e House was the less to be opposed since, whilst it
strengthened the hands of the Executive, it did not greatly exceed or
infringe the ordinary law. Mr. Bright at the same time, it is only fair
to add, made no secret of his own conviction that the Government had not
grappled with sufficient courage with its difficulties, and he
complained of the delay which had arisen over promised legislation of a
remedial character.

Lord John himself was persuaded, some time before Mr. Bright made this
speech, that it was useless to attempt to meet the captious and selfish
objections on the question of agrarian reform of the landlord class;
and, as a matter of fact, he had already drawn up, without consulting
anyone, the outline of a measure which he described to Lord Clarendon as
a 'plan for giving some security and some provision to the miserable
cottiers, who are now treated as brute beasts.' Years before--to be
exact, in the spring of 1844--he had declared in the House of Commons
that, whilst the Government of England was, as it ought to be, a
Government of opinion, the Government of Ireland was notoriously a
Government of force. Gradually he was forced to the view that centuries
of oppression and misunderstanding, of class hatred and opposite aims,
had brought about a social condition which made it necessary that
judicial authority should have a voice between landlord and tenant in
every case of ejectment. Lord John's difficulties in dealing with
Ireland were complicated by the distrust of three-fourths of the people
of the good intentions of English statesmanship. Political agitators,
great and small, of the Young Ireland school, did their best to deepen
the suspicions of an impulsive and ignorant peasantry against the
Whigs, and Lord John was personally assailed, until he became a sort of
bogie-man to the lively and undisciplined imagination of a sensitive but
resentful race.

[Sidenote: THE TREASON FELONY ACT]

Even educated Irishmen of a later generation have, with scarcely an
exception, failed to do justice either to the dull weight of prejudice
and opposition with which Lord John had to contend in his efforts to
help their country, or to give him due credit for the constructive
statesmanship which he brought to a complicated and disheartening
task.[16] Lord John Russell was, in fact, in some directions not only in
advance of his party but of his times; and, though it has long been the
fashion to cavil at his Irish pol