It was, I think, the late Lord Morris of Killanin, himself a stalwart champion of the parliamentary union between the component parts of the United Kingdom, who, on being asked by the charming wife of an English viceroy of Ireland to tell her what was the real cause of Irish disaffection, replied that all the trouble arose from the fact that a stupid race like the English persisted in trying to govern a clever race like the Irish. It was one of those quizzical remarks for which some of Lord Morris's countrymen are famed, and which, made, more Hibernico, half in jest and wholly in earnest, contain a great truth embedded in a gruff, satirical turn of expression. Its force and cogency emerge clearly after a perusal of Mr. Fisher's book. I must not, however, be taken as suggesting that Mr. Fisher's principal object is to indicate any such conclusion: far from it, for his purpose is altogether different; but his marshalling of facts, his revelation of the weakness and iniquity of the Irish parliament, and his exposure of the methods of corruption employed by the English executive in Ireland leave clearly discernible to the thinking man the basic truth that English misgovernment, flowing from callousness

1 The End of the Irish Parliament, by Joseph R. Fisher. Longmans, Green, and Co., New York; London: Edward Arnold. Pp. xii + 316. 1911. For a short preliminary review of this book see The Catholic University Bulletin for February, 1912.

towards the rights of a conquered nation and from a culpable unwillingness or neglect to understand the character of the race with which the rulers had to deal, was primarily responsible for most of Ireland's woes.

Swift and Whately, quoted approvingly by Mr. Fisher, have very well illustrated the attitude of English statesmen towards Irish affairs in Church and State. In his own grimly satirical way Swift describes the bishops of the Irish established church -that church in which he himself held so distinguished a position as Dean of St. Patrick's. "Excellent and moral men,” he says, "have been selected upon every occasion of vacancy. But it unfortunately has uniformly happened that as these worthy divines crossed Hounslow Heath, on their road to Ireland to take possession of their bishopricks, they have been regularly robbed and murdered by the highwaymen frequenting that common, who seize upon their robes and patents, come over to Ireland, and are consecrated bishops in their stead." And Whately, who had studied his subject at close range, is no less pungent when speaking of the civil governors. 'People who think it easy to govern Ireland," he says, "because it is poor, half-civilised, and full of ignorance, are like the medical student who imagined that he had learned enough of medicine to doctor very little children."

There we have the keynote of the whole disgraceful situation: the tyranny and extermination of Elizabethan, Jacobean, and Cromwellian days were succeeded by the savage religious enactments of the reign of Anne; and when religious persecution had in some degree abated in practice, it gave way in turn to a coldness, a want of sympathy, and an almost invincible ignorance of the wants and requirements, the ideas, feelings, and aspirations of the Irish people. In Mr. Fisher's forcible language, the English conquerors no more dreamt of providing a Parliament for the Irish enemy' than did the New England colonists for the Indians who had inhabited the territories lying round Massachusetts Bay. To them the native Irish outside the Pale were public enemies, and were treated as such ... The overwhelming bulk of the Irish people stood aloof and lived their own lives" (p. 4).

In their dealings with the sister country, especially from the sixteenth century onward, the cardinal error of English statesmen, for which they stand condemned at the bar of history, was the dispossession of the ancient owners of the land of Ireland, the presentation of the titles to their property to a horde of adventurers and planters, and the consequent impoverishment, generally accompanied by the outlawry, of the masses of the population. This policy, initiated by Henry II. and developed to an extraordinary pitch under Elizabeth, was continued with a will by her successors. Its evil results have been apparent

even down to our own times. They were particularly noticeable during the reigns of Anne and the Georges. For the greater part of the eighteenth century anything more wretched than the condition of the peasantry of Ireland the annals of mankind can scarcely show. Their religion proscribed, their priests banned, their property assessed for tithes to support an alien church, their children and themselves debarred from education, their country periodically swept by famine, the land let at rack-rents to sub-tenant under sub-tenant, six deep, so that even at the best of times potatoes and water were the staple food of the common people, is it any wonder that they were ultimately goaded into revolt against the system, and that their many wrongs came to a head in such movements as those originated by the Whiteboys and the Defenders? If there has been an "Irish Question," it is mainly because there have been bad land laws, and if there were bad land laws, it was mainly because the English conquerors did not give themselves a thought about the application of the first principle of good government, namely, the happiness and welfare of the people governed. The mere Irish" were left out of account: the concern of English rulers for centuries was only with the party of ascendancy, which, in a very literal sense, acted as a garrison for overawing and holding down the conquered natives.

