odily asked one
another whether they might not just as well have had the policy of Mr.
Parnell's bill adopted on College Green, as adopted at Westminster.

III

The moment had by this time once more come for testing the proposition
from which Mr. Gladstone's policy had first started. The tory government
had been turned out at the beginning of 1886 upon coercion, and Mr.
Gladstone's government had in the summer of that year been beaten upon
conciliation. "I ventured to state in 1886," said Mr. Gladstone a year
later,(234) "that we had arrived at the point where two roads met, or
rather where two roads parted; one of them the road that marked the
endeavour to govern Ireland according to its constitutionally expressed
wishes; the other the road principally marked by ultra-constitutional
measures, growing more and more pronounced in character." Others, he said,
with whom we had been in close alliance down to that date, considered that
a third course was open, namely liberal concession, stopping short of
autonomy, but upon a careful avoidance of coercion. Now it became visible
that this was a mistake, and that in default of effective conciliation,
coercion was the inevitable alternative. So it happened.

The government again unlocked the ancient armoury, and brought out the
well-worn engines. The new Crimes bill in most particulars followed the
old Act, but it contained one or two serious extensions, including a
clause afterwards dropped, that gave to the crown a choice in cases of
murder or certain other aggravated offences of carrying the prisoner out
of his own country over to England and trying him before a Middlesex jury
at the Old Bailey--a puny imitation of the heroic expedient suggested in
1769, of bringing American rebels over for trial in England under a
slumbering statute of King Henry VIII. The most startling innovation of
all was that the new Act was henceforth to be the permanent law of
Ireland, and all its drastic provisions were to be brought into force
whenever the executive government pleased.(235) This Act was not
restricted as every former law of the kind had been in point of time, to
meet an emergency; it was made a standing instrument of government.
Criminal law and procedure is one of the most important of all the
branches of civil rule, and certainly is one of the most important of all
its elements. This was now in Ireland to shift up and down, to be one
thing to-day and another thing to-morro