Irish, who are most at England’s mercy, have been condemned to nurse their grievance and denied the conditions of loyalty. The remedy does not apply, we are told, to Irish disorders, firstly because parliamentary institutions are an exotic(122) unsuited to the Irish soil and temperament, and secondly because they have been weighed in Irish balances and found wanting. It is hard to see why they should be regarded as more exotic in Irish Dublin than in French Quebec: Sir Wilfrid Laurier cannot be termed a failure as a parliamentarian; British parties at Westminster have been inconvenienced by the parliamentary skill rather than by the parliamentary incompetence of Irish members; and the present menace to parliamentary institutions does not come from Ireland. Nor, indeed, is the argument one which we can employ with any consistency, for there is hardly a word in our legal and constitutional terminology that is not of foreign origin. Parliament itself is not of Anglo-Saxon derivation, and nearly all the things we cherish most have been imported from abroad—our racehorses and our religion, our alphabet and our algebra, our trial by jury and our vote by ballot. Pure-bred civilisations have been rare, inelastic, and unprogressive, and the test of a nation’s political capacity lies not in its rigid adherence to its original stock-in-trade, but in its powers of assimilation and adaptability to its environment. It is no reproach to us that we have dethroned indigenous deities, nor to the Irish that they have appropriated our Parliamentary weapons; for it is a poor country which cannot borrow its neighbours’ wisdom and profit by their experience.