Page:England and Ireland (Mill).djvu/42

The difficulty of governing Ireland lies entirely in our own minds; it is an incapability of understanding. When able to understand what justice requires, liberal Englishmen do not refuse to do it. They understood the injustice of the political disabilities of Catholics, and they removed them. They understand the injustice of endowing an alien Church, and they have made up their minds that the endowment shall no longer continue. Foreign nations and posterity will judge England's capacity for government, by the ability she now shows to overcome the difficulty of seeing what justice requires in the matter of Irish landed tenure. To her it is a difficulty. Other nations see no difficulty in it. To the Prussian Conservative, Von Raumer, and the French Liberal, Gustave de Beaumont, it was already, thirty years ago, the most obvious thing in the world. It will seem so to future generations. Posterity will hardly be just to the men of our time. The superstitions of landlordism once cast off, it will be difficult to imagine what real and deep-rooted superstitions they once were, and how much of the best moral and even intellectual attributes was compatible with them. But not the less is he in whom any principle or feeling has become a superstition, convulsively clung to where the reasons fail, unfit to have the power of imposing his superstition on people who do not share it. If we cannot distinguish the essentials from the accidents of landed property; if it is and must remain to us the Ark of the Covenant which must be neither touched nor looked into, for however indispensable a need, it is our duty to retire from a country where a modification of the constitution of landed property is the primary neces-