From the Spectator, 24 Feb. THE COUP D'ETAT IN IRELAND. vent the necessity for victory, and the gentlest mode of prevention is to arrest those who would have led the actual on slaught. This they have done and are doing with a rapidity and decisiveness which, in adding to the dramatic effect of their strong measures, help to strike without bloodshed the terror which, would certainly follow victory in the streets. They may not sueceed, for, as we have so frequently pointed out, the special danger of Fenianism arises from the folly, and rashness, and blindness to facts which render it so weak. A greater conspiracy would be easier to deal with, for great conspirators would at least know when they were hopelessly outmatched. But at least the Ministry have tried, have visibly shown to all Fenians, and sympathizers with Fenians, that their next step will bring them face to face with the strongest Government in the world, awake, armed, and forced to believe that sternness is truest mercy. The Government is right, and in that fact lies our own condemnation. After six hundred years of unbroken sway, and forty of honest effort to be just, English Liberals are still compelled to support an Administration which dares not allow a few hundred misguided men to summon the Irish people to insurrection. As Mr. Bright told the House, in the wonderful burst of eloquence in which on Saturday he pleaded the Irish cause,-a burst unequalled among his speeches, and sufficient of itself to convince a whispering generation that oratory is not yet an extinct force THE Government of Ireland has been authorized to arrest any person it suspects, and keep him in durance if necessary for a year. That is the practical meaning of "suspending the Habeas Corpus," and that such a power should have become once more needful, so needful as to be granted by Parliament by a vote of 364 to 6, is one of the gravest and most deplorable incidents of this generation. It is the more grave and the more deplorable, because the Government is clearly in the right. If it had been precipitate, as so often before in Irish affairs, or misled by that thirst for power which inferior statesmen so frequently mistake for energy, the evil would have been comparatively small and temporary. Unhappily all the evidence shows that Govvernment has been only too patient, too much inclined to share in that apathetic scorn with which Englishmen are apt to receive Irish complaints as well as Irish menaces. It has known for months that a conspiracy was on foot, that Americanized Irish were arriving, that arms were being collected, that a military organization had been set on foot, that men, otherwise respectable, of blameless lives, and unimpeached character, were striving hard to stir the people to civil war, and still it has forborne. It has acted only when an outbreak appeared imminent, and has even now acted in the most moderate way. It was essential, if possible, to prevent an emeute in the streets. The politicians who "All the Irish in America, and all the whisper that after all the affair had better citizens of America, with all their organiza"come to a head," cannot know what they tion, and all their vast resources, would not are talking about. Ten minutes' bloodshed in England or in Scotland raise the very in Dublin might throw Ireland back a slightest flame of sedition or insurrectionary century, one night of conflagration undo all movement." It is only in Ireland that we the work of the last twenty years, reopen dare not smile when five hundred strangers the chasm between classes now so slowly call on the people to make war on the filling up, revive the paralytic Orange or throne, and property, and the priesthood, ganization, place landlord and tenant, rich that we employ troops to arrest shopkeepers, and poor, Protestant and Catholic, once and garrison a capital of our own as if it more in deadly hostility to each other and had just been snatched from a powerful foe. the laws. That the emeute would be put Scotland fought us far more bitterly than down scarcely needs assertion. An ex- ever Ireland did. Scotchmen hated us as perienced and stern soldier, accustomed at hardly as ever Irish peasants can. Scotonce to rebellion and to Ireland, directs a land possesses to this day a nationality as force amply sufficient for a foreign cam- strong and as peculiar as that of Ireland, a paign, and behind him are ranged twenty- separate creed, a distinct system of law, a four millions of English and Scotch people, representation indefinitely less competent who will have exhausted their youth and to control the action of the central Parliathe accumulations of eight hundred years ment, and if treason were spouted to-mor before the Fenian design can approach row from the Calton Hill the Government a realization. The duty of Government is would not add a man to the police of not to conquer its own people, but to pre- Edinburgh. When there is nothing to