Of the three great nostrums so liberally applied by England, extirpation and persecution had entirely failed, but confiscation had done its work.  The great Protestant landlordism of Ireland[74] had been strongly and effectually built up.  But, like other human contrivances, while it held Ireland fast, it had also undesigned results.  The repressed principle of national life, the struggles of which had theretofore been extinguished in blood, slowly sprang up anew in a form which, though extremely narrow, and extravagantly imperfect, was armed with constitutional guarantees; and, the regimen of violence once displaced, these guarantees were sure to operate.  What had been transacted in England under Plantagenets and Stuarts was, to a large extent, transacted anew by the Parliament of Ireland in the eighteenth century.  That Parliament, indeed, deserves almost every imaginable epithet of censure.  It was corrupt, servile, selfish, cruel.  But when we have said all this, and said it truly, there is more to tell.  It was alive, and it was national.  Even absenteeism, that obstinately clinging curse, though it enfeebled and distracted, could not, and did not, annihilate nationality.  The Irish Legislation was, moreover, compressed and thwarted by a foreign executive; but even to this tremendous agent the vital principle was too strong eventually to succumb.

Mr. Lecky well observes that the Irish case supplied “one of the most striking examples upon record"[75] of an unconquerable efficacy in even the most defective Parliament.  I am, however, doubtful whether in this proposition we have before us the whole case.  This efficacy is not invariably found even in tolerably constructed Parliaments.  Why do we find it in a Parliament of which the constitution and the environment were alike intolerable?  My answer is, because that Parliament found itself faced by a British influence which was entirely anti-national, and was thus constrained to seek for strength in the principle of nationality.

Selfishness is a rooted principle of action in nations not less than in single persons.  It seems to draw a certain perfume from the virtue of patriotism, which lies upon its borders.  It stalks abroad with a semblance of decency, nay, even of excellence.  And under this cover a paramount community readily embraces the notion, that a dependent community may be made to exist not for its own sake, but for the sake of an extraneous society of men.  With this idea, the European nations, utterly benighted in comparison with the ancient Greeks, founded their transmarine dependencies.  But a vast maritime distance, perhaps aided by some filtration of sound ideas, prevented the application of this theory in its nakedness and rigour to the American Colonies of England.  In Ireland we had not even the title of founders to allege.  Nay, we were, in point of indigenous civilization, the junior people.  But the maritime severance, sufficient to prevent accurate and familiar knowledge,