xpressed as anywhere in a letter of
Lord Salisbury to Lord Randolph Churchill when he declared "the
instinctive feeling of an Englishman is to wish to get rid of an
Irishman," to which one may reply--"What! did the hand then of the
Potter shake?"

Though abuse of the plaintiff's attorney has been indulged in so often,
neither English party has scorned, as from its expressions one would
have expected, to make use of the Irish vote when its own career has
been in danger. The appeals which in spite of this one sees addressed at
intervals to the Irish leaders to abandon their attitude of _Nolo
episcopari_ and take Ministerial office, for which some, at any rate, of
their number have by their ability been conspicuously fitted, is to
ignore the fundamental protest on which this self-denying ordnance
depends. The protest against the _status quo_ has been traditionally
made in this manner; to waive it would be tantamount to an abdication of
the claims which have been so consistently made. To accept office might
be to curry favour with one party or the other, but its
refusal--especially as compared with its acceptance by the Irish
Unionists--does much to deprive the enemy of the occasion to suggest
sordid motives as reasons for the continuance of the Parliamentary
agitation.

In urging his great reform, Lord Durham was wont to lay great stress on
the evil effect of the English party system on Canadian politics. The
party system in Great Britain acts as a corrective and an adjusting
mechanism to a degree which is never known in Ireland, where the
principle of government with consent of the governed has only been
applied to one corner of the island.

The supreme example of so many, in which concessions have been made to
Ireland in times of public danger, which had been obstinately refused in
times of public security is that of Emancipation, concerning which Peel
in June, 1828, reaffirmed his determination never to surrender, but in
January, 1829, on the ground that five-sixths of the infantry force of
the three kingdoms was engaged in police work in Ireland, introduced the
Bill which obtained the Royal consent in circumstances such as to rob it
of its grace and to make gratitude impossible. I am not, however, here
concerned with emancipation as such, but with the set-off for its
concession, under which on the principle of taking away with one hand,
while giving with the other, the forty shilling freeholders, who had
returned O