the opposition. Still less, ministers
retorted, had you a mandate for coercion. (M116) Such a scheme as this,
exclaimed the critics, with all its checks and counterchecks, its
truncated functions, its vetoes, exceptions, and reservations, is
degrading to Ireland, and every Irish patriot with a spark of spirit in
his bosom must feel it so. As if, retorted the defenders, there were no
degradation to a free people in suffering twenty years of your firm and
resolute coercion. One side argued that the interests of Ireland and Great
Britain were much too closely intertwined to permit a double legislature.
The other argued that this very interdependence was just what made an
Irish legislature safe, because it was incredible that they should act as
if they had no benefit to receive from us, and no injury to suffer from
injury inflicted upon us. Do you, asked some, blot out of your minds the
bitter, incendiary, and rebellious speech of Irish members? But do you
then, the rejoinder followed, suppose that the language that came from
men's hearts when a boon was refused, is a clue to the sentiment in their
hearts when the boon shall have been granted? Ministers were bombarded
with reproachful quotations from their old speeches. They answered the
fire by taunts about the dropping of coercion, and the amazing manoeuvres
of the autumn of 1885. The device of the two orders was denounced as
inconsistent with the democratic tendencies of the age. A very impressive
argument forsooth from you, was the reply, who are either stout defenders
of the House of Lords as it is, or else stout advocates for some of the
multifarious schemes for mixing hereditary peers with fossil officials,
all of them equally alien to the democratic tendencies whether of this age
or any other. So, with stroke and counter-stroke, was the ball kept
flying.

Much was made of foreign and colonial analogies; of the union between
Austria and Hungary, Norway and Sweden, Denmark and Iceland; how in
forcing legislative union on North America we lost the colonies; how the
union of legislatures ended in the severance of Holland from Belgium. All
this carried little conviction. Most members of parliament like to think
with pretty large blinkers on, and though it may make for narrowness, this
is consistent with much practical wisdom. Historical parallels in the
actual politics of the day are usually rather decorative than substantial.

If people disbelieve premisses, nothing ca