valuable change which the varying aspect of human affairs
absolutely and imperiously requires ... I admit that to a
certain extent the Government will lose the affections of the
Orangemen ... but you must perceive that it is better to have
four friends and one enemy than four enemies and one friend."

--SYDNEY SMITH, _Letters of Peter Plymley_, 1807.

From the outcry which arose in the last years of the late Government at
the revelations which came to be known as the MacDonnell mystery one
would have thought that Conservatives could look back to a record
unstained by any traffic with the unclean thing for which they express
such horror. I will try to show how small is the measure of truth in
this belief, and in what manner it has proved impossible to maintain the
_status quo_ in the teeth of democratic feeling without _pourparlers_
behind the scenes, even when in the open such dealings have had perforce
to be denounced as impossible.

Twenty-five years ago the rigid application of the Crimes Act by Lord
Spencer, the Viceroy, after the Phoenix Park murders had put an end to
the "Kilmainham Treaty," and the failure on the part of the Government
to amend the Land Act of 1881, together with the sympathetic attitude of
Lord Randolph Churchill, then conducting his guerilla tactics as leader
of the Fourth Party, all served to make opposition on the part of the
Irish members to the Liberal Government increase, and it was by their
aid that in June, 1885, it was thrown out of office on a defeat by
twelve votes on the Budget. Lord Salisbury then took office with his
"ministry of care-takers," with a minority in the House of Commons, for
a general election could not take place until the provisions of the new
Franchise Act had come into force.

Colour was lent to the general impression which was abroad that the
Conservatives were flirting with Home Rule by the appointment to the
Lord Lieutenancy with a seat in the Cabinet of Lord Carnarvon, the
statesman who had established federation in Canada and had attempted to
bring it about in South Africa, who was familiar with the machinery of
subordinate legislatures and Colonial parliaments, and whose sympathies
with the Irish people were to be inferred from the fact that he had
voted for Disestablishment in 1869, and for the Land Bill of the
following year, in a speech on which measure he had urged the House of
Lords not to delay concession till it could