ENGLAND'S DANGER.

Daily Telegraph (Napier), Issue 3104, 9 June 1881, Page 4

ENGLAND'S DANGER.

There ia a pregnant passage in Fronde's Cfcsar' whieli it might just now be wqll to circulate among the commoners. It is us follows : —" Notwithstanding many differences, tlio English and the Eomans essentially resemble one another. The early Eomans possessed the faculty of • selfgovernment beyond any people of whom wo have historical knowledge, with the one exception of ourselves. In virtue of their temporal freedom they became the most powerful nation of the- known world ; and their liberties perished only when Komc became the mistress of conquered races to ■vvhcmi she was unable or unwilling to extend Lei* privileges. If England was similarly supreme, if all rival powers were eclipsed by her or laid under her feet, the imperial tendencies which are as strongly marked in us as our love of liberty might lead us over the earne course totliesnr.no end. If there be olio lesson that history clearly tcaohos, it is this, that, free nations cannot govern subject provinces. If they are tillable, or UOWlJing to admit their clejenclpncio,:> to

share their own Constitution, the Constitution itself will fall in pieces from mere incompetence for its duties." Despotic rule in India has already reacted on England to tho extent of turning a Queen into an Empress, who has deemed it within her new privilege to correspond with commanders in the field, and to prevent tho removal of a reckless Commissioner (Sir Bartle Frcre), long after the people unanimously demanded it. And now the first step toward a military depotism in Ireland has availed to fetter free discussion permanently in the House of Commons. This is tho way, bit by bit, in which Constitutions crumble.

Many of the ablest Knglishmen arc aware of tho dangerous tendency upon which their country has entered. They arc aghast at the facility with which the venerable teachers of radicalism in tho past —Bright, Forster, Fawcctt, Dilke, and Chamberlain— have been drawn into a course contrary to all their antecedents, and they are alurmed. There are struggles ahead more formidable than any through which Parliament is now passing. Ireland is now rising, with a force not suspected in her, to make English history. As tho Negro was the test race of America, as the Jew is the test race of Germany, so arc the Irish now the test race of English liberty. Nothing can change that fact. What the English shall do to Ireland they will bo doing for their own nation ; if it be depotism, they will share that depotism ; if it be justice and liberation, it will be an end of their own hereditary feudalism —notably an end of the power of the House of Lords, and of the thraldom of the soil under ancient privilege.—Moneure D. Conway, in the Cincinnati Commercial,