it was not used to prejudice the larger demand. On the other side
the Irish landlords themselves peremptorily rejected the plan that had
been devised for their protection.

The air was thick with suggestions, devices, contrivances, expedients,
possible or madly impossible. Proposals or embryonic notions of proposals
floated like motes in a sunbeam. Those to whom lobby diplomacy is as the
breath of their nostrils, were in their element. So were the worthy
persons who are always ready with ingenious schemes for catching a vote or
two here, at the cost of twenty votes elsewhere. Intrigue may be too dark
a word, but coaxing, bullying, managing, and all the other arts of party
emergency, went on at an unprecedented rate. Of these arts, the
supervising angels will hardly record that any section had a monopoly. The
legerdemain that makes words pass for things, and liquefies things into
words, achieved many flashes of success. But they were only momentary, and
the solid obstacles remained. The foundations of human character are much
the same in all historic ages, and every public crisis brings out the same
types.

Much depended on Mr. Bright, the great citizen and noble orator, who had
in the last five-and-forty years fought and helped to win more than one
battle for wise and just government; whose constancy had confronted storms
of public obloquy without yielding an inch of his ground; whose eye for
the highest questions of state had proved itself singularly sure; and
whose simplicity, love of right, and unsophisticated purity of public and
private conduct, commanded the trust and the reverence of nearly all the
better part of his countrymen. To Mr. Bright the eyes of many thousands
were turned in these weeks of anxiety and doubt. He had in public kept
silence, though in private he made little secret of his disapproval of the
new policy. Before the bill was produced he had a prolonged conversation
(March 20) with Mr. Gladstone at Downing Street. "Long and weighty" are
the words in the diary. The minister sketched his general design, Mr.
Bright stated his objections much in the form in which, as we shall see,
he stated them later. Of the exclusion of the Irish members he approved.
The Land bill he thought quite wrong, for why should so enormous an effort
be made for one interest only? He expressed his sympathy with Mr.
Gladstone in his great difficulties, could not but admire his ardour, and
came away with the expectation that