nsible part of the plan. Mr. Gladstone
retained his impartiality, but knew that if we proposed to keep the
Irishmen, we should be run in upon quite as fiercely from the other side.
Mr. Parnell stood to his original position. Any regular and compulsory
attendance at Westminster, he said, would be highly objectionable to his
friends. Further, the right of Irish members to take part in purely
English as well as imperial business would be seized upon by English
politicians, whenever it should answer their purpose, as a pretext for
interfering in Irish affairs. In short, he foresaw, as all did, the
difficulties that would inevitably arise from retention. But the tide ran
more and more strongly the other way. Scotland grew rather restive at a
proposal which, as she apprehended, would make a precedent for herself
when her turn for extension of local powers should come, and Scotchmen had
no intention of being shut out (M119) from a voice in imperial affairs. In
England, the catholics professed alarm at the prospect of losing the only
catholic force in the House of Commons. "We cannot spare one of you,"
cried Cardinal Manning. Some partisans of imperial federation took it into
their heads that the plan for Ireland would be fatal to a plan for the
whole empire, though others more rationally conceived that if there was to
be a scheme for the empire, schemes for its several parts must come first.
Some sages, while pretending infinite friendship to home rule, insisted
that the parliament at Westminster should retain a direct and active veto
upon legislation at Dublin, and that Irish members should remain as they
were in London. That is to say, every precaution should be taken to ensure
a stiff fight at Westminster over every Irish measure of any importance
that had already been fought on College Green. Speaking generally, the
feeling against this provision was due less to the anomaly of taxation
without representation, than to fears for the unity of the empire and the
supremacy of parliament.

The Purchase bill proved from the first to be an almost intolerable dose.
Vivid pictures were drawn of a train of railway trucks two miles long,
loaded with millions of bright sovereigns, all travelling from the pocket
of the British son of toil to the pocket of the idle Irish landlord. The
nationalists from the first urged that the scheme for home rule should not
be weighted with a land scheme, though they were willing to accept it so
long as