You cannot take out a summons against a people or call out the posse comitatus of a community which is itself the defendant in the execution.

It may be replied that England can stop her subvention to Ireland, and that this will be her security; but a national strike in Ireland against repayment of land purchase and local loan advances already made would be more than a set-off, and the Imperial credit of England would be shaken to its foundation. The credit of England, Ireland and Scotland has been hitherto interdependent. They have had a common purse since the Union, and more than a century of mutual commitments. No colony and no dependency ever stood in such a relation to the United Kingdom as that in which each member of the United Kingdom stands to the other. The failure of Ireland to meet her obligations voluntarily or involuntarily will involve loss to every individual Englishman or Scotsman who holds an investment in any of the three kingdoms. If England goes to war when Ireland has Home Rule, the Irish executive may, without arming a man, bring England to humiliation by stopping the payment of the land annuities, and shaking down the credit of Guaranteed Land Stock, and with it that of all other Government securities. War is carried on by credit. Home Rule Ireland has only to threaten to stop payment, and British credit falls and a blow is dealt vaster in its effects than a great disaster on the field of battle. Once the Imperial Parliament gives up the executive control of Ireland and of Irish finance, it betrays not only Irish Unionists but the whole people of Great Britain.

Under the Union, Ireland, Scotland and England form one domain. While the Union lasts no single kingdom and no portion of any of the three kingdoms is, or can be said to be, run at a loss.' Such an expression is only true if separation is pre-supposed. The individuals in each of the three kingdoms contribute to the common Exchequer in equal measure by common taxes. Each kingdom is entitled to have its wants supplied, not because it is England or Scotland or Ireland, but because they are one united land, and their needs, whether peculiar or common, must be met from the common Exchequer. The peculiar needs of Ireland, too long neglected, have in more recent years received attention and been supplied Vol. 216.-No. 430.

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in no stinted measure; and the return for this expenditure has been multifold. In six years Irish imports and exports have increased by 27,000,000l. in value. This trade is, in overwhelming proportions, a trade with British markets. It enriches England and Scotland as well as Ireland. This increasing prosperity of Ireland will, in the judgment of the vast majority of the merchants and bankers and commercial leaders in every part of Ireland, be arrested and possibly annihilated by Home Rule.

Prudence, profit, patriotism, imperialism, urge men to strengthen the Union. Sentimentalism, indifference and petty appeals to the ignorance of the electorate to 'cut the loss' may induce the nation, if it has forgotten the art of government, to pension off Ireland; but Great Britain will not then be rid of Ireland. She will have lost the true allegiance of those Irishmen whose forefathers gave their blood and services freely to create and keep the British Empire, and who proved themselves not unfit to lead the armies and command the fleets and shape the diplomacy and inspire the statesmanship that have made these twin islands a centre of the world's activities. Great Britain may forget; she may forget her own honour, and betray not only them, but her own inheritance of Imperial greatness. Deprived for the moment of the protection of her ancient constitution, outmanoeuvered in division lobbies, and obsessed by demagogues, she may become absorbed in the policy of petty cash, and conceive it statesmanship to pension off her sister kingdom as a poor relation. But, as Lamb says, 'a poor relation is the most irrelevant thing in nature, a piece of impertinent correspondency, an odious approximation, a haunting conscience, a preposterous shadow lengthening in the noon-tide of your prosperity, an unwelcome remembrancer, a perpetually recurring mortification, a drain on your purse, a more intolerable dun upon your pride, a drawback upon success, a rebuke to your rising, a stain in your blood, a blot on your scutcheon, a rent in your garment, a death's head at your banquet, Agathocles' pot, a Mordecai in your gate, a Lazarus at your door, a lion in your path, a frog in your chamber, a fly in your ointment, a mote in your eye, a triumph to your enemy, an apology to your friends-the one thing not needful.'

THE

QUARTERLY REVIEW.

No. 431.-APRIL, 1912.

Art. 1.-THE YOUNGER PITT.

1. William Pitt der Jüngere. By Felix Salomon. Band I. Leipzig and Berlin: Trübner, 1906.

2. William Pitt and National Revival. William Pitt and the Great War. By J. Holland Rose. London: Bell, 1911.

3. British Statesmen of the Great War. By the Hon. J. W. Fortescue. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1911. 4. The Political History of England. Edited by W. Hunt and R. L. Poole. Vol. x, 1760-1801. By William Hunt. London: Longmans, 1905.

5. England under the Hanoverians. By C. Grant Robertson, M.A. (Vol. VI of a History of England edited by Prof. C. W. Oman.) London: Methuen, 1911.

