thing
less violently impressive would have roused industrious England to take
this question at last into the mind, as a matter for settlement.
The Liberal leader has driven it home; and wantonly, in the way of a
pedestrian demagogue, some think; certainly to the discomposure of the
comfortable and the myopely busy, who prefer to live on with a disease
in the frame rather than at all be stirred. They can, we see, pronounce
a positive electoral negative; yet even they, after the eighty and odd
years of our domestic perplexity, in the presence of the eighty and
odd members pledged for Home Rule, have been moved to excited inquiries
regarding measures--short of the obnoxious Bill. How much we suffer
from sniffing the vain incense of that word practical, is contempt of
prevision! Many of the measures now being proposed responsively to the
fretful cry for them, as a better alternative to correction by force
of arms, are sound and just. Ten years back, or at a more recent period
before Mr. Parnell's triumph in the number of his followers, they
would have formed a basis for the appeasement of the troubled land.
The institution of county boards, the abolition of the detested Castle,
something like the establishment of a Royal residence in Dublin, would
have begun the work well. Materially and sentimentally, they were the
right steps to take. They are now proposed too late. They are regarded
as petty concessions, insufficient and vexatious. The lower and the
higher elements in the population are fused by the enthusiasm of men who
find themselves marching in full body on a road, under a flag, at the
heels of a trusted leader; and they will no longer be fed with sops.
Petty concessions are signs of weakness to the unsatisfied; they prick
an appetite, they do not close breaches. If our object is, as we hear
it said, to appease the Irish, we shall have to give them the Parliament
their leader demands. It might once have been much less; it may be
worried into a raving, perhaps a desperate wrestling, for still more.
Nations pay Sibylline prices for want of forethought. Mr. Parnell's
terms are embodied in Mr. Gladstone's Bill, to which he and his band
have subscribed. The one point for him is the statutory Parliament, so
that Ireland may civilly govern herself; and standing before the world
as representative of his country, he addresses an applausive audience
when he cites the total failure of England to do that business of
government, a