that the Ministry of 1880 ended its career amid the pitfalls of an Irish Coercion Bill.  The maxim to beware when all men speak well of you, there has been no need to impress on Irish members since the days of Parnell, as there was at the time when under Butt’s leadership a punctilious observance of Parliamentary procedure earned for the Irish representatives a contumelious respect which laughed their demands out of court.

If Parnell had not set out with the deliberate intention of making Ireland stink in the nostrils of the respectable English gentlemen who thronged the benches of the finest club in London, the protest against misgovernment would have taken the form of violence in Ireland and not of obstruction in the House of Commons.  The orderly debates of Butt’s time were as unproductive in showing the Irish representatives to be in earnest as were the wholesale suspensions of the later regime profitable, and if proof of this be needed it is to be found in the fact that in 1877 there were but eight English Home Rulers in the House of Commons, and that to attempt to secure reforms was to knock one’s head against a stone wall.  Speaking of the Irish representation in 1880 Mr. Gladstone made this solemn declaration:—­“I believe a greater calumny, a more gross and injurious statement, could not possibly be made against the Irish nation.  We believe we are at issue with an organised attempt to override the free will and judgment of the Irish nation.”  That bubble was pricked after the Franchise Act of 1885, when Parnell returned to the House of Commons with nearly twenty more followers than he had had before.

There is a quotation of Blackstone’s from Lord Burghley to the effect that England could never be ruined but by a Parliament, and Englishmen must admit that they have paid a price, though by no means as we think too dearly, for insisting on the maintenance in their chamber, under existing conditions of a foreign body against its will and admittedly hostile to the traditions of which they are so proud.  The closure, which Lord Randolph Churchill used to pronounce with elaborate emphasis as cloture, the curtailment of the rights of private members, the growth in the power of the Cabinet, and pari passu the loss in power on the part of the House, all these are instances of the way in which the sand in the bearings has been able to thwart the Parliamentary machine.  “If we cannot rule ourselves,” said Parnell in 1884, “we can, at least, cause them to be ruled as we choose.”

In spite of the odium which it entailed, Parnell, once he had “taken his coat off,” maintained this attitude regardless of the feelings it evoked, which are perhaps as well expressed as anywhere in a letter of Lord Salisbury to Lord Randolph Churchill when he declared “the instinctive feeling of an Englishman is to wish to get rid of an Irishman,” to which one may reply—­“What! did the hand then of the Potter shake?”