hat business--this was the phenomenon which
confronted us, and we felt that no rules of debate would overcome the
dangers it threatened.

It is from this year 1882 that I date the impression which we formed,
that Home Rule was sure to come. "It may be a bold experiment," we said
to one another in the lobbies; "there are serious difficulties in the
way, though the case for it is stronger than we thought two years ago.
But if the Irishmen persist as they are doing now, they will get it. It
is only a question of their tenacity."

It was impossible not to be struck during the conflicts of 1881 and 1882
with the small amount of real bitterness which the conduct of the Irish
members, irritating as it often was, provoked among the Liberals, who of
course bore the brunt of the conflict. The Nationalists did their best
to injure a Government which was at the same time being denounced by the
Tories as too favourable to Irish claims; they lowered the character of
Parliament by scenes far more painful than those of the session of 1887,
on which so much indignation has been lately expended; they said the
hardest things they could think of against us in the House; they
attacked us in our constituencies. Their partisans (for I do not charge
this on the leaders) interrupted and broke up our meetings.
Nevertheless, all this did not provoke responsive hatred from the
Liberals. There could not be a greater contrast than that between the
way in which the great bulk of the Liberal members all through the
Parliament of 1880 behaved towards their Irish antagonists, and the
violence with which the Tory members, under much slighter provocation,
conduct themselves towards those antagonists now. I say this not to the
credit of our temper, which was no better than that of other men heated
by the struggles of a crowded assembly. It was due entirely to our
feeling that there was a great balance of wrong standing to the debit of
England; that if the Irish were turbulent, it was the ill-treatment of
former days that had made them so; and that, whatever might be their
methods, they were fighting for their country. Although, therefore,
there was little social intercourse between us and them, there was
always a hope and a wish that the day might come when the Liberal party
should resume its natural position of joining the representatives of the
Irish people in obtaining radical reforms in Irish government. And the
remarkable speech of February 9, 1882,