in the
matter."[16]

There is no need to quote Mr. Gladstone's declarations on the Irish
question at the General Election of 1885, and previously. He has been
accused of springing a surprise on the country when he proposed Home
Rule in the beginning of 1886. That is not, at all events, the opinion
of Lord Hartington. In a speech delivered at the Eighty Club in March,
1886, his Lordship, with his usual manly candour, declared as follows:
"I am not going to say one word of complaint or charge against Mr.
Gladstone for the attitude which he has taken on this question. I think
no one who has read or heard, during a long series of years, the
declarations of Mr. Gladstone on the question of self-government for
Ireland, can be surprised at the tone of his present declarations....
When I look back to those declarations that Mr. Gladstone made in
Parliament, which have not been unfrequent; when I look back to the
increased definiteness given to those declarations in his address to the
electors of Midlothian, and in his Midlothian speeches; I say, when I
consider all these things, I feel that I have not, and that no one has,
any right to complain of the tone of the declarations which Mr.
Gladstone has recently made upon this subject."

So much as to the state of Liberal opinion on the Irish question at the
General Election of 1885. The leaders of all sections of the party put
the Irish question in the foreground of their programme for the session
of 1886. We all remember Sir Charles Dilke's public announcement that he
and Mr. Chamberlain were going to visit Ireland in the autumn of 1885,
to study the Irish question on the spot, with a view to maturing a plan
for the first session of the new Parliament.

What about the Conservative party? Lord Salisbury's Newport speech was
avowedly the programme of his Cabinet. It was the Conservative answer to
Mr. Gladstone's Midlothian manifesto. He dealt with the Irish question
in guarded language; but it was language which plainly showed that he
recognized, not less clearly than the Liberal leaders, the crucial
change which the assimilation of the Irish franchise to that of Great
Britain had wrought in Irish policy. His keen eye saw at once the
important bearing which that enfranchisement had on the traditional
policy of coercion: "You had passed an Act of Parliament, giving in
unexampled abundance, and with unexampled freedom, supreme power to the
great mass of the Irish people--supreme