ord Lansdowne stirred much
commotion by retiring from the government, and landowners and capitalists
were full of consternation. At least one member of the cabinet was
profoundly uneasy. It is impossible to read the letters of the Duke of
Argyll to Mr. Gladstone on land, church establishment, the Zulu war,
without wondering on what theory a cabinet was formed that included him,
able and (M21) upright as he was, along with radicals like Mr.
Chamberlain. Before the cabinet was six months old the duke was plucking
Mr. Gladstone's sleeve with some vivacity at the Birmingham language on
Irish land. Mr. Parnell in the committee stage abstained from supporting
the measure, sixteen liberals voted against the third reading, and the
House of Lords, in which nationalist Ireland had not a single
representative, threw out the bill by a majority of 282 against 51. It was
said that if all the opposition peers had stayed away, still ministers
would have been beaten by their own supporters.

Looking back upon these events, Mr. Gladstone set out in a memorandum of
later years, that during the session of 1880 the details of the budget
gave him a good deal to do, while the absorbing nature of foreign
questions before and after his accession to office had withdrawn his
attention from his own Land Act of 1870:(35)--

Late in the session came the decisive and disastrous rejection by
the House of Lords of the bill by means of which the government
had hoped to arrest the progress of disorder, and avert the
necessity for measures in the direction of coercion. The rapid and
vast extension of agrarian disturbance followed, as was to be
expected, this wild excess of landlordism, and the Irish
government proceeded to warn the cabinet that coercive legislation
would be necessary.

Forster allowed himself to be persuaded by the governmental agents
in Ireland that the root of the evil lay within small compass;
that there were in the several parishes a certain limited number
of unreasonable and mischievous men, that these men were known to
the police, and that if summary powers were confided to the Irish
government, by the exercise of which these objectionable persons
might be removed, the evil would die out of itself. I must say I
never fell into this extraordinary illusion of Forster's about his
'village ruffian.' But he was a very impracticable man placed in a
position of gr