burn but granite, even children may be allowed to play with lucifers. It is because Ireland is a magazine that the amusement is there so terribly formidable. There are probably not in the island ten thousand Fenians, but the sympathy with Fenianism, the sense that their wild project is the evil expression of a good thought, the hysterical appeal for love to the sister who gives only justice, pervades every class but that which owns the soil. Everywhere English travellers find the peasantry at heart sympathizing with the Fenians. Everywhere they hear the same conviction that Ireland is at last to be a nation, to be relieved from that cold just rule which no nation not of our blood has ever yet been able either to like or to shake off. Everywhere they become conscious of the existence in the Irish mind of an ideal, a vision, a hope cherished often by men who know that it is baseless-and the idea, the vision, and the hope are all alike fatal to those which Englishmen entertain. Everywhere they hear the same thought, that Irishmen want a country and cannot find one, the vague expression of a discontent which, like the discontent of a man forced into a groove unsuited to his genius, is but the deeper because it has so little quotable justification. There, we believe, is the very root of all the mischief in Ireland. We insist, Mr. Roebuck insisted in this very debate, in words which read like screams, that Ireland shall be English, shall be justly governed, but by English laws, shall be enriched, but by English modes of toil, shall be happy, but on the English theory, in which happiness means only comfort. The Irish desire all those things, but in the Irish way. Why should they not have them? The Scotch have them and the English, and their union is but the firmer for the difference in nationality. The Highlander does not fight the less ardently for the throne because he wears a kilt, but more ardently, the symbol being to him proof that his is the cause of his own land as well as of the empire to which he belongs. Is there a General in Great Britain who would venture to propose the abolition of Highland regiments, or one who would not be shocked to see Irishmen in their national green and gold? Who protests in Edinburgh against the Highland dress? The Irish dress is in Dublin at this moment so proscribed, that its mere possession may ensure a sentence to Pentonville. That difference on the smallest of questions is an index of the difference in our treatment of the largest. We honestly try to do justice to Ireland, but it is the justice of a judge, not that of a warm friend. Grant that the idea of nationality in Ireland is a whim, or even a silly whim, still the first condition of friendship is a readiness to recognize idiosyncrasies of that kind, to accept oddities, or "ways," or even radical differences of temperament at the very least not to censure or deride them. We concede the whims to the nation we like, why not to the nation which we want to like us? Mr. Bright says the statesmen of England are bound to do justice to Ireland, to devote to her affairs the attention never refused when English or Scotch counties are aggrieved, and so also say we, with the addition that we are bound to devote it in a spirit of hearty cordiality. The two people are bound together for better or worse inseparably, and justice, though the wife's first right, is not the first claim she makes upon her lord. What sort of a union is that in which, while the wife is always discontented, the husband tells all the world that he is severely just to her? We may and must abolish the hostile Church Establishment that corporation which seems to Catholic Irishmen to tax their bodies in order that it may have means to damn their souls and we may one day bring the tenure into harmony with Irish ideas; but we must do more than this. We must cease to tell the wife every hour that she is only a woman, cease to taunt Irishmen with being Irish, cease to say or to think when a million of our brethren go into exile that it is a pleasant riddance. There is no more reason why Irishmen, fairly admitted into the great family, should not be devoted to the family interest, than there is why Scotchmen should not be. They are Celts? So are the Highlanders and the Welsh. They are Catholics? So are some of the noblest and most loyal of British families. They are, in short, Irishmen? Well, Irishmen are, as such, not only good subjects, but have a singular adaptability for foreign careers, rise in Austria, or Spain, or France, or America, or for that matter England, to the very top, and exhibit in every English colony the very capacity of getting on on which we pride ourselves so much. Who wants better kinsmen than the "rebels" D'Arcy McGee and Gavan Duffy? The difference of creed is no wider than that which exists in Prussia and is scarcely heard of, the dif ference of race less wide than that which separates the Strasburgher from