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we should have been so constructed that the pleasures of one would not interfere with the pleasures of another, or that each of us would discharge by instinct those duties which the welfare of the community requires from all. In a world in which we are made to depend so largely for our well-being on the conduct of our neighbours, and yet are created infinitely unequal in ability and worthiness of character, the superior part has a natural right to govern; the inferior has a natural right to be governed; and a rude but adequate test of superiority and inferiority is provided in the relative strength of the different orders of human beings.' (Pp. 1, 2.)

We admit that individual right and national right are similarly conditioned in point of limitation. But, then, the right of each individual is limited by the corresponding right of every other individual, to whom he stands in any degree of social relationship. Therefore, no individual can exercise his own rights so as to trench upon, or injuriously affect, the rights of others. The solitary inhabitant of a wilderness may act as he pleases without any other restraint than that imposed by his own absolute will; but the moment he comes into the neighbourhood of other inhabitants of the same territory, each of whose rights is naturally as absolute as his own, the law of reciprocity is at once developed, namely, that no individual can have a right to damage or restrict any other individual's right, and a similar rule must exist in respect to any number of associated individuals relatively to each other. If this principle be incontestable in relation to individual rights, then it follows that the rights of neighbouring nations mutually control and limit each other to the destruction of our author's theory. Mr. Froude asserts that the superior part has a natural right to govern,' on the ground of men being created infinitely unequal in ability and worthiness of 'character.' But who is to be the judge of infinite' inequality? Has every man who deems himself superior in mental attainments or in moral character to his neighbour a right to subjugate him to his power or caprice? If no single individual either has, or can possibly have, any such right, then no number of individuals calling themselves a nation can possibly possess it in virtue of their mere aggregation unless a collection of cyphers can form a whole number from the mere fact of their being grouped together in a row. Mr. Froude asks, What constitutes a nation? and then proceeds to observe that the right of a people to self-government consists and 'can consist in nothing but their power to defend themselves.' What is this but to confound moral right with physical selfdefence, and to represent them as one and the same thing differing only in name? But Mr. Froude fails to see that,

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according to his own doctrine, which represents individual and national rights as identical, an individual, strong enough to overpower his neighbour and to deprive him of the power of self-government, acquires an ipso facto right of reducing him to slavery, solely in virtue of the weak wretch's inability to repel aggression. Thus Mr. Froude would justify every -system of slave-holding known to history. The poet says:

'Where'er a wrong exists a right is slain,'

but in this philosophy there can never be a wrong' in human society, so long as overpowering might exists on the side of the oppressor. The Middle Ages are sometimes described as barbarous, but still medieval chivalry gloried in defending the weak against the strong, and in rescuing the distressed from the power of tyrants. But in the nineteenth century Mr. Froude carries us away back to those pre-historic ages when ȧperý, virtus, was only another name for military valour, and propounds for our instruction and guidance the enormous dogma that might constitutes right-a tenet which he has himself characterised as expressing the morality of wild beasts and savages.

He imagines, however, that he is taking safer ground when he assumes that the right to resist depends on the power of ' resistance.' But he is merely repeating the old ethical mistake of confounding moral right with physical power. It may not be wise, or prudent, or expedient to resist when defensive power is insufficient, but this misfortune can never affect the abstract question of right, which depends entirely on the fact whether a wrong has or has not been committed by the aggressor. Morality of this order, if generally accepted, would untie the hands of all the most ambitious and encroaching Powers of the world. France would have a right to absorb Belgium, Germany Holland, and Russia Turkey. The only check upon the aggrandising propensities of nations would be the dread of disturbing the balance of power, which makes outside nations interfere on the first encroachment which intimates the intention on the part of a great State to absorb or reduce to dependence a weaker neighbour. But Mr. Froude withdraws all the moral checks at present in existence.

There may be a case, however, in which a stronger Power is justified by the principle and duty of self-preservation in absorbing a weaker or in reducing it to subjection. If the territory of the weaker community should be so situated as to form a point d'appui for a hostile Power beyond its frontier, so as to threaten the independence of the stronger

Power, and if the inhabitants of the weaker country refuse to enter into friendly relations with the stronger to insure its safety from foreign invasion, a state of circumstances may arise which would justify the annexation of the weaker country as an imperative measure of defence. The maxim Necessitas non habet legem would certainly justify compulsory occupation, since nations, like individuals, are entitled to employ extreme measures for the protection of their national life, though in other circumstances these measures might be unjustifiable on the ground of general morality and international justice. Now this has been the relation of Ireland towards England ever since the sixteenth century, when the rupture between the English Crown and the Court of Rome took place; and, at the present day the possession of Ireland is indispensable to our Imperial existence. Even if we had not annexed Ireland to the English Crown long before the period of the Reformation, the events of the sixteenth century, preparing the way for desolating wars between the Catholic and Protestant Powers, must have compelled us to hold Ireland. Nations are slow to wait till their enemy attacks them with overwhelming power. If Ireland had been allowed to become French or Spanish, it would have involved the aggrandisement of our enemies to an extent that would have enabled them to impair our own security or to threaten our very national existence. We keep Ireland now under the same government with England for precisely the same reasons which made the Northern States of America coerce the Southern into reunion, and for the same reason that made England in past days seek a union with Scotland which for generations was the point d'appui from which the French threatened an invasion hostile to our liberties and our religion. This is the true and incontrovertible ground upon which the retention of Ireland as an integral and inseparable portion of the United Kingdom can be thoroughly justified. We have no need for the immoral and self-contradictory theories to which Mr. Froude has recourse, as if at the present day the common sense of mankind could ever receive the savage dogma that might constitutes right, and that aggression becomes sanctified in proportion to its crushing force.

