I have shown how, as a result of our aloofness from both English parties, we find ourselves between the upper and the nether millstones, and in what way in regard to the University question the old error which for so long obstructed the land question is at work—­mean the error of denying reform for English reasons and endeavouring to force English doctrines into the law and government of Ireland and of suppressing Irish customs and Irish ideas.

On the advent to power of the present Government the heads of the great departments in Whitehall excused their apparent dilatoriness in effecting those administrative changes which the country expected from a Liberal Government, by the fact that after twenty years of Conservative rule the permanent officials were so steeped in the methods of Toryism their habits were to such a degree tinged and coloured by its policy, that there was the greatest possible difficulty in making the necessary alterations.  In the case of Ireland this is so to a much greater extent, and one must recognise the truth of that saying of some Irish member to the effect that a new Chief Secretary was like the change of the dial on a clock—­the difference was not great, for the works remain the same.

The main arguments against reform are founded on prophetic fears, and if one is impressed by the threats of a jacquerie on the part of the Orangemen, led though they may be again, as they were twenty years ago, by a Minister of Cabinet rank, Nationalists, on the other hand, may remind Englishmen that the Irish volcanoes are not yet extinct, and that the history of reform is such as to show the value of violence on the failure of peaceful persuasion—­a feature the most lamentable in Irish politics; and in this connection let it never be forgotten that “the warnings of Irish members,” as Mr. Morley wrote in the Pall Mall Gazette on the introduction of the Coercion Bill which followed the Phoenix Park murders, “have a most unpleasant knack of coming true.”  When the counsels of prudence coincide with the claims of justice, surely the last word had been said to disarm opposition.

“Old Buckshot,” said Parnell grimly enough in 1881, “thinks that by making Ireland a gaol he will settle the Irish question.”  Throwing over that theory Great Britain decided in 1884—­in the phrase then current—­that to count heads was better than to break them, but having counted them she ignored their verdict, and has continued so to do for more than twenty years.  One would have thought that she would have applied the rigour of her theories and put an end to this travesty by which she has conceded the letter of democracy—­a phantom privilege which she has rendered nugatory.  It was the impossibility of ignoring the constitutionally-expressed wishes of the Irish people after he had extended the suffrage, which made Mr. Gladstone a Home Ruler, and Englishmen have to remember that this, the only remedy in the whole of their political materia medica which they have not tried, is the one which has effected a cure wherever else it has been applied.