Ireland is not the only country edged by the Atlantic: neither is it the saddest. Her children are not in any marked degree more illiterate now-a-days than those of England, and if they were so for a long time—when they had to slip off to unlawful and clandestine “hedge schools” if they wanted to learn their alphabet—we know too well who was responsible for such an outrage on civilization. The Celts of Erin are Roman Catholics, it is true, but after all there are on our planet a certain number of nations who have not died yet of this religion. As for their political capacity, they vindicate it every day by the wisdom and firmness they display in sustaining the struggle against the oppressor. One must bow to evidence and do justice to Ireland. And for this there are not two formulas. There is only one, in two articles: 1.—Expropriation of the landlords with a fair indemnity, to the profit of the Irish tenantry. 2.—The extension to Ireland of Home Rule, which is the invariable rule of all British possessions, near or far, guaranteed of course by all the precautions judged necessary for the security and unity of the United Kingdom. * * * * * It is the glory of Mr. Gladstone to have understood and to have had the moral courage to declare that there is no other solution. And as we think of this, is it not a strong argument in favour of the superior justice of agrarian revendications in Ireland, that it should have imposed itself to the reason of that illustrious politician, the most English assuredly of all the statesmen that have succeeded each other in office since the time of William Pitt? Those common reasoners who rebel against a necessary restitution, should think of this. Here is an old man seventy-eight years of age, who, ever since he left Eton, had no other care, no other occupation than the affairs of his country; the most energetic, the most active and brilliant of leaders, the most experienced in finance; of all the orators in the British Parliament the most lucid and pungent; a refined scholar, an accomplished Hellenist, the possessor of an hereditary fortune that frees him from domestic cares, the son of a British merchant-prince, and the father of an Anglican clergyman, himself Protestant to the core, and fond of officiating in the place of his son in the church of Hawarden; a man whose predominant quality is his earnestness, and whose supreme rule of conduct is a well-regulated love of his country. This statesman, who has been ten times in office since the year, already so far from us, when he entered it under the leadership of Robert Peel, and who knows everything about the affairs of his country at home and abroad, has made his life-study of the Irish question. Twenty times in forty years has he attempted to grapple with it, to unravel it, to solve it. All the remedial measures that have been applied to the wounds of Ireland since 1860 had him for their initiator.