who formed that garrison were fully and fixedly resolved upon the policy, pure and simple, of extermination. Nor can we pay them the compliment of allowing that their motive was religious, that they wanted Ireland for the professors of a faith which they considered true. They wanted Ireland for themselves. The Irish were the owners of the soil, and as such were in the way; for that reason the Irish should go. Cato was not more intensely and persistently bent upon the destruction of Carthage than were the members of James's English garrison upon the utter expulsion or utter extinction of the Irish race. We should be sorry to say that the English policy in Ireland has always been directed to the same end. We should be still more sorry to say that the English people themselves have always prompted and patronized such a policy. Most of all should we be sorry to say that even now the English people would prefer such a policy to any other. We believe that for the one brutal blockhead who can chuckle over the yearly decrease of the population of Ireland, there are one hundred Englishmen who see in the necessitated emigration of the Irish people one of the greatest losses, as well as one of the greatest dangers to the British empire, and who deplore the causes, whether of the present or of the past, which make it only too likely that if the Irish are going with a vengeance they will try to return with abundance of the same commodity. Still, however just be the English people of these times, the Calendar makes it evident that the Englishmen who ruled Ireland for James the First made up their minds that in one way or other, by banishment, or by starvation, or by the sword, the Irish then in Ireland would have to disappear. We say nothing of the malicious delight with which they contemplated this extinction of a people. We only put down the fact that in their intent, determinate and fixed, the people was doomed. But why was not the purpose realized? Of course it is to the providence of God that the result is in the first instance due. And though often in the events of history traces of the Divine interference are difficult to discover, they are not difficult to discover here. It was a clear mercy to both peoples to preserve the weaker in its ancient home. It was well for the Irish to be still possessors of the old isle, to whose very soil there clung the sacred and strengthening memories of a thousand years. It was well for the English to have beside them that strange, unselfish people whose whole life showed what England wanted so sadly to see-faith which was never conquered by sense or sensuality, loyalty which was never traitor to the cause of the absent King, courage which had never succumbed to a little hunger or a little burning, and a grand contentedness of heart which made merry in the sunshine, and was not saddened in the storm. But, under the providence of God, the Irish Executive were deterred from realizing their purpose by two circumstances. One was that these men were mediocrities, and that, though mediocrities might resolve upon a policy of extermination, it requires, as long as public opinion lasts, something different from mediocrity to carry such a policy through. The influence of public opinion is often denied, but it is denied without reason. It often saves many an oppressed province, and it often saves many a collier's wife. The wastes of the province will be seen by the nations, and the black-eyes of the collier's wife will not escape neighbourly observation. But if either Sir Arthur Chichester or Bill the collier could only get his "impediment" out of the reach of restriction for a while-up, say, in a Ring of Saturn or a Field of Mars,-ah! how soon and silently, even to the satisfying of Mr. Carlyle, would the thing be done! But the other cause which prevented Mountjoy and Mountjoy's successor from attempting directly (we have seen that indirectly they did their best) to rid Ireland of its native population was much more efficacious. Without it, too, we do not think that public opinion would have been equal or nearly equal to saving the Irish. This second cause was the state of affairs in England and on the Continent. In England the King's position was, even a year after his accession, extremely critical. On the Continent the English interests were not prospering. The Catholic powers, with the sanction of the Pope-we may say with his encouragement-were manifesting some soreness about the position of the Catholics of England. Great fear possessed all the kingdom that the Spaniards had not given up the idea of invading Britain; and it was, not unwisely, judged that there might not be always a hurricane at hand to win a victory for the British fleet. Our Calendar shows that this fear of a Spanish invasion was especially rife and strong among the members of the Irish Executive. They thought they had special reasons for being afraid. It was reported that the expected Spanish expedition would aim at the seizure of Ireland, and the servitors of Mountjoy could not expect much mercy from the soldiers of the orthodox King, the more especially as, under the Spanish banners and clad in Spanish mail, were many of those very Irish whose lands the garrison had wrenched away. In whatever way the garrison argued, this much our Calendar makes certain, that the state of affairs abroad saved the inhabitants of Ireland. We wish the reader to remember all along that these men were, like the King, mediocrities, and that it was their mediocrity which made them so appreciative of danger. Had they been great bad men, they would, with Cromwell's dauntless impudence, have slaughtered the Irish, and if necessary flung Irish heads into the Catholic courts of Europe. But they were only bad men of the middling sort. They were certainly not after the heart of God; they were just as certainly not after the heart of the devil. They were selfish men to the backbone; and selfish men are invariably cowards. Their cowardice saved Ireland. What a difference it would have made in the subsequent history of the Empire if James himself had tried to govern Ireland, and tried, in his mediocre way, to do a little good for the Irish people! He might, for instance, have convoked an Irish Parliament with full freedom of debate and full power of legislation. Sir