men would represent Ireland, while for the notables of each province the provincial legislatures would afford a field.

It is deemed enough to say, in condemnation of any scheme of this kind, that it is not what the majority of the Irish are demanding, and that the eighty-five members who follow Mr. Parnell would not accept it. But carry it, and what would happen? Would not Ulster accept it? It is just what Ulster desires, while a general Irish Parliament is just what Ulster fears. Would Leinster, Munster, and Connaught, metropolitan and Celtic Ireland, refuse to accept? How would they carry their refusal into effect? They could only do so by the majority abstaining from the election of members for the provincial legislatures. But this would leave those assemblies to be elected by the minority, who would assuredly elect them gladly enough, but how would that suit the majority? No, the Home Rulers may say that nothing less than an Irish Parliament will they accept, and no wonder that, with Mr. Gladstone's offer before them, they should say so; but once carry a plan for establishing provincial legislatures, and they will come into it before long.

And indeed one cannot but at first feel astonishment that Mr. Gladstone should have preferred to such a plan his plan for an Irish Parliament. Last year I was often and often inclined to say as to Egypt: With one tenth of the ingenuity and pains which Mr. Gladstone spends to prove, what neither he nor any one else ever can prove, that his Egyptian policy has been sagacious, consistent, and successful, he might have produced an Egyptian policy sagacious, consistent, and successful. So one may say now as to Ireland: With one tenth of the ingenuity and pains which Mr. Gladstone is expending upon a bad and dangerous measure for Ireland, he might have produced a good and safe one. But alas, he is above all a great Parliamentary manager Probably he is of the same opinion with Cardinal de Retz, who has been already mentioned; he thinks that it takes higher qualities to make a good party-leader than to make a good emperor of the universe.' The eighty-five Parnellite members added to the Liberal majority, and enabling him, as he hopes, to defy opposition and to carry his measure victoriously, are irresistible to him. To the difficult work of a statesman he prefers the work for which he has such a matchless talent-the seemingly facile but really dangerous strokes of the Parliamentary tactician and party manager.

Not that he himself foresees danger from it. No, that is the grave thing. He does not foresee danger. Statesmen foresee, Mr. Gladstone does not. He no more foresees danger from his Irish Parliament than he foresaw that his abolition of the Irish Church would not conciliate Catholic sentiment in Ireland, or that his Land Act would not conciliate the Irish peasant. He has no foresight because he has no insight. With all his admirable gifts he has little

more real insight than the rank and file of his Liberal majority, people who think that if men very much want a thing they ought to have it, and that Mr. Fox's dictum makes this certain. It is this confiding majority under this unforeseeing leader which makes me tremble. Will anything ever awaken either the leader or the followers to a sense of danger? When the vessel of State is actually grinding on the rocks, will Mr. Gladstone be still cheerfully devising fresh strokes of management; and, when not engaged in applauding him, will Mr. Illingworth be still prattling about disestablishment and Mr. Stansfeld about contagious disease?

I have long been urging that the performance of our Liberals was far less valuable than they supposed, that their doings wanted more of simple and sincere thought to direct them, and that by their actual practice, however prosperous they might fancy themselves, they could not really succeed.' But now they do really seem to have done what the puzzled foreigners imagine England altogether has done to have reached the nadir. They have shown us about the worst that a party of movement can do, when that party is bounded and backward and without insight, and is led by a manager of astounding skill and energy, but himself without insight likewise. The danger of our situation is so grave that it can hardly be exaggerated. People are shocked at even the mention of the contingency of civil war. But the danger of civil war inevitably arises whenever two impossible parties, full of hatred and contempt for each other, with no mediating power of reason to reconcile them, are in presence. So the English civil war arose when, facing and scornfully hating one another, were two impossibilities: the prerogative of the King and the license of the Cavaliers on the one side, the hideousness and immense ennui of the Puritans on the other. The Vendean war arose out of a like collision between two implacable impossibilities: the old régime and Jacobinism. Here lies the danger of civil war in Ireland, if the situation cannot find rational treatment; Protestant ascendency is impossible, but the Ulster men will not let bunglers, in removing it, drag them down to a lower civilisation without a struggle. Nay, the like danger exists for England itself. Change we must; but if a Liberal party with no insight, led by a victorious manager who is no statesman, brings us to failure and chaos, the existing England will not let itself be ruined without a struggle.

