testants besides Mr. Parnell himself among
the Nationalist leaders. There was no ill-feeling (except in Ulster)
between Protestants and Roman Catholics in Ireland. There was no reason
to expect that either the Catholic hierarchy or the priesthood generally
would be supreme in an Irish Parliament, and much reason to expect the
contrary. As regards Ulster, where, no doubt, there were special
difficulties, due to the bitter antagonism of the Orangemen (not of the
Protestants generally) and Catholics, Mr. Gladstone had undertaken to
consider any special provisions which could be suggested as proper to
meet those difficulties. These replies, however, made little impression.
They were pronounced, and pronounced all the more confidently the more
ignorant of Ireland the speaker was, to be too hypothetical. To many
Englishmen the case seemed to be one of two hostile factions contending
in Ireland for the last sixty years, and that the gift of
self-government might enable one of them to tyrannize over the other.
True, that party was the majority, and, according to the principles of
democratic government, therefore entitled to prevail. But it is one
thing to admit a principle and another to consent to its application.
The minority had the sympathy of the upper classes in England, because
the minority contained the landlords. It had the sympathy of a part of
the middle class, because it contained the Protestants. And of those
Englishmen who were impartial as between the Irish factions, there were
some who held that England must in any case remain responsible for the
internal peace and the just government of Ireland, and could not grant
powers whose possession might tempt the one party to injustice, and the
other to resist injustice by violence.

There was another anticipation, another forecast of evils to follow,
which told most of all upon English opinion. This was the notion that
Home Rule was only a stage in the road to the complete separation of the
two islands. The argument was conceived as follows: "The motive passions
of the Irish agitation have all along been hatred toward England and a
desire to make Ireland a nation, holding her independent place among the
nations of the world. This design was proclaimed by the Young Irelanders
of 1848 and by the Fenian rebels of 1866; it has been avowed, in
intervals of candour, by the present Nationalists themselves. The grant
of an Irish Parliament will stimulate rather than appease thi