John Davys, in his earliest Irish letter, written before his fellow-officials had taught him his lesson, looks to such a parliament as one of the first means of turning Ireland into a commonwealth from being a common misery. But James the First held parliaments useless, unless it was to hear himself speechify; and a sea-voyage, even across St. George's Channel, was as hateful to him as were sucking-pigs. Kindly treatment of the Irish, even on a small scale, would have done much to move them, with their memories of Queen Elizabeth; they were just then in a position to appreciate the smallest act of friendliness very keenly; but the infamous Somerset and his more infamous paramour had the royal treasures-blood-drops wrung from the heart of Ireland-lavished for their luxury; the King himself drank and dribbled,* gabbled and gormandized, stuttered and swore and slept, and the famine-stricken people of Ireland were left to die! Religious freedom would have done most of all, depriving Irish disloyalty of its strongest sanction and its sharpest sting; but James the First, who knew little of any religion and valued none, yet sat among the doctors and solved doubts, ordered the burning of witches, and permitted the banning of priests as if he were, in his own ridiculous person, the latest and loftiest manifestation of the Divine! We are well aware that James's position was not without its difficulties. The anti-Catholic and anti-Irish parties in his kingdom were very strong. It would be hard for him to favour either Ireland or Catholicity without giving great "His tongue was too large for his mouth, which ever made him speak full in the mouth, and made him drink very uncomely, as if catching his drink which came out into the cup, on each side of his mouth."-Balfour's "Annals," ap. Guthrie, vol. ix. 142. offence to many who would be only too ready to take him at a disadvantage. Still, this is no defence of James. Justice to Ireland, and freedom to the Catholic religion would have been, not only his honestest, but his safest policy. His Spanish troubles, and his Irish troubles would then, in all likelihood, have had no existence. Nor do we think he would have been in serious danger from England or Scotland. It has always appeared to our minds simply impossible for either one country or the other to have become really Protestant in fifty years. Putting aside the large number of the nobility and gentry who, both in England and Scotland, clung on in despite of all to the old Faith, and made no secret of their fidelity, it seems to us a certainty that, not only was the heart of the nation Catholic, even in the times of James the First, but that many of those noblemen who publicly professed Protestantism at that time, nay, many even of those who pricked on the King to persecute the Catholics, did so, in some cases to save the property which they had inherited from their fathers, in some cases to save the property which they had wrung from the monks. But if James had ensured to them the manent peaceful possession of their lands; if he assured the nation that he himself desired the past to be passed and forgotten; and if he proclaimed that henceforth no man should, either in person or fortune, suffer for his religion, we have no doubt whatever that, after nine days of unusual clamour among the clergy, and unusual hesitation among the laity, James would have had to support him both the mass of the people and the mass of the nobility. In any case he would have gathered round him the hearts and hands of that gallant people-who, even when he slept with his sins about him, forgot his worthlessness, and fought still on for his worthless progeny; who, when they had a man like Montrose to lead them, alone brought victory to his worthless son, and who owe to the leadership of his worthless grandson the bitterest memory of their bitter past. And with all Ireland, strong and united, aiding the Cavaliers-if it came to that-there would have been no disgrace at Naseby, and no murder at Whitehall. per But " False friend, false son, false father, and false King, It were very well if the evil that he did did not survive him; but both to England and to Ireland he left a legacy of woes. For England, he left that disastrous civil strife which spilled the blood of his unhappy son, and which was never quite ended till duplicity and debauchery extinguished the Stuarts. In Ireland he fixed and established that fatal policy which has made the loyalest people of the earth disloyal, and the warmesthearted people of the earth full of rancour and revenge. Better times, indeed, we live in; and with the more genial season, the better products of the Irish nature begin to appear. But, whenever his ear is vexed by sounds that savour of Irish disaffection, the wise statesman, remembering Ireland's history, will not forget her patience in the past; and if he finds her cold and unconfiding now, he will know well where to place the blame. And among the many foreigners who will have to bear it, there is no one on whom it will press more heavily than James the First. ART. II. THE LABOURERS AND POLITICAL ECONOMY. Reports of the Meeting held at Exeter Hall on Tuesday Evening, Dec. 10th, 1872. Enigmas of Life. By W. R. GREG. London: Trübner & Co. ON Na former occasion (April, 1872, p. 422) we expressed our agreement with Father O'Reilly "that the tendency, in our countries and in some others, is rather towards an excess of education, for the masses of the people: an excess of imperfect education, which serves to communicate to a great many knowledge not needed by their position, and at the same time incomplete and (in consequence) not unfrequently mischievous." But in making this general remark, we did not sufficiently bear in mind one circumstance; viz., the political importance of such education under a constitutional government. For more years than can easily be counted, the clergy and philanthropists of every denomination have admitted as undeniable, that the agricultural labourers of this country are in a physical condition, which is truly deplorable and heart-rending, whether one considers their temporal or their eternal interests. these philanthropists have felt themselves obliged to be content with interfering to alleviate misery in this or that particular Yet |