f the _Times_, must be held absolutely incapable.

Those who took this view were encouraged in it by the prime minister.
Within four-and-twenty hours he publicly took the truth of the story, with
all its worst innuendoes, entirely for granted. He went with rapid stride
from possibility to probability, and from probability to certainty. In a
speech, of which precipitate credulity was not the only fault, Lord
Salisbury let fall the sentence: "When men who knew gentlemen who
intimately knew Mr. Parnell murdered Mr. Burke." He denounced Mr.
Gladstone for making a trusted friend of such a man--one who had "mixed on
terms of intimacy with those whose advocacy of assassination was well
known." Then he went further. "You may go back," he said, "to the
beginning of British government, you may go back from decade to decade,
and from leader to leader, but you will never find a man who has accepted
a position, in reference to an ally tainted with the strong presumption of
conniving at assassination, which has been accepted by Mr. Gladstone at
the present time."(246) Seldom has party spirit led eminent personages to
greater lengths of dishonouring absurdity.

Now and afterwards people asked why Mr. Parnell did not promptly bring his
libellers before a court of law. The answer was simple. The case would
naturally have been tried in London. In other words, not only the
plaintiff's own character, but the whole movement that he represented,
would have been submitted to a Middlesex jury, with all the national and
political prejudices inevitable in such a body, and with all the twelve
chances of a disagreement, that would be almost as disastrous to Mr.
Parnell as an actual verdict for his assailants. The issues were too great
to be exposed to the hazards of a cast of the die. Then, why not lay the
venue in Ireland? It was true that a favourable verdict might just as
reasonably be expected from the prepossessions of Dublin, as an
unfavourable one from the prepossessions of London. But the moral effect
of an Irish verdict upon English opinion would be exactly as worthless, as
the effect of an English verdict in a political or international case
would be upon the judgment and feeling of Ireland. To procure a
condemnation of the _Times_ at the Four Courts, as a means of affecting
English opinion, would not be worth a single guinea. Undoubtedly the
subsequent course of this strange history fully justified the advice that
Mr. Parnell received i