ed for Ireland by any responsible
legislator within the walls of the British Parliament. But so powerful
was the leverage upon them of conflicting passions and interests beyond
their own borders that these sovereign states, well organised,
homogeneous, prosperous communities, much more populous and richer in
the aggregate in 1861 than Ireland is to-day, practically lost the
control of their own affairs, and were swept helplessly into a terrific
conflict, which they had the greatest imaginable interest in avoiding,
and no interest whatever in promoting.

I have seen and heard nothing in Ireland to warrant the very common
impression that the country, as a whole, is either misgoverned or
ungovernable; nothing to justify me in regarding the difficulties which
there impede the maintenance of law and order as really indigenous and
spontaneous. The "agitated" Ireland of 1888 appears to me to be almost
as clearly and demonstrably the creation of forces not generated in, but
acting upon, a country, as was the "bleeding Kansas" of 1856. But the
"bleeding Kansas" of 1856 brought the great American Union to the verge
of disruption, and the "agitated Ireland" of 1888 may do as much, or
worse, for the British Empire. There is, no doubt, a great deal of
distress in one or another part of Ireland, though it has not been my
fortune to come upon any outward and visible signs of such grinding
misery as forces itself upon you in certain of the richest provinces of
that independent, busy, prosperous, Roman Catholic kingdom of Belgium,
which on a territory little more than one-third as large as the
territory of Ireland, maintains nearly a million more inhabitants, and
adds to its population, on an average, in round numbers, as many people
in four years as Ireland loses in five.

I have seen peasant proprietors in Flanders and Brabant who could give
the ideal Irish agent of the Nationalist newspapers lessons in
rack-renting, though I am not at all sure that they might not get a hint
or two themselves from some of the small farmers who came in my way in
Ireland.

Like all countries, mainly agricultural, too, Ireland has suffered a
great deal of late years from the fall in prices following upon a period
of intoxicating prosperity. Whether she has suffered more relatively
than we should have suffered from the same cause in America, had we been
foolish enough to imitate the monometallic policy of Germany in 1873, is
however open to question; a