the advent to power of the present Government the heads of the great
departments in Whitehall excused their apparent dilatoriness in
effecting those administrative changes which the country expected from a
Liberal Government, by the fact that after twenty years of Conservative
rule the permanent officials were so steeped in the methods of Toryism
their habits were to such a degree tinged and coloured by its policy,
that there was the greatest possible difficulty in making the necessary
alterations. In the case of Ireland this is so to a much greater extent,
and one must recognise the truth of that saying of some Irish member to
the effect that a new Chief Secretary was like the change of the dial on
a clock--the difference was not great, for the works remain the same.

The main arguments against reform are founded on prophetic fears, and if
one is impressed by the threats of a _jacquerie_ on the part of the
Orangemen, led though they may be again, as they were twenty years ago,
by a Minister of Cabinet rank, Nationalists, on the other hand, may
remind Englishmen that the Irish volcanoes are not yet extinct, and that
the history of reform is such as to show the value of violence on the
failure of peaceful persuasion--a feature the most lamentable in Irish
politics; and in this connection let it never be forgotten that "the
warnings of Irish members," as Mr. Morley wrote in the _Pall Mall
Gazette_ on the introduction of the Coercion Bill which followed the
Phoenix Park murders, "have a most unpleasant knack of coming true."
When the counsels of prudence coincide with the claims of justice,
surely the last word had been said to disarm opposition.

"Old Buckshot," said Parnell grimly enough in 1881, "thinks that by
making Ireland a gaol he will settle the Irish question." Throwing
over that theory Great Britain decided in 1884--in the phrase then
current--that to count heads was better than to break them, but having
counted them she ignored their verdict, and has continued so to do for
more than twenty years. One would have thought that she would have
applied the rigour of her theories and put an end to this travesty by
which she has conceded the letter of democracy--a phantom privilege
which she has rendered nugatory. It was the impossibility of ignoring
the constitutionally-expressed wishes of the Irish people after he had
extended the suffrage, which made Mr. Gladstone a Home Ruler, and
Englishmen have to remember that