Of the interminable chain of fatalities which sicken the mind in following every phase of Ireland's history, Burke's rigid temperamental conservatism always seems to me the most fatal and the most melancholy. It is not that he, the greatest intellect Ireland has ever produced, made his career in England. By the time one reaches the period in which he lived one gets used to the expatriation of Irish brains and vigour, not only to England and America, but to Spain, France, Russia, and Germany. It is that his intellect was so constituted as in the long run to be useless, and on some occasions absolutely harmful, to Ireland, sincerely as he loved her, and often as he supported measures for her temporary benefit, and rejoiced in their temporary success. An incident occurred in 1773 which tested his worth to Ireland, and incidentally threw into strong light English views of Ireland and America at the period immediately preceding the revolutionary epoch. The Irish Government, not with any high social aim, but in desperation at the growing Treasury deficit, proposed a tax upon the rents of absentee landlords, and the fate of the measure, like all Irish measures, had to be decided in the first instance in England. North's Tory Ministry actually consented to it. Chatham, far from the active world, and too broken in health to influence policy either way, wrote a powerful plea for it; but a strong group of Whig magnates, themselves wealthy absentee proprietors of Irish land, signed a vehement remonstrance which carried the day against it, and the author of this remonstrance, of all men in the world, was the Irishman Burke, who, owning not an acre of Irish land himself, devoted all his transcendent talents, all the subtlety and variety of his reasoning, to clothing the selfish greed of others with the garb of an enlightened patriotism.