the Parisian. Of the true antipathy of race, the instinct which is said to separate colours, there is scarcely a trace. Who scruples to marry an Irish girl, or is ashamed to enter an Irish family, or avoids anything Irish, unless it be Irish landed property? There is really nothing to overcome, except that baneful belief of which Mr. Roebuck and Mr. Horsman are the exponents, that a thing, or a system, or an idea which happens to be English must therefore be best, that because there can be but one motive-power there must also be but one mode of applying it. Suppose we try the one experiment never yet tried amid all our efforts, and instead of coercing Irish nationality, recognize it as we have done Scotch nationality, foster it, and so bind it into our own? Are we the weaker or the stronger because men who share every English success and English failure still glow with pleasure at the thought that they are not English, but other, still quote with pride to Englishmen a history which is one long record of resistance to English oppression, still march by the side of English soldiers to an air which tells of a great English defeat? Suppose we give over taunting the wife with her weakness, and her zeal for her priest, and her taste for obvious millinery, and cultivate, instead of coercing, her womanliness? Would not the Union become a little more real, a little more perfect, a little less liable to sudden and causeless breaches? Just at present she is flinging the china in hot fury at her husband, and that must be stopped, but afterwards, divorce being impossible? From The Spectator 28th April. THE SITUATION IN EUROPE. THE times are very hard indeed for credulous people-the country clergymen, stockbrokers, squires, and other innocent persons, who believe that telegrams must have some foundation, that despatches must either reveal or cloak a meaning, that inspired journals must speak truth, that the Times knows anything. What with snippety extracts from Continental papers, leaders in the Times, forged letters from the Foreign Office to explain the leaders, rumours from Berlin, gossip from Italy, special telegrams from Vienna, important documents from the great chancelleries too old to be of any use, and bran new documents from chancelleries too small to be of any importance, they must during the past week have been not a little bewildered. They Оп must have felt that a little ignorance would greatly increase their knowledge. Saturday all was peace, and on Monday all warlike again; on Tuesday Lippe Lemberg had offered mediation, and metal liques went up 1 per cent.; on Wednesday the Emperor Napoleon was seen pulling his moustache, and rentes fell two; on Thursday Garibaldi had left Caprera, and the world was consequently on fire; and on Friday Bismark had gout, and the human race was consequently saved. Every gossip had a new story, and the greatest gossip of all, the mysterious entity which calls itself" Reuter," and which manufactures history by the drachm, publishes on an average three irreconcilable statements a day. All this while the few grave facts of the situation have scarcely changed at all. Prussia has not given up her demand for Holstein, or withdrawn the order placing five corps d'armée in readiness for active service, or dismissed Count von Bismark to the exile which is for him the only alternative of success. The proposal to reform the Federation by a mass vote has not been abandoned, nor have the Princelings selected the sauce with which they would Austria has not best like to be eaten. waived, or sold, or pledged her right to the Duchies, or modified her formal decision to fight rather than be turned out, or become less sensitive to her position in Germany, or commenced any negotiation for the evacuation of Venice. The Emperor Napoleon has not broken silence, or the Czar published any threat, or Victor Emanuel recalled the orders for the rapid concentration of forces to the North. Nothing in fact has changed, either in the motives which impel the German Powers to battle, in the incidents which show that those motives are becoming powerful, or in the tone those motives impel them to preserve, or indeed in anything except publicists' "views" of the ultimate result. The positive facts are not peaceful, and the negative facts are decidedly disquieting. The positive facts are that Count von Bismark has returned a half consent to the demand to disarm, that Italy is arming fast and anxious for money, that the Kaiser has given Hungary new assurances of his good faith, that metalliques are sinking steadily, that the "minor Powers are scuttling about like crows when a storm is nigh, and that M. Paulin Limayrac, who is to the French Foreign Office pretty nearly what paper is to a journalist, keeps telling France not to be frightened, for the Emperor will wait events. "Don't be afraid for the dogs, mother," says the sedate child; "I shan't separate them till I see which is else