That a Parliament hampered, mutilated, restricted, demoralised, should have made such a stand for the country’s interests, testifies to the vigour of constitutional and national life in Ireland. Society indeed is so closely bound together in any country that the most imperfect and exclusive body of its inhabitants must feel to some degree the needs and aspirations of the whole. Mr. A. M. Sullivan, in the last Home Rule controversy, rightly argued that it was not what the Parliament was that chiefly mattered, but where it was: “Anything will do, if it is only in Ireland,” he said, “the Protestant Synod would do.” The same need for some representative life of a people in their own land was felt by the Great Earl of Kildare over four hundred years ago. “You hear of our case as in a dream,” he cried to the London councillors, “and feel not the smart that vexeth us.” The close of the old Irish polity, the fate of the Irish Parliaments, have a deeper lesson to teach than the supposed faults of the Irish temper, Iberian, Celtic, or Norman. The story of the old Gaelic State, and of the later Anglo-Irish Commonwealth, both alike reveal a power of patriotism, a passion of human aspiration, which cannot find its final satisfaction in material gifts; and which is ill understood by those who deny to Ireland fair fame, dignity, and a lofty patriotism, and offer in their place oblivion, with a promise for the future of Tariff Reform and its financial consequences. The series of failures that have through seven centuries followed the English dealing with Ireland have their inexorable lesson: “That nothing has a natural right to last But equity and reason; that all else Meets foes irreconcilable, and at best Lives only by variety of disease.” IX.—Ireland As A Dependency. BY PROFESSOR A. F. POLLARD “The ocean,” said Grattan, with reference to the connexion between Great Britain and Ireland, “protests against separation, and the sea against union.” The protests of natural forces cannot be ignored, and the history of the relations between the two islands is filled with the efforts of statesmen to find a middle way between the horns of this dilemma, and to adjust the estranging drift of the Irish Channel, the Irish climate, and racial divergence to the bonds of common interest imposed by the Atlantic Ocean and foreign competition upon the British Isles. After a brief eighteen years of uneasy legislative independence, the pendulum swung to the other extreme, and the Act of Union inaugurated a century of restless incorporation; but, for five out of the six and a half centuries of English parliamentary history, Ireland had a subordinate Parliament. Union has been the exception, not the rule, in the relations of the kingdoms.