implies that the existence of certain widespread feelings is a condition requisite for full appreciation of the reasoning in support of Home Rule.  The reasons may be good, but it is faith which gives them convincing power.  They derive their cogency from a favouring atmosphere of opinion or feeling.  Two features of recent controversy suffice of themselves (if proof were needed) to establish the truth of this assertion.  The rhetorical emphasis laid by Home Rulers on the baseness of the arts which carried the Act of Union is, as an argument in favour of repealing the Act, little else than irrational.  The assumed infamy of Pitt does not prove the alleged wisdom of Gladstone; and to urge the repeal of an Act which has stood for nearly a century, because it was carried by corruption, is in the eye of reason as absurd as to question the title of modern French landowners because of the horrors of the Reign of Terror.  Even a Legitimist would not now base a moral claim to an estate on the ground that his grandfather was deprived of it through confiscation and murder.  But rhetoric is not governed by the laws of logic, and insistence on the corruption or the criminality by which the Act of Union was carried is an effective method of conciliating popular sentiment to the cause of repeal.  No notion again has been more widely circulated or put forward on higher authority than that past reforms have been due in the main to the enthusiasm of the masses.  But no notion is more directly at variance with the lessons of history.  In the eighteenth century the enlightenment of the Whig aristocracy was England’s safeguard against the Jacobitism and the bigotry of the crowd.  Every effort in favour of religious liberty was till recently the work of an educated minority who opposed popular prejudice.  In the last century popular sentiment would have denied all rights to Jews; in 1780 Lord George Gordon was the hero of the people of England, and even more emphatically of the people of Scotland.  And Burke was forced to present an elaborate defence to his constituents at Bristol for taking part in an attempt to mitigate the penal laws against the Roman Catholics.  There is every reason to suppose that even in 1829 a plebiscite, had one been possible, would have negatived the Catholic Relief Bill.  The mitigation again of the Criminal Law was the work of thinkers like Romilly and Bentham.  These eminent reformers would have been much surprised to have been told that the uneducated masses were their staunch supporters.  One of the greatest improvements ever effected by legislation was the reform in the administration of parochial relief.  The new poor law was essentially unpopular; its principles were established by economists; its enactment was due to the Whigs, supported, as it should always be remembered to his credit, by the Duke of Wellington.  It may be conjectured from recent legislation that at this very moment an indiscriminate renewal of outdoor relief would command the approval of the agricultural