liberals and Irish
gave to the struggle a parliamentary complexion, by which no coercion
struggle had ever been marked hitherto. In the dialectic of senate and
platform, Mr. Balfour displayed a strength of wrist, a rapidity, an
instant readiness for combat, that took his foes by surprise, and roused
in his friends a delight hardly surpassed in the politics of our day.

There was another important novelty this time. To England hitherto Irish
coercion had been little more than a word of common form, used without any
thought what the thing itself was like to the people coerced. Now it was
different. Coercion had for once become a flaming party issue, and when
that happens all the world awakes. Mr. Gladstone had proclaimed that the
choice lay between conciliation and coercion. The country would have liked
conciliation, but did not trust his plan. When coercion came, the two
British parties rushed to their swords, and the deciding body of neutrals
looked on with anxiety and concern. There has never been a more
strenuously sustained contest in the history of political campaigns. No
effort was spared to bring the realities of repression vividly home to the
judgment and feelings of men and women of our own island. English visitors
trooped over to Ireland, and brought back stories of rapacious landlords,
violent police, and famishing folk cast out homeless upon the wintry
roadside. Irishmen became the most welcome speakers on British platforms,
and for the first time in all our history they got a hearing for their
lamentable tale. To English audiences it was as new and interesting as the
narrative of an African explorer or a navigator in the Pacific. Our Irish
instructors even came to the curious conclusion that ordinary
international estimates must be revised, and that Englishmen are in truth
far more emotional than Irishmen. Ministerial speakers, on the other hand,
diligently exposed inaccuracy here or over-colouring there. They appealed
to the English distaste for disorder, and to the English taste for
mastery, and they did not overlook the slumbering jealousy of popery and
priestcraft. But the course of affairs was too rapid for them, the strong
harsh doses to the Irish patient were too incessant. The Irish convictions
in cases where the land was concerned rose to 2805, and of these rather
over one-half were in cases where in England the rights of the prisoner
would have been guarded by a jury. The tide of common popular feel