osition the rough things will be made smooth, and, the troubled
waters will run clear, if only the Government of order may be allowed
time to do its beneficent work of repression and re-establishment
thoroughly and to the roots.

II.

In politics, as in nature, beneficent powers work quietly, while
destructive agencies sweep across the world with noise and tumult. The
fruit tree grows in silence; the tempest which uproots it shakes the
earth to its centre. The gradual evolution of society in the
development of art, the softening of manners, the equalization of
justice, the respect for law, the purity of morals, which are its
results and correlatives, comes about as silently as the growth of the
tree; but the wars which desolate nations, and the revolutions which
destroy in a few months the work of many centuries, are as tumultuous
as the tempest and as boisterous as the storm.

In Ireland at the present moment this rule holds good with surprising
accuracy. Where the tranquilizing effect of Lord Ashbourne's Act
attracts but little attention outside its own immediate sphere, the
Plan of Campaign has everywhere been accompanied with murder,
boycotting, outrage, and the loud cries of those who, playing at
bowls, have to put up with rubbers. Where men who have retained their
sense of manly honesty and commercial justice, buy their lands in
peace, without asking the world to witness the transaction--those
tenants who, having for years refused to pay a reduced rent or any
portion of arrears, are at last evicted from the land they do not care
to hold as honest men should, make the political welkin ring with
their complaints, and call on the nation at large to avenge their
wrongs. And the analogy holds good all through. The Irish tenant
yearns to possess the land he farms. Lord Ashbourne's Act enables him
to do this by the benign way of peace, fairness, and self-respect. The
Plan of Campaign, on the other hand, teaches him the destructive
methods of dishonesty and violence. The one is a legal, quiet, and
equitable arrangement, without personal bitterness, without hysterical
shrieking, without wrong-doing to any one. The other is an offence
against the common interests of society, and a breach of the law
accompanied by crimes against humanity. The one is silent and
beneficent; the other noisy, uprooting, and malevolent. But as the
powers of growth and development are, in the long run, superior to
those of destruction-