ding refusal to every demand for reform
and held as sacrosanct the existing state of affairs, constitutional and
social.

That the numbers of the moderate Unionists of all sections are at
present small is not surprising. The country has too long been governed
as a dependency, with the Protestant gentry as the _oculus reipublicae_,
for the "garrison" readily to waive that which they have come to look
upon as their inalienable heritage. That the numbers of Orangemen will
grow small by degrees as a result of land purchase is the general
belief; but it must not be forgotten that the more violent among them,
in their efforts to rake the ashes; and blow up the cinders of dead
prejudices and extinguished hate, will have the backing of a powerful
Press, the eagerness of the greatest organ of which in this matter in
the past led to the worst blow its prestige has ever endured. Liberal
statesmen during the recent general election were constrained to call
attention to the manner in which the power of the Press had been
exploited by a few persons who had endeavoured to secure a "corner" in
those sources of political education, and the obviousness of the policy,
it was admitted, did something to defeat its own ends. Of one thing we
may be certain, the Orange drum will be beaten once more, for the old
ascendancy spirit will die hard; all the devices of artificial
respiration will be called in to prolong its life, and when it does
breathe its last one may expect it to do so in the arms of its friends
in an attic in Printing House Square.

One can only hope that the "ultras" will pitch their tone too high, and
that their efforts to revive the old perverse antipathies will fail, so
that Irish Unionists will realise, as some of them are doing already,
that patriotism, like charity, begins at home, and that they cannot
compound for distrust of their own countrymen by loud-voiced
protestations of loyalty to the blessings of British rule.

It was very generally admitted that the logical outcome of Mr. Wyndham's
Land Act was an Irish authority to stand between the Irish tenant and
the British Exchequer, which, under the Act, is left in the invidious
position of an absentee landlord to people who dislike its ascendancy
and distrust its administrative methods, while an Irish authority with a
direct interest in the transaction would be able to see that payments
were punctually made. In the not very likely contingency of failure to
do this, u