he very threshold.

The plan was opened by Mr. Gladstone in cabinet on March 13th, and Mr.
Chamberlain and Mr. Trevelyan at once wished to resign. He remonstrated in
a vigorous correspondence. "I have seen many and many a resignation," he
said, "but never one based upon the intentions, nay the immature
intentions, of the prime minister, and on a pure intuition of what may
happen. Bricks and rafters are prepared for a house, but are not
themselves a house." The evil hour was postponed, but not for long. The
Cabinet met again a few days later (March 26) and things came to a sharp
issue. The question was raised in a sufficiently definite form by the
proposition from the prime minister for the establishment of a statutory
body sitting in Dublin with legislative powers. No difficulty was made
about the bare proposition itself. Every one seemed to go as far as that.
It needed to be tested, and tests were at once forthcoming. Mr. Trevelyan
could not assent to the control of the immediate machinery of law and
order being withdrawn from direct British authority, among other reasons
because it was this proposal that created the necessity for buying out the
Irish landlords, which he regarded as raising a problem absolutely
insoluble.(193) Mr. Chamberlain raised four points. He objected to the
cesser of Irish representation; he could not consent to the grant of full
rights of taxation to Ireland; he resisted the surrender of the
appointment of judges and magistrates; and he argued strongly against
proceeding by enumeration of the things that an Irish government might not
do, instead of by a specific delegation of the things that it might
do.(194) That these four objections were not in themselves incapable of
accommodation was shown by subsequent events. The second was very
speedily, and the first was ultimately allowed, while the fourth was held
by good authority to be little more than a question of drafting. Even the
third was not a point either way on which to break up a government,
destroy a policy, and split a party. But everybody who is acquainted with
either the great or the small conflicts of human history, knows how little
the mere terms of a principle or of an objection are to be trusted as a
clue either to its practical significance, or (M110) to the design with
which it is in reality advanced. The design here under all the four heads
of objection, was the dwarfing of the legislative body, the cramping and
constriction of