of his career can the latter epithet be applied to him.  It must, I think, be admitted that his ideas, even although we may disagree with them, were not those of a charlatan, but of a statesman.  They cannot be brushed aside as trivial.  They deserve serious consideration.  Moreover, he had a very remarkable power of penetrating to the core of any question which he treated, coupled with an aptitude for wide generalisation which is rare amongst Englishmen, and which he probably derived from his foreign ancestors.  An instance in point is his epigrammatic statement that “In England, where society was strong, they tolerated a weak Government, but in Ireland, where society was weak, the policy should be to have the Government strong.”  Mr. Monypenny is quite justified in saying:  “The significance of the Irish question cannot be exhausted in a formula, but in that single sentence there is more of wisdom and enlightenment than in many thousands of the dreary pages of Irish debate that are buried in the volumes of Hansard.”

More than this.  In one very important respect he was half a century in advance of his contemporaries.  With true political instinct he fell upon what was unquestionably the weakest point in the armour of the so-called Manchester School of politicians.  He saw that whilst material civilisation in England was advancing with rapid strides, there was “no proportionate advance in our moral civilisation.”  “In the hurry-skurry of money-making, men-making, and machine-making,” the moral side of national life was being unduly neglected.  He was able with justifiable pride to say:  “Long before what is called the ’condition of the people question’ was discussed in the House of Commons, I had employed my pen on the subject.  I had long been aware that there was something rotten in the core of our social system.  I had seen that while immense fortunes were accumulating, while wealth was increasing to a superabundance, and while Great Britain was cited throughout Europe as the most prosperous nation in the world, the working classes, the creators of wealth, were steeped in the most abject poverty and gradually sinking into the deepest degradation.”  The generation of 1912 cannot dub as a charlatan the man who could speak thus in 1844.  For in truth, more especially during the last five years, we have been suffering from a failure to recognise betimes the truth of this foreseeing statesman’s admonition.  Having for years neglected social reform, we have recently tried to make up for lost time by the hurried adoption of a number of measures, often faulty in principle and ill-considered in detail, which seek to obtain by frenzied haste those advantages which can only be secured by the strenuous and persistent application of sound principles embodied in deliberate and well-conceived legislative enactments.