Ireland stands to-day between Great Britain and the millions of the Irish race in America and Australia very much as the Border States of the American Union stood in 1861 between the North and the South.  There was little either in the Tariff question or in the Slavery question to shake the foundations of law and order in the Border States, could they have been left to themselves; and the Border States enjoyed all the advantages and immunities of “Home Rule” to an extent and under guarantees never yet openly demanded for Ireland by any responsible legislator within the walls of the British Parliament.  But so powerful was the leverage upon them of conflicting passions and interests beyond their own borders that these sovereign states, well organised, homogeneous, prosperous communities, much more populous and richer in the aggregate in 1861 than Ireland is to-day, practically lost the control of their own affairs, and were swept helplessly into a terrific conflict, which they had the greatest imaginable interest in avoiding, and no interest whatever in promoting.

I have seen and heard nothing in Ireland to warrant the very common impression that the country, as a whole, is either misgoverned or ungovernable; nothing to justify me in regarding the difficulties which there impede the maintenance of law and order as really indigenous and spontaneous.  The “agitated” Ireland of 1888 appears to me to be almost as clearly and demonstrably the creation of forces not generated in, but acting upon, a country, as was the “bleeding Kansas” of 1856.  But the “bleeding Kansas” of 1856 brought the great American Union to the verge of disruption, and the “agitated Ireland” of 1888 may do as much, or worse, for the British Empire.  There is, no doubt, a great deal of distress in one or another part of Ireland, though it has not been my fortune to come upon any outward and visible signs of such grinding misery as forces itself upon you in certain of the richest provinces of that independent, busy, prosperous, Roman Catholic kingdom of Belgium, which on a territory little more than one-third as large as the territory of Ireland, maintains nearly a million more inhabitants, and adds to its population, on an average, in round numbers, as many people in four years as Ireland loses in five.

I have seen peasant proprietors in Flanders and Brabant who could give the ideal Irish agent of the Nationalist newspapers lessons in rack-renting, though I am not at all sure that they might not get a hint or two themselves from some of the small farmers who came in my way in Ireland.