ascendancy, and if the Protestant interest had also been the Austrian interest; if the mission of the Magyars had been to act as a garrison, to keep down the Roman Catholic majority, their cause could never have triumphed till Protestant ascendancy should be abolished.  But Hungarian Protestantism did not need such support, although the Pope has as much authority in Hungary as in Ireland.  Of course the cases of Hungary and Ireland are in many respects dissimilar.  But they are alike in this:  their respective histories establish the great fact that the most benevolent of sovereigns, and the wisest of legislatures, can never produce contentment or loyalty in a kingdom which is ruled through and for another kingdom.

We can easily understand that when the light of royalty shines upon a country through a conquering nation still dominant, the medium is of necessity dense, cold, refracting, and discolouring.  Of this the best illustration is derived from the relations between Austria and Hungary, now so happily adjusted to the unspeakable advantage of both nations.  Austrian rule was unsympathetic, harsh, insolent, domineering, based upon the arrogant assumption that the Hungarians were incapable of managing their own affairs without the guidance of Austrian wisdom and the support of Austrian steadiness.  But the Hungarians, united among themselves, putting their trust, not in boastful, vapouring, and self-seeking agitators, but in honest, truthful, high-minded, and capable statesmen, persevered in a course of firm, but temperate and constitutional, national self-assertion, until the Austrians were compelled to put away from them their supercilious airs of natural superiority, and to concede the principle of international equality and the right of self-government.

What sickens the reader of Irish history most of all is the anarchy of the old clan system, the everlasting alternation of outrages and avenging reprisals.  One faction, when it felt strong and had a favourable opportunity, made a sudden raid upon another faction, taken at a disadvantage, plundering and killing with reckless fury.  The outraged party treasured up its anger till it had power to retaliate, and then glutted its vengeance without mercy in the same way.  When this fatal propensity to mutual destruction was restrained by law, it broke out from time to time in other ways.  What was wanted to cure it effectually was a strong, steady, central government, such as England enjoys herself.  But the very system which is most calculated to foster factiousness is the one which has reigned for centuries in Dublin Castle.  The British sovereign knows no party, and, whatever other sovereigns have done, Queen Victoria has never forgotten this constitutional principle.  But the Irish lord-lieutenant is always a party-man, and is always surrounded by party-men.  They were Whigs or Tories, Liberals or Conservatives, often extreme in their views and violent in their temper.  The vice of the old clan system was its tendency to unsettle, to undo, to upset, to smash and destroy.  Instead of counteracting that vice (which still lingers in the national blood), by a fixed, unchanging system of administration, based on principles of unswerving rectitude, which knows no distinction of party, no favouritism, England ruled by the alternate sway of factions.