to meet the views of Mr. Parnell;
and, without admitting that it is all he requires, the Irish leader
cordially accepts it, but he wants, he has told us, 'the full and
complete right to arrange our own affairs and make ours a nation--to
secure for her, free from outside control, the right to direct her own
course among the peoples of the world.' We are asked to suppose that he
and his friends, started in their new career, will be stopped by such a
ridiculous invention as this First Order. And it is a project like this,
inconsistent with itself, implying constitutional degradation of the
very people whom it is supposed to conciliate, patched up with strange
curiosities as unknown in England as in Ireland, which Parliament is
asked to accept as a 'final settlement' of our Irish difficulties.

The Bill proposed settles nothing. Its only result is a renewed
manifestation of the power and influence of the Irish agitator. In this
extraordinary state of affairs men are apt to forget the series of
events which have brought about our present condition. Ministries come
and go at the bidding of Mr. Parnell. English policy in the future,
important schemes affecting the gravest concerns of England, of
Scotland, of Ireland, depend not on any principle accepted by the
British public, but on the humour of the Irish leader. The existence of
the House of Lords, the legal position of the Church of Scotland, the
maintenance of our most important military reserve, the right of the
Sovereign in relation to peace and war, are exposed to critical
divisions, not because British opinion is eager for revolution, or has
become indifferent to the vast interests involved, but because the
Nationalist party wish to remind us of their voting power.

Our alarm at all this should not make us lose sight of the antecedent
facts which have built up this force of mischief. Mr. Gladstone is Prime
Minister by the favour of the Irish party, and this party is the outcome
of Mr. Gladstone's own policy. Whether the fluent rhetorician foresaw
his present position, whether perched on his slender ledge of power he
now enjoys it, we need not stop to consider. What we would remind our
readers is that for nearly twenty years past he has, in the main line of
his public life, notwithstanding some convulsive oscillations, pursued
with the pertinacity of one possessed the policy of which the present
Irish organization is the natural and the logical development. The
Nation