disinterested of religious corporations, and accomplished ends which Pagan emperors and Christian kings had, during long centuries, vainly sought to attain. Those who are called its victims evoked upon it the benedictions of heaven, and its mild severity emulated the spirit with which the apostles had despotically preached one doctrine, for the salvation of the human race, from which they permitted no dissent.

In the second epoch of the Inquisition, the harsh rules of State policy obtained the victory over the unchangeably merciful principles which have ever guided the Christian Church. Judaism and Mahommedanism had acquired an ascendancy in the Spanish Empire which threatened its overthrow. The danger was so imminent in the year 1472 that human probabilities were in favour of a speedy reduction of the Spanish peninsula to a similar state with Persia, Turkey, and the northern provinces of Africa. The chivalrous and haughty nobility of Castile and Arragon, pampered by prosperity, and absence of political restraint, encouraged rather than repressed. the evil, and the immense wealth of Catholic dignitaries had acquired for them an independence of the Crown which monarchs, like Ferdinand and Isabella, could not but view with jealousy and wish to diminish. The pestilence of Judaism had, moreover, to such an extent infected the hierarchy, and corrupted the Grandees of Spain, that their ranks were filled with secret enemies of the Church, who were equally hostile to the Crown.

Truly, as De Maistre says, a desperate remedy was required for so desperate an evil! Still, it can scarcely be doubted, that, had the mild policy of the Church of Rome prevailed, Spain might have been saved, as France and Italy were in the thirteenth century, without such an immense effusion of blood. The Divine instincts governing, at all times, the Holy Pontiffs, would have been blessed by the ever watchful Providence of God, who loves mercy, and rejoices in crowning with success those principles of charity, which caused to descend on earth the unbounded love of a Saviour in the person of our Lord Jesus Christ.

HE state of Ireland does not mend; nor do the signs of any far-sighted and deliberate Irish policy on the part either of the Government, or of the Opposition, or of the members of Parliament who represent the constituencies of that country, make themselves manifest. The Habeas Corpus Act has been again suspended; and it is only too likely that it will remain suspended for the next five or six years. And the wonder is that no one seems to be very much ashamed, or even alarmed that it should be so. Irish Catholic members appear on the whole to feel rather more anxiety at the prospect that the present Government may possibly allow the Ecclesiastical Titles Act to be repealed; and are capable of infinitely greater indignation on the occasion of Lord Derby's giving a pension of £30 a year to an Orange poetaster. We are passing through a session very dismal in the evidence it affords that the Irish representation, sinking fast into the position of a mere tail, or mere end of a tail to either party, is losing all its legitimate influence. A few years ago the Irish independent members held the balance between the two great parties; but then honourable gentlemen at least professed independence. This session it would not be fair to say that they count for nothing, but it would be true to say that they are the first votes discounted in any close party contest or combination. Yet the state of the country with which they are connected is truly awful. Were Mr. Grattan or Mr. O'Connell alive and in Parliament now, one can fancy in what tones the condition of Ireland would be presented to the House of Commons. There is abundant evidence that disaffection is widening its area and increasing in intensity. Popular sympathy with Fenianism is growing in places where the organisation had no original hold. There is no pause in the operations of the Brotherhood. Not a week passes that the police do not hear of the arrival of new agents, provided with abundant funds from America. A very lamentable feeling of settled hostility is growing between the constabulary and the peasantry. The country is still in a

And President Roberts has arrived in Paris to conclude an alliance, offensive and defensive, with those enemies of God and man, the secret societies of the Continent.

Meantime another session of Parliament is tending fast towards its close, and all the great grievances of the country remain unremedied. The Government is not to be excused for this, but certainly the Government ought not to bear all the blame. For a great part of the session, as long indeed as there was a hope that a change of ministry was possible, a considerable section of the Irish members acted, even on Irish and Catholic questions, in the spirit of a factious party combination; and they have thus lost weight with ministers, with the House, and with the country-and certainly lost more than one great opportunity of doing public good. It is obvious, for example, that the repeal of the Ecclesiastical Titles Act is the natural, if not the necessary preliminary to a more wholesome state of relations than at present exists between the Catholic Church and the Government of the United Kingdom; and it is also obvious that its repeal could be more easily expected from the present Government than from the party of which Lord Russell is the head. Yet the only opposition to the proposition, that was worthy of serious consideration, came from Irish Catholic members of the Liberal connection; and if it has taken three months, during which the question has been repeatedly counted out, to get the select committee struck to which the Government had consented in April, it is clear, at all events, whoever else may be to blame, that there were not forty Irish members, Catholic or representing Catholic interests, who thought it worth their while to attend in order to make and to keep a House for the purpose.

