What we now see in Ireland, after nearly twenty years of legislation,
steadily tending to the triumph of equal rights, is an agitation
threatening not only the "co-existence" of these two systems, but the
very existence of each of these systems.

To get at the origin and the meaning of this agitation we must be
content, I believe, to go no further back than ten years, and to look
for them, not in Ireland, but in America, not to Mr. Parnell and Mr.
Gladstone primarily, but to Mr. Davitt and Mr. Henry George.


III.

In a very remarkable letter written to Earl Grey in 1868, after the
Clerkenwell explosions had brought the disestablishment of the Irish
Protestant Church into Mr. Gladstone's scheme of "practical politics,"
the Archbishop of Westminster, not then a Cardinal, called the attention
of Englishmen to the fact, not yet I fear adequately apprehended by
them, that "the assimilating power of America upon the Irish people, if
seven days slower than that of England in reaching Ireland, is sevenfold
more penetrating and powerful upon the whole population." By this the
Archbishop meant, what was unquestionably true, that even in 1868, only
twenty years after the great Irish exodus to America began, the social
and political ideas of America were exerting a seven-fold stronger
influence upon the character and the tendencies of the Irish people than
the social and political ideas of England. Thanks to the development of
the cables and the telegraph since 1868, and to the enormous progress
of America since that time in wealth and population, this "assimilating
power" reaches Ireland much more rapidly, and exerts upon the Irish
people a very much more drastic influence than in 1868. This