Men are the victims of their own career:  it is absolutely impossible that leaders many of whom have indulged in virulence, in slanders, in cruelty, in oppression, should be suddenly credited with strict truthfulness, with sobriety, with respect for the rights of others.  Even as it is, landlords are, in Mr. Sexton’s eyes, criminals,[130] and he therefore cannot be trusted to act with fairness towards Irish landowners.  Mr. Redmond holds that imprisoned dynamiters and other criminals should be released, whether guilty or not, and it is therefore reasonable not to put Mr. Redmond in a position where he can insist upon an amnesty for dynamiters and conspirators.  Nor is it at all clear that as regards amnesty any Anti-Parnellite dare dissent from the doctrine of Mr. Redmond.  It is odious, it will be said, to dwell on faults or crimes which, were it possible, every man would wish forgotten.  But when we are asked to trust politicians who are untrustworthy, it is a duty to say why we must refuse to them every kind of confidence.  Of the penalty for such plain speaking I am well aware.  It will be said that to attack the Irish leaders is to slander the Irish people.  This is untrue.  In times of revolution men perpetually come to the front unworthy of the nation whom they lead.  To treat distrust of the leaders of the Land League as dislike or distrust of the Irish people is as unfair as to say that the censor of Robespierre, of Marat, or of Barere denies that during the Revolution Frenchmen displayed high genius and rare virtues.  There are thousands of Irishmen who will endorse every word I have written about the Irish leaders.  Add to this that I am not called upon to pronounce any further condemnation upon the party than was pronounced upon the chief among them by the Special Commission.  All I assert is that from the nature of things the men found guilty by the Commission cannot inspire trust.

Power, it is often intimated, teaches its own lessons.  Trust Irishmen with the government of their own country, and you may feel confident that experience will teach them how to govern justly.

To this argument I need not myself provide a reply:  it has been admirably given by my friend Mr. Bryce.  Every word which in the following passage refers to the State legislatures of the United States applies in principle to the future Parliament at Dublin:—­

’The chief lesson which a study of the more vicious among the State legislatures teaches, is that power does not necessarily bring responsibility in its train.  I should be ashamed to write down so bald a platitude were it not that it is one of those platitudes which are constantly forgotten or ignored.  People who know well enough that, in private life, wealth or rank or any other kind of power is as likely to mar a man as to make him, to lower as to raise his sense of duty, have nevertheless contracted the habit of talking as if human nature changed when it entered public life, as if the mere possession