endured affect us deeply. It pains us deeply to hear anyone say that there are two nations in Ireland, and, if goodwill could effect it, our hearts' desire is that there should be but one. Nor indeed is it true that there are two nations in Ireland. There are two races; but a race is but the making of a nation; to deserve that name it must have a constituted government, an independent position in the world. The Celt and the Saxon in Ireland together do possess this national character. But most of it belongs to the Saxon, and Home Rule will not give it to the Celt. It will, on the contrary, make the absence of it more conspicuous. Will a race whose country is garrisoned by the army of another people, whose legislative powers are limited, whose liberties do not extend to making war or peace as they please, deserve the name of a nation? Surely not.

We hear the true aspirations of the Irish Home Rulers in the eloquent words of Mr. Sexton, when he describes the claim which he favours as

'the claim of a nation that has struggled and suffered for 700 years, that has gone through the pangs and pains of political persecution, that has suffered all that misgovernment could devise and execute— the agony of the penal days, the pain of enforced ignorance, the pangs of exile, and the plunder and confiscation of their property, the decay of their population, every conceivable form of misrule, injustice, and discontent that a pampered and a paltry faction should endeavour by threats of violence to encounter the claim of the nation when this was recognized by the conscience of the British people.' 1

This quotation will suffice to show that we have been presenting the true view of the case when we say that the struggle for Home Rule is the struggle of a race for rehabilitation. But when Mr. Sexton calls the race a nation he is thinking not of what it is now, nor of what it will be under the Bill, but of what he hopes the Bill will help it one day to become. And in such language he perfectly represents the people for whom he speaks. There is not an Irish peasant, priest, or politician, who cares for the Home Rule Bill except for the. sake of what it promises. It is the passage through the Red. Sea, an uncomfortable night of wading which must be gone through to reach the promised land. Ireland a nation means Ireland with a nation's rights; perhaps not necessarily at war with England, but certainly at peace with her by independent choice. And when you have a spirit like this to deal with, the safeguards which the Bill provides, were they as perfect as they are illusory, would still be futile. A political party 1 Speech at the Rotunda, Dublin, March 8, 1893.

may be bound by political provisions, but not a race struggling to constitute itself a nation. This character of the struggle enables us to view with the greatest charity and understanding the means which are used for victory, doubtful though they often be. But the very same character forces us to remember what lengths the victory must run to, and how vain paper barriers must prove to its progress.

It may be thought that prudence must limit the acts of the Home Rule Government of Ireland, that the Irish statesmen will see the necessity of building up a credit upon the world's Stock Exchange and inviting the most nervous investors to trust in their moderation and their respect for the rights of property. In one department at all events it will be impossible for them to sustain such a reputation. In three years-only a moment in the business of acquiring credit-they will be allowed to deal with the land. Their past utterances and their past conduct show what kind of professions and practice in that matter are agreeable to their constituents. They will be forced on pain of political extinction to deal very hardly with the landlords, and such dealing with the landlords cannot be used without extensive injury to the moneyed classes both in England and Ireland who are the landlords' creditors.

Hard dealing with the landlords and their creditors may be inflicted by the English Parliament without injury to the credit of the nation. It is but one obscure instance of harsh dealing on the part of a great commercial establishment known for its strict observance of law in every other quarter. But it will be very different with the Irish Assembly, which will have no acquired reputation of legality and fairness. In them even the very smallest amount of hardship which can reasonably be expected towards the landlords will bear the inevitable appearance of revolutionary confiscation, under which no credit in the money market can possibly be acquired. To leave such a question as that of the land to be dealt with by a Government with all its experience and all its character still to gain is a cruel injustice, not only to the landlords themselves, but to the assembly on whom the responsibility of despatching them is left. If it could be supposed to shrink from the task, the race clamorous for restitution of its property will assuredly send up more resolute representatives, and the Gironde will give place to the Mountain.

The dependence of the Church of Ireland upon the land is very intimate. In the first place, about half the amount of

its capital is charged upon Irish land. In the year 1871 the Representative Body of the Church was entrusted, through the commutation of the clergy, with the capital sums to pay their annuities under the Act of Disestablishment. It became the duty of its able and trusty financiers-would that an Irish Government could hope for such servants-to invest this great sum at as high a rate as was consistent with safety. Irish landlords desiring to consolidate the charges on their property and to reduce the interest, borrowed largely from the Church at 4 and 4 per cent., in order to pay off mortgages which bore a higher rate. No money was lent by the Representative Body except as a first charge upon land which, according to the estimation of the time, was of double the value of the sums advanced. The interest has been paid until quite lately with wonderful regularity. But the rents have fallen by nearly a half, and thus in many, if not most, cases the margin has entirely disappeared, and the interest due to the Church as mortgagee swallows up the whole rent, leaving little or nothing to the nominal owner. There is already a considerable arrear of interest which there is no prospect of ever recovering. Further reductions must trench upon the part of the rent which is available for payment of the mortgages, and a forced sale at a few years' purchase will abolish it wholly. But indeed it is difficult to see how any rents or any payment of purchase moneys, however low, are likely to be obtained in Home Rule Ireland. The tenants are full of anticipations of free possession. The tribunes who are to form the new Government have never set limits to their encouragement of the tenants' hopes, or to their denunciation of the landlords' claims. Can we conceive tenants coerced by a Home Rule executive to pay for the benefit either of a landlord or of a mortgagee of different race and religion?

