ditions and opposed to the interests of the mass of the people. Let
an observer for a moment take up the point of view natural to a
continental critic, and admit, in the language of De Beaumont, that the
primary radical and permanent cause of Irish misery has been the
maintenance in Ireland by England of a "bad aristocracy,"[10] or, to put
the same thing more generally, and it may be more fairly that the vice
of the connection between the two countries has consisted in its being a
relation of peoples standing at different stages of civilization and
tending towards different courses of development. Here you find the
original source of a thousand ills, and hence especially have originated
four potent causes of the condition of things which now tries the
patience and overtaxes the resources of English statesmanship.

First,--The English constitution has both from its form and from its
spirit caused in past times, and even at the present day causes as much
evil to Ireland as it has conferred, or does confer, benefit upon
England.[11]

The assailants of popular government point to the misrule of Ireland as
a proof that the Parliamentary system is radically vicious. They do not
prove their point, because the calamities of Ireland afford no evidence
whatever that England, which has been more prosperous for a greater
length of time than any other nation in Europe, has essentially suffered
from the power of the English Parliament. What these critics do prove is
that a representative assembly is a bad form of government for any
nation or class whom it does not represent, and they establish to
demonstration that a parliamentary despotism may well be a worse
government for a dependency than a royal despotism. This is so for two
reasons. The rule of Parliament has meant in England government by
parties; and whatever be the merits of party spirit in a free,
self-governed country, its calamitous defects, when applied to the
administration of a dependency, are patent. Down to 1782 Ireland was
avowedly subject to the despotism or sovereignty of the British
Parliament, and at every turn the interest of the country was sacrificed
to the exigencies of English politics Between 1782 to 1800 the nominal
independence of Ireland placed a check on the power of the English
Parliament, yet in substance the English executive, controlled as it was
by the Parliament at Westminster, remained the ultimate sovereign of the
kingdom of Ireland. If Pitt c