tenantry as Mr. Gladstone's Irish Land Bill, would have been
proposed by a Government, or could have been carried through Parliament,
unless the British public had been led to perceive that a case might be
made, and perhaps a party formed, for a measure considerably stronger.
It is the character of the British people, or at least of the higher and
middle classes who pass muster for the British people, that to induce
them to approve of any change, it is necessary that they should look
upon it as a middle course: they think every proposal extreme and
violent unless they hear of some other proposal going still farther,
upon which their antipathy to extreme views may discharge itself. So it
proved in the present instance; my proposal was condemned, but any
scheme for Irish Land reform short of mine, came to be thought moderate
by comparison. I may observe that the attacks made on my plan usually
gave a very incorrect idea of its nature. It was usually discussed as a
proposal that the State should buy up the land and become the universal
landlord; though in fact it only offered to each individual landlord
this as an alternative, if he liked better to sell his estate than to
retain it on the new conditions; and I fully anticipated that most
landlords would continue to prefer the position of landowners to that of
Government annuitants, and would retain their existing relation to their
tenants, often on more indulgent terms than the full rents on which the
compensation to be given them by Government would have been based. This
and many other explanations I gave in a speech on Ireland, in the debate
on Mr. Maguire's Resolution, early in the session of 1868. A corrected
report of this speech, together with my speech on Mr. Fortescue's Bill,
has been published (not by me, but with my permission) in Ireland.

Another public duty, of a most serious kind, it was my lot to have to
perform, both in and out of Parliament, during these years. A
disturbance in Jamaica, provoked in the first instance by injustice, and
exaggerated by rage and panic into a premeditated rebellion, had been
the motive or excuse for taking hundreds of innocent lives by military
violence, or by sentence of what were called courts-martial, continuing
for weeks after the brief disturbance had been put down; with many added
atrocities of destruction of property logging women as well as men, and
a general display of the brutal recklessness which usually prevails when