upply Ireland with
good schools, and defend Irish tenants against the extortions of bad
landlords. He was vehemently opposed to Gladstone's scheme of Home Rule,
because, in his view, it tended to disintegration where he specially
desired cohesion: but, in the tumults of 1885-8, he never lost his head,
never forgot his old sympathy with Irish wrongs, never "drew up an
indictment against a whole people."[22] All through these stormy years,
he stood firm for an effective system of Local Government in Ireland.
Irish government, he said, had "been conducted in accordance with the
wishes of the minority, and of the British Philistine." He desired a
system which should accord with the wishes of the majority. He
deprecated Forster's "expression of general objection to Home Rule";
because, though Home Rule as understood by Parnell was intolerable,
there was another kind of Home Rule which was possible and even
desirable. He was keenly anxious that his friends, the Liberal
Unionists, should not let the opportunity slip, but should bring forward
a "counter scheme to Gladstone's," giving real powers of local
government. In 1887 he again insisted that the "opinion of quiet
reasonable people throughout the country" was bent on giving the Irish
the due control of their own local affairs. He pleaded for a system
"built on sufficiently large lines, not too complicated, not fantastic,
not hesitating and suspicious, not taking back with one hand what it
gives with the other." A similar system he wished to see extended to
England, and he pointed out that it admirably facilitated that national
control of Secondary Education for which he was always pleading.

Then again, with reference to Irish land, his belief in the action of
the State displayed itself very clearly. In his opinion the remedy for
agrarian trouble in Ireland was that the State should, after rigid and
impartial enquiry, distinguish between good landlords and bad, and then
expropriate the bad ones. This, he thought, would "give the sort of
equity, the sort of moral satisfaction, which the case needed." Once
again he was in harmony with Liberal opinion, when he desired to widen
the basis of the State by extending the suffrage in turn to the Artisans
and the Labourers. In one respect at least he was in harmony rather with
Collectivist Radicalism than with orthodox Liberalism, for he did not in
the least dread the intervention of the State between employer and
employed. He desire