ay not be easy, but the reward will be ample.

The mainspring of public life had, from a venerable antiquity, lain _de
jure_ within Ireland herself. The heaviest fetter upon this life was the
Law of Poynings; the most ingenious device upon record for hamstringing
legislative independence, because it cut off the means of resumption
inherent in the nature of Parliaments such as were those of the three
countries. But the Law of Poynings was an Irish Law. Its operation
effectually aided on the civil side those ruder causes, under the action
of which Ireland had lain for four centuries usually passive, and
bleeding at every pore. The main factors of her destiny worked, in
practice, from this side the water. But from the reign of Anne, or
perhaps from the Revolution onwards,

"Novus saecorum nascitur ordo."

Of the three great nostrums so liberally applied by England, extirpation
and persecution had entirely failed, but confiscation had done its work.
The great Protestant landlordism of Ireland[74] had been strongly and
effectually built up. But, like other human contrivances, while it held
Ireland fast, it had also undesigned results. The repressed principle of
national life, the struggles of which had theretofore been extinguished
in blood, slowly sprang up anew in a form which, though extremely
narrow, and extravagantly imperfect, was armed with constitutional
guarantees; and, the regimen of violence once displaced, these
guarantees were sure to operate. What had been transacted in England
under Plantagenets and Stuarts was, to a large extent, transacted anew
by the Parliament of Ireland in the eighteenth century. That Parliament,
indeed, deserves almost every imaginable epithet of censure. It was
corrupt, servile, selfish, cruel. But when we have said all this, and
said it truly, there is more to tell. It was alive, and it was national.
Even absenteeism, that obstinately clinging curse, though it enfeebled
and distracted, could not, and did not, annihilate nationality. The
Irish Legislation was, moreover, compressed and thwarted by a foreign
executive; but even to this tremendous agent the vital principle was
too strong eventually to succumb.

Mr. Lecky well observes that the Irish case supplied "one of the most
striking examples upon record"[75] of an unconquerable efficacy in even
the most defective Parliament. I am, however, doubtful whether in this
proposition we have before us the whole case. This efficacy is