ever out
of the hands of the restraining classes. Democracy spelt anarchy, and
the word patriotism was degraded in a way that had no parallel since the
French Revolution.

The first outward and visible sign was the creation of the Irish Home
Rule party, which constituted itself separate and distinct from the rest
of the House of Commons, the standard of which the new gang was to
debase. Nor did they rest content until it became the scene of faction
fights and organised obstruction in combination with the flagrant
violation of all decencies of language and behaviour.

Members were returned for Irish constituencies who had been convicts;
others came who richly deserved imprisonment for life. They instigated
murders, and clamoured because the murderers were not regarded as
heroes; or if they were hung, canonised them as martyrs. They attempted
to prostitute the law to their own base standard of political morality.
They assiduously laboured to render life valueless in Ireland and
property worthless, whilst no deed was too cowardly, no atrocity too
barbarous, for them to praise. They alone in modern times warred against
women and children. Animals were the dumb victims of the inhuman
ferocity they in no way tried to check, and they effectively taught the
receptive Irish millions that a British Government could be coerced into
giving what was demanded provided a sufficient number of crimes created
a holocaust large enough to intimidate the weak-kneed at St. Stephen's.

But Mr. Parnell and the Land League would all have been promptly reduced
to the pitiful unimportance from which they had so noisily emerged if it
had not been for Mr. Gladstone.

The root of English politics has been party government--'where all are
for a party, and none are for the State,' to reverse Macaulay's famous
line. Now the Irish vote of sixty was a solid asset, capable in many
cases of weighing down one side of the political scale. It was obvious
that the votes would be unscrupulously given, and Mr. Gladstone bid
higher than the Tories. Literally the necessary parliamentary machinery
for the government of the United Kingdom was clogged by the
Nationalists, who brought obstruction to a fine art, and it was Mr.
Gladstone who always gave in when the Irish outcry would have stimulated
an honest man to avail himself of all loyal forces which law and the
common weal provided.

Long before this the Irish political agitator had set himself to
embitter