s of policy were not of great or
immediate concern, he took them as they came; but when they pressed for
treatment and determination, then he swooped down upon them with the
strength and vision of an eagle.

II

His career in the most deeply operative portion of it was so intimately
concerned with Ireland, that my readers will perhaps benignantly permit a
page or two of historic digression. I know the subject seems uninviting.
My apology must be that it occupied no insignificant portion of Mr.
Gladstone's public life, and that his treatment of it made one of his
deepest marks on the legislation of the century. After all, there is no
English-speaking community in any part of the wide globe, where our tragic
mismanagement of the land of Ireland, and of those dwelling on it and
sustained by it, has not left its unlucky stamp.

(M86) If Englishmen and Scots had not found the theme so uninviting, if
they had given a fraction of the attention to the tenure and history of
Irish land, that was bestowed, say, upon the Seisachtheia of Solon at
Athens, or the Sempronian law in ancient Rome, this chapter in our annals
would not have been written. As it was, parliament had made laws for
landlord and tenant in Ireland without well understanding what is either
an Irish landlord or an Irish tenant. England has been able to rule India,
Mill said, because the business of ruling devolved upon men who passed
their lives in India, and made Indian interests their regular occupation.
India has on the whole been governed with a pretty full perception of its
differences from England. Ireland on the contrary, suffering a worse
misfortune than absentee landlords, was governed by an absentee
parliament. In England, property means the rights of the rent-receiver who
has equipped the land and prepared it for the capital and the skill of the
tenant. In Ireland, in the minds of the vast majority of the population,
for reasons just as good, property includes rights of the cultivator,
whose labour has drained the land, and reclaimed it, and fenced it, and
made farm-roads, and put a dwelling and farm buildings on it, and given to
it all the working value that it possesses. We need suppose no criminality
on either side. The origin of the difference was perfectly natural. In
Ireland the holdings were small and multitudinous; no landlord who was not
a millionaire, could have prepared and equipped holdings numbered by
hundreds or thousands; and if he