even Lord Palmerston himself, were anxious for the immediate return of
the last-named minister to power. Who will pretend that in the House, of
Commons in February 1886, anything at all like the same state of facts
prevailed? As for the resolutions in the case of the Irish church, they
were moved by Mr. Gladstone in opposition, and he thought it obvious that
a policy proposed in opposition stands on a totally different footing from
a policy laid before parliament on the responsibility of a government, and
a government bound by every necessity of the situation to prompt
action.(191)

(M109) At a later stage, as we shall see, it was actually proposed that a
vote for the second reading of the bill should be taken to mean no more
than a vote for its principle. Every one of the objections that instantly
sprang out of their ambush against this proposal would have worked just as
much mischief against an initial resolution. In short, in opening a policy
of this difficulty and extent, the cabinet was bound to produce to
parliament not merely its policy but its plan for carrying the policy out.
By that course only could parliament know what it was doing. Any other
course must have ended in a mystifying, irritating, and barren confusion,
alike in the House of Commons and in the country.(192)

The same consideration that made procedure by resolution unadvisable told
with equal force within the cabinet. Examination into the feasibility of
some sort of plan was most rapidly brought to a head by the test of a
particular plan. It is a mere fable of faction that a cast iron policy was
arbitrarily imposed upon the cabinet; as matter of fact, the plan
originally propounded did undergo large and radical modifications.

The policy as a whole shaped itself in two measures. First, a scheme for
creating a legislative body, and defining its powers; second, a scheme for
opening the way to a settlement of the land question, in discharge of an
obligation of honour and policy, imposed upon this country by its active
share in all the mischiefs that the Irish land system had produced. The
introduction of a plan for dealing with the land was not very popular even
among ministers, but it was pressed by Lord Spencer and the Irish
secretary, on the double ground that the land was too burning a question
to be left where it then stood, and next that it was unfair to a new and
untried legislature in Ireland to find itself confronted by such a
question on t