, it would be absurd not to allow the Irish Legislature
to settle such a matter in accordance with Irish feeling. Curiously
enough, the Unionists did not receive much encouragement on this point
from the Irish branch of the enemies of Home Rule. Mr. Macartney, an
Irish Orangeman, proclaimed on the part of his co-religionists that the
Irish Protestants had nearly as much objection to divorce as the Irish
Catholics; and, so far as that part of the amendment was concerned, he
had no desire to see it pressed. What he apprehended was a change in the
law for the purpose of prejudicing mixed marriages--marriages between
Catholics and Protestants. Mr. Gladstone, it is well known, on the
question of divorce is a very sound and very strong Conservative. The
sturdy fight he made against divorce still lives in Parliamentary
history, and has often been brought up--sometimes in justification of
equally stubborn fights--against him. It is one of the points on which
he does not seem to have much modified his opinions, in spite of the
advance of time, and all that has taken place in the long stretch of
years between now and the day when an unbelieving and pagan minister
like Lord Palmerston enabled men and women to get rid of adulterous
spouses. But Mr. Gladstone declined to be drawn.

[Sidenote: Disestablishment.]

On June 18th, Mr. Bartley proposed an amendment to a restriction in the
Bill with regard to the establishment and endowment of any church. By
the Bill--as is pretty well known--the Irish Parliament are forbidden to
confer on any church the privilege of State establishment and State
endowment. To this restriction no Irish member has ever raised the least
objection. It was reserved for Mr. Bartley--one of the most vehement
opponents of Irish nationality and an Irish Parliament--to declare that
such a restriction would make the Parliament unworthy of the acceptance
of a nation of freemen, and to propose that accordingly it should be
removed. The position, then, in which the Irish opponents of the Bill
were placed, was this--that while denouncing the supremacy and
encroachments of the Catholic Church as one of the main objections
against the Bill, they proposed that the Irish Parliament should have
the right to establish and endow that very Church. Mr. Balfour
perceived--under the light thus borne in upon him--that this was not an
amendment which the Tory party could safely support; and he accordingly
advised Mr. Bartley to wit