the Parliamentary tactics of the Irish party, but merely stating how their conduct struck many Englishmen.) There could be no doubt as to the hostility which they, still less as to that which their fellow-countrymen in the United States, had expressed toward England, for they had openly wished success to Russia while war seemed impending with her, and the so-called Mahdi of the Soudan was vociferously cheered at many a Nationalist meeting.  At the Election of 1885 they had done their utmost to defeat Liberal candidates in every English and Scotch constituency where there existed a body of Irish voters, and had thrown some twenty seats or more into the hands of the Tories.  Now, to many Englishmen, the proposal to create an Irish Parliament seemed nothing more or less than a proposal to hand over to these Irish members the government of Ireland, with all the opportunities thence arising to oppress the opposite party in Ireland and to worry England herself.  It was all very well to urge that the tactics which the Nationalists had pursued when their object was to extort Home Rule would be dropped, because superfluous, when Home Rule had been granted; or to point out that an Irish Parliament would contain different men from those who had been sent to Westminster as Mr. Parnell’s nominees.  Neither of these arguments could overcome the suspicious antipathy which many Englishmen felt, nor dissolve the association in their minds between the Nationalist leaders and the forces of disorder.  The Parnellites (thus they reasoned) are bad men; what they seek is therefore likely to be bad, and whether bad in itself or not, they will make a bad use of it.  In such reasonings there was more of sentiment and prejudice than of reason, but sentiment and prejudice are proverbially harder than arguments to expel from minds where they have made a lodgment.

The internal condition of Ireland supplied more substantial grounds for alarm.  As everybody knows, she is not, either in religion or in blood, or in feelings and ideas, a homogeneous country.  Three-fourths of the people are Roman Catholics, one-fourth Protestants, and this Protestant fourth subdivided into bodies not fond of one another, who have little community of sentiment.  Besides the Scottish colony in Ulster, many English families have settled here and there through the country.  They have been regarded as intruders by the aboriginal Celtic population, and many of them, although hundreds of years may have passed since they came, still look on themselves as rather English than Irish.  The last fifty years, whose wonderful changes have in most parts of the world tended to unite and weld into one compact body the inhabitants of each part of the earth’s surface, connecting them by the ties of commerce, and of a far easier and swifter intercourse than was formerly possible, have in Ireland worked in the opposite direction.  It has become more and more the habit of the richer class in Ireland to go to England for its enjoyment,