Again, the Government laid on the table very early in the Session, two Bills proposing to deal very extensively, and on the whole, we are disposed to think, very liberally with the question of landlord and tenant in Ireland.

It

An opposition, chiefly composed of gentlemen, never previously very conspicuous in the advocacy of the principle of tenant right, was promptly organized to these measures. was led by Mr. Gregory, whose only other contribution to the settlement of the Land Question was the famous Quarter Acre clause; and his chief ground of objection to the one Bill was that it did not contain the substance of the other.

That these Bills, if passed, would have effected a final settlement of the question, we are not rash enough to assert; but of this we are confident, that if the majority of the Irish Members had gone into Committee upon them with the deter

settlement, then the question of Reform is not the only question on which Mr. Disraeli would have yielded to proper pressure in this year of grace. He knows well that to settle the Irish Land Question would be an achievement hardly second to effecting the Reform of Parliament itself; and the state of opinion in England, the state of affairs abroad, was not unfavourable to a bold line on the part of any government, properly urged and properly sustained. But the Irish Liberals were thinking at the time far more of the wrongs of the compound householder who does not exist in Ireland, than of the tenant at will, who unhappily does; and the Irish Tories, who were mutinous as to the principal provisions of the Tenants' Compensation Bill, seeing their advantage, brought a strong party pressure to bear on the Chief Secretary. Lord Naas has not as yet actually abandoned his Bills, but, of course, there is little, if any hope now, that they can be carried this year. And, indeed, so long as the Irish Tories, acting in the interest of the landlord class, are seconded by the Irish Liberals acting in the interest of party, it will be impossible to pass any beneficial measure on this subject.

Meantime, if the wrongs of Ireland could be cured by writing, then indeed we might begin to hope that that country was nigh hand to redemption. The Irish Question is passing from the stage of newspaper articles and correspondence into the stage of brochures and books. Ireland has been more. written on within the last six months than in any six years since O'Connell's death:-and not altogether ineffectually. A very strong English public opinion is forming on the subject of Irish policy-to some degree regarding the necessity of a large measure of tenant right, but even more so in relation to the less pressing question of the Church Establishment. Another Irish question which has made comparatively silent but not less effectual progress is that of Denomitional education. No one, who marks the signs of the times, can doubt that if the Irish Catholic members are really in earnest on this question, and can be brought to conduct themselves with common policy, it may be possible within the next year or two to achieve all that the Irish Bishops have asked in every department of education, from the Catholic University to the common school.

But, after all, the great and primary question for statesmen with regard to Ireland is how to abolish Fenianism-is how to make the Irish people as loyal and contented as the English and the Scotch are. The secret of this is absolutely in the question of land tenure. The Irish people is a people with no considerable industry except agriculture, intensely devoted

to that industry, and with apparently no natural capacity at present for any other industry. The law of the land is such that persons pursuing that industry cannot, as a rule, legally acquire property, or are, at least, liable to be arbitrarily deprived of it, or to be rack-rented for producing it. And the common custom of Irish landlords is such that these courses, upon their part, are not regarded as dishonourable; and the present tendency of their custom and system of management is to reduce their people more and more to the condition of tenants-at-will-which is a condition rather worse than serfage, as it was formerly practised in Russia, and is, indeed, in its helplessness against wrong and its utterness of subjection almost analogous to that of cattle. These being the conditions which the law permits between the two great castes, each tends to disown its duties to the country. The Irish landlord, if he be rich enough, lives anywhere but on his property. The Irish tenant escapes with his despair and his vengeance to a country where every man can own the land ho occupies; and where an Irish bailiff or an Irish agent would be regarded as creatures only fit to be added to Mr. Barnum's museum. Such is the process producing Fenianism. As long as these are the conditions of the life of the great mass of the Irish people, it is absurd to expect any other result. They would be more or less than human, if they could be content as they are. The conditions of life in the country into which they naturally escape, and with which their communication is most intimate, are such as in every way to heighten and strengthen their discontent. When England abolishes the Irish Church Establishment, she will do a wise and a just thing, and she will have the reward which is proper to justice and wisdom. But in the vast mass of political and social wrong and discontent, of which Fenianism is the organized outcome, the Church Establishment is a very insignificant item. If the Catholic Church had been established in its place a hundred years ago, wo know no reason, therefore, why Fenianism might not be as widely-spread and as dangerous to-day-unless it be, indeed, that in that case the Catholic Church in Ireland would have probably attempted the conversion of the Irish Protestant gentry and so gradually united them on the six days of the week as well as on the seventh, in heart and interest with the people-in which case a more humane and tolerable social polity might probably have grown up between them, instead of that in which the landlord looks upon the priest as his natural enemy, and the tenant as his natural spoil. At present the English Government has the zealous and active aid of the Irish Catholic clergy in opposing