by doctors and correspondents in language of horror and sorrow practically identical with the words of the Franciscan annalists, John Clyn and Thady Dowling, writing, in the year 1348, the description of the Black Death in their Annalium Hiberniæ Chronicon: "That pestilence depopulated whole villages and towns, castles and market-places, so that scarcely an inhabitant remained. The contagion worked so mightily that whosoever touched a sick man or a corpse was at once infected and died. The penitent

and the father-confessor were buried together. The terror of death drove men away from love of neighbor and from the burying of the dead. Man and wife, children and servants went the same road-the way of the Death." Few Irishmen realize that something far worse than "the tyranny of England" again and again laid in ruin the industry, and annihilated the population, through wide regions of their verdant and smiling land. The thousands of miles between Kharbin and Kilkenny, where the Franciscan annalists described what they saw in 1348, still happily intervene between Manchuria and Ireland; but it is the same Black Death which is at Kharbin to-day; and modern science has to grapple with the fact that communications are easier, even if science is immeasurably wiser, than six hundred years ago.

Besides, the plague came again and again to Europe since the awful visitation of the fourteenth century. Under the Merry Monarch it broke out in London, and again slew its tens of thousands above the forgotten plague pit of Smithfield, where fifty thousand Englishmen and Englishwomen had been buried together in the year of the Black Death, three hundred and twenty years before. What a reflection that even to-day, deep under the foundations of that busy quarter of modern London, pickaxe and spade might still

stir the mouldering bones of some of those slaughtered myriads who died like flies, as the miserable coolies are dying in the Manchurian cities to-day! And fifteen years before the Great Plague of London in 1665 the pestilence had raged in Ireland, completing the destruction wrought by the Cromwellian armies, and not sparing the Cromwellian victors as well. When General Ireton, Cromwell's own sonin-law, hanged the Catholic Bishop of Emly, Dr. Albert O'Brien, after the capture of Limerick by the merciless Nonconformists, it was said that the murdered bishop, before mounting the gallows, had turned and summoned the Lord General Ireton to the judgment of God. And lo! the iron soldier sickened of the plague and went to the judgment of God! But the deaths of the Cromwellians were few and far between, when compared with the destruction which fell upon the Irishry in that horrible time. "Eight months together has the plague raged in Galway," wrote the Most Reverend Provost Patrick Lynch to Monsignor Massari, the Secretary of Propaganda at Rome, on May 1, 1650, "and the city has become a wilderness. Three thousand are the corpses, and all the living population have fled." Of all the priests of Galway, "solum remanserunt mecum duo collega." Of the state of Dublin the Secretary of Propaganda heard still more awful news. "In Dublin have thirty thousand died of the pest." then the pest came to England, carried back perhaps in the baggage of the ruthless Ironsides who had wielded the sword of the Lord and of Gideon.

And

The road of the plague always seems to have been the same road, and ever the scourge marched from the Far East to the westernmost West. Its apparitions also seem invariably to have been connected with great movements and disturbances among nations and peoples, wanderings of races, and the dis

placements and transportations of persons and commodities which arise in the course of extensive commerce and what is called the development of international relations. Nature seems to dislike those arbitrary interferences with the slow deposits of centuries which are effected by great conquerors and by great merchants and mercantile communities. When the plague came first to Europe in the days of the Ancient World it came out of the Levant, that sentina gentium, and it broke out in the harbor of Athens. That was 429 years before Christ. The mercantile fleets of the Athenian Empire concentrated the products of the known and unknown East along the wharves of the Piræus, and the eastern plague landed along with other commodities. A thousand years was to pass before the bubonic plague was to come to Europe on a vast and awful scale, after the migrations of the barbarians had thrown up from their depths all the settled races of the world, after Goths and Visigoths, and Vandals and Huns had crossed all borders of the Roman civilization, when Justinian and Theodora were reigning on the imperial throne at Constantinople. The Huns, especially those savage Mongolians who drew the recruits for their hordes from the Siberia and Manchuria of to-day, were exactly suited to bring the endemic plague of their ancestral steppes into Asia Minor and across the Balkans and the Alps. From 530 to 580 it wasted the Græco-Roman Empire. In Constantinople the deaths were a thousand a day. Through the subsequent century it attacked simultaneously or in succession every country between Mount Ararat and the mountains of Kerry and Donegal. No century, indeed, was henceforth to be free from the awful visitor from the Far East. The armies of the Crusaders were at once to provoke and to suffer some of its most devastating excesses. The

The Outlook.

