lative Union there have been multitudes of
men in England as upright, as enlightened, as well-intentioned towards
Ireland, as Professor Dicey, and with better opportunities of
translating their thoughts into acts. Yet what has been the result? _Si
monumenlum requiris circumspice_. Behold Ireland at this moment, and
examine every year of its history since the Union. Do the annals of any
constitutional Government in the world present so portentous a monument
of Parliamentary failure, so vivid an example of a moral and material
ruin "paved with good intentions"? Therein lies the pathos of it. Not
from malice, not from cruelty, not from wanton injustice, not even from
callous indifference to suffering and wrong, does our misgovernment of
Ireland come. If the evil had its root in deliberate wrong-doing on the
part of England it would probably have been cured long ago. But each
generation, while freely confessing the sins of its fathers, has
protested its own innocence and boasted of its own achievements, and
then, with a pharisaic sense of rectitude, has complacently pointed to
some inscrutable flaw in the Irish character as the key to the Irish
problem. The generation which passed the Act of Union, oblivious of
British pledges solemnly given and lightly broken, wondered what had
become of the prosperity and contentment which the promoters of the
Union had promised to Ireland. The next generation made vicarious
penance, and preferred the enactment of Catholic emancipation to the
alternative of civil war; and then wondered in its turn that Ireland
still remained unpacified. Then came a terrible famine, followed by
evictions on a scale so vast and cruel that the late Sir Robert Peel
declared that no parallel could be found for such a tale of inhumanity
in "the records of any country, civilized or barbarous." Another
generation, pluming itself on its enlightened views and kind intentions,
passed the Encumbered Estates Act, which delivered the Irish tenants
over to the tender mercies of speculators and money-lenders; and then
Parliament for a time closed its eyes and ears, and relied upon force
alone to keep Ireland quiet. It rejected every suggestion of reform in
the Land laws; and a great Minister, himself an Irish landlord,
dismissed the whole subject in the flippant epigram that "tenant-right
was landlord-wrong." Since then the Irish Church has been
disestablished, and two Land Acts have been passed; yet we seem to be as
far