Matthew Arnold, Civilization in the United States: First and Last Impressions of America.

[131] is to avert one's eye from the House of Commons as much as possible; if one keeps on constantly watching it welter in its baneful confusion, one is likely to fall into the fulminating style of the wrathful Hebrew prophets, and to call it “an astonishment, a hissing, and a curse.”

Well, then, our greatest institution, the House of Commons, we cannot say is at present working, like the American institutions, easily and successfully. Suppose we now pass to Ireland. I will not ask if our institutions work easily and successfully in Ireland; to ask such a question would be too bitter, too cruel a mockery. Those hateful cases which have been tried in the Dublin Courts this last year suggest the dark and ill-omened word which applies to the whole state of Ireland--anti-natural. Anti-natural, anti-nature; that is the word which rises irresistibly in the mind as I survey Ireland. Everything is unnatural there: the proceedings of the English who rule, the proceedings of the Irish who resist. But it is with the working of our English institutions there that I am now concerned. It is unnatural that Ireland should be governed by Lord Spencer and Mr. Campbell Bannerman; as unnatural as for Scotland to be governed by Lord