at a discount but is fatal to the acquisition of popular influence.  Of course the power of knowledge and thought, though kept in the background, is not really eliminated.  But it is in the circumstances not unnatural that most of us should fall into the error of attributing to the influence of prominent individuals or organisations the events and conditions which the superficial observer regards as the creation of the hour, but which are in reality the outcome of a slow and continuous process of evolution.  I remember as a boy being captivated by that charming corrective to this view of historical development, Buckle’s History of Civilization, which in recent years has often recurred to my mind, despite the fact that many of his theories are now somewhat discredited.  Buckle, if I remember right, almost eliminates the personal factor in the life of nations.  According to his theory, it would not have made much difference to modern civilisation if Napoleon had happened, as was so near being the case, to be born a British instead of a French subject.  It would also have followed that if O’Connell had limited his activities to his professional work, or if Parnell had chanced to hate Ireland as bitterly as he hated England, we should have been, politically, very much where we are to-day.  The student of Irish affairs should, of course, avoid the extreme views of historical causation; but in the search for the truth he will, I think, be well advised to attach less significance to the influence of prominent personality than is the practice of the ordinary observer in Ireland.

The warning I have to offer, I think, will be justified by a reflection upon the history of the panaceas which we have been offered, and upon our present state.  To those of my British readers who honestly desire to understand the Irish Question, I would say, let them eschew the sweeping generalisations by which Irish intelligence is commonly outraged.  I may pass by the explanation which rests upon the cheap attribution of racial inferiority with the simple reply that our inferior race has much of the superior blood in its veins; yet the Irish problem is just as acute in districts where the English blood predominates as where the people are ‘mere Irish.’  If this view be disputed, the matter is not worth arguing about, because we cannot be born again.  But there are three other common explanations of the Irish difficulty, any one of which taken by itself only leads away from the truth.  I refer, I need hardly say, to the familiar assertions that the origin of the evil is political, that it is religious, or that it is neither one nor the other, but economic.  In Irish history, no doubt, we may find, under any of these heads, cause enough for much of our present wrong-goings.  But I am profoundly convinced that each of the simple explanations to which I have just alluded—­the racial, the political, the religious, the economic—­is based upon reasoning from imperfect knowledge of the