e majority. The First Order consists of persons who
must be possessors of 4000l. or an equivalent income. That is their
personal qualification, and they are to be elected by occupiers rated at
25l. Property qualification for Members of Parliament was abolished in
England some thirty years ago. Rating, as a qualification for electors,
has been abandoned in a series of deliberate public measures from 1866
to 1885; but it is these old clothes of English Parliaments which Mr.
Gladstone offers to his new nationality. Why should these expedients be
adopted in Ireland? Checks upon legislative action, a second Chamber, a
Second or a First Order, are questions upon which theorists are divided.
They are certainly not questions which have occupied the National
League. These 'Orders' in Parliamentary life are not native Irish ideas.
These reproductions of quaint customs, such as we might find in some
ecclesiastical synod, or in the village organization of some old
Scandinavian community, are England's guarantees for the security of
property in the Sister Island. That Island, we know, has been abandoned
for some years to the National League, whose power was founded on their
opportunities of excommunicating any one who did not subscribe to their
funds and obey their decrees. The principle of the National League was
that property in land was an outrage on Irish opinion; and we are asked
to believe that this American-Irish organization, clothed with
Parliamentary power in Dublin, will be kept in check by a device, which
has no sanction in ancient tradition, in local sympathy, in recognized
opinion. The First Order in the new Chamber will be so many people
marked out for plunder. If any one possessing 4000l. worth of property,
which he can convert into cash, is venturesome enough to accept a seat
in the Chamber, what will become of him and his electors, people who are
scheduled in each locality as the owners of property rated at 25l. a
year? The majority of them in the South and West will be tenants who
have not dared to pay their rents, because the National League
prohibited the payment. Let us suppose people are found to constitute
the First Order, and they veto some scheme of the majority, and a
general election occurs, will the expedients which have made the League
what it is be suddenly forgotten? Can we doubt that the First Order and
its electors would be straightway boycotted out of existence? The
Ministerial proposal is an attempt