Well, then, our greatest institution, the House of Commons, we cannot say is at present working, like the American institutions, easily and successfully. Suppose we now pass to Ireland. I will not ask if our institutions work easily and successfully in Ireland; to ask such a question would be too bitter, too cruel a mockery. Those hateful cases which have been tried in the Dublin Courts this last year suggest the dark and ill-omened word which applies to the whole state of Ireland—_anti-natural_. _Anti-natural_, _anti-nature_—that is the word which rises irresistibly in my mind as I survey Ireland. Everything is unnatural there—the proceedings of the English who rule, the proceedings of the Irish who resist. But it is with the working of our English institutions there that I am now concerned. It is unnatural that Ireland should be governed by Lord Spencer and Mr. Campbell Bannerman—as unnatural as for Scotland to be governed by Lord Cranbrook and Mr. Healy. It is unnatural that Ireland should be governed under a Crimes Act. But there is necessity, replies the Government. Well, then, if there is such evil necessity, it is unnatural that the Irish newspapers should be free to write as they write and the Irish members to speak as they speak—free to inflame and further exasperate a seditious people’s mind, and to promote the continuance of the evil necessity. A necessity for the Crimes Act is a necessity for absolute government. By our patchwork proceedings we set up, indeed, a make-believe of Ireland’s being constitutionally governed. But it is not constitutionally governed; nobody supposes it to be constitutionally governed, except, perhaps, that born swallower of all clap-trap, the British Philistine. The Irish themselves, the all-important personages in this case, are not taken in; our make-believe does not produce in them the very least gratitude, the very least softening. At the same time it adds an hundred fold to the difficulties of an absolute government.