1885, declining at the same time the honor of an earldom proffered by the Queen.  The ministry was wrecked on the rock which has proved so dangerous to all British political navigators for a hundred years.  No human genius seems capable of solving the Irish question.  It is apparently no nearer solution than it was in the days of William Pitt.  In attempts to solve the problem, Mr. Gladstone found himself opposed by the aristocracy, by the Church, by the army, by men of letters, by men of wealth throughout the country.  Lord Salisbury succeeded him; but only for a few months, and in January, 1886, Mr. Gladstone was for the third time called to the premiership.  He now advanced a step, and proposed the startling policy of Home Rule for Ireland in matters distinctly Irish; but his following would not hold together on the issue, and in June he retired again.

From then until 1891 he was not in office, but he was indefatigably working with voice and pen for the Irish cause.  He made in his retirement many converts to his opinions, and was again elevated to power on the Irish question as an issue in 1891.  Yet the English on the whole seem to be against him in his Irish policy, which is denounced as unpractical, and which his opponents even declare to be on his part an insincere policy, entered upon and pursued solely as a bid for power.  It is generally felt among the upper classes that no concession and no boons would satisfy the Irish short of virtual independence of British rule.  If political rights could be separated from political power there might be more hope of settling the difficulty, which looks like a conflict between justice and wisdom.  The sympathy of Americans is mostly on the side of the “grand old man” in his Herculean task, even while they admit that self-government in our own large cities is a dismal failure from the balance of power which is held by foreigners,—­by the Irish in the East, and by the Germans in the West.  And those who see the rapid growth of the Roman Catholic Church in the United States, especially in those sections of the country where Puritanism once had complete sway, and the immense political power wielded by Roman Catholic priests, can understand why the conservative classes of England are opposed to the recognition of the political rights of a people who might unite with socialists and radicals in overturning the institutions on which the glory and prospects of a great nation are believed to be based.  The Catholics in Ireland constitute about seven-eighths of the population, and English Protestants fear to deliver the thrifty Protestant minority into the hands of the great majority armed with the tyrannical possibilities of Home Rule.  It is indeed a many-sided and difficult problem.  There are instincts in nations, as among individuals, which reason fails to overcome, even as there are some subjects in reference to which experience is a safer guide than genius or logic.