rade than the well-meaning but
academic resolutions of their critics; and in the matter of social
reform I have yet to learn that any body of men have done such good work
for their country as have the Irish members by the passing into law, on
their initiative, of the Labourers Act, by which nearly half a million
of the Irish population will be rescued from conditions of life which,
with a population lacking the religious sense of the Irish poor, would
have resulted in absolute moral degradation.

I have spoken throughout of the exponents of Sinn Fein as of a party,
but it is difficult to find the common measure of agreement which such
a term connotes in the heterogeneous elements which for the moment call
themselves by the same name. We read of old Fenians, who have ever
hankered after physical force, presiding over meetings to expound
passive resistance in which young Republicans from Belfast rub shoulders
with men whose ideal is vaguely expressed as repeal--a return one must
suppose to that anomalous constitution of Grattan's Parliament in which,
while the legislature was independent the Executive was not responsible
thereto, but went out of office with the Ministry in the Parliament at
Westminster.

Irish Parliamentary candidates are selected under a system in which the
party caucus has far less share than in any part of the three kingdoms.
They have behind them the credentials of popular election which are not
possessed by a single one of the self-constituted group of critics who
assail them; and one need only say that vague, unfounded charges as to
political probity, in no instance substantiated by a single shred of
proof, do not redound to the credit of those who frame them.

When the advocates of Sinn Fein can point to a record of services as
disinterested and as consistent as those of the Irish Parliamentary
Party, when they can produce evidence of work in the immediate past as
fruitful for the good of their country as the Labourers Act, the Town
Tenants Act, and the Merchandise Marks Act, they will have some ground
upon which to claim a hearing from their countrymen. Till then they have
no cause to throw stones at those who are honestly working for the good
of their country, although they do not proclaim themselves on the
housetops the only patriotic section of the Irish people.

Not one of the advocates of this bloodless war which they propose has,
so far as I am aware, in spite of three years spent in prea