the burdens
by which, in the days of Swift, of Grattan, and of O'Connell, she most
loudly declared herself to be oppressed. Whether with a Parliament at
Dublin she would have fared as well in this respect since 1800 must be a
matter of conjecture merely--and it must be equally a matter of
conjecture also whether she would fare any better in this respect with a
Parliament at Dublin hereafter. I am in no position to pronounce upon
this--but it is quite certain that nothing is more uncommon than to find
an educated and intelligent man, not an active partisan, in Ireland
to-day, who looks forward to the reestablishment, in existing
circumstances, of a Parliament at Dublin with confidence or hope.

How the establishment of such a Parliament would affect the position of
Great Britain as a power in Europe, and how it would affect the fiscal
policy, and with the fiscal policy the well-being of the British people,
are questions for British subjects to consider, not for me.

That the processes employed during the past decade, and now employed to
bring about the establishment of such a Parliament, have been, and are
in their nature, essentially revolutionary, subversive of all sound and
healthy relations between man and man, inconsistent with social
stability, and therefore with social progress and with social peace,
what I have seen and heard in Ireland during the past six months compels
me to feel. Of the "Coercion," under which the Nationalist speakers and
writers ask us in America to believe that the island groans and
travails, I have seen literally nothing.

Nowhere in the world is the press more absolutely free than to-day in
Ireland. Nowhere in the world are the actions of men in authority more
bitterly and unsparingly criticised. If public men or private citizens
are sent to prison in Ireland, they are sent there, not as they were in
America during the civil war, or in Ireland under the "Coercion Act" of
1881, on suspicion of something they may have done, or may have intended
to do, but after being tried for doing, and convicted of having done,
certain things made offences against the law by a Parliament in which
they are represented, and of which, in some cases, they are members.

To call this "Coercion" is, from the American point of view, simply
ludicrous. What it may be from the British or the Irish point of view is
another affair, and does not concern me. I may be permitted, however, I
hope without incivility, to