As examples of the differential treatment meted out to Ireland which is not of a nature to impress her with confidence in English methods may be mentioned the fact that the Irish militia are drafted out of the country for their training, that no citizen army of volunteers is permitted, and the desire of one faction to preserve these discriminations is to be seen in the anger with which was greeted the omission the other day of the Irish Arms Act from the Expiring Laws Continuation Bill.

Under every bad government there arise popular organisations bred of the wildness of despair which enjoy the moral sanction which the law has failed to secure “When citizens,” said Filangieri long ago, “see the Sword of Justice idle they snatch a dagger.”  So long as the Government sate on the safety valve, so long did periodic explosions of revolutionary resentment arise, and one must appreciate the fact that in a country so devoutly Catholic as is Ireland the natural conservatism which attachment to an historic Church inculcates, and the direction on its part of anathemas at secret societies and at violence, served to make it more difficult by far to arouse revolutionary reprisals than it would be in similar circumstances in England.

“When bad men combine,” wrote Edmund Burke, “the good must associate, else they will fall one by one an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.”  No one can accuse Burke—­the apostle of constitutionalism, the arch-enemy of the French revolution—­of condoning violence, but even he admitted that there is a limit at which forbearance ceases to be a virtue.

England must blame herself for the war of classes with which the National struggle has been complicated.  It was the Act of Union which made the landlord class look to England, and established it in the anomalous position of a body drawing its income from one country and its support from another; by this means it made them a veritable English garrison appealing to England as being the only loyal people.  Let us hope it is not true to say at this date that like the Bourbons they have learnt nothing and forgotten nothing.  The rich, the proud, and the powerful have had their day, and can one deny that the attempt to govern Ireland in the sole interests of a minority has made Ireland what it is.  An unbiased French observer three-quarters of a century ago declared that the cause of Irish distress was its mauvaise aristocratic.  It was the interest of this class, as they themselves admit, which was allowed to dominate the policy of the Unionist Party, and to effect this, force was the only available instrument.  With the recognition of the fact that the possession of property is no guarantee of intelligence has come the crippling of the policy of laissez faire, supported though it was by the brewers of Dublin and the shipbuilders of Belfast, for this reason—­that rich men tend always to rally to the defence of property.  The exercise of the duties which property imposes and the responsibility which it entails being the chief advantages of a landed gentry, and their main raison d’etre as a ruling caste having been conspicuous by its absence, with few exceptions, in Ireland, the passing of the landowner as a social factor is looked upon with complacency.