y from his friends.

V

The reception of the bill by the organs of Irish opinion was easy to
foretell. The nationalists accepted it in sober and rational language,
subject to amendments on the head of finance and the constabulary clauses.
The tories said it was a bill for setting up an Irish republic. It is
another selfish English plan, said the moderates. Some Irishmen who had
played with home rule while it was a phrase, drew back when they saw it in
a bill. Others, while holding to home rule, objected to being reduced to
the status of colonists. The body of home rulers who were protestant was
small, and even against them it was retorted that for every protestant
nationalist there were ten catholic unionists. The Fenian organs across
the Atlantic, while quarrelling with such provisions as the two orders,
"one of which would be Irish and the other English," did justice to the
bravery of the attempt, and to the new moral forces which it would call
out. The florid violence which the Fenians abandoned was now with proper
variations adopted by Orangemen in the north. The General Assembly of the
presbyterian church in Ireland passed strong resolutions against a
parliament, in favour of a peasant proprietary, in favour of loyalty, and
of coercion. A few days later the general synod of the protestant
episcopal church followed suit, and denounced a parliament. The Orange
print in Belfast drew up a Solemn League and Covenant for Ulster, to
ignore and resist an Irish national government. Unionist prints in Dublin
declared and indignantly repelled "the selfish English design to get rid
of the Irish nuisance from Westminster, and reduce us to the position of a
tributary dependency."(203)

The pivot of the whole policy was the acceptance of the bill by the
representatives of Ireland. On the evening when the bill was produced, Mr.
Parnell made certain complaints as to the reservation of the control of
the constabulary, as to the power of the first order to effect a deadlock,
and as to finance. He explicitly and publicly warned the government from
the first that, when the committee stage was reached, he would claim a
large decrease in the fraction named for the imperial contribution. There
was never any dissembling as to this. In private discussion, he had always
held that the fair proportion of Irish contribution to imperial charges
was not a fifteenth but a twentieth, and he said no more in the House than
he had persistently