Next to the loss of the money upon mortgage comes the loss of the subscriptions of those whom Home Rule will impoverish or expel. It is to be confessed that the reduction of Church income through the previous losses of the landlords has not been as great as was anticipated. Either the cessation of their help has called out help from other classes, or else the aid which these gave had been over-estimated. But the blow which Home Rule will deal them will be far more universal in its range, and will smite far more deeply than those which they have already endured, either from the English Parliament or the Irish agitators. It must reduce subscriptions in a ruinous degree.

But when the loss of capital from the failure of land

investments and the loss of subscriptions by the expulsion of landowners have been endured, the list of the Church's losses is far from complete. Of the remaining half of her savings a very large proportion is invested in preference shares and other like securities which bear moderate interest, and were counted in the normal condition of Irish prosperity as absolutely safe. The universal fall of Irish securities in the money market since the introduction of the Home Rule Bill declares with the absolute sincerity of the language of the pocket what capitalists and investors think of the monetary prospects of the new Government. There is absolutely nothing to set against this potent argument. We have indeed abundance of oratorical prophecy of the prosperity which is to attend the re-born nation. But no one that we have heard of has suggested a possible source of income which will be opened up for Ireland by the new constitution. Forcible transfer of property from the prosperous to the penniless within the limits of Ireland itself is the only hope which can reasonably be entertained; and that process, as every educated man is aware, will mean the destruction of credit, the withdrawal of capital, and the impoverishment of the country.

The Parnellite section of the Home Rulers are well aware of these prospects, and they would vote against the Bill on account of its financial clauses if such a vote did not imply their own political extinction. But of all proofs of the commercial unsoundness of the financial arrangements the most forcible to our minds is the refusal of Mr. Gladstone to receive a deputation of Irish business men from the southern provinces. That Mr. Gladstone, the most skilful and persuasive speaker on money questions that the world ever saw, should deny his cause the great advantage of triumphantly overthrowing in argument these men of figures is explicable only upon the supposition that he knew his cause to be indefensible by any arts of oratory before a jury acquainted with the facts.1

We do not know what source of income the Irish Church possesses which will not be sorely diminished, if not wholly dried up, by the certain and inevitable effects of this measure. For the sake of maintaining her ministrations, in however poor a form, throughout the country, she will be forced to come to England for aid. She has never yet asked for it, and we trust that Mr. Gladstone and his friends, as church

1 Since the above was written Mr. Gladstone has received a deputation of financiers from Belfast, but the manner in which he treated them does not induce us to alter what we have said.

men, will help to repair the ruin which as statesmen they will have wrought.

The material prospects of the Church of Ireland under Home Rule are therefore sufficiently gloomy. The moral and spiritual outlook is hardly better. When we look forward in this direction one vast figure blocks the view, the Church of Rome. We contemplate the prospect without the terror which, in former periods of history, a great advance in the power of the Church of Rome would have justly caused. We are willing to take into the fullest account the lessons which even an infallible Church must have learnt from its own errors. And what is still more important, we know that there are elements within the Roman Catholic Church, even in Ireland, which forebode an opposition to the power of the priesthood. In the long run Ireland will not stand conspicuous in the world as the only country in which the curb has not been applied to ecclesiastical power in temporal things. But meanwhile the calmest observer must foresee a great immediate advance in it. The form of the Roman priest, which in Ireland is neither ascetic nor graceful, looms large upon the view. The very circumstance which assures us that he will raise up opposition to himself is our certainty that, according to his invariable habit, he will lord it offensively while his day lasts.

It will be an extremely novel sensation for English Gladstonians, especially of the Nonconformist section, to watch the progress, under their own immediate patronage and sanction, of a Roman triumph such as the century has not seen elsewhere. Who can doubt it? The Roman Church is strong in Ireland because it is national. The Irish peasant sees in his Church the symbol of his country and his race. With it he rises or he falls. The ambitions of the priesthood go hand in hand for a great distance with the aspirations of the race. Even if this were otherwise, we have seen in the recent elections what the direct power of the Roman clergy over the more ignorant part of the Irish population still is, and in what spirit they use it. Never in the darkest ages did a Christian bishop speak more exactly as the infidel would have him speak than did the Roman Bishop of Meath in his election pastoral. For he told his flock that the only reason they had for believing in the truth of Christianity was the authority of their bishops, and that if episcopal authority was good for this high purpose, it was good also for the selection of members of Parliament.

There is no doubt in our judgment that the Roman Church

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