ck-in-trade, not merely of the ordinary politician, who, for
want of a case, abuses the plaintiff's attorney, but of leading men,
and, still more, of leading newspapers, who might be thought bound to
produce from recent events and an examination of the condition of
Ireland some better grounds for the passion they display. It is
noticeable that such reproaches come more often from the so-called
Liberal Unionists than from the present Ministry. Perhaps, with their
belief that all Liberals are unprincipled revolutionaries, the Tories
deem a sin more or less to be of small account. Perhaps a recollection
of their own remarkable gyrations, before and after the General
Election of 1885, may suggest that the less said about the past the
better for everybody. Be the cause what it may, it is surprising to find
that a section commanding so much ability as the group of Dissentient
Liberals does, should rely rather on the charge of inconsistency than on
the advocacy of any counter-policy of their own. It is not large and
elevated, but petty, minds that rejoice to say to an opponent (and all
the more so if he was once a friend), "You must either be wrong now, or
have been wrong then, because you have changed your opinion. I have not
changed; I was right then, and I am right now." Such an argument not
only dispenses with the necessity of sifting the facts, but it fosters
the satisfaction of the person who employs it. Consistency is the pet
virtue of the self-righteous, and the man who values himself on his
consistency can seldom be induced to see that to shut one's eyes to the
facts which time develops, to refuse to reconsider one's position by the
light they shed, to cling to an old solution when the problem is
substantially new, is a proof, not of fortitude and wisdom, but rather
of folly and conceit.

Such persons may be left to the contemplation of their own virtues. But
there are many fair-minded men of both political parties, or of neither,
who, while acquitting those Liberal members who supported Home Rule in
1886 and opposed Coercion in 1887 of the sordid or spiteful motives with
which the virulence of journalism credits them, have nevertheless been
surprised at the apparent swiftness and completeness of the change in
their opinions. It would be idle to deny that, in startling the minds of
steady-going people, this change did, for the moment, weaken the
influence and weight of those who had changed. This must be so. A man
who