Its introduction aroused the keenest
political battle which during half a century has been fought in England.
The Bill therefore became at once the mark of hostile and (what is
nearly the same thing) of unfair criticism at the hands of opponents.
This was to be expected; it is the necessary result of the system which
makes tenure of office depend on success in carrying through or
resisting proposed legislation. What did take place but was not to be
expected was, that the Government of Ireland Bill met with harsh
criticism at the hands of its friends. The Opposition wished to prove
that the principle of the Bill was bad, by showing that it led to
disastrous and absurd results. They therefore directed their assaults
upon the details of a measure which they disliked in reality not because
of the special provisions which they attacked, but because of the
principle to which these provisions gave effect. Ministeralists on the
other hand were only too ready to surrender any clause in the Bill as a
matter of detail, provided only they could persuade Parliament to
sanction the principle of the measure, and thereby affirm the policy of
giving Ireland an Irish Executive and an Irish Parliament. Nor was this
course of action dictated solely by the exigencies of Parliamentary
strategy. Ministerialists saw the flaws in the Bill as plainly as did
the Opposition, and no man (it may be conjectured), from the Premier who
devised, down to the draughtsman who drew, the Government of Ireland
Bill, would have wished it to become an Act in the form in which it
stood on the 7th day of June, 1886. The supporters, moreover, of the
Government emphasized their dislike to the details of the particular
measure, because to attack a detail of the machinery by which it was
proposed to give Ireland Home Rule countenanced in the critic's own mind
the assumption that some mechanism could be invented which might carry
out the principle of creating an Irish Parliament without violating the
conditions on which alone the idea of any such measure could be
entertained by any English statesman. Opponents, in short, of the
Government of Ireland Bill attacked its details out of hostility to its
principle; its defenders tried to win approval for its principle by
conceding or insisting upon the defects of its details.[54] The result
was unfortunate. The Bill was never either by its opponents or its
friends regarded in the light in which it ought to be viewed by a
co