for—­they held the balance of power and they could order the Government to do their bidding or quit.  Yet instead of regarding themselves as the ambassadors of a nation claiming its liberty they seemed to be obsessed with a criminal selfishness passing all possible belief.  When it was proposed to make Members of Parliament stipendiaries of the State, they at first protested vehemently against the application of this principle to the Irish representatives, and therein they were right.  From a purely democratic standpoint no reasonable objection can be urged against the payment of those who give their time and talent to the public service, but Ireland was in different case.  Her representatives were at Westminster unwillingly, not to assist in the government of the Empire with gracious intent, but rather definitely to obstruct, impede and hamper this government until Ireland’s inalienable right to self-government was conceded, and therefore it was their clear duty to say that they would accept payment only from the country and the people they served and that they cast back this Treasury bribe in the teeth of those who offered it.  But having ostentatiously resolved that they would never accept a Parliamentary stipend, they finally allowed their virtuous resistance to temptation to be overcome and voted for “payment of members,” which, without their votes, would never have been adopted by the House of Commons.  There were placemen now in Parliament, and place-hunting was no longer a pastime to be proscribed amongst Nationalists.  It may be there was no wilful corruption in thus accepting from the common purse of the United Kingdom payment which was made to all Members of Parliament alike, but it deprived the Irish people of control of their representatives and handed them over to the control of the English Treasury, and thus opened the way to the downfall of Parliamentarianism in Ireland that rapidly set in.  Abandoned all too lightly was the rigid principle that to accept favours from England was to betray Ireland, and the pursuit of place and patronage was esteemed as not being inconsistent with a pure patriotism.

Furthermore, as if to cap the climax of their imbecilities and blunders, the Irish Party allowed the first precious year of their mastery of Parliament to be devoted to the passage of an Insurance Act which nobody in Ireland outside the job-seekers wanted, which every independent voice in the country, including a unanimous Bench of Bishops, protested against, and whose only recommendation was that it provided a regular deluge of well-paid positions for the votaries of the secret sectarian society that had the country in its vicious grip.  Such a debauch of sham Nationalism as now ensued was never paralleled in the worst period of Ireland’s history, and that this should be done in the name of patriotism was not its least degrading feature.  Nemesis could not fail to overtake this conscious sin against the national ideal.  It met with its own condign punishment before many years