etermined or that is intelligible.

Inside the House subterranean activity was at its height all through the
month of May. This was the critical period. The regular opposition spoke
little and did little; with composed interest they watched others do their
work. On the ministerial side men wavered and changed and changed again,
from day to day and almost from hour to hour. Never were the motions of
the pendulum so agitated and so irregular. So novel and complex a problem
was a terrible burden for a new parliament. About half its members had not
sat in any parliament before. The whips were new, some of the leaders on
the front benches were new, and those of them who were most in earnest
about the policy were too heavily engrossed in the business of the
measure, to have much time for the exercises of explanation, argument, and
persuasion with their adherents. One circumstance told powerfully for
ministers. The great central organisation of the liberal party came
decisively over to Mr. Gladstone (May 5), and was followed by nearly all
the local associations in the country. Neither whig secession nor radical
dubitation shook the strength inherent in such machinery, in a community
where the principle of government by party has solidly established itself.
This was almost the single consolidating and steadying element in that
hour of dispersion. A serious move in the opposite direction had taken
place three weeks earlier. A great meeting was held at the Opera House, in
the Haymarket, presided over by the accomplished whig nobleman who had the
misfortune to be Irish viceroy in the two dismal years from 1880, and it
was attended both by Lord Salisbury on one side and Lord Hartington on the
other. This was the first broad public mark of liberal secession, and of
that practical fusion between whig and tory which the new Irish policy had
actually precipitated, but to which all the signs in the political heavens
had been for three or four years unmistakably pointing.

The strength of the friends of the bill was twofold: first, it lay in the
dislike of coercion as the only visible alternative; and second, it lay in
the hope of at last touching the firm ground of a final settlement with
Ireland. Their weakness was also twofold: first, misgivings about the
exclusion of the Irish members; and second, repugnance to the scheme for
land purchase. There were not a few, indeed, who pronounced the exclusion
of Irish members to be the most se