. Ever since the crowns and parliaments of Great Britain and
Ireland were united, in A.D. 1800, there has been in Ireland a party
which protested against that union as fraudulently obtained and
inexpedient in itself. For many years this party, led by Daniel
O'Connell, maintained an agitation for Repeal. After his death a more
extreme section, which sought the complete independence of Ireland,
raised the insurrection of 1848, and subsequently, under the guidance of
other hands, formed the Fenian conspiracy, whose projected insurrection
was nipped in the bud in 1867, though the conspiracy continued to menace
the Government and the tranquillity of the island. In 1872 the Home Rule
party was formed, demanding, not the Repeal of the Union, but the
creation of an Irish Legislature, and the agitation, conducted in
Parliament in a more systematic and persistent way than heretofore, took
also a legitimate constitutional form. To this demand English and Scotch
opinion was at first almost unanimously opposed. At the General Election
of 1880, which, however, turned mainly on the foreign policy of Lord
Beaconsfield's Government, not more than three or four members were
returned by constituencies in Great Britain who professed to consider
Home Rule as even an open question. All through the Parliament, which
sat from 1880 till 1885, the Nationalist party, led by Mr. Parnell, and
including at first less than half, ultimately about half, of the Irish
members, was in constant and generally bitter opposition to the
Government of Mr. Gladstone. But during these five years a steady,
although silent and often unconscious, process of change was passing in
the minds of English and Scotch members, especially Liberal members, due
to their growing sense of the mistakes which Parliament committed in
handling Irish questions, and of the hopelessness of the efforts which
the Executive was making to pacify the country on the old methods. The
adoption of a Home Rule policy by one of the great English parties was,
therefore, not so sudden a change as it seemed. The process had been
going on for years, though in its earlier stages it was so gradual and
so unwelcome as to be faintly felt and reluctantly admitted by the minds
that were undergoing it. In the spring of 1886 the question could be no
longer evaded or postponed. It was necessary to choose between one of
two courses; the refusal of the demand for self-government, coupled with
the introduction of