gathering of the armies from Europe to rescue the Holy Sepulchre and the gathering of the countless hosts of Asia to keep the banners of Islam above the towers of Jerusalem, all suited exactly the propagation of the dread evil which festered and spread amid the pollutions of crowds and the promiscuity of international and inter-continental encampments. The crowning horror of the Black Death of the fourteenth century had been preceded by fresh revolutions of Asia, under whose Chiefs of Tartary whose dread sultans were Tamerlane and his predecessors; and the fresh virus of the Mongolian and Manchurian wastes was poured with overwhelming venom into the veins of helpless Europe. Thirty millions of Christians perished in Europe. Still vaster multitudes of heathen and infidel races were destroyed in Asia and Africa. The economic changes alone which were caused by that wholesale annihilation of labor and industry, wealth and civilization, have hardly ceased altogether to mould the course of history to the present day. Our ancestors in those appalling years had the additional terror that no man knew what caused the death which, black and bloody, smote millions by a breath. The assembled Faculty of Paris solemnly stated, after profound consultations, that a poisonous vapor had been distilled in the Indian Ocean under the baleful conjunction of Jupiter and Mars dominated by the red orb of Saturn in a House of Hate! Perhaps we are not really much nearer to the originating cause of it all, when we have located the bacillus of the rat flea and the bacillus of the marmots of Manchuria. A breath of contagion can kill in the name of the scientific bacillus as surely as under the red House of the Astrological Conjuncture which expressed the sapience of the Faculty of Paris in the fourteenth century.

In the course of the debate on the Home Rule amendment to the Address, the Prime Minister turned a question from Lord Hugh Cecil, as to the means by which the supremacy of the Imperial Parliament would be maintained, with the genially evasive answer, "Solvitur ambulando." The answer, lightly given by way of parrying the thrusts of an acute persistent Parliamentary heckler, might none the less serve as a motto for much that is habitual in English statesmanship. We generally do solve questions in that way. Lord Hugh wittily suggested a neat translation. It means, he thinks, "walking through the division lobbies." A statesman solves most of his difficulties, under the conditions of the modern party system, by relying on the legs of his followers. Somehow, they always do the necessary walking. A more exact translation would, perhaps, be "muddling through.” It is the tendency of party leaders absorbed in the tactical needs of a situation which changes with a fascinating variety from day to day and week to week, to leave the coming problem to adjust itself. It is down for next session in the programme, as a speech may be down in the statesman's diary for next month.

When next session arrives, the Bill will be drafted pretty much as when next month comes the speech will be prepared. In the hurry and bustle of party warfare a statesman takes his problems as they come. The solutions are necessarily a little empirical. They are the work of men who are forced to live for the day, and they are apt to show the limitations of such hasty workmanship.

It is hardly necessary to dwell upon the more obvious of the problems which lie on the surface of Home Rule. There is the issue raised by Lord Hugh

Cecil. In what form will the supremacy of the Imperial Parliament be asserted? Will there still be an rish Secretary, who will advise the Crown to give or refuse its assent to the Bills passed by an Irish Parliament, and answer for his advice to the Parliament at Westminster? That is the procedure in the case of Colonies, and while, in the early years of Irish autonomy, it might be used effectively on grave occasions, all the analogies and the practice of our Empire suggest that it would in time become an effete and obsolete check. Yet it is the common wish of both parties to the settlement that the check, however it may operate, should be a reality. Nothing would go so far to reconcile the more reasonable section of the Protestant minority to their position as the knowledge that there existed a vigilant Court of Appeal before which they might bring for review any legislation which, in their opinion, menaced their liberties. risk of intolerance is not, to our thinking, a real one. A race which chose as its national leaders two Protestants in succession, Butt and Parnell, cannot fairly be accused of exclusive sympathies. The immense influence which the parish priest exerted in the past, mainly for good, is no longer so absolute as it was. He owed it, in great part, to the fact that he was usually the one man in the district who had education enough to enable him to stand against the landlord. Education today is more widely diffused, and the landlord has been bought out. But though clericalism may not be an enemy, the fear of clericalism is a danger which must be met. Mr. Redmond has himself recognized that it is by establishing the reality of the Imperial Parliament's supremacy that confidence can best be given to the minority. The

The

form in which this supremacy shall be asserted depends on the attitude which is ultimately adopted towards the question of federalism. It is difficult to imagine any satisfactory adjustment of the thorny question of the inclusion of the Irish members in the Parliament at Westminster which does not involve an adjustment of the functions of the House of Commons to suit the case, not merely of Ireland, but of the other three nationalities for which it stands.

