All I assert is that from the nature of things the men found guilty by the Commission cannot inspire trust.
Power, it is often intimated, teaches its own lessons.

Trust Irishmen with the government of their own country, and you may feel confident that experience will teach them how to govern justly.
To this argument I need not myself provide a reply: it has been admirably given by my friend Mr.Bryce.Every word which in the following passage refers to the State legislatures of the United States applies in principle to the future Parliament at Dublin:-- 'The chief lesson which a study of the more vicious among the State legislatures teaches, is that power does not necessarily bring responsibility in its train.

I should be ashamed to write down so bald a platitude were it not that it is one of those platitudes which are constantly forgotten or ignored.

People who know well enough that, in private life, wealth or rank or any other kind of power is as likely to mar a man as to make him, to lower as to raise his sense of duty, have nevertheless contracted the habit of talking as if human nature changed when it entered public life, as if the mere possession of public functions, whether of voting or of legislating, tended of itself to secure their proper exercise.

We know that power does not purify men in despotic governments, but we talk as if it did so in free governments.