ve been long deferred. Even the sufferers
from a vicious commercial policy did not see its essential iniquity, and
it is hardly a subject for wonder that a generation of Englishmen who
supposed themselves to gain greatly by controlling or extinguishing the
colonial or the Irish trade should not have recognised the full iniquity
of a policy which in itself hardly seemed intolerable to many of those
colonists who endured the wrong. Still less can we be surprised that
Englishmen a century ago, amid a world where the idea of human equality
was not as yet recognised, should have failed to perceive what many
Englishmen it may be suspected will hardly admit at present, that to
most men equality, i.e. the treatment of all subjects by their
government on similar principles, seems a form of justice, and that the
multitude will tolerate restrictions on their freedom far more easily
than offences against their sense of equality. No one will care to deny
that French Governments have at all periods been far more despotic than
the Government of England; but few persons who have given the matter a
thought can deny that France has shown a power quite unknown to
Englishmen of attaching to herself by affection countries which she has
annexed by force. Strasburg was stolen from Germany, yet Strasburg soon
became French in heart. Belgium and the Rhine Provinces would gladly
have remained parts of the Napoleonic Empire. Savoy annexed in 1859
showed no disposition to separate from France in 1870. The explanation
of these facts is not far to seek. When France annexes a country she may
govern it well or ill, but she governs it on the same principles as the
rest of the French dominions. Englishmen found it for centuries
impossible to govern Englishmen in Ireland or Englishmen in
Massachusetts exactly as if they were Englishmen in Middlesex. It is not
uninstructive that every French Assembly since the Revolution has
included Deputies from the colonies; no colony has ever sent a member to
the Parliament at Westminster.

Secondly,--The English connection has inevitably, and therefore without
blame to anyone, brought upon Ireland the evils involved in the
artificial suppression of revolution.

The crises called revolutions are the ultimate and desperate cures for
the fundamental disorganisation of society. The issue of a revolutionary
struggle shows what is the true sovereign power in the revolutionised
state. So strong is the interest of mankind,