sham banners of St. Joseph and harangued by a mock priest, “They manage their affairs in general wonderfully close, but I have no opinion of them. I have just returned from Ireland, where I thought I would go and see what they really are after. No real business in them. Their treason is a fairy tale, and their sedition a child talking in its sleep.” * * * * * And this brings me to Disraeli’s ideas concerning the romantic, the persecuted, the generous, the witty, the pathetic Ireland. No one who has studied his career can question his intense sympathy. Many of his earliest friends had been brilliant Irishmen and Irishwomen. He too sprang from a race once persecuted, still pathetic, always witty and romantic. Already, in 1843, Disraeli had exclaimed: “You must reorganise and reconstruct the Government, and even the social state of Ireland.... By really penetrating into the mystery of this great misgovernment” might be brought about “a state of society which would be advantageous both to England and Ireland, and which would put an end to a state of things that was the bane of England and opprobrium of Europe.” But his ideas are conspicuously set forth in the great speech of 1844, which won the high praise of Macaulay, which Mr. Gladstone, some quarter of a century later, described as one of the “most closely woven tissues of argument and observation that had ever been heard in the House,” and the reperusal of which he recommended as an intellectual “treat;” though Disraeli himself then ironically observed that when he delivered it, nobody appeared to listen. “It seemed to me that I was pouring water upon sand, but it seems now that the water came from a golden goblet.” He showed that, politically, Ireland was an open question. It was not the Tories who started the penal code. Mr. Pitt would have settled the question long ago had not the great war diverted his policy. Again, the grievances of Ireland were not due to Protestantism. They were owing to Puritanism--Puritanism in disloyal rebellion against which loyal Ireland rebelled. Ireland, he proved, was never so contented as in 1635. There was then perfect civil and religious equality. “At that period there was a Parliament in Dublin called by a Protestant king, presided over by a Protestant viceroy, and at that moment there was a Protestant Established Church in Ireland; yet the majority of the members of that Parliament were Roman Catholics. The government was at that time carried on by a council of state presided over by a Protestant deputy, yet many of the members of that council were Roman Catholics. The municipalities were then full of Roman Catholics. Several of the sheriffs also were Roman Catholics, and a very considerable number of magistrates were Roman Catholics. _It is, therefore, very evident that it is not the necessary consequence of English connection--of a Protestant monarchy, or even of a Protestant