h will ever learn how to govern this country, and I am sure it
can never govern itself. Would your people make a State of it?"

To this I replied that with Cuba and Canada and Mexico, all still to be
digested and assimilated, I thought the deglutition of Ireland by the
great Republic must be remitted to a future much too remote to interest
either of us.

"I suppose so," he said in a humorously despondent tone; "and so I see
nothing for people who think as I do, but Australia or New Zealand!"

Mr. Kavanagh sees the future, I think, in colouring not quite so dark.
As a public man, familiar for years with the method and ways of British
Parliaments, he seems to regard the possible future legislation of
Westminster with more anxiety and alarm than the past or present
agitations in Ireland. The business of banishing political economy to
Jupiter and Saturn, however delightful it may be to the people who make
laws, is a dangerous one to the people for whom the laws are made. While
he has very positive opinions as to the wisdom of the concession made in
the successive Land Acts for Ireland, which have been passed since 1870,
he is much less disquieted, I think, by those concessions, than by the
spirit by which the legislation granting them has been guided. He thinks
great good has been already done by Mr. Balfour, and that much more good
will be done by him if the Irish people are made to feel that clamorous
resistance to the law will no longer be regarded at Westminster as a
sufficient reason for changing the law. That is as much as to say that
party spirit in Great Britain is the chief peril of Ireland to-day. And
how can any Irishman, no matter what his state in his own country may
be, or his knowledge of Irish affairs, or his patriotic earnestness and
desire for Irish prosperity, hope to control the tides of party spirit
in England or Scotland?

Of the influence upon the people in Ireland of the spirit of recent
legislation for Ireland, the story of the troubles on the O'Grady
estate, as Mr. Kavanagh tells it to me, is a most striking illustration.
"The O'Grady of Kilballyowen," as his title shows, is the direct
representative, not of any Norman invader, but of an ancient Irish race.
The O'Gradys were the heads of a sept of the "mere Irish"; and if there
be such a thing--past, present, or future--as an "Irish nation," the
place of the O'Gradys in that nation ought to be assumed. Mr. Thomas De
Courcy O'Grady, who now wears