Dublin she would have fared as well in this respect since 1800 must be a matter of conjecture merely—­and it must be equally a matter of conjecture also whether she would fare any better in this respect with a Parliament at Dublin hereafter.  I am in no position to pronounce upon this—­but it is quite certain that nothing is more uncommon than to find an educated and intelligent man, not an active partisan, in Ireland to-day, who looks forward to the reestablishment, in existing circumstances, of a Parliament at Dublin with confidence or hope.

How the establishment of such a Parliament would affect the position of Great Britain as a power in Europe, and how it would affect the fiscal policy, and with the fiscal policy the well-being of the British people, are questions for British subjects to consider, not for me.

That the processes employed during the past decade, and now employed to bring about the establishment of such a Parliament, have been, and are in their nature, essentially revolutionary, subversive of all sound and healthy relations between man and man, inconsistent with social stability, and therefore with social progress and with social peace, what I have seen and heard in Ireland during the past six months compels me to feel.  Of the “Coercion,” under which the Nationalist speakers and writers ask us in America to believe that the island groans and travails, I have seen literally nothing.

Nowhere in the world is the press more absolutely free than to-day in Ireland.  Nowhere in the world are the actions of men in authority more bitterly and unsparingly criticised.  If public men or private citizens are sent to prison in Ireland, they are sent there, not as they were in America during the civil war, or in Ireland under the “Coercion Act” of 1881, on suspicion of something they may have done, or may have intended to do, but after being tried for doing, and convicted of having done, certain things made offences against the law by a Parliament in which they are represented, and of which, in some cases, they are members.

To call this “Coercion” is, from the American point of view, simply ludicrous.  What it may be from the British or the Irish point of view is another affair, and does not concern me.  I may be permitted, however, I hope without incivility, to say that if this be “Coercion” from the British or the Irish point of view, I am well content to be an American citizen.  Ours is essentially a government not of emotions, but of statutes, and most Americans, I think, will agree with me that the sage was right who declared it to be better to live where nothing is lawful than where all things are lawful.