This gentleman is a pessimist as to the future. "I am a youngish man still," he said, "and a single man, and I am glad of it. I don't believe the English will ever learn how to govern this country, and I am sure it can never govern itself. Would your people make a State of it?" To this I replied that with Cuba and Canada and Mexico, all still to be digested and assimilated, I thought the deglutition of Ireland by the great Republic must be remitted to a future much too remote to interest either of us. "I suppose so," he said in a humorously despondent tone; "and so I see nothing for people who think as I do, but Australia or New Zealand!" Mr. Kavanagh sees the future, I think, in colouring not quite so dark. As a public man, familiar for years with the method and ways of British Parliaments, he seems to regard the possible future legislation of Westminster with more anxiety and alarm than the past or present agitations in Ireland. The business of banishing political economy to Jupiter and Saturn, however delightful it may be to the people who make laws, is a dangerous one to the people for whom the laws are made. While he has very positive opinions as to the wisdom of the concession made in the successive Land Acts for Ireland, which have been passed since 1870, he is much less disquieted, I think, by those concessions, than by the spirit by which the legislation granting them has been guided. He thinks great good has been already done by Mr. Balfour, and that much more good will be done by him if the Irish people are made to feel that clamorous resistance to the law will no longer be regarded at Westminster as a sufficient reason for changing the law. That is as much as to say that party spirit in Great Britain is the chief peril of Ireland to-day. And how can any Irishman, no matter what his state in his own country may be, or his knowledge of Irish affairs, or his patriotic earnestness and desire for Irish prosperity, hope to control the tides of party spirit in England or Scotland?