poor people, and the law should look after them, instead
of which it has only looked after the rich." To hold opinions so
unconventional in the service of a Unionist Viceroy was impossible, and
in a year other fields for Sir Redvers' activities were found. Sir West
Ridgeway, who succeeded him, served as Mr. Balfour's lieutenant during
the latter's efforts to "kill Home Rule with kindness," and it is
significant to find him at this day writing articles in the reviews on
the disappearance of Unionism, and pinning his faith to Dunravenism as
the next move.

It is assuredly a remarkable fact that the shrewdest of English
statesmen have not been able to see the complication with which the
Irish problem is entangled. Macaulay imagined that the religious
difficulty was the crux of the Irish question, but Emancipation did not
bring the expected peace and contentment in its train. John Bright
imagined that the agrarian question was the only obstacle to
reconciliation, but a recognition three-quarters of a century after the
Union that the laws of tenure are made for man and not man for the laws
of tenure, failed to put an end to Irish disaffection. Mr. Gladstone
thought in 1870 that the Irish problem was solved. Complicated as the
question has been in its various aspects--religious, racial, economic,
and agrarian--our demands have too often and too long been met in the
spirit of the Levite who passed by on the other side, until violence has
forced tardy redress, acquiesced in with reluctance. If the action of
Wellington and Peel was pusillanimous in granting Emancipation, for the
express purpose of resisting which they were placed in power, backed as
they were in their refusal by their allies in Ireland, the next great
measures of reform forty years later were admitted by Mr. Gladstone
himself to be equally the result of violence and breaches of the law.
The Queen's Speech of 1880 contained but a passing reference to Ireland
and of the intention of the Government to rule without exceptional
legislation; the Queen's Speech of 1881 contained reference to little
but Ireland and of the intention of the Government to introduce a
Coercion Bill.

In July, 1885, Lord Salisbury's Viceroy, on taking office, deprecated
the use of Coercion, but in January, 1886, the same Government
introduced a Coercion Bill, though less than six months before they had
repudiated it, and had beaten the Liberal Government on this very issue
with the aid of