Therefore at the present time that need for us, on which I have so often and so vainly insisted, to let our minds have free and fair play, no longer to deceive ourselves, to brush aside the claptrap and fictions of our public and party life, to be lucid, to get at the plain simple truth, to see things as they really are, becomes more urgent, more the one thing needful for us, than ever. That sentence of Butler, which I have more than once quoted in past times, acquires now a heightened, an almost awful significance. Things are what they

are, and the consequences of them will be what they will be; why then should we desire to be deceived?' The laws which govern the course of human affairs, which make this thing salutary to a nation and that thing pernicious, are not of our making or under our power. Our wishing and asserting can avail nothing against them. Lord Ripon's calling Mr. Gladstone's antecedents glorious cannot make them other than what they are-Parliamentary victories, but a statesman's failures. Mr. Morley's great triumph' in the election of 330 Liberal members, more or less, who without excessive arrogance may be taken to be the best men in the way of intelligence and honesty that the Liberal party can produce,' cannot make the Liberal party, both in and out of Parliament, other than what it is a party of bounded and backward mind, without insight. Deluders and deluded, the utterers of these phrases may fancy them solid while they utter them, the hearers while they hear them. But solid they cannot make them; and it is not on the thing being asserted and believed, but on its being really true or false, that our welfare turns.

6

Whatever may be the faults of the Liberal party, the Conservative party at any rate,' says Mr. Bradlaugh, is blind;' and here, too, of course, there is danger. The Conservative party is the party of stability and permanence, the party of resistance to change; and when the Liberal party, the party of movement, moves unwise and dangerous changes, recourse will naturally be had, by sensible men, to the Conservative party. After all, our country as it is, as the past has made it, as it stands there before us, is something; it is precious, it shall not lightly be imperilled by the bungling work of rash hands. Burke from such a motive threw himself on the Conservative forces in this country to resist Jacobinism. But no solution of the problems of national life is to be reached by resting on those forces absolutely. Burke would have been far more edifying for us to-day if he had rested on them less absolutely. What has been said of the urgent need of seeing things as they really are is of general application, and applies to Conservative action as well as Liberal. If Conservative action is blind, we are undone. True, for the moment our pressing danger is just now from the Liberal party and its leader. If they cannot be stopped and defeated, the thing is over, and we need not trouble ourselves about the Conservative party and its blindness. But supposing them defeated, the Conservative programme requires to be treated just like the Liberal, to be surveyed with a resolutely clear and fair mind.

Now there is always a likelihood that this programme will be just to maintain things as they are, and nothing further. Already there are symptoms of danger in the exhortations, earnestly made and often repeated, to keep faith with the Irish proprietor to whose security England, it is said, has pledged herself; to secure the Irish landowners and to prevent the scandal and peril of Catholic supremacy in Ireland.

As to Catholicism, it has been the great stone of stumbling to us

in Ireland, and so it will continue to be while we treat it inequitably. Mr. Gladstone's Bill treats it inequitably. His Bill withholds from the Irish the power to endow or establish Catholicism. That, he well knows, is the one exception which his Liberal followers make to their rule, borrowed from Mr. Fox, that if men very much wish to do a thing we should let them do it. To endow Catholicism they must not be permitted, however much they may wish it. That provision alone would be fatal to any sincere and lasting gratitude in Ireland for Mr. Gladstone's measure. If his measure is defeated it would be fatal to repeat his mistake. Why should not the majority in Ireland be suffered to endow and establish its religion just as much as in England or Scotland? It is precisely one of those cases where the provincial legislatures should have the power to do as they think proper. Mr. Whitbread's thoughtful Americans' will tell him that in the United States there is this power, although to the notions and practice of America, sprung out of the loins of Nonconformity, religious establishments are unfamiliar. But even in this century, I think, Connecticut had an established Congregational Church, and it might have an Established Church again to-morrow if it chose. Ulster would most certainly not establish Catholicism. If it chose to establish Presbyterianism it should be free to do so. If the Celtic and Catholic provinces chose to establish Catholicism, they should be free to do so. So long as we have two sets of weights and measures in this matter, one for Great Britain and another for Ireland, there can never be concord.

