a small
proportion of the two or three hundred millions worth of land in Ireland;
and I do not well see how the unprotected tenants of the land in general
would take essential benefit from the purchase and owning of land by a few
of their fortunate brethren." If the land question was urgent, and Bright
himself, like Mill, thought that it was, this answer of Mr. Gladstone's
was irrefragable. In acknowledging the despatch of this correspondence
from Mr. Gladstone, Lord Granville says to him (May 26, 1869):--

This question may break us up. Bright is thin-skinned; the attacks
in the Lords ruffle him more than he chooses to admit. I cannot
make out how far he likes office, the cabinet, and his new
position. It will be particularly disagreeable to him to have this
plan, of which he is so much enamoured and for which he has
received so much blame and a little praise, snuffed out by the
cabinet. And yet how is it possible to avoid it, even putting
aside the strong opinions of Lowe, Cardwell, and others? My only
hope is that you have got the germ of some larger and more
comprehensive plan in your head, than has yet been developed.

The plan ultimately adopted, after a severe struggle and with momentous
consequences, did not first spring from Mr. Gladstone's brain. The idea of
adapting the law to custom in all its depth and breadth, and extending the
rooted notion of tenant-right to its furthest bearings, was necessarily a
plant of Irish and not of English growth. Mr. Chichester Fortescue, the
Irish chief secretary and an Irishman, first opened a bold expansion of
the familiar principle of many tenant-right bills. He had introduced such
a bill himself in 1866, and the conservative government had brought in
another in 1867. It is believed that he was instigated to adopt the new
and bolder line by Sir Edward Sullivan, then the Irish attorney-general.
Away from Sullivan, it was observed, he had little to say of value about
his plan. In the cabinet Fortescue was not found effective, but he was
thoroughly at home in the subject, and his speeches in public on Irish
business had all the cogency of a man speaking his native tongue, and even
genius in an acquired language is less telling. What is astonishing is the
magic of the rapid and sympathetic penetration with which Mr. Gladstone
went to the heart of the problem, as it was presented to him by his Irish
advisers. This was his way. When act