be to stultify parliament. Your inconsistency would have
provoked such intense exasperation, that it would have led to ten times
more evil, ten times more resistance to the law, than your Crimes Act
could possibly have availed to check. Then the audience was favoured with
a philosophic view of boycotting. This, said the minister, is an offence
which legislation has very great difficulty in reaching. The provisions of
the Crimes Act against it had a very small effect. It grew up under that
Act. And, after all, look at boycotting. An unpopular man or his family go
to mass. The congregation with one accord get up and walk out. Are you
going to indict people for leaving church? The plain fact is that
boycotting "is more like the excommunication or interdict of the middle
ages, than anything that we know now." "The truth about boycotting is that
it depends on the passing humour of the population."

It is important to remember that in the month immediately preceding this
polished apologetic, there were delivered some of the most violent
boycotting speeches ever made in Ireland.(157) These speeches must have
been known to the Irish government, and their occurrence and the purport
of them must presumably have been known therefore to the prime minister.
Here was indeed a removal of the ancient buoys and beacons that had
hitherto guided English navigation in Irish waters. There was even less of
a solid ultimatum at Newport, than in those utterances in Midlothian which
were at that time and long afterwards found so culpably vague, blind, and
elusive. Some of the more astute of the minister's own colleagues were
delighted with his speech, as keeping the Irishmen steady to the tory
party. They began to hope that they might even come within five-and-twenty
of the liberals when the polling began.

The question on which side the Irish vote in Great Britain should be
thrown seems not to have been decided until after Mr. Gladstone's speech.
It was then speedily settled. On Nov. 21 a manifesto was issued, handing
over the Irish vote in Great Britain solid to the orator of the Newport
speech. The tactics were obvious. It was Mr. Parnell's interest to bring
the two contending British parties as near as might be to a level, and
this he could only hope to do by throwing his strength upon the weaker
side. It was from the weaker side, if they could be retained in office,
that he would get the best terms.(158) The document was composed with
vig