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Government out, and out it had to go, beaten on January 26 by 79 (331 to 252) on an amendment of Jesse Collings regretting the omission from the Queen's Speech of measures benefiting the rural labourer. Hartington, Goschen, and Sir Henry James voted with the Government, and 257 Liberals and 74 Irish Nationalists against it. Salisbury thereupon resigned (January 27), and Gladstone became Premier for the third time on February 1, 1886. Many fell away from him: Hartington, Goschen, Derby,1 Northbrook, and John Bright all declined to join his Government. Chamberlain consented to be a member of it, but disagreed with the policy of Home Rule that Gladstone had in his mind. Chamberlain wanted a more limited scheme of local government, accompanied by proposals as to land and education, but as Gladstone left him liberty of judgment and Chamberlain was prepared to examine into Gladstone's more detailed scheme, he remained temporarily in the Administration. John Morley was the Chief Secretary in the new Government, and he and Spencer urged a Land Bill upon Gladstone, although it was not popular with the Cabinet, so that the official policy that was announced was a Home Rule and a Land Bill. Upon this Chamberlain resigned (March 26), accompanied by George Trevelyan, who was Secretary for Scotland, Jesse Collings, Secretary to the Local Government Board, and Heneage, Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. The four chief reasons adduced by Chamberlain for his resignation were that he objected to the cesser of Irish representation, to the grant of full rights of taxation to Ireland, to the surrender of the appointment of judges and magistrates, and, lastly, to proceeding by the enumeration of those things an Irish Government might not do, instead of by specific delegation of what it might do.

On the scheme becoming known, Parnell urged upon Gladstone his financial arguments, namely, that the just proportion of Irish contribution to the Imperial fund was not one-fourteenth or one-fifteenth, but one-twentieth or one twenty-first part, and for some little time a good deal of anxiety was created on the Ministerial benches for fear that Parnell might divide against them on this point.

At length, on April 8, 1886, Gladstone introduced his first celebrated Home Rule Bill. Now Isaac Butt 2 may be said to have been the real author of the Home Rule movement; for although there had been a movement in favour of the Repeal of the Union soon after the emancipation of the Catholics, and the

1 Edward Henry Stanley, fifteenth Earl of Derby (1826-1893). Until 1891 he led the Liberal Unionist Peers in the House of Lords.

2 Isaac Butt defended the Fenian prisoners in 1865, and was much impressed by their political earnestness and indifference to death. It is said that this circumstance induced him to take the view that there must be something rotten in the state of Ireland, and that the cry for separation was not without excuse.

question from that time had never really slept, the peculiar modification of the arrangements made in 1801 for fixing the relations between the two countries issued entirely from his own study of the question. A small but active party of discontented Protestants had resented the consummation of Gladstone's policy, which had resulted in the disestablishment and practical disendowment of the Irish Church, and they found congenial adherents among the men of " Young Ireland," the Rump of the old Repeal following on the survivors of O'Connell's "Tail," and others who had Fenian sympathies. In May 1870, just after the Land Act of that year had become law, a meeting was held in the Bilton Hotel, Sackville Street, Dublin, attended by Irishmen representing almost every grade of society and shade of political and religious opinion. They met to deliberate upon the political position of Ireland, and to discuss the question as to what should be done to advance the cause of reform. One of the remarkable features of the meeting was that it was chiefly composed of Protestant Conservatives, the element in Irish life so inimical as a rule to the voice of concession. After a brilliant speech, Isaac Butt proposed the following resolution :-"That the establishment of an Irish Parliament with full control over our domestic affairs is the only remedy for the evils of Ireland," and it was enthusiastically and unanimously carried. On May 26, 1870, another meeting took place, at which the Home Rule Association was formally constituted.1

Butt soon became the leader of the Home Rule movement, and among other prominent members of the Association were Biggar, Patrick Egan, and Thomas Sexton who was at this time Lord Mayor of Dublin. What Butt wanted was Home Rule on the principle of Federalism, that is to say, separate Legislatures for England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales, and an Imperial Council presiding at their head. It was, therefore, a different movement from the Repeal agitation which aimed at the restoration of Grattan's Parliament; for the latter could negotiate independent treaties with foreign Powers, control any army or navy of its own, and act upon its own initiative in other matters-privileges which Butt did not demand. His scheme, nevertheless, was powerfully attacked by Gladstone, and not without reason, for it lacked that sound bottom without which no reform of the kind had any prospect of enduring. The great advocate of Irish freedom had fiercely denounced Home Rule as a senseless and disgraceful policy and had asked

"Can any

sensible man, can any

rational man, suppose that

1 Professor Galbraith, of Trinity College, is said to have been the author of the phrase "Home Rule."

Appendix LXXXIX, Principles of its constitution.

at this time of day, in this condition of the world, we are going to disintegrate the great capital institutions of the country for the purpose of making ourselves ridiculous in the sight of all mankind, and crippling any power we possess for bestowing benefits, through legislation, on the country to which we belong?"

This tone of righteous horror is peculiarly interesting by the light of later events. It shows that a man's fervent opinion one day may be diametrically opposed to his fervent opinion on another, and it is easy to comprehend that such an amazing transformation at the eleventh hour should have generated discomfort in the breasts of those Radicals who never indulged in inconsistency unless it paid.

