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and Presbyterianism in Scotland, they could not give, because of the bigotry of the English and Scotch of the middle class. Do you suppose that the Irish Catholics feel any particular gratitude to a Liberal Ministry for gratifying its Nonconformist supporters, and giving itself the air of achieving a grand and genial policy of conciliation,' without doing them real justice? They do not, and cannot; and your measure was not healing. I think I was the only person who said so, in print at any rate, at the time. Plenty of people saw it, but the English are pedants, and they thought that if we all agreed to call what we had done a grand and genial policy of conciliation,' perhaps it would pass for being so. But it is not your fond desire nor mine that can alter the nature of things.' At present I hear on all sides that the Irish Catholics, who, to do them justice, are quick enough, see our grand and genial' act of 1868 in simply its true light, and are not grateful for it in the least.

Do I say that a Liberal Ministry could, in 1868, have done justice to Irish Catholicism, or that it could do justice to it now? Go to the Surrey Tabernacle,' say my Liberal friends to me; regard that forest of firm, serious, unintelligent faces uplifted towards Mr. Spurgeon, and then ask yourself what would be the effect produced on all that force of hard and narrow prejudice by a proposal of Mr. Gladstone to pay the Catholic priests in Ireland, or to give them money for their houses and churches, or to establish schools and universities suited to Catholics, as England has public schools and universities suited to Anglicans, and Scotland such as are suited to Presbyterians. What would be Mr. Gladstone's chance of carrying such a measure?' I know quite well, of course, that he would have no chance at all of carrying it. But the English people are improvable, I hope. Slowly this powerful race works its way out of its confining ruts, and its clouded vision of things, to the manifestation of those great qualities which it has at bottom-piety, integrity, good-nature, and good-humour. Our serious middle class, which has so turned a religion full of grace and truth into a religion full of hardness and misapprehension, is not doomed to lie in its present dark obstruction for ever, it is improvable. And we insignificant quiet people, as we had our consolation from perceiving what might yet be done about the land, when rhetoricians were startling us out of our senses, and despondent persons were telling us that there was no hope left, so we have our consolation, too, from perceiving what may yet be done about Catholicism. There is still something in reserve, still a resource which we have not yet tried, and which classes and parties amongst us have agreed never to mention, but which in quiet circles, where pedantry is laid aside and things are allowed to be what they are, presents itself to our minds and is a great comfort to us. And the Irish too, when they are exasperated by the pedantry and unreality of the agreement, in England, to pass

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off as a great and genial policy of conciliation' what is nothing of the kind, may be more patient if they know that there is an increasing number of persons over here who abhor this make-believe and try to explode it, though keeping quite in the background at present, and seeking to work on men's minds quietly rather than to bustle in Parliament and at public meetings.

Before, then, we adopt the tremendous alternative of either governing Ireland as a Crown colony or casting her adrift, before we afflict ourselves with the despairing thought that Ireland is going inevitably to confusion and ruin, there is still something left for us. As we pleased ourselves with the imagination of Lord Coleridge and Mr. Samuel Morley, and other like men of truth and equity, going as a Commission to Ireland, and enabling us to break with the old evil system as to the land by expropriating the worst landlords, and as we were comforted by thinking that though this might be out of the question at present, yet perhaps, if everything else failed, it might be tried and succeed,-so we may do in regard to Catholicism. We may please ourselves with the imagination of Lord Coleridge and the other Mr. Morley, Mr. John Morley, and men of like freedom with them from bigotry and prejudice, going as a Commission to Ireland, and putting us in the right way to do justice to the religion of the mass of the Irish people, and to make amends for our abominable treatment of it under the long reign of the Penal Code-a treatment much worse than Louis the Fourteenth's treatment of French Protestantism, and maintained without scruple by our religious people, while they were invoking the vengeance of heaven on Louis the Fourteenth, and turning up their eyes in anguish at the ill-usage of the distant negro. And here, too, though to carry a measure really healing may be out of the question at present, yet perhaps, if everything else fails, such a measure may at last be tried and succeed.

But it is not yet enough, even that our measures should be healing; 'the temper, too, of the Irish must be managed, and their good affections cultivated.' If we want to bring them to acquiesce cordially in the English connexion, it is not enough to make well-being general and to do justice, we and our civilisation must also be attractive to them. And this opens a great question, on which I must say something hereafter. For the present I have said enough. When a good-natured editor, with all kinds of potentates pressing to speak in his Review, allows an insignificant to talk to insignificants, one should not abuse his kindness.

MATTHEW ARNOLD.

BUSINESS IN THE HOUSE OF COMMONS.

