Though abuse of the plaintiff’s attorney has been indulged in so often, neither English party has scorned, as from its expressions one would have expected, to make use of the Irish vote when its own career has been in danger.  The appeals which in spite of this one sees addressed at intervals to the Irish leaders to abandon their attitude of Nolo episcopari and take Ministerial office, for which some, at any rate, of their number have by their ability been conspicuously fitted, is to ignore the fundamental protest on which this self-denying ordnance depends.  The protest against the status quo has been traditionally made in this manner; to waive it would be tantamount to an abdication of the claims which have been so consistently made.  To accept office might be to curry favour with one party or the other, but its refusal—­especially as compared with its acceptance by the Irish Unionists—­does much to deprive the enemy of the occasion to suggest sordid motives as reasons for the continuance of the Parliamentary agitation.

In urging his great reform, Lord Durham was wont to lay great stress on the evil effect of the English party system on Canadian politics.  The party system in Great Britain acts as a corrective and an adjusting mechanism to a degree which is never known in Ireland, where the principle of government with consent of the governed has only been applied to one corner of the island.

The supreme example of so many, in which concessions have been made to Ireland in times of public danger, which had been obstinately refused in times of public security is that of Emancipation, concerning which Peel in June, 1828, reaffirmed his determination never to surrender, but in January, 1829, on the ground that five-sixths of the infantry force of the three kingdoms was engaged in police work in Ireland, introduced the Bill which obtained the Royal consent in circumstances such as to rob it of its grace and to make gratitude impossible.  I am not, however, here concerned with emancipation as such, but with the set-off for its concession, under which on the principle of taking away with one hand, while giving with the other, the forty shilling freeholders, who had returned O’Connell at the Clare election, were disfranchised to the number of 200,000, and in this way was gilded the pill for the purpose of placating the English governing classes.  The same principle was followed in 1841, when the Corporations of Ireland were thrown open to Catholics, for out of some sixty-five all except ten or eleven were abolished.  The results of the disfranchising clauses of the Act of 1829 are to be seen in the fact that in 1850, while in England the electors were twenty-eight per cent. of the adult male population, in Ireland they were only two per cent.  A Bill introduced in that year would, if it had passed into law, have raised the percentage in Ireland to fifteen.  The Lords amendments altered the percentage to eight,