[40] Remembering the bitter vituperation of which the Liberation Society has been the subject, the following passage from Sir Roundell Palmer's speech, while creditable to the speaker, is amusing also:--'When we see considerable bodies connected--_I won't call them with agitations, for that is a word that might not be acceptable_--but with movements out of doors for the purpose of influencing public opinion on this subject.... I cannot pretend to deny that the question should be brought under our attention.' This is substituting rose-water for vitriol!
[41] The University Tests Abolition Bill received the royal assent on the 16th of June.
[42] London: J. and C. Mozley, and Masters and Son, 1870.
_The Cromwellian Settlement of Ireland._ By J. P. PRENDERGAST, Barrister-at-law. Second Edition. Enlarged. With a Facsimile of a Cromwellian Debenture. Longmans. 1870.
It is the tritest of common places to deplore the persistency with which the Irish will go back to early times, and explain the failure of the well-meant attempts of modern legislation by narrating old persecutions. They will do it; and the practical effect of their doing so is seen, in the agitation for 'home government' among the wilder spirits in Fenianism, among men like Mr. Butt and Mr. J. Martin. But, though we regret the 'over-long memory' of the Irish, we cannot but feel that Englishmen have never paid attention enough to the history of the sister island. To most English readers everything beyond what it suited the purpose of Macaulay and Carlyle and Froude to tell them, is a mere blank. Educated men read with surprise in Mr. Hill-Burton's Scotland, the statement that Ireland was the old _Scotia_, the _Scotia major_ when it becomes necessary to make a distinction, and that the _perfervidum ingenium_ which carried four Scotia missionaries over the whole continent, is that very temperament which makes the Irish of to-day so impatient of English rule. Mr. Reichel's lectures, again (chiefly known, we fear, only through the appreciative notices of them in the _Saturday Review_) have been a sort of new revelation of the way in which Popery was forced upon Ireland by the English invaders, and of the general state of the country in Plantagenet times. Even Mr. Froude continually overthrows preconceived opinions--as when he proves that in Elizabeth's time the only part of Ireland where there was anything like peace and security was that which was still ruled by native princes; 'the pale' being ground down by taxation and ravaged by an unpaid soldiery, the successors of those 'paddy persons' who under Leicester had made England despicable in the Netherlands, whilst Ulster, under Shane O'Neil, was quiet and prosperous. What Englishman, again, had anything like a true notion of the disgraceful horrors of '98, till he read Massey's George the Third? Yet Irishmen know and ponder over all these things. A whole library of cheap historical monographs has for many years spread the knowledge of them broadcast; and to this reading, unhappily so one-sided, is due that stubborn 'ingratitude' as we call it, which even the Disestablishment and the Land Bill fail to satisfy.