ustified by necessity, but still a
departure from our established principles of legislation. It ought to
have brought satisfaction and confidence, if not gratitude, with it;
ought to have led Ireland to believe in the sincere friendliness of
England, and produced a new cordiality between the islands. It did
nothing of the kind. It was held to have been extorted from our fears;
its grace and sweetness were destroyed by the concomitant severities
which the Coercion Act had brought into force, as wholesome food becomes
distasteful when some bitter compound has been sprinkled over it. We
were deeply mortified at this result of our efforts. What was the malign
power which made the boons we had conferred shrivel up, "like fairy
gifts fading away"? We still believed the Coercion Act to have been
justified, but lamented the fate which baffled the main object of our
efforts, the winning over Ireland to trust the justice and the capacity
of the Imperial Parliament. And thus the two facts which stood out from
the history of this eventful session were, first, that even in
legislating for the good of Ireland we were legislating against the
wishes of Ireland, imposing on her enactments which her representatives
opposed, and which we supported only at the bidding of the Ministry;
and, secondly, that at the end of a long session, entirely devoted to
her needs, we found her more hostile and not less disturbed than she had
been at its beginning. We began to wonder whether we should ever succeed
better on our present lines. But we still mostly regarded Home Rule as a
disagreeable solution.

SESSION OF 1882.--Still graver were the lessons of the first four months
of this year. Mr. Forster went on filling the prisons of Ireland with
persons whom he arrested under the Habeas Corpus Suspension Act, and
never brought to trial. But the country grew no more quiet. At last he
had nine hundred and forty men under lock and key, many of them not
"village ruffians," whose power a few weeks' detention was to break, but
political offenders, and even popular leaders. How long could this go
on? Where was it to stop? It became plain that the Act was a failure,
and that the people, trained to combination by a century and a half's
practice, were too strong for the Executive. Either the scheme and plan
of the Act had been wrong, or its administration had been incompetent.
Whichever was the source of the failure (most people will now blame
both), the fault mu