may be wrong, for General la Marmora strongest." The negative facts are that if can hardly be better informed than M. de the Powers meant peace they would certain- Metternich, and he, it is affirmed, believes ly say so, to avoid the immense losses un- in a favourable issue; but none of those certainty inflicts upon their revenues, and preparations tend to peace. People who as yet they have not said a word; that have just screwed themselves up to some no journal has been "invited" on either great effort are apt to wish at last that the side to leave off abusing a friendly power; necessity for the effort would come, to and that not a word, good or bad, can be feel, if it is put off, as if they had wasted extracted from Napoleon, whose temptation power. The movement of armies tends to is certainly not a mania for non-interven- increase the bitterness between nations, and tion. We must class among the negatives a proud country like Austria, threatened also what at first looks like positive fact, the on both sides, may be goaded into taking absence of any decision in the Roumanian that dangerous initiative which the malaquarrel. There is a very ugly though some- droit person who forged Mr. Lister's letter what obscure little game playing out there, to the Times, and put on it both frank and which, if great persons were not watching postage stamp, ascribed to her. Indeed it greater events, would no doubt produce is just conceivable that the Kaiser, aware results. What in the world put Charles of the existence of a plan which he cannot of Hohenzollern, Catholic and Prussian, re- alter, and which means war at a moment to lated to Frederick William, connected with be fixed by his enemies, may choose to fix the Beauharnais, into the head of Greek the moment himself, and pour into Saxony Slavs upon the Danube as their fitting king? as he once poured through Lombardy to Napoleon? or hatred of Austria ? or what? anticipate his foes. Such rashness, the His refusal has increased the Republican Times tells him, would loose him the moral party in the Principalities, and the inaction sympathies of Europe; but then, when batof Conference in presence of such a danger helps to prove that its members are paralyzed by the bitterness raging between their employers. evidence still shows that Austria is willing to fight rather than give way, and Prussia rather than draw back, and that is all any human being, beyond the short list of sovereigns and statesmen engaged, can justly pretend to know. tle has joined, moral sympathies do not, in the judgment of military sovereigns, count for much. They are apt to prefer a sympathy reducible either to conscripts or Of course, war not having been declared, to cash. There are in fact plenty of reasons the possibilities of peace are not over, nor to convince the actual rulers of the world have the conservative forces which tend to that they had better not fight, but there is peace lost their usual hold. Kings know, as yet no proof that those reasons have inas they knew last week, that war has terri-spired that conviction. The balance of ble risks, and their subjects know that, beaten or victorious, they will have to pay. If Frederick William chooses to avoid war and wait for a better opportunity, he can avoid it at the price of reconciliation with his people, an option which has been before him any time these three months; and if the people of Prussia are unanimous, they can make him avoid it. They, however, only protest in addresses on behalf of economy, and the King's servant, whom he can dismiss with a word, tells them in reply that he shall avoid war "if he can," i. e., if he can secure his ends without it, but that economy is not the only thing to be thought of," a very menacing truism. It is very unlikely indeed, again, that Italy, with half her army on furlough, a budget not yet accepted, a very great deficit, and a Premier who understands organization, should suddenly recall her soldiers, accumulate 40,000 men on the Po, collect a pontoon train, and make inquiries about loans certainly in Paris, and it is possible in Berlin-unless her Ministers really believed in war. They may be wrong, as everybody 66 There is one view of all these events to which we have never yet alluded, but which has some curious hold on the public mind. This is what we may call the dramatic, or rather the histrionic, theory. There are very worthy and tolerably well informed people in clubs and elsewhere who will tell you that the visible moves on the European chess-board are all unreal, that there is a plot to be worked out to which only themselves have the clue, that Napoleon has bought Sardinia or arranged for the Rhine, that Roumania is to be given to Austria and the Duchies to Prussia and the cold shoulder to St. Petersburg, that the solution is on the Danube, or in a Congress, or in Belgium, or, in short, in any place or any transaction which nobody else expects. Exiles believe