sentatives, and
therein they were right. From a purely democratic standpoint no
reasonable objection can be urged against the payment of those who give
their time and talent to the public service, but Ireland was in
different case. Her representatives were at Westminster unwillingly,
not to assist in the government of the Empire with gracious intent, but
rather definitely to obstruct, impede and hamper this government until
Ireland's inalienable right to self-government was conceded, and
therefore it was their clear duty to say that they would accept payment
only from the country and the people they served and that they cast back
this Treasury bribe in the teeth of those who offered it. But having
ostentatiously resolved that they would never accept a Parliamentary
stipend, they finally allowed their virtuous resistance to temptation to
be overcome and voted for "payment of members," which, without their
votes, would never have been adopted by the House of Commons. There were
placemen now in Parliament, and place-hunting was no longer a pastime to
be proscribed amongst Nationalists. It may be there was no wilful
corruption in thus accepting from the common purse of the United Kingdom
payment which was made to all Members of Parliament alike, but it
deprived the Irish people of control of their representatives and handed
them over to the control of the English Treasury, and thus opened the
way to the downfall of Parliamentarianism in Ireland that rapidly set
in. Abandoned all too lightly was the rigid principle that to accept
favours from England was to betray Ireland, and the pursuit of place and
patronage was esteemed as not being inconsistent with a pure patriotism.

Furthermore, as if to cap the climax of their imbecilities and
blunders, the Irish Party allowed the first precious year of their
mastery of Parliament to be devoted to the passage of an Insurance Act
which nobody in Ireland outside the job-seekers wanted, which every
independent voice in the country, including a unanimous Bench of
Bishops, protested against, and whose only recommendation was that it
provided a regular deluge of well-paid positions for the votaries of
the secret sectarian society that had the country in its vicious grip.
Such a debauch of sham Nationalism as now ensued was never paralleled
in the worst period of Ireland's history, and that this should be done
in the name of patriotism was not its least degrading feature. Nemesis
could not