These questions are central; they will not be "solved by walking." We may be sure that they have engaged, and will still engage, the attention of a Cabinet which for two years of conference and conflict will have been busied continually with the larger constitutional issues. Yet, vital though these are, it is questionable whether the success of Home Rule ultimately turns upon them. There is another problem, on which hangs the whole internal future of an Irish State. From the plantations to the famine, and from the famine to land purchase, it is finance and economics which have been the real basis of the Irish question. It is a sentimental illusion which treats the religious difficulty as the fountain of Irish trouble. A Catholic in the darker centuries of the island's history was a man forbidden to hold land, and restrained from the exercise of his brains in a profession. The consequences of a poverty which this persecution imposed, from motives which partook more of greed than of fanaticism, have made the Irish question as it is to-day. It has been complicated in its financial aspects as much by our recent efforts to make amends as by our earlier oppressions. There is for the foundation of the whole difficulty that fundamental injustice of over-taxation which a Royal Commission established with an approach to unanimity. There is the further complication of land purchase, which based an Irish re

form upon British credit. There is the more recent complication of old age pensions, which has given to a race, in which the aged poor form a larger proportion than they do among ourselves, while the standard of living is lower, a benefit out of all proportion to any contribution which Ireland makes to the new revenues from the super-tax and unearned increment. It is on the whole re-adjustment between Imperial and local burdens that the future of the Irish State may turn. Crippled in finance, it would encounter, when it came to grapple with all its concrete problems of internal development, nothing but that disillusion which fosters unrest.

Here, clearly, is a problem that must be solved, not by walking but by counting. In this single financial issue lies work which must somehow be overtaken by careful study before a workable Home Rule Bill can be framed. The question moreover, is not without its bearings on the problem of Ulster. Is it really a narrow but idealistic fanaticism which underlies the fear of Home Rule? Is it merely prejudice, and the memory of a long ascendancy, that stand in the way of appeasement? Does this competent, hard-headed race, with Protestant England and Scotland behind it, seriously dread the risk of intolerant legislation? There are men who know Ulster, who entertain a shrewd suspicion that here also the root of the difficulty is economic. It is conceivable that what wealthy Ulster really fears is not intolerant legislation, or partial administration, but "predatory" taxation. Agrarian Ireland will want resources for its own development. The division of races is in some part a division of interests. Protestant industrialist is against the Catholic farmer. It is just conceivable that, in the adjustment of burdens, the agrarian majority might be tempted to deal brusquely with the industrial minority. There

The pitted

are clearly arguments which could with some force be urged in favor of the plan which the still-born scheme of devolution propounded. It is essential that an Irish Parliament should be free to deal with its own expenditure, to economize here, and develop there. It may be less essential in the first instance that it should wield the power of taxation. As a purely temporary measure, and for a fixed term of years, there might be wisdom in an arrangement which would hand over to the Irish Exchequer a fixed sum from Imperial taxation to meet its local needs. As a permanent arrangement such a

The Nation.

proposal would certainly and properly be rejected by Irish sentiment. But it has advantages which might commend it as a method of helping us through the difficult early years before the two main constituents of the Irish people have got to understand and work with each other. The year that lies between us and the production of a Home Rule Bill might well be spent in the study of such questions by a small expert Committee. We cannot afford to muddle our way into Home Rule. Three Bills have failed. The next must show a maturity and a finality which none of its predecessors could boast.

It may

In 1908 Parliament passed an Act known as the Prevention of Crime Act. It was introduced by Lord Gladstone, who was then Home Secretary, and it is only now that we are learning exactly what it meant. Last week the Home Office issued a draft of rules which clothe the bones and breathe life into the vague principles. be thought a strange thing that an Act should be passed of which the meaning is not interpreted till two years later; and so it is. The transaction is significant of our times, in which functionaries rule our life more strictly and more widely than ever before. Perhaps in this case it could not be helped; we should not like to be captious in a matter in which the aims of the Home Office are perfectly sound. As the rules are only tentative, however, it is necessary that they should be carefully examined, and that their effect should be corrected if necessary, by the only form of control which is ultimately effectual-public opinion. The purpose of preventive detention is, or should be, to protect the community

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from being preyed upon; to remove out of the way men who have proved themselves to be a public danger or an intolerable public nuisance. But the community must not be protected at the cost of cruelty to the criminal. is not easy to strike the balance and be fair to both sides. The new rules, which are to come into force on Mayday, are an attempt to strike that balance, but, as we shall see, they refer to only one of two large criminal classes, both of which are legitimate objects of preventive detention.

The problem of the habitual criminal is the greatest of all problems in modern crime. The ferocious and desperate character who used to attack warders and prison officials whenever they came near him is almost extinct and to that extent there is an improvement in the character of British crime. But the habitual criminal, who now represents the worst kind of crime with which we have to deal, goes on. In prison he may be, and generally is, quite well behaved. conduct marks and

He gets his goodgives little or no