All this is told in masterly fashion, if with slightly provoking historical calm, by Mr. Fisher. Further, in pursuance of his thesis, he takes special pains to show, first, that the so-called Irish parliament was never really representative of the majority

of the people of Ireland, the Nonconformists, who were specially strong in the province of Ulster, being barred from membership thereof from 1704 until 1780, and the Catholics being excluded not only from membership but even, until 1793, from a vote towards the election of its members; and, secondly, that the shifting and vacillating policy of the government in England resulted in leaving the great majority of the inhabitants of Ireland a prey to the "Undertakers" and a few great families, who engineered the parliament as a machine for wholesale jobbery and for the promotion of their own interests, wholly irrespective of the rights of the remainder of the population.

It is only when he gets down to Grattan's parliament and the carrying of the Union that Mr. Fisher runs counter to generally received opinions. The proposition that he sets himself to prove is that, contrary to the belief of most Irishmen, the much belauded Irish constitution which is known by Grattan's name was "surely the most impotent and unworkable machine ever devised by the wit of man" (p. 135), that it was, in fact, “little better than a patent absurdity" (p. 218), and that, from 1782 on, the union of the British and Irish parliaments was a logical necessity, as inevitable as the crack of doom.

Mr. Fisher begins his account of the end of the Irish parliament with the viceroyalty of Lord Townshend (1767-1772), whom he holds up for an admiration that hitherto has not been usually accorded, and thereafter he carries us interestingly along through the rule of the Harcourts, the Carlisles, the Rutlands, and the rest, until he brings us up fairly and squarely before Cornwallis and Castlereagh and the Earl of Clare. Of necessity in this account he introduces us to the agrarian revolt in South and North, the exploits of Paul Jones and the Ranger in Carrickfergus Bay in 1778, the consequent Volunteer Movement, Grattan's Declaration of Independence, Pitt's Commercial Propositions, the Peep o' Day Boys and the Defenders, the organisation of the United Irishmen, the plots, plans, attempts, and failure of Wolfe Tone, the Rebellion of 1798, and the final scene of the Union. Here and there, too, we get most interesting

glimpses of the world movements of the American and French Revolutions and of their effect upon Irish feelings and ideas.

He who undertakes the perusal of this volume without an intimate knowledge of the history of the period under review to serve as a corrective to Mr. Fisher's ex parte statements, or with prejudices derived from the wholesale inaccuracies of successive generations of stump orators, will receive many an unpleasant jar. If such a one takes Mr. Fisher for guide, he will be made sullenly to realise that several of his idols have feet of clay, he will see with amazement many brilliant reputations dimmed, and, stranger still, he will find one or two of the blacker characters of popular imagination unexpectedly whitewashed. Among those who come under the lash are Flood, Foster, Fox, and Burke; but however it may be with the counts brought against these, Mr. Fisher will find few to agree with him in his estimate of Grattan; and surely it is a stiffer task than even he can accomplish to rehabilitate in the good opinion of Irishmen Castlereagh or Pitt or "black Jack Fitzgibbon.

That Molyneux in 1698 sighed for a union, that the Irish Lords and Commons petitioned Queen Anne for it in 1703 and 1707, and that Montesquieu and Adam Smith and other philosophers and statesmen raised their voices in its favour throughout the century, are interesting sidelights let in on the history of the question, which will, however, be new only to those who are not familiar with the works of previous writers.

The religious difficulty here, as elsewhere in the troubled pages of Irish history, plays a prominent part. Readers of a historian like Lecky will moult no feather when told by Mr. Fisher that the Catholic bishops, the leaders of the Catholic laity, and the masses of the Catholics so far as their opinion was ascertained, were in favour of the Union, and that some of them fought strenuously for its accomplishment. Thus Dr. Lennan, Bishop of Dromore, led the newly enfranchised members of his flock to such effect in Newry in 1799 that he was in a position to report to Dr. Troy, Archbishop of Dublin, that