with no mean literary skill, which penetrates into every village, gives the people their first political impressions, forms and directs their enthusiasm, and seems likely in the long leisure of the pastoral life to exercise an increasing power.  Close observers of the Irish character will hardly have failed to notice the great change which since the famine has passed over the amusements of the people.  The old love of boisterous out-of-door sports has almost disappeared, and those who would have once sought their pleasures in the market or the fair now gather in groups in the public-house, where one of their number reads out a Fenian newspaper.  Whatever else this change may portend, it is certainly of no good omen for the future loyalty of the people.

“It was long customary in England to underrate this disaffection by ascribing it to very transitory causes.  The quarter of a century that followed the Union was marked by almost perpetual disturbance; but this it was said was merely the natural ground swell of agitation which followed a great reform.  It was then the popular theory that it was the work of O’Connell, who was described during many years as the one obstacle to the peace of Ireland, and whose death was made the subject of no little congratulation, as though Irish discontent had perished with its organ.  It was as if, the AEolian harp being shattered, men wrote an epitaph upon the wind.  Experience has abundantly proved the folly of such theories.  Measured by mere chronology, a little more than seventy years have passed since the Union, but famine and emigration have compressed into these years the work of centuries.  The character, feelings, and conditions of the people have been profoundly altered.  A long course of remedial legislation has been carried, and during many years the national party has been without a leader and without a stimulus.  Yet, so far from subsiding, disloyalty in Ireland is probably as extensive, and is certainly as malignant, as at the death of O’Connell, only in many respects the public opinion of the country has palpably deteriorated.  O’Connell taught an attachment to the connection, a loyalty to the crown, a respect for the rights of property, a consistency of Liberalism, which we look for in vain among his successors; and that faith in moral force and constitutional agitation which he made it one of his greatest objects to instil into the people has almost vanished with the failure of his agitation."[27]

Few Irish Nationalists have drawn a weightier indictment against the Union than this.  After a trial of seventy years, Mr. Lecky sums up the case against the Union in these pregnant sentences:—­

“The Imperial Parliament allays no discontent, and attracts no affection;” “The genuine national enthusiasm never flows in the channel of imperial politics;” the people have “an utter scepticism about constitutional means of realizing their ends,” and are imbued with “a blind, persistent hatred of England.”  Worse still, neither the material progress of the country, nor the education of the people, has reconciled them to the Imperial Parliament.  Indeed, their disloyalty has increased with their prosperity and enlightenment.  This is the story which Mr. Lecky has to tell.  But why are the Irish disloyal?  Mr. Lecky shall answer the question.