le
question. I replied that during a long and busy life I had always
observed how, in successful enterprises, the majority did not rule.
The intelligent minority, the persons who had shown their wisdom,
their industry, their sagacity, their integrity, that they were
competent and reliable, those, I said, were the people who were
entrusted with the management of great affairs, and not the
many-headed mob. The management of Irish affairs promises to be a task
of tremendous difficulty, and those to whom you propose to entrust
this huge and complicated machinery stand convicted of inability to
manage with even tolerable success such comparatively simple affairs
as the party journal, or the rent collection of new Tipperary. Both
these enterprises turned out dead failures owing to the total
incapacity of the Irish Parliamentary party. And we are asked to
entrust the future of the country to these men, whose only
qualifications are a faculty for glib talk and an unreasonable hatred
of everything English.

"Mr. Gladstone has shown to demonstration that statesmen are no longer
to direct the course of legislation; are no longer to lead the people
onward in the paths of progressive improvement. The unthinking,
uneducated masses are in future to signify their will, and statesmen
are to be the automata to carry out their behests, whatever they may
be. The unwashed, unshorn incapables who have nothing, because they
lack the brains and industry to acquire property, are nowadays told
that they, and they alone, shall decide the fate of empires, shall
decide the ownership of property, shall manipulate the fortunes of
those who have raised themselves from the dirt by ability,
self-denial, and unremitting hard work. Look at the comparative
returns of the illiterate electorate. In Scotland 1 in 160, in England
1 in 170, in Ireland 1 in 5. In one quarter of Donegal, a Catholic
one, more illiterates than in all Scotland. Not that there is so much
difference as these figures would seem to show. But if men who can
write declare themselves illiterate, so that the priests and village
ruffians may be satisfied as to how they individually voted, is not
this still more deplorable? The conduct of the English Gladstonians
passes my comprehension. They do not examine for themselves. They say
Mr. Gladstone says so-and-so, and for them this is sufficient. Do they
say their prayers to the Grand Old Man?"

Another Salthill malcontent said:--"An English