into
it. Mr. Gladstone's Bill for helping to the wiser government of Ireland
has brought forth our busy citizens on the top-rubble in traversing
counterswarms, and whatever may be said against a Bill that deals roughly
with many sensitive interests, one asks whether anything less violently
impressive would have roused industrious England to take this question at
last into the mind, as a matter for settlement. The Liberal leader has
driven it home; and wantonly, in the way of a pedestrian demagogue, some
think; certainly to the discomposure of the comfortable and the myopely
busy, who prefer to live on with a disease in the frame rather than at
all be stirred. They can, we see, pronounce a positive electoral
negative; yet even they, after the eighty and odd years of our domestic
perplexity, in the presence of the eighty and odd members pledged for
Home Rule, have been moved to excited inquiries regarding measures--short
of the obnoxious Bill. How much we suffer from sniffing the vain incense
of that word practical, is contempt of prevision! Many of the measures
now being proposed responsively to the fretful cry for them, as a better
alternative to correction by force of arms, are sound and just. Ten years
back, or at a more recent period before Mr. Parnell's triumph in the
number of his followers, they would have formed a basis for the
appeasement of the troubled land. The institution of county boards, the
abolition of the detested Castle, something like the establishment of a
Royal residence in Dublin, would have begun the work well. Materially and
sentimentally, they were the right steps to take. They are now proposed
too late. They are regarded as petty concessions, insufficient and
vexatious. The lower and the higher elements in the population are fused
by the enthusiasm of men who find themselves marching in full body on a
road, under a flag, at the heels of a trusted leader; and they will no
longer be fed with sops. Petty concessions are signs of weakness to the
unsatisfied; they prick an appetite, they do not close breaches. If our
object is, as we hear it said, to appease the Irish, we shall have to
give them the Parliament their leader demands. It might once have been
much less; it may be worried into a raving, perhaps a desperate
wrestling, for still more. Nations pay Sibylline prices for want of
forethought. Mr. Parnell's terms are embodied in Mr. Gladstone's Bill, to
which he and his band have subscribed. The o