e time when under Butt's leadership a
punctilious observance of Parliamentary procedure earned for the Irish
representatives a contumelious respect which laughed their demands out
of court.

If Parnell had not set out with the deliberate intention of making
Ireland stink in the nostrils of the respectable English gentlemen who
thronged the benches of the finest club in London, the protest against
misgovernment would have taken the form of violence in Ireland and not
of obstruction in the House of Commons. The orderly debates of Butt's
time were as unproductive in showing the Irish representatives to be in
earnest as were the wholesale suspensions of the later _regime_
profitable, and if proof of this be needed it is to be found in the fact
that in 1877 there were but eight English Home Rulers in the House of
Commons, and that to attempt to secure reforms was to knock one's head
against a stone wall. Speaking of the Irish representation in 1880 Mr.
Gladstone made this solemn declaration:--"I believe a greater calumny, a
more gross and injurious statement, could not possibly be made against
the Irish nation. We believe we are at issue with an organised attempt
to override the free will and judgment of the Irish nation." That bubble
was pricked after the Franchise Act of 1885, when Parnell returned to
the House of Commons with nearly twenty more followers than he had had
before.

There is a quotation of Blackstone's from Lord Burghley to the effect
that England could never be ruined but by a Parliament, and Englishmen
must admit that they have paid a price, though by no means as we think
too dearly, for insisting on the maintenance in their chamber, under
existing conditions of a foreign body against its will and admittedly
hostile to the traditions of which they are so proud. The closure,
which Lord Randolph Churchill used to pronounce with elaborate emphasis
as _cloture_, the curtailment of the rights of private members, the
growth in the power of the Cabinet, and _pari passu_ the loss in power
on the part of the House, all these are instances of the way in which
the sand in the bearings has been able to thwart the Parliamentary
machine. "If we cannot rule ourselves," said Parnell in 1884, "we can,
at least, cause them to be ruled as we choose."

In spite of the odium which it entailed, Parnell, once he had "taken his
coat off," maintained this attitude regardless of the feelings it
evoked, which are perhaps as well e