So far at any rate Sinn Féiners must admit that "_beacoup de bruit, pen de fruit_" sums up their action in regard to Irish affairs. Any success in propagandism which they may have achieved is to be traced to a natural impatience, especially among _dilletante_ politicians, whose experience is purely academic, at the slowness of the Parliamentary machine in effecting reforms, but any force which it possesses is discounted by the fact that men whose views are extreme in youth tend to become the most moderate with advancing years--a fact of which a classic example is to be found in the career of Sir Charles Gavan Duffy, one of the most distinguished of the Young Irelanders, who, after a brilliant career in Australia, returned to European his old age and spent several years in the attempt to persuade Conservatives to adopt the policy of Home Rule--a propaganda on his part to which the episode of Lord Carnarvon bears witness, and which was advocated by him in the _National_ and _Contemporary Reviews_ in 1884 and 1885. It may well be that the political groundlings who are at present the backbone of the Sinn Féin movement will, when they gain political experience, alter their views in as complete a manner. One can draw an English parallel to this movement in Ireland. There are in the former, as in the latter, country a certain limited number of people who hold extreme political views, which in the case of the English are pure socialism. The English extremists have been so far successful as to secure the return of one Member of Parliament in full sympathy with their aspirations. The Irish extremists have not so far dared to put to the test their chance of obtaining even one Parliamentary ewe lamb. Without the advantage which the English _intransigeants_ possess, of a few weeks' knowledge on the part of one person of the inside working of Parliamentary government, in exactly the same manner as do the Englishmen of the same type, these Irishmen spend their time reviling popular representatives as ignorant, venal, and beneath contempt. A prophet who, on the basis of the election of Mr. Grayson, foretold an imminent dissolution of the democratic forces in Great Britain, would in truth have more ground on which to base his forecast than has one who from the nebulous movements of the Sinn Féin party, arrives at an analogous conclusion in the case of Ireland. That the political landmarks in Ireland have in the last few years shifted is obvious to the most superficial observer. The devolutionist secession from orthodox Unionism, the Independent Orange Lodge represented by Mr. Sloan, the "Russellite" Ulster tenant-farmers, and the rise of a democratic vote in Belfast regardless of the strife of sects, all serve as indications of this fact; but let it be noted that while we have evidences in these directions of the forces at work in the disintegration of the old Orange strongholds, we have no such obvious