ne discovered that Ireland
was a nation, and ought to be treated as such. As regards his own
share in the matter, the change came too late, and he went to the
grave leaving Ireland (in spite of two Home Rule Bills) still
unpacified; but his influence has lived and wrought, not only in
the Liberal party. The principle of Irish nationality has been
recognized in legislative form, and the most law-abiding citizen
in Great Britain might drink that toast of "Ireland a Nation" which
aforetime was considered seditious, if not treasonable.

It was certainly a very odd prejudice of English Philistinism which
prevented us, for so many centuries, from recognizing a fact so palpable
as Irish nationality. If ever a race of men had characteristics of
its own, marking it out from its nearest neighbours, that race is
the Irish, and among the best of those characteristics are chastity,
courtesy, hospitality, humour, and fine manners. The intense Catholicism
of Ireland may be difficult for Protestants to applaud; yet most
certainly those who fail to take it into account are hopelessly
handicapped in the attempt to deal with Irish problems. The Irish
are born fighters. One of the most splendid passages which even
Irish oratory ever produced was that in which Sheill protested
against the insolence of stigmatizing the countrymen of Wellington
as "aliens" from England, and no policy could be more suicidal than
that which deflects the soldiership of Ireland from the British
cause.

Charles James Fox shares with Edmund Burke the praise of having
brought the ideas which we call Liberal to bear on Irish government,
and his words are at least as true to-day as when they were written:
"We ought not to presume to legislate for a nation in whose feelings
and affections, wants and interests, opinions and prejudices, we have
no sympathy." Are "The Incompatibles" to be always incompatible, or
can we now, even at the eleventh hour, make some effort to understand
the working of the Irish temperament?

The incompatibility, as Matthew Arnold read it, is not between
the two nations which Providence has so closely knit together,
but between insolence, dulness, rigidity, on the one hand, and
sensibility, quickness, flexibility, on the other. What Arnold
lamented was that England has too often been represented in Ireland,
and here also when Irish questions were discussed, by "the genuine,
unmitigated Murdstone--the common middle-class Englishman, who
has