that kind of thing with most undoubting faith, just as Islington believes that all com motions in the universe, from the arrival of the new star to the disappearance of the last bankrupt, are the work either of the Jesuits or the Pope. Well, it may all be true, only a little ignorance, as we said, would make us all so very much more learned. As a rule, for the last fifty years every nation in Europe has declared war or made peace according to the general drift of its policy, or its interests, or, in one or two instances, its ingrained beliefs and prejudices. Plots have been many, but no plot can be said to have been worked out successfully by war, because war demands nowadays too many visible preparations and the aid of too many people. Kings have to trust subordinates, communication is quick, cyphers are faithful, and money has not lost its power, and any plot made anywhere against a throne is usually known very speedily to those whom the intrigue menaIt is therefore always by far the safer course for observers to clear their minds of belief in plots, to understand the chief motives which guide the men who control armies, and to let mysterious rumours of wonderful combination slide. The greatest "plotter" in Europe plots simply by waiting for events, and he was outwitted by Count Cavour, who did precisely the same thing; and the watchers for plots, if right once in a hundred years, are pretty sure to be wrong for the other ninety and nine. The root of the mischief to-day may, for what we know, be an intrigue of Turkey to seize Heligoland, but the balance of probabilities is that its source is the desire of the Prussian monarchy to annex the two Duchies taken from Denmark. If that proves in the end to be the case, if in fact all the statesmen of Europe are not in a conspiracy to tell fibs with unction, the difficulty is not settled, or very likely to be, yet. ces. From The Spectator. AN IMPRESSION OF THE NATIONAL POR TRAIT EXHIBITION. THE first impression made upon the ordinary visitor by the National Portrait Exhibition, now open in South Kensington, is not a favourable one. Up to far too great a height, in endless wooden lobbies of endless wooden galleries, stretch a multitude of portraits, arranged apparently without any principle beyond an exceedingly vague chronological idea. All the pictures in one, or two, or three recesses, are supposed to belong to one particular period, but that does not prevent the portraits of the same individual from being on half-a-dozen walls. He might imagine that comparison had been considered dangerous, many portraits of the same celebrity being so unlike that one of them is obviously fictitious, or one is bad, or both are unreal, but that some of the worst cases of all have been hung with intention side by side. There are two, for instance, of George Buchanan, a man chiefly known by his translation of the Psalms, hung side by side, one of which is palpably an absurdity. We do not care in such a case one straw for documentary proof. If the old man's spirit, were to rap decisively for a week that both were accurate portraits of him in the flesh, it would not make the faintest difference in the judgment of any man possessed of common sense and not utterly blind. If drawn from the same face, the painter of one was so utterly incompetent that the picture has no locus standi as a portrait; but great as is the power of misrepresentation possessed by portrait painters, even this explanation is inadmissible. The portraits are not of the same man, the bones are different, the root-colour is different, the expression of the face is different, the very colour of the eyes, which do not change with age, is different. George Buchanan was very possibly like one of the two, preferentially the one on the left, but he was not like both. Portraits of Henry VIII., again, which are all alike, and all, with one remarkable exception, represent a heavy-jowled, light-haired, sensual man, of the jovially heartless type, are hung about over wall after wall, while of Queen Elizabeth there is also no end. The truth is that Mr. Cole, in his eagerness to make the collection "national," and "great," and " vast," and magnificent, and worthy of South Kensington, and of the wretched art-camp of iron, and wood, and glass, he and his employers are squatting down there, and for which they are constantly assailing the Treasury, and which would all burn like so much touchwood, has neglected to authenticate the portraits altogether. What is the use of an old portrait, particulary of the tea-tray kind, without a pedigree? Nobody wants to see the majority of these pictures as specimens of art, but as historic testimonies, the credibility of which must be proved by evidence, exactly like the credibility of documents or a counsel's speech. It is said in the preface to the catalogue, obviously written after the pictures had arrived, that the illusion," where there is one, is "harm |