nd I have an impression, which it will
require evidence to remove, that the actual organisation known as the
National Land League could never have been called into being had the
British Government devoted to action upon the Currency Question, before
1879, the time and energy which it has expended before and since that
date in unsettling the principles of free contract, and tinkering at the
relations of landlord and tenant in Ireland.

But I am trenching upon inquiries here beyond the province of this book.

Fortunately it is not necessary to my object in printing these volumes
that I should either form or formulate any positive opinions as to the
origin of the existing crisis in Ireland. Nor need I volunteer any
suggestions of my own as to the methods by which order may best be
maintained and civil government carried on in Ireland. It suffices for
me that I close this self-imposed survey of men and things in that
country with a conviction, as positive as it is melancholy, that the
work which Mr. Redmond, M.P., informed us at Chicago that he and his
Nationalist colleagues had undertaken, of "making the government of
Ireland by England impossible," has been so far achieved, and by such
methods as to make it extremely doubtful whether Ireland can be governed
by anybody at all in accordance with any of the systems of government
hitherto recognised in or adopted for that country. I certainly can see
nothing in the organisation and conduct, down to this time, of the party
known as the party of the Irish Nationalists, I will not say to
encourage, but even to excuse, a belief that Ireland could be governed
as a civilised country were it turned over to-morrow to their control. A
great deal has been done by them to propagate throughout Christendom a
general impression that England has dismally failed to govern Ireland in
the past, and is unlikely hereafter to succeed in governing Ireland. But
even granting this impression to be absolutely well founded, it by no
means follows that Ireland is any more capable of governing herself than
England is of governing her. The Russians have not made a brilliant
success of their administration in Poland, but the Poles certainly
administered Poland no better than the Russians have done. With an Irish
representation in an Imperial British Parliament at Westminster,
Ireland, under Mr. Gladstone's "base and blackguard" Union of 1800, has
at least succeeded in shaking off some of the weightiest of