our House of Lords - primogeniture, established church, and an independent judiciary. Its note is Constancy the wish to carry into the future the things of the past, the capacity to keep aloof from the strife and aims of the passing hour." But terrible as Lord Acton said it would be to sweep away" the House of Lords he was too honest to obscure its real character. "The House of Lords feels a stronger duty towards its eldest sons than towards the masses of ignorant, vulgar and greedy people. Therefore, except under very perceptible pressure, it always resists measures aimed at doing good to the poor. It has been almost always in the wrong sometimes from prejudice and fear and miscalculation, still oftener from instinct and selfpreservation. Generally it does only a temporary injury, and that is its plea for existence. But the injury may be irreparable. And if we have manifest suffering, degradation, and death on one side, and the risk of a remodelled senate on the other, the certain evil outweighs the contingent danger."

Since the economic status of the Irish is the pivot of Irish politics, I beg leave to dwell on the conclusions of a liberal like Acton. "I am not sure that there is any quite available and compendious answer to the two reproaches of setting the poor against the rich, and of giving power to those least fit for it," he wrote to Mary Gladstone in 1881. "There lurks in each an atom of inevitable truth; and the sententious arguments which serve to dazzle people at elections may generally be met by epigrams just as sparkling and just as sound on the other side." But what has the candid liberal to say in favor of giving votes to ignorant people and urging needy

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people to combine against the rich? Acton referred to the current campaign. "It was necessary to bring home to the constituencies, to needy and ignorant men, the fact that Society, the wealthy ruling class, that supported our late Mazarin [Disraeli] in clubs and drawing-rooms, was ready to spend the treasure and the blood of the people in defence of an infamous tyranny [Turkey], to gratify pride, the love of authority, and the lust of power. Nearly the same situation arose in Ireland, and in other questions not so urgent. Secondly, as to Democracy, it is true that masses of new electors are utterly ignorant. . . The answer is that cannot make an omelette without breaking eggs that politics are not made up of artifices only, but of truths, and that truths have to be told. . . . If there is a free contract, in open market, between capital and labor, it cannot be right that one of the two contracting parties should have the making of the laws, the management of the conditions, the keeping of the peace, the administration of justice, the distribution of taxes, the control of expenditure, in its own hands exclusively. It is unjust that all these securities, all these advantages, should be all on the side that has least urgent need of them, that has least to lose. That is the flesh and blood argu

ment.

"That is why Reform, full of questions of expediency and policy in detail, is, in the gross, not a question of expediency or of policy at all; and why some of us regard our opponents as men who should imagine sophisms to avoid keeping promises, paying debts, or speaking truths."

PRIVILEGE ABUSED

The aristagogue like Bagehot did not sway Acton. "The fact is that education, intelligence, wealth, are a security against certain faults of conduct, not against errors of policy. There is no error so monstrous that it fails to find defenders among the ablest men. Imagine a congress of eminent celebrities, such as More, Bacon, Grotius, Pascal, Cromwell, Bossuet, Montesquieu, Napoleon, Jefferson, Pitt, etc. The result would be an Encyclopædia of Error. They would assert Slavery, Socialism, Persecution, Divine Right, Military despotism, the reign of force, the supremacy of the executive over legislation and justice, purchase in the magistracy, the abolition of credit, the limitation of laws to nineteen years, etc. If you were to read Walter Scott's pamphlets, Southey's Colloquies, Ellenborough's Diary, Wellington's Despatches-distrust of the select few, of the chosen leaders of the community, would displace the dread of the masses."

It is well before parting from Acton to add his widest generalization. He was no disciple of Rousseau. He thought Rousseau's eloquence "unreal, unhealthy." He explicitly stood aloof from "the blaze and the whirlwind of Rousseau." . "The danger is not that a particular class is unfit to govern," he declares. "Every class is unfit to govern. The law of liberty tends to abolish the reign of race over race, of faith over faith, of class over class. It is not the realization of a political ideal: it is the discharge of a moral obligation. Nor do I admit the other accusation, of rousing class animosities. The upper class used to enjoy undi

vided sway, and used it for their own advantage, protecting their interests against those below them, by laws which were selfish and often inhuman. Almost all that has been done for the good of the people has been done since the rich lost the monopoly of power, since the rights of property were discovered to be not quite unlimited."

THE EFFECT ON IRELAND

This, I am persuaded, is the kind of preamble that Irish history calls for. Other considerations do weigh against and at times overbalance the economic one the consideration of public policy mainly with a view to the safety of the realm; its consideration with a view to a select pursuit of eternal salvation; and its consideration with a view to national characteristics. The safety of the realm, it is perfectly clear, is a transcendent issue; but the kind of unhappiness that befell Ireland did not primarily hinge upon this issue, and it can be corrected without seriously affecting it. The clash of religions is tragic but remediable. Neither Catholicism nor Presbyterianism excludes the unity and happiness of Irishmen. Nor is there any hopeless difficulty about accommodating the national characteristics of Scotch-Irish, Anglo-Irish, or Irish. In other countries, particularly the United States, we find varieties of religion and mixtures of race and social dissidence, but it was very largely because a privileged class insisted upon extending its privilege -one of property that trouble in the United States became unavoidable. No American doubts that covert privilege was represented at the foundation of the union and made something of its oppor

tunities but we have simply to imagine an overt particularism on the part of New England, greedily clutching power to the bosom of New England, to decide that privilege would have wrecked federalism. The fate of the Jews is a supreme example of the result of invidious distinction, the baleful power of the Magyars is an example of an obvious source of it. National and racial and religious principles enter into all these conflicts, but without a powerful economic element you cannot have explosion. The long step toward political adjustment, to take it the other way, is the correction of economic differences. But it is the one step at which the British government of Ireland has oftenest faltered. Usually within the British government there have been persons like Lord Morley who interpreted the House of Commons in a spirit quite different from the glittering gayety of Walter Bagehot. Such liberals did not take their inspiration from sensible men of substantial means. They held their representative assembly in solemn honor. They believed it to be the bulwark of liberties as general as they were fundamental. They saw it as a wheel on which the destiny of the British people could be turned. At a time when the broadened electorate had just swept the rotten borough out of existence, they exulted in the transfer of power and trusted that it could work economic miracles. At the behest of such liberals, great changes did take place in Ireland. After a struggle that exhibited property stripped and battling with naked indecency through long sessions of the House of Lords, the land question of Ireland was finally brought to an adjustment by the very junkers who had bled the peasantry. But this re