straight ahead like a
cannon ball.--BISMARCK.

I

The month of December was passed by Mr. Gladstone at Hawarden, in such
depth of meditation as it is easy for us to conjecture. The composition of
his party, the new situation in parliament, the mutual relations of
important individuals, the Irish case, his own share in respect of the
Irish case, the strange new departure in Irish policy announced and acted
upon by the subsisting cabinet--from all these points of view it was now
his business to survey the extraordinary scene. The knot to be unravelled
in 1886 was hardly less entangled than that which engaged the powerful
genius of Pitt at the opening of the century. Stripped of invidious
innuendo, the words of Lord Salisbury a few weeks later state with
strength and truth the problem that now confronted parliament and its
chief men. "Up to the time," said the tory prime minister, "when Mr.
Gladstone took office, be it for good or evil, for many generations
Ireland had been governed through the influence and the action of the
landed gentry. I do not wish to defend that system. There is a good deal
to be said for it, and a good deal to be said against it. What I wish to
insist upon is, not that that system was good, but that the statesman who
undertook to overthrow it, should have had something to put in its place.
He utterly destroyed it. By the Land Act of 1870, by the Ballot Act of
1872, by the Land Act of 1881, and last of all by the Reform bill of 1884,
the power of the landed gentry in Ireland is absolutely shattered; and he
now stands before the formidable problem of a country deprived of a system
of government under which it had existed for many generations, and
absolutely without even a sketch of a substitute by which the ordinary
functions of law and order can be maintained. Those changes which he
introduced into the government of Ireland were changes that were admirable
from a parliamentary point of view. They were suited to the dominant
humour of the moment. But they were barren of any institutions by which
the country could be governed and kept in prosperity for the future."(166)
This is a statement of the case that biographer and historian alike should
ponder. Particularly should they remember that both parties had renounced
coercion.

Mr. Gladstone has publicly explained the working of his mind, and both his
private letters at the time, and many a conversation later, attest the
hold which the ne