orked gross wrong," what is the explanation and the defence? We
are quite content with Mr. Dicey's own answer. "Ignorance and want of
sympathy produced all the evils of cruelty and malignity. An intended
reform produced injustice, litigation, misery, and discontent. The case
is noticeable, for it is a type of a thousand subsequent English
attempts to reform and improve Ireland." This description would apply,
with hardly a word altered, to the wrong done by the Encumbered Estates
Act in the reign of Queen Victoria. That memorable measure, as Mr.
Gladstone said, was due not to the action of a party, but to the action
of a Parliament. Sir Robert Peel was hardly less responsible for it than
Lord John Russell. "We produced it," said Mr. Gladstone, "with a
general, lazy, uninformed, and irreflective good intention of taking
capital to Ireland. What did we do? We sold the improvements of the
tenants" (House of Commons, April 16). It is the same story, from the
first chapter to the last, in education, poor law, public works, relief
Acts, even in coercion Acts--lazy, uninformed, and irreflective good
intention. That is the argument from history. When we are asked what
good law an Irish Parliament would make that could not equally well be
made by the Parliament at Westminster, this is the answer. It is not
the will, it is the intelligence, that is wanting. We all know what the
past has been. Why should the future be different?

"It is an inherent condition of human affairs," said Mill in a book
which, in spite of some chimeras, is a wholesome corrective of the
teaching of our new jurists, "that no intention, however sincere, of
protecting the interests of others can make it safe or salutary to tie
up their own hands. Still more obviously true is it, that by their own
hands only can any positive and durable improvement of their
circumstances in life be worked out" (_Repres. Government_, p. 57). It
is these wise lessons from human experience to which the advocate of
Home Rule appeals, and not the wild doctrine that any body of persons
claiming to be united by a sense of nationality possesses _an inherent
and divine right_ to be treated as an independent community. It is quite
true that circumstances sometimes justify a temporary dictatorship. In
that there is nothing at variance with Liberalism. But the Parliamentary
dictatorship in Ireland has lasted a great deal too long to be called
temporary, and its stupid shambling operations