In the November number of this Review I took the liberty of drawing the attention of its readers to the extremely critical state of affairs with regard to the transaction of business in Parliament. I tried to point out that the art of wasting time was be come a kind of profession, and that no time was to be lost if that assembly, on whose wisdom and foresight everything depends, was to be saved from inevitable decline and disgrace. I do not think that any one took the trouble to reply to me; I was unanswered and unheeded. Every one must, one would think, have foreseen the inevitable attempt to defeat the Irish Coercion Bill, but nobody seemed to think the matter worth a thought. I confess that I fully expected that before entering on the discussion of such a measure the Government would have taken some pains to place the House on a level with the other states of Europe and America; and would not have rushed into an ignoble and hopeless quarrel, from which they had nothing to expect but defeat. I was not at all surprised to see that the whole of the month of January was wasted, without any perceptible progress being made: the result appeared to me perfectly certain beforehand. All the methods which the ingenuity of every country but our own has devised to check the practice of speaking against time lay before the Government, they had nothing to do but to take their choice; they did choose at last, and, as it seems to me, they chose very unfortunately. They had recourse to the last and worst resource of a defeated and dispirited party—that is, a despotism-resting on what was sure to prove, and has actually proved, a vain hope, that they could avoid the delays which the introduction of new rules and the passing them though the House were sure to involve, the Government hit upon what I must consider the unhappy device of establishing two states, one of quiet and one of emergency, leaving the latter to be ruled by laws which the Speaker alone was authorised to make, without even consulting Parliament, and for which he alone was responsible. Let us look at this proceeding from a legal point of view. There is no doubt that the House of Commons possesses the power to make laws for its own guidance, for the power has been freely executed for six centuries; it is surely a very bold, nay, I will say a very rash, experiment, to tamper with constitutional arrangements of such elaborate

completeness and such venerable antiquity. The right of regulating its own proceedings is undoubtedly in the House of Commons, but where are we to find the right to delegate this right to another body, or to a single person? Can any case be imagined to which the maxim Delegatus non potest delegare could be more properly applied than the case where a great and ancient assembly breaks through the practice and traditions of many centuries in order to strip itself of one of its noblest prerogatives, the right of regulating its own proceedings, in favour of a single man who is to issue these laws without being obliged to consult any one as an alternative to the existing law; for whose laws no one but himself is responsible, and for the revocation of whose laws or their correction, as far as I can see, no provision whatever is made?

An old proverb says that it is a miserable servitude where law is vague or uncertain. Look at the state to which the House of Commons has reduced itself! It has two laws, and can never be certain under which it has to live. Most men find it hard enough to make themselves acquainted with one law, but it is hard indeed to have to reckon with two, and not two running side by side, like law and equity, but one at the shortest notice and for the most inconceivable reasons superseded by the other. We have been accustomed in times of emergency to submit to certain restrictions on our liberty, which vanished in easier times; but to find ourselves in time of peace living under two laws alternately is a trial which I believe no nation except ourselves has ever been called upon to endure, much less has imposed on itself.

We are really practising a course of proceeding-allowance being made for the difference of manners and institutions-not unlike the course adopted by the Romans when the Consul was directed to take care that the city should receive no damage; and just as this violent invasion of the law paved the way for the ruin of the Republic, so these newly instituted invasions of the law and practice of Parliament have an obvious tendency to weaken and shatter our ancient constitution, and to rend the House of Commons, on which our liberties rest, into disorderly fragments, instead of welding this great assembly into one harmonious and compact whole. It is the nature of all great assemblies to split and subdivide themselves into factions. Which is the better citizen-he who bears with patience the evils of the Commonwealth and seeks for remedies within the Constitution, or he who, unable to endure with patience the checks and disappointments of public life, seeks to indemnify himself for his mortification by violent measures, which tear up old landmarks, and are the usual forerunners of further and worse change? It is hard to prove a negative, but I believe you may ransack the history of England since the Conquest without finding anything like a precedent for the recent proceedings in the House of Commons. War and treason and violence you will find in abundance, but a deliberate act, by which any community of free Englishmen

surrendered to a single man the power of making laws for their guidance for such an act, I believe, you will search the annals of England in vain. It may be said, and said with perfect truth, that the present Speaker of the House of Commons is the very last man by whom these enormous and hitherto unheard-of powers would be likely to be abused. I grant it freely; but this only shows the height from which we have fallen, when we are reduced to place our confidence, not in the manly instincts of a free selfgoverned people, but in the moderation and patriotism of a single man, to whom we have entrusted what ought never to have passed out of our own hands. It is so much easier to confide in a single man than to frame and carry a law, that the experiment of appointing a dictator has been a favourite in all ages, but in England at least it has never found favour until now. The tendency by which such violent steps are dictated is a very natural one. It offers an escape from a situation of great embarrassment and difficulty; if it succeeds, those who framed it take the lion's share of the credit, and, if it fail, the dictator is always there to bear the blame which ought to be awarded to those who trust to men rather than to measures to cure the disorders of the State.

The evil of the course is, as it seems to me, the more to be deplored, because, except from the returning wisdom of Parliament itself, it seems to be entirely without a remedy. Even supposing, as I think, that the maxim Delegatus non potest delegare applies, and the House of Commons has no more right to delegate its powers of making the law for its own guidance than it would have to transfer its legislative powers to the mayor and aldermen of London, where is the court, where is the tribunal, before which such an issue can be tried? The House has always claimed and maintained that it is the only judge of its own practice and proceeding, and I apprehend that it is perfectly clear that there is no jurisdiction known to our law which would presume to interfere with what has been done. If what is done is wrong, it is, I believe, absolutely without remedy, except from the wisdom of Parliament itself.

I confess I am not without a strong feeling of impatience, or even of shame, when I read that the House of Commons has been invited to declare a state of urgency. It is an evil period in the history of States when they come to use great words for small things. Great emergencies may fairly call upon us to do things from which in calmer moments we should shrink; but who could suppose that no simpler method for checking the ignoble art of talking against time could be found than that of splitting the business of the House into two, and making a distinction of the most arbitrary and illogical nature, under which the rules to be applied depend, not on the importance of the subject, but on the importunity of the orators? It seems to me very difficult to imagine a more vicious system than