placemen now in Parliament, and place-hunting was no longer a pastime to be proscribed amongst Nationalists. It may be there was no wilful corruption in thus accepting from the common purse of the United Kingdom payment which was made to all Members of Parliament alike, but it deprived the Irish people of control of their representatives and handed them over to the control of the English Treasury, and thus opened the way to the downfall of Parliamentarianism in Ireland that rapidly set in. Abandoned all too lightly was the rigid principle that to accept favours from England was to betray Ireland, and the pursuit of place and patronage was esteemed as not being inconsistent with a pure patriotism. Furthermore, as if to cap the climax of their imbecilities and blunders, the Irish Party allowed the first precious year of their mastery of Parliament to be devoted to the passage of an Insurance Act which nobody in Ireland outside the job-seekers wanted, which every independent voice in the country, including a unanimous Bench of Bishops, protested against, and whose only recommendation was that it provided a regular deluge of well-paid positions for the votaries of the secret sectarian society that had the country in its vicious grip. Such a debauch of sham Nationalism as now ensued was never paralleled in the worst period of Ireland's history, and that this should be done in the name of patriotism was not its least degrading feature. Nemesis could not fail to overtake this conscious sin against the national ideal. It met with its own condign punishment before many years were over. To show the veritable depths of baseness to which the so-called National Movement had fallen it need only be stated that it was charged against their official organ--_The Freeman's Journal _--that no less than eighteen members of its staff had obtained positions of profit under the Crown, including a Lord Chancellorship, an Under-secretaryship, Judgeships, Crown Prosecutorships, University Professorships, Resident Magistracies, Local Government Inspectorships, etc. In this connection it is also worthy of mention that when the premises of this concern were burnt out in the course of the Easter Week Rebellion it was reendowed for "national" purposes, with a Treasury grant of £60,000, being twice the amount which the then directors of the _Freeman_ confessed to be the business value of the property.