had laid down in the revived Nation that to obtain these reforms was the surest method of reviving the national 'spirit and the claims for a national existence.
"Do me the honour of reading an article in the April Dublin headed 'Is Ireland Irreconcilable?' upon which the Times (April 2oth), to my utter astonishment, and the Spectator (April 16th), to my great satisfaction, has written extravagant panegyrics.[1] No Irish paper has yet said a syllable on the subject. This is the first political paper I have really been able to write for a long time, and I wrote it as if it were to be the last trying hard to tell the truth on all sides right round. But beyond this I had a word of justice to say in your regard, and in so doing to give our unfortunate and absurd successors a good excuse to slip out of a desperate position. The Times works this point admirably, and quotes nearly all I give of the new Nation's programme. As I write, a batch of letters of congratulation arrives, inter alia, from Lord O'Hagan—who says, 'I am charmed. It is nobly written, and full of wise and generous thinking'—from Dr. Russell, MacCarthy, &c. I hope you will think it holds not unworthily our old line.
"What is the secret of your wrong relations with Lord Canterbury? It has since I wrote come to my knowledge, in a way I dare not mention, that he has set a very black mark against your name."
A week later he wrote announcing that he had appended my lecture to a republication of his article as a pamphlet, and that his experiment had been successful.
- ↑ The brochure to which Cashel Hoey referred was a review article afterwards published in a pamphlet entitled, "Is Ireland Irreconcilable?" It painted with exceeding vigour, and in a style which was graceful and picturesque, the new Irish policy Mr. Gladstone had initiated. The Irish establishment had fallen, not before an organised Irish agitation, or before a great leader of the Irish people, but because one British Statesman, stepping beyond the traditional policy of his party, had declared that the Irish Church as a State Church must cease to exist. Mr. Gladstone was now engaged in revising the Land Code in a similar spirit, and the writer admonished the National Party that it was their duty to make this policy fruitful, by repressing the tumultuous spirit of driftless discontent which prevailed so widely at the very time these reforms were being executed. Mr. Hoey treated the revival of the Nation in 1850 as the rally of the people after a disastrous defeat, and quoted my language in the early articles as indentical with the reforms Mr. Gladstone had undertaken. He published as an appendix to the pamphlet my recent lecture in Melbourne—"Why is Ireland poor and discontented?"—which he regarded as a continuation of the same policy.
