appearances it failed to achieve the immediate object in view, but that great lesson was not taught in vain, and the cries of India are no longer given, as Burke put it, to the seas and winds to be blown about over a remote and

unhearing ocean. Burke traced with relentless energy every step in that melancholy process by which each state in turn was first protected, then made the subject of exaction, then mortgaged to the full extent of its revenue, and finally ruined. The possession of wealth in the governed has time out of mind served to excite suspicions of treason in the minds of their rulers, especially when pressing financial necessities have made it convenient that it should do so. How far this principle governed the East India Company in its dealings with native princes will always be a matter for debate, but Burke's facts are strikingly suggestive. Some curious reflections strike one also on the different value of money at different times, when one reads the usurious terms exacted by obliging English money lenders from an embarrassed Indian State a century ago. Fifteen per cent. upon a debt of four and a half millions appears to have been divided without a qualm between a few private gentlemen. Increased usury always followed upon increased embarrassment, and we find that the State of Tanjore was at one time paying at the modest rate of forty-eight per cent. monthly, with compound interest. Burke raised the very natural question as to the services which had been rendered in return for these enormous obligations. He argued that it was not in the power of a private adventurer to advance these prodigious sums. What then had been the equivalent ? And with his usual insistence upon the moral aspect of the question he demanded to know what were the arts, what the sciences, what the moral institutions, for the bestowal of which these unheard

of obligations might be supposed to be the acknowledgement. Finally, he reverts once more to his inherent reverence for existing institutions, and owns himself in a manner stupefied by the desperate boldness of a few obscure young men who had tossed about, subverted, and torn to pieces as it were, in the gambols of a boyish and unlucky malice, the most established rights, the most ancient and most revered institutions of ages and nations.

Burke's action in regard to Ireland was in strict accordance with the root principles of his nature. It was, moreover, the rock upon which above all others his amicable relations with his constituents at Bristol were dashed in pieces. Commercial restrictions and Catholic disabilities-these were the two things which engrossed nearly all that attention which he directed to the land of his nativity. He argued that it was commercially unwise to restrict the growth of the Irish nation in a communion of prosperity with England. He further argued that it did not and could not make for the stability of a constitution to have two millions of the citizens permanently disfranchised. It was the first named, however, which excited the most intense indignation amongst the trading community of Bristol. That community saw in the possible prosperity of Ireland the knell of their own commercial success. Now-a-days, it is a matter of common belief that, however blindly selfish may be the attitude of a given constituency, it is incumbent upon its representative to further its interests in Parliament be the cost to the rest of the empire what it may. Not so thought Burke. Members must be permitted, he argued, to have a very enlarged view of things, otherwise the national representation would be infallibly degraded into a confused and scuffling bustle of local agency. He stood boldly forth for

the commercial emancipation of Ireland against the prejudices of his constituents, and wrung from Parliament some considerable concessions. He embraced the doctrines of free trade by implication when he declared that in unrestricted intercourse alone could the commercial fortunes of trading nations find their truest growth. But he had stronger grounds for his attitude upon this question than the prosperity, or otherwise, of Ireland. England was then at the height of her troubles, and Burke feared that Ireland might do what she eventually did—namely, seize the favourable moment for demanding by force what England had refused to concede with dignity. In 1780 he justified himself to his constituents in the memorable speech previous to that election from which he withdrew under the shadow of certain defeat. Successful justificawas, of course, out of the question. Burke had committed that most fatal of all blunders-namely, asserting the cause of justice against the bigoted prejudices of his countrymen. It was nothing that the lapse of time had proved him conclusively right. This was but to intensify the original cause of offence. He had been right on the American question. He had been right on the Irish question, and he received his reward. It is impossible to read his manly defence without emotion. He had been, he said, an Irishman on the Irish business, just as he was an American when on the same principles he wished timely concessions to America. When England refused, and Ireland later on exacted, he had felt equally distressed, "I became,” he says, "unpopular in England for the one, and in Ireland for the other. What then, what obligation lay on me to be popular? I was bound to serve both Kingdoms. To be pleased with my service was their affair, not mine." The lapse of one hundred years has induced Parliamentary representatives to waive this superiority to

popular applause, and I think we must all agree that there is but too little fear in our own day of a repetition of offences similar to Burke's. With equal force, in 1782, Burke inveighed against the unwisdom of keeping the Irish Catholics entirely outside the constitution. He condemned absolutely the method of prescribing whole bodies of men by denominations and general descriptions. He terms the penal laws which had been re-enacted by the Irish Parliament against Irish Catholics as an universal, unmitigated, indispensable, exceptionless disqualification from every office of trust and profit, from every vote at an election, from any privilege in a town corporate, from a vote at a vestry, from being a barrister, attorney or solicitor. The Irish Parliament, be it noted, had in 1782 exacted from England a full measure of legislative independence. Burke's most reasonable plea was that that same Parliament should concede to the Roman Catholics of Ireland some share of the elective franchise, some measure of that freedom which they had wrung from the English administration. Here, again, his ineradicable respect for the principle of growth displays itself. He speaks on a supposition that there is a disposition to take the State in the condition in which it is found, and to improve it in that state to the best advantage.

It is in a similar strain that in 1792, ten years later, and when life was fast drawing to a close, we find him addressing his memorable letter to Sir Hercules Langrish. Therein he traced the origin of the great chasm which had existed between the English and the native Irish in Ireland from the times of Elizabeth downwards, and combated vigorously the idea that the latter ought to enjoy all things under the State, but ought not to form a part of the State. He had by this time found fresh cause for alarm in the offers held out to Irish Catholics by

Jacobins and Dissenters, and was strongly in favour of ranging the Irish on the side of law and order by giving them an immediate interest in the Constitution. "Is the narrowing of the foundation," he asks, "the best way to secure a building? Can two millions of your fellow subjects be permanently disenfranchised?" It is noteworthy that, as early as 1792, many in the Irish Parliament were in such a heat at the idea of the Catholics having a share in the franchise, that they threatened to throw up their independence and precipitate a union with Great Britain. Burke's prescience was again demonstrated when he questions whether, even so, the exclusion of two millions of Irishmen from all share in the Constitution could be made a permanent article of the union. In one of his rare attempts at humour, he supposed the unhappy case of a gentleman who, even under the union, might be exposed to the mortification of asking the votes of those who held a different opinion from himself concerning the elements in the sacraments. When practically at death's door, in 1797, we find Burke still urging the prudence of endorsing the claims of the Irish Catholics, and dreading the possibility of their being driven into the arms of the Jacobins. He states that he is in favour of the closest connection between the two countries, but conceives that the whole of the superior, and what he would call the imperial, politics, ought to have their residence in England, and that Ireland locally, civilly, and commercially independent, ought to look up to Great Britain in all matters of peace or war in all those points to be guided by her, and, in a word, with her to live or die. This is Home Rule in its essence, and therefore those of us who have a whim to classify the men of a century ago according to present day controversies will, pace the altered circumstances, have no