circumstances it has been accomplished with success in England, has hardly a parallel in any other European country.  Ireland on the other hand has, despite the deviations from her natural course caused by her connection with a powerful nation, tended to follow the lines of progress pursued by continental countries, and notably by France.  A foreign critic like De Beaumont finds it far easier than could any Englishman to enter into the condition of Ireland, and this not only because he is as a foreigner delivered from the animosities or partialities which must in one way or another warp every English judgment, but mainly because the phenomena which puzzle an Englishman, as for example the passion of Irish peasants for the possession of land,[10] are from his own experience familiar and appear natural to a Frenchman.  What to the mind of a foreign observer needs explanation is the social condition of England rather than of Ireland.  He at any rate can see at a glance that the relation between the two countries has planted and maintained in Ireland an aristocracy, aristocratic institutions, and above all an aristocratic land law, foreign to the traditions and opposed to the interests of the mass of the people.  Let an observer for a moment take up the point of view natural to a continental critic, and admit, in the language of De Beaumont, that the primary radical and permanent cause of Irish misery has been the maintenance in Ireland by England of a “bad aristocracy,"[10] or, to put the same thing more generally, and it may be more fairly that the vice of the connection between the two countries has consisted in its being a relation of peoples standing at different stages of civilization and tending towards different courses of development.  Here you find the original source of a thousand ills, and hence especially have originated four potent causes of the condition of things which now tries the patience and overtaxes the resources of English statesmanship.

First,—­The English constitution has both from its form and from its spirit caused in past times, and even at the present day causes as much evil to Ireland as it has conferred, or does confer, benefit upon England.[11]

The assailants of popular government point to the misrule of Ireland as a proof that the Parliamentary system is radically vicious.  They do not prove their point, because the calamities of Ireland afford no evidence whatever that England, which has been more prosperous for a greater length of time than any other nation in Europe, has essentially suffered from the power of the English Parliament.  What these critics do prove is that a representative assembly is a bad form of government for any nation or class whom it does not represent, and they establish to demonstration that a parliamentary despotism may well be a worse government for a dependency than a royal despotism.  This is so for two reasons.  The rule of Parliament has meant in England government