The land question presents most grave and formidable difficulties, but undoubtedly they are not to be got rid of by holding ourselves pledged to make the present Irish landlords' tenure and rents as secure as those of a landlord in England. We ought not to do it if we could, and in the long run we could not do it if we would. How greatly is a clear and fair mind needed here! and perhaps such a mind on such a subject the Conservatives, the landed party, do not easily attain. We have always meant and endeavoured to give to the Irish landlord the same security that the English has. But the thing is impossible. Why? Because at bottom the acquiescence of the community makes the security of property. The land-system of England has, in my opinion, grave disadvantages; but it has this acquiescence. It has it partly from the moderation of the people, but more from the general conduct and moderation of the landlords. If many English landlords had borne such a reputation as that which the first Lord Lonsdale, for instance, acquired for himself in the north, the English landed system would not have had this acquiescence. In Scotland it has it in a less degree, and is therefore less secure; and, whatever the Duke of Argyll may think, deservedly. Let him consult the Tory Johnson for the past, and weigh, as to the present, the fact that Mr. Winans is possible. But it has it in a

considerable degree, though in a lower degree than England. Ireland has it in the degree to be expected from its history of confiscation, penal laws, absenteeism-that is to say, hardly at all. And we are bound in good faith, we are pledged to obtain, by force if necessary, for the Irish landlord the acquiescence and security which in England come naturally! We are bound to do it for a landed system where the landowners have been a class with whom, in Burke's words, 'the melancholy and invidious title of grantees of confiscation was a favourite ;' who 'would not let Time draw his oblivious veil over the unpleasant means by which their domains were acquired;' who 'abandoned all pretext of the general good of the community'! But there has been great improvement, you say: the present landowners give in general little cause for complaint. Absenteeism has continued, but ah! even if the improvement had been ten times greater than it has, Butler's memorable and stern sentence would still be true: 'Real reformation is in many cases of no avail at all towards preventing the miseries annexed to folly exceeding a certain degree. There is a certain bound to misbehaviour, which being transgressed, there remains no place for repentance in the natural course of things.' But a class of altogether new and innocent owners has arisen. Alas! every one who has bought land in Ireland has bought it with a lien of Nemesis upon it. It is of no use deceiving ourselves. To make the landowner in the Celtic and Catholic parts of Ireland secure as the English landowner is impossible for us.

What is possible is to bear our part in his loss; for loss he must incur. He must incur loss for folly and misbehaviour, whether on his own part or on that of his predecessors, exceeding a certain degree. But most certainly we ought to share his loss with him. For when complaints were addressed to England, 'the double name of the complainants,' says Burke, 'Irish and Papist (it would be hard to say which singly was the more odious), shut up the hearts of every one against them.' All classes in Great Britain are guilty in this matter; perhaps the middle class, the stronghold of Protestant prejudice, most. And, therefore, though the Irish landlords can, I think, be now no more maintained than were the planters, yet to some extent this country is bound to indemnify them as it did the planters. They must choose between making their own terms with their own community, or making them with the Imperial Parliament. In the latter case, part of their indemnity should be contributed by Ireland, part, most certainly, by ourselves. Loss they must, however, expect. to suffer, the landowners of the Celtic and Catholic provinces at any rate. To this the English Conservatives, whatever natural sympathy and compassion they may entertain for them, must clearly make up their minds.

On the reasonableness of the Conservative party our best hope at present depends. In that nadir of Liberalism which we seem to VOL. XIX.-No. 111.

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