rebellion of 1798; and all patriotic Irishmen were exasperated at the oppression of the poor by the rich. Removal of religious disabilities was urgently demanded, and most of the men were members in 1825 of an independent association, which could easily have turned the island into one vast camp. V. Germany had been devastated by twenty years of battles; and many thousand Germans had perished, either in defending their homes against Napoleon, or in serving under him in Russia. His overthrow left them in deeper subjection than ever to a league of despots, who differed in pomp of title and extent of territory, but agreed in obstinately denying any political liberty to the people. The servitude of Germany was confirmed by the agreement of clergymen and philosophers, that absolute monarchy was "ordained of God." The ban of church and university was on the revolutionary rationalism which had inspired the eighteenth century. The predominant philosophy during the first half of the nineteenth century insisted on the infallibility of what was called intuition, but was often merely tradition. This was already the case in Germany, where moribund ideas of politics and theology were worshipped as the loftiest revelations of pure reason. Devout disciples still hold that all established institutions are justified and all knowledge revealed by Hegel's method of deduction from his own peculiar definition of the Infinite. That definition seems self-contradictory; but this is only a trifle, compared with the method's permitting the master to prefer absolute monarchy, and forcing him to deny that any nation, not extremely limited in area, can long remain a democracy. Hegel's indifference to the existence of the United States was like his asserting, after the discovery of Ceres, that the place where it had been found, and where hundreds of other planets are now known to exist, must be empty. Among other results of his system were a denial that lightning is electricity, and an assertion that rain is merely a change of air into water. Neither liberty nor knowledge gains by disregard of experience in favour of deductions from imaginary intuitions.