Yet when Mr. Froude leaves his ethical discussions and proceeds to describe the actual course of the relations that existed for centuries between the two countries, we cannot but admire his rapid and comprehensive narrative, and especially his admirable portraiture of the Irish character. In his contrast between the conditions under which Scotland and Wales

became portions of the Empire, and those which marked the incorporation of Ireland, he does full justice to the bravery of the Irish and their splendid military services, not only to England's enemies abroad but to England herself. Yet,' he says

In their own country, in their efforts to shake off English supremacy, their patriotism has evaporated in words. No advantage of numbers has availed them; no sacred sense of hearth and home has stirred their nobler nature. An unappeasable discontent has been attended with the paralysis of manliness: and, with a few accidental exceptions, continually recurring insurrections have only issued in absolute and ever disgraceful defeat. Could Ireland have but fought as Scotland fought, she would have been mistress of her own destinies. In a successful struggle for freedom she would have developed qualities which would have made her worthy of possessing it. She would have been one more independent country added to the commonwealth of nations, and her history would have been another honourable and inspiriting chapter among the brighter records of mankind. She might have stood alone; she might have united herself, had she so pleased, with England, on fair and equal conditions, or she might have preferred alliances with the Continental Powers. . . . Again, could Ireland, on discovering like the Welsh that she was too weak or too divided to encounter England in the field, have acquiesced, as the Welsh acquiesced, in the alternative of submission, there was not originally any one advantage which England possessed which she was not willing and eager to share with her. If England was to become a great Power, the annexation of Ireland was essential to her, if only to prevent the presence there of an enemy; but she had everything to lose by treating her as a conquered province, seizing her lands, and governing her by force; everything to gain by conciliating the Irish people, extending to them the protection of her own laws, the privileges of her own higher civilisation, and assimilating them on every side, so far as their temperament allowed, to her subjects at home. Yet Ireland would neither resist courageously, nor would she honourably submit.'

We commend this telling passage to the special attention of those Irish Nationalists who deem it the height of patriotism to keep Ireland still irreconcilable that she may be for ever a thorn in the side of England. The Netherlands threw off the yoke of Spain, Greece wrung its independence from Turkey, and Italy from Austria, but Ireland failed utterly in all her struggles for independence. According to Mr. Froude, she never fought but one good battle in all her history, and that was on the bloody but fatal field of Aughrim. He may well say that

A nation which at once will not defend its liberties in the field, nor yet allow itself to be governed, but struggles to preserve the independence which it wants the spirit to uphold in arms, by insubordination and anarchy and secret crime, may bewail its wrongs in wild and weeping

VOL. CXXXVII. NO. CCLXXIX.

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eloquence in the ears of mankind, may at length, in a time when the methods by which sterner ages repressed this kind of conduct are unpermitted, make itself so intolerable as to be cast off and bidden go upon its own bad way; but it will not go for its own benefit.'

We think that Mr. Froude has given a very fair and candid statement of all the various difficulties, so curiously complex in their character, that so long opposed the establishment of English civilisation in Ireland, while he has not failed to expose the harshness and cruelty often exercised by the conquerors. His picture of Irish society during the only period when the country was in full and ample possession of all the privileges of Home Rule, namely, towards the end of the fifteenth century, is really appalling. It was the time when the free right of every one to make war upon his neighbour at pleasure was the Magna Charta of Irish liberty;' when strife and bloodshed were the sole business of life; and those of them took highest 'rank, and rose most to favour in song and legend, who had 'slaughtered most enemies, and burnt and harried the largest ' number of homesteads.' Mr. Froude has explained the failure of all the early schemes of English colonisation by the great assimilating power which belongs to the Irish race, for generation after generation of settlers was rapidly absorbed into Celtic families. He is equally just and sagacious in ascribing general failure to the vacillating policy of England.

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'England tries coercion till impatience with the cost and a sense of the discredit produce a hope that coercion is no longer needed or a belief that it has been a mistake from the beginning. Conciliation follows, and compromise, and concession and apology. The strain is taken off, the anarchy revives, and again, with a monotonous uniformity, there is a fresh appeal to the sword.'

Ireland suffered at once from her comThus, age after age, parative weakness and from her long separation from England, till in modern times a more wise and liberal policy determined that the weaker country should be no longer degraded or the stronger unjust.

We now approach the period of the Reformation when, unhappily for their respective interests, the two countries took different ways, the Irish, by immediate instinct, throwing themselves on the Roman side, though, as Mr. Froude informs them, their tendency in all England's quarrels to take the opposite side might have reminded them that it was England We 'which first riveted the Roman yoke upon their neck.'*

*It is apropos to the present subject to mention that Father Burke, a Dominican friar, took Mr. Froude lately to task in New York for

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