sia in Poland, or of
Austria in Italy--a part cruel, hateful, demoralizing, contrary to all
our high principles and professions, and fraught with dangers to our own
freedom. Our position will be worse than that of Russia in this respect,
that, while her Poland is only a province, our Fenianism is an element
pervading every city of the United Kingdom in which Irish abound, and
allying itself with kindred misery, discontent, and disorder.
Wretchedness, the result of misgovernment, has caused the Irish people
to multiply with the recklessness of despair, and now here are their
avenging hosts in the midst of us, here is the poison of their
disaffection running through every member of our social frame. Not only
so, but the same wretchedness has sent millions of emigrants to form an
Irish nation in the United States, where the Irish are a great political
power, swaying by their votes the councils of the American Republic, and
in immediate contact with those Transatlantic possessions of England,
the retention of which it is now patriotic to applaud, and will one day
be patriotic to have dissuaded.

" ... That Ireland is not at this moment, materially speaking, in a
particularly suffering state, but, on the contrary, the farmers are
rather prosperous, and wages, even when allowance is made for the rise
in the price of provisions, considerably higher than they were, only
adds to the significance of this widespread disaffection.

"The Fenian movement is not religious, nor radically economical (though
no doubt it has in it a socialistic element), but national, and the
remedy for it must be one which cures national discontent. This is the
great truth which the English people have to lay to heart."[47]

Mr. Goldwin Smith then dispels the notion that the Irish question is a
religious one.

"When Fenianism first appeared, the Orangemen, in accordance with their
fixed idea, ascribed it to the priests. They were undeceived, I was
told, by seeing a priest run away from the Fenians in fear of his
life."[48]

Neither was it a question of the land.

"The land question, no doubt, lies nearer to the heart of the matter,
and it is the great key to Irish history in the past; but I do not
believe that even this is fundamental."

He then states what is "fundamental."[49]

"The real root of the disaffection which exhibits itself at present in
the guise of Fenianism, and which has been suddenly kindled into flame
by the arming of the Iris