ons, with its six hundred and seventy members, there are nearly
ninety Irish Nationalists. They are a well-disciplined body, voting as
one man, though capable of speaking enough for a thousand. They have no
interest in English or Scotch or colonial or Indian affairs, but only in
Irish, and look upon the vote which they have the right of giving upon
the former solely as a means of furthering their own Irish aims. They
are, therefore, in the British Parliament not merely a foreign body,
indifferent to the great British and imperial issues confided to it, but
a hostile body, opposed to its present constitution, seeking to
discredit it in its authority over Ireland, and to make more and more
palpable and incurable the incompetence for Irish business whereof they
accuse it. Several modes of doing this are open to them. They may, as
some of the more actively bitter among them did in the Parliaments of
1874 and 1880, obstruct business by long and frequent speeches, dilatory
motions, and all those devices which in America are called
filibustering. The House of Commons may, no doubt, try to check these
tactics by more stringent rules of procedure, but the attempts already
made in this direction have had but slight success, and every
restriction of debate, since it trenches on the freedom of English and
Scotch no less than of Irish members, injures Parliament as a whole.
They may disgust the British people with the House of Commons by keeping
it (as they have done in former years) so constantly occupied with Irish
business as to leave it little time for English and Scotch measures.
They may throw the weight of their collective vote into the scale of one
or other British party, according to the amount of concession it will
make to them, or, by always voting against the Ministry of the day, they
may cause frequent and sudden changes of Government. This plan also they
have followed in time past; for the moment it is not so applicable,
because the Tories and dissentient Liberals, taken together, possess a
majority in the House of Commons. But at any moment the alliance of
those two sections may vanish, or another General Election may leave
Tories and Liberals so nearly balanced that the Irish vote could turn
the scale. Whoever reflects on the nature of Parliamentary Government
will perceive that it is based on the assumption that the members of the
ruling assembly, however much they may differ on other subjects, agree
in desiring the s