fidence. Of the penalty for such plain speaking I am well aware.
It will be said that to attack the Irish leaders is to slander the Irish
people. This is untrue. In times of revolution men perpetually come to
the front unworthy of the nation whom they lead. To treat distrust of
the leaders of the Land League as dislike or distrust of the Irish
people is as unfair as to say that the censor of Robespierre, of Marat,
or of Barere denies that during the Revolution Frenchmen displayed high
genius and rare virtues. There are thousands of Irishmen who will
endorse every word I have written about the Irish leaders. Add to this
that I am not called upon to pronounce any further condemnation upon the
party than was pronounced upon the chief among them by the Special
Commission. All I assert is that from the nature of things the men found
guilty by the Commission cannot inspire trust.

Power, it is often intimated, teaches its own lessons. Trust Irishmen
with the government of their own country, and you may feel confident
that experience will teach them how to govern justly.

To this argument I need not myself provide a reply: it has been
admirably given by my friend Mr. Bryce. Every word which in the
following passage refers to the State legislatures of the United States
applies in principle to the future Parliament at Dublin:--

'The chief lesson which a study of the more vicious among the State
legislatures teaches, is that power does not necessarily bring
responsibility in its train. I should be ashamed to write down so
bald a platitude were it not that it is one of those platitudes
which are constantly forgotten or ignored. People who know well
enough that, in private life, wealth or rank or any other kind of
power is as likely to mar a man as to make him, to lower as to
raise his sense of duty, have nevertheless contracted the habit of
talking as if human nature changed when it entered public life, as
if the mere possession of public functions, whether of voting or of
legislating, tended of itself to secure their proper exercise. We
know that power does not purify men in despotic governments, but we
talk as if it did so in free governments. Every one would of course
admit, if the point were put flatly to him, that power alone is not
enough, but that there must be added to power, in the case of the
voter, a direct interest in the choice of good m