attended and justified by the most signal and immediate success, Could there be a stronger testimony to the permanent necessity of exceptional legislative and executive proceedings? Ordinary powers are habitually insufficient; extraordinary powers always hit the mark.

In conclusion, we cannot avoid expressing a feeling of astonish ment at what appears to us the curiously mistaken and even perverse point of view from which this measure has been regarded, both by its assailants and its defenders, especially among the Liberal press and party. In arguing against the suspension of the Habeas Corpus, the Daily News' remarked that the suspension of the law was a strange mode of teaching Irishmen respect for law; as if the suspension was proposed for any other reason than to make the enforcement of their laws more feasible, and to attain that order and security which is the aim and object of all laws. Radicals of the soi-disant philosophical type have deplored and even condemned the alleged violation of the constitution, while admitting that perhaps the emergency might excuse the breach,-forgetting that the end is more sacred than the means, that means which do not effect their end are essentially faulty and self-condemned, and that a constitution which not only fails to protect life and property, but actually stands in the way of their protection, needs to be amended without an hour's delay. Men who wish to be considered as friends of freedom par excellence, urge the much abused phrase of the 'liberty of the subject,' in bar of all legislation of the coercive sort,—as if every law and every police regulation were not in its essence an invasion of that liberty; as if the liberty of evil doers were the thing specially to be respected, and the menaced or impaired liberty of the well disposed majority of the citizens and of the community at large were a matter of no concern, or at least of very secondary moment. Irish members commit the strange Hibernianism of denouncing as an insult this endeavour to maintain the jurisdiction of Irish courts of justice, the supremacy of Irish law, the security of Irish life, and property, and peace ;not, apparently, perceiving that it is directed solely against lawbreakers, and can be an insult to Ireland only on the assumption that the Irish as a whole are malefactors; its sole aim being to defend one division of Irishmen against the outrages of another. Irish patriots announce their opposition to the measure on large placards as Protest against despotism,'-it being the irregular and secret despotism of mobs and bands of brigands that alone has made the measure necessary. Miscellaneous Liberals follow suit, and seem unable to divest themselves of the delusive notion

that

that measures for the efficacious protection of civil rights and the due enforcement of the law, must, if at all stringent or exceptional, be at variance with a righteous and conciliatory policy towards Ireland,-instead of being, as they are, the strongest conceivable proof of a resolution to pursue such a policy, even at the risk of misrepresentation and unpopularity, by rescuing Ireland from her worst internal foes-the lawless men who disgrace her name, who hinder her progress, who drive away capital from her shores. And, finally, Ministers not only postpone the needful Bill as long as possible, and then introduce it with bated breath and in a distinctly apologetic tone and attitude; as it were begging pardon of the House for asking to be empowered to punish murderers and restrain and catch malefactors, and almost with an expression of regret towards the lawless ruffians in question that they should be forced at last to act so vigorously against them. 'Gentlemen (they seem to say), this is too much; you must be quiet: public sentiment and common decency will suffer us to be supine no longer.'

Now, surely, all this is utterly unsound. The Ministerial apology is due to the peaceable citizens whom they have been so, slow to aid, not to the lawless, whom they are at length about to coerce. Toleration of violence and tenderness towards crime are no more a part of Liberal than of Conservative principles, and can be regarded as such only under the influence of a curious, inarticulate, unavowed semi-consciousness that criminals, agitators, provokers to sedition, terrorists, and the like, belong as a whole to the Liberal party, or at least are its indirect auxiliaries. Perhaps there lurks behind the mental confusion a misty notion that the malefactors and their friends constitute a numerical majority of the people, and, on Reform principles, are entitled as such to a certain degree of deference, or at least of forbearance. We believe this assumption to be entirely a mistake, and the vague and tacit inference drawn from it is simply ludicrous. Whigs, Tories, Radicals, alike agree in the doctrine that no man can be suffered to judge in his own cause, to right his own wrongs, or to defy the law as long as the law remains unrepealed; for be it remembered, the actual law is the expression of the will of the actual ruling majority of the nation. The Liberal, therefore, who tolerates outrage, turbulence, or crime, is untrue to his own principles, and is allowing the few to oppress the many, and a class and section to resist the people. The party now in power have, moreover, a special superadded interest in reducing the seething mass of Irish disaffection to impotence and submission, and are peculiarly bound to do so: if they do not or cannot, the principles on which they propose to govern Ireland will be discredited at the

2 P 2

outset ;

outset; their remedial measures can have no fair play; and the representatives which the country, under the combined influence of Fenian and agrarian terrorism, will return-will be of a cha1acter seriously to embarrass both Government and legislation, and to bring the representative system (as applied to Ireland at least) into contempt. The principles on which Ireland ought to be ruled are written in sunbeams in the whole history of the past -though, alas! the sunbeam has more often taken the form of a warning beacon than a guiding light. On the one side, a tender and vigilant consideration for the rights and wants of the people, whether labourers or peasant farmers; on the other, the sternest and promptest repression, by whatever measures as may be found necessary, of all breaches of the law, whether they take the shape of turbulence or distinct crime; and, to crown the whole, a quick eye and an iron grasp-not spasmodic, but permanent and pertinacious to curb and crush every provocative influence, every agency which tends or seeks to foster agitation or encourage resistance, or rouse malignant feelings between class and class, or sect and sect, or the people and their rulers: in a word, to control and repress, and if need be to punish, with an equal and impartial hand, all brutal and oppressive landlords, all denouncing priests, all incendiary orators, all seditious newspapersso as to give the unhappy country, for at least half a generation, a respite from that chronic excitement which is fostered by perpetual and systematic stimulants to violence and crime on the one hand, and on the other by a conviction, based upon experience, that violence and crime may be ventured with impunity. Twenty years of combined equity and firmness, undisturbed by the ignoble exigencies of party conflict either at the hustings or in Parliament-if that Utopia of patriotism may be dreamed ofwould give Ireland such prosperity and peace as have never blessed it yet. All righteous claims generously granted-all unrighteous ones recognised as ungrantable; every real grievance redressed with promptitude-every artificial one exposed and silenced; enthusiasts who live in idle dreams, declaimers who live by disseminating falsehood, agitators who trade on the malig nant passions they excite, alike reduced to impotence or inaction -would leave only that inherent residuum of misconception between the two portions of the kingdom which it is foolish not to recognise, but which need not then be dreaded.

INDEX

TO THE

HUNDRED AND TWENTY-EIGHTH VOLUME OF THE
QUARTERLY REVIEW.