nion that the grant of local government to Ireland would be
even more dangerous to the United Kingdom than the grant of Home
Rule.[23]

If we turn back, indeed, to the early Parliamentary debates and the
speeches in the country, we find that Mr. Chamberlain in 1886
concentrated his attack rather on Mr. Gladstone's Land Bill[24] than on
his Home Rule scheme. In his speech on the second reading of the 1886
Bill, indeed, Mr. Chamberlain proclaimed himself a Home Ruler on a
larger scale than Mr. Gladstone--a federal Home Ruler. But in the
country, he brought every resource of his intellect to oppose the
scheme of land purchase.

Similarly with John Bright. Lord Morley, in his "Life of Gladstone,"
describes Bright's speech on July 1st, 1886, as the "death warrant" of
the first Home Rule Bill. But if we turn to that speech we find that
Bright, too, based his opposition to Home Rule almost entirely on his
hatred of the great land purchase scheme of that year. He called it a
"most monstrous proposal." "If it were not for a Bill like this," he
said, "to alter the Government of Ireland, to revolutionise it, no one
would dream of this extravagant and monstrous proposition in regard to
Irish land; and if the political proposition makes the economic
necessary, then the economic or land purchase proposition, in my
opinion, absolutely condemns the political proposition." In other
words, John Bright held to the view that it was the necessity for the
Irish Land Bill of 1886 which condemned the Home Rule Bill of that
year.

So powerfully did that argument work on the feelings of the British
public that in the Home Rule Bill of 1893, not only was the land
purchase proposition dropped, but in its place a clause was actually
inserted forbidding the new Irish Parliament to pass any legislation
"respecting the relations of landlord and tenant for the sale, purchase
or re-letting of land" for a period of three years after the passing of
the Act.[25]

So anxious was Mr. Gladstone to show to the English people that Home
Rule could be given to Ireland without the necessity of expenditure on
land purchase, and with comparative safety to the continuance of the
landlord system in Ireland!

Such was the record on these questions up to the year 1895, when the
Unionists brought the short Liberal Parliament to a close, and entered
upon a period of ten years' power, sustained in two elections with a
Parliamentary majority of 150 in 1895 and of 130