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 of public functions, whether of voting or of legislating, tended of itself to secure their proper exercise. We know that power does not purify men in despotic governments, but we talk as if it did so in free governments. Every one would of course admit, if the point were put flatly to him, that power alone is not enough, but that there must be added to power, in the case of the voter, a direct interest in the choice of good men, in the case of the legislator, responsibility to the voters, in the case of both, a measure of enlightenment and honour. What the legislatures of the worst States show is not merely the need for the existence of a sound public opinion, for such a public opinion exists, but the need for methods by which it can be brought into efficient action upon representatives who, if they are left to themselves, and are not individually persons with a sense of honour and a character to lose, will be at least as bad in public life as they could be in private. The greatness of the scale on which they act, and of the material interests they control, will do little to inspire them. New York and Pennsylvania are by far the largest and wealthiest States in the Union. Their legislatures are confessedly the worst.'[131]