In November 1873 a Home Rule Conference was held in Dublin, and the Home Rule Association reconstituted under the name of the Home Rule League. The goal it aimed at was an Irish Parliament to manage the internal affairs of Ireland and control Irish finance, subject to the obligation of contributing a just proportion towards Imperial expenditure, whilst Ireland was to continue to be represented on imperial questions in the Parliament at Westminster. The idea gradually increased in strength supported by the Church and the Freeman's Journal, and at the General Election of 1874 nearly sixty Home Rulers were returned for Irish constituencies-Butt with conscientious persistency bringing forward each year a proposal in Parliament in favour of the measure. By the end of 1876 Parnell saw that Butt's efforts were a total failure and he determined to push on for himself. But Isaac Butt was no extremist, and the following year, on April 12, he publicly stated in the House that he disapproved of Parnell's obstructive tactics on the Mutiny Bill. The breach was thus increased, and a correspondence took place between them in the Freeman's Journal. On September 1, 1877, the Home Rule Confederation of Great Britain, which had been formed in 1873, and had always been under the control of the Fenians, held its annual meeting in Liverpool. Parnell was chosen President, Butt, the former President, not being re-elected. Butt felt this keenly, and it was the turning-point in Parnell's career, for the Irish Party now looked to him and not to Butt to lead them, and he became the acknowledged chief of that party in the House of Commons which pursued the so-called "active policy," that is to say, the system of forcing concessions from the Legislature by the dead weight of obstruction and the general sufflamination of Parliamentary business. Butt retired from the leadership of the Home Rule Party the same year during the obstructionist struggle in Parliament over the South African Bill, and died on May 13, 1879. He was succeeded by Shaw, Parnell's smaller and more violent party keeping aloof. In March 1880 Disraeli issued a political manifesto in the form of

a letter to the Duke of Marlborough, in which he announced his intention of dissolving Parliament and appealing to the country for a verdict upon his policy. The chief topic of this epistle was the Irish Parliamenty Party whom he virulently denounced, and with much rhetorical flourish he called upon the intellect of England to struggle against the policy of Home Rule. Shortly afterwards the General Election took place, the Liberals were returned to power, and the Home Rule vote in the House of Commons was increased to 64.

There was still nothing to show the line of policy along which Gladstone was destined to go, and it was not until shortly before his accession to office in 1886, after the Salisbury Government had been defeated upon a minor issue, that he suddenly adopted the cause of Home Rule of which for years he had been ostensibly the rigid opponent. The large majority of the Irish Catholics, whose predecessors in 1880 had been more or less indifferent to the question of a Union, were now zealous for separation, whilst the Irish Protestants and Presbyterians, whose forbears had striven against the Union, were now passionately attached to its maintenance. Thus the positions were exactly reversed. The Catholics, indeed, had some reason for desiring a change in the Constitution, for, although they formed an enormous majority in the country, for all purposes of administration of their own affairs they had hardly any power at all. Speaking of this system of injustice Joseph Chamberlain declared on September 8, 1885, at Warrington—

"I do not believe that the great majority of Englishmen have the slightest conception of the system under which this free nation attempts to rule a sister country. It is a system which is founded on the bayonets of 30,000 soldiers encamped permanently as in a hostile country. It is a system as completely centralized and bureaucratic as that with which Russia governs Poland, or as that which was common in Venice under Austrian rule. An Irishman at this moment cannot move a step; he cannot lift a finger in any parochial, municipal, or educational work, without being confronted, interfered with, controlled by an English official appointed by a foreign Government, and without a shadow or share of representative authority. I say the time has come to reform altogether the absurd and irritating anachronism which is known as Dublin Castle-to sweep away altogether these alien boards of foreign officials, and to substitute for them a genuine Irish Administration for purely Irish business."

And yet men wondered why Ireland was discontented. Elaborate reasons were hunted out to prove that as a race the Irish, like the Galatians, were treacherous and fickle; that there was not a grain of stability in their composition; that in fact they were a fundamentally perverse and incurable people, whose existence on earth was one of the mysteries of the Divine

economy, and whom the only way to govern was by the cat-o'nine-tails. These wiseacres who inquired into the matter might as well have examined the skull of a man who had been discovered bound hand and foot and weighted with lead at the bottom of a deep well. They might as well have directed their solemn investigations upon the cranial conformation of the drowned man, and pronounced the cause of death to have been the abnormal thickness of the bone behind the left ear, the load of which had sunk him, as try to prove that the degeneration of Ireland was due to the levity or perversity of the Irish character. In fact, for their own reputation they would have done more wisely, for it is possible that some other learned fools might have believed them.1

In the Bill which Gladstone introduced in 1886 he proposed that a legislative body consisting of two orders should be created to sit in Dublin. It was to have a parliamentary life of five years, renewable by election. The First Order was to consist of 103 members, composed of twenty-eight representative peers and seventy-five other members, the latter having property qualifications either of £200 a year of real estate or personal property of £4,000, elected for ten years by voters having a yearly qualification of twenty-five pounds, and a property qualification of £200 a year. The twenty-eight representative peers could elect themselves as members of the First Order by notifying the LordLieutenant of their desire. They could hold the membership for life or for thirty years. After the expiration of this last term all the members of the First Order would have to be elected on the franchise specified. The Second Order was to consist of 204 or 206 members, including the 103 already allowed by the Act of Union, and an additional 101 were to be elected for five years on the existing franchise. Ireland's representation in the House of Commons was to cease when the Irish Parliament came into existence, provision being made, however, for a temporary return thereto of a certain quota when Ireland's interests required their presence. These two Orders of some 307 members were, as a rule, to sit together, but the First Order was to have for a short period a veto on the decisions of the other. Numerous restrictions were at the same time placed upon the legislative power of the proposed new Parliament. All questions of defence and armed force, all foreign and colonial relations, the law of trade and navigation, and of coinage and legal tender were to remain outside its purview. It could not meddle with certain charters and contracts, nor establish or endow any particular religion. The right, moreover, of imposing customs and excise was especially withheld from it, this privilege being invested in the Imperial Parliament. The Lord-Lieutenant also 1 Appendix XC, quotation from Sir Robert Giffen.

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