6. Le Directoire et La Paix de l'Europe (1795-1799). By R. Guyot. Paris: Alcan, 1911.

7. The Manuscripts of J. B. Fortescue, preserved at Dropmore. Historical Manuscripts Commission, Thirteenth Report. Vols I-VII. 1892-1910.

Ir is very nearly fifty years since the appearance of Lord Stanhope's Life of the Younger Pitt was marked by an article in this Review from the pen of a writer, himself destined to lead Pitt's party, hold Pitt's office of Prime Minister, and direct the foreign policy of our country during critical phases. The late Lord Salisbury's lengthy study of what Dr Rose calls 'a monumental work,' and Mr Fortescue, with more contempt than justice, terms four watery volumes,' has a literary and political interest of its own; but a comparison of its treatment of the problems and issues of Pitt's career with the books at the head of this article brings out very clearly the Vol. 216.-No 431,

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immense addition to our knowledge in the last half century and the more critical temper of the scholar of to-day. M. Guyot's volume, for example, shows that, if foreign savants and archivists have re-written the history of the leading European States, the sources are not yet exhausted nor the verdicts of a Sorel, a Masson, a Fournier, a Philipson or a Hüffer yet accepted as final; while the special contributions to Irish and British, naval, military and economic history of Mr Lecky, Captain Mahan, Mr Fortescue, Mr and Mrs Webb, and Prof. Cunningham are being continuously supplemented and revised by the discovery of documentary material unknown to or not touched by Lord Stanhope, or Erskine May, whose Constitutional History' dates from the same year. Old controversies have taken new forms, and new controversies have arisen on points regarded as settled by Stanhope's generation. Happily too to-day we are freed alike from the fetters of the Pontiffs of Holland House, whose infallibility the genius of Macaulay made an article of faith, and from burying with Canning and Lord Stanhope our political allegiance in the grave of the Master.

In the list of these new and original materials, which includes such important sources as Auckland's Diary and Correspondence, the Wyvill Papers, Windham's Diary, the Creevey Papers and the Journals of Lady Holland, the Dropmore Papers stand without a rival. On the lives of Pitt and Grenville this wonderful collection has lifted the curtain; and, as M. Guyot is well aware, in these precious pages we can trace the genesis and development of important political measures at home and abroad, and the motives, fears and hopes of two of the great Triumvirate in Pitt's Cabinet. So far the third Triumvir, Henry Dundas, has remained shrouded in a protective obscurity; but, when the Arniston archives have yielded their harvest too, the evidence will be pretty complete.

Modern scholars accordingly are steadily endeavouring to codify the most recent results of research in accessible works of reasonable compass. In the admirably planned 'Political History of England,' Dr Hunt, who shares the general editorship with Dr Poole, is able to devote a whole volume to the period from the accession of

George III to the Legislative Union with Ireland, and to provide a critical narrative based throughout on faithful and learned collation of the new with the old material. Those who are deep in Dr Hunt's debt may perhaps be permitted a presumptuous wish to cross swords with him over this or that interpretation of character or motive, or this or that judgment of a policy or transaction, without impairing their respect for his knowledge and fairness or his capacity to furnish the student with a clear and scholarly presentation of the controversial issues as well as of the achievements which make Pitt's epoch inexhaustible in its appeal. And Dr Hunt would be the first to admit that the younger Pitt deserves on every ground more comprehensive reexamination than can be allotted even in the most excellent of general histories, and that the time has come for a new biography. Fortunately Dr Holland Rose has saved British scholarship from the reproach of allowing the duty and the honour to fall to German erudition. Prof. Salomon's Life of Pitt promises to be a very valuable contribution to the subject, for it is based a painstaking and impartial investigation of our archives, but so far the story has only reached the momentous year 1793; if the second volume is as thorough, as critical and as clear as the first, Prof. Salomon will have earned the sincere gratitude of British students, and we hope that his work will soon be available in an English translation.

on

That Pitt's own university of Cambridge should provide a successor to Lord Stanhope is peculiarly appropriate; and Dr Rose's two solid volumes are undoubtedly happy in the opportunity of their birth. As the biographer of Napoleon, Dr Rose has studied European history with breadth and thoroughness; and he has supplemented his researches on Pitt's life in the British.. Museum and the Record Office by valuable material drawn from private papers and collections, notably the Pitt Mss. (now in our national archives), the MSS. preserved at Chevening and Orwell Park, and others of less importance noted in the Preface. If, as Bagehot pregnantly remarked, the chief difficulty of historical investigators and of posterity lies, not in pronouncing judgment on the results of a policy, which is always easy,