of able men-some of them of transcendent acuteness and encyclopædic knowledge-devoted laborious lives to the grave discussion of mere frivolities and the arduous pursuit of intellectual will-o'-the-wisps. To say nothing of a little modesty, a little impartial pondering over personal experience might suggest a doubt as to the adequacy of this short and easy method of dealing with a large chapter of the history of the human mind. Even an acquaintance with popular literature which had extended so far as to include that part of the contributions of Sam Slick which contains his weighty aphorism that there is a great deal of human nature in all mankind,' might raise a doubt whether, after all, the men of that epoch, who, take them all round, were endowed with wisdom and folly in much the same proportion as ourselves,