her prerogatives and an assault
upon her position. The anticipations of both were well founded. Nine
years after the Emancipation Act, tithe, which an English Prime Minister
had declared was as sacred as rent, was by Act of Parliament commuted
into a rent-charge no longer collected directly from the tenant, but
paid by the landlord, who, however, compensated himself for its
incidence on his shoulders by raising rents. Forty years later the
Church Act was passed, and almost simultaneously was begun the assault
on the land system which had given support to, and received it from, the
Church Establishment.

I have heard it said by Englishmen who have watched the course of
politics for some years that the jingling watchword which Lord Randolph
Churchill coined for the Unionists twenty years ago, that Home Rule
would spell Rome Rule, if used again to-day would to a very great extent
fall flat. They have based this view, not on the assumption that
Englishmen love Rome more, but rather upon the opinion that they care
for all religions less, and that hence the appeal to bigotry would make
less play.

The fact, however, remains that one meets men in England with every
sympathy for Irish claims who shrink nevertheless from the advocacy of
the principle of self-government through fear lest the Protestant
minority should suffer. This fear for the rights of minorities serves
always as the last ditch in which a losing cause entrenches itself, and
timid souls have always been found who hesitate at the approach of every
reform on the ground that the devil you know may turn out to be not so
bad as the devil you do not know. The legislative history of the House
of Lords during the last century, if examples of this were needed, would
provide them in large numbers; and as to the question of whether it is
better that the majority or the minority of a nation should be governed
against its will, one need scarcely say which is the principle adopted
in a normal system of Parliamentary government. The rapidity with which
under Grattan's Parliament an emancipated Ireland ceased to be
intolerant leads one to suspect that the bigotry of creeds which is
attributed to us as a race is not a natural characteristic, but rather
the outcome of external causes. This view is borne out by the opinion
of Lecky, who declared that the deliberate policy of English statesmen
was "to dig a deep chasm between Catholics and Protestants," and if
proof of the allega