Meantime, in the House itself the Home Rule Bill was crawling slowly along.  The Unionists were at their sinister work of delaying its progress by all kinds of absurd and irrelevant amendments.  For instance, one Unionist wished to restrict the Irish Legislature as to the law of marriage and divorce.  Mr. Gladstone has over and over again pointed out that, as the Irish have one way of looking at these things, and the English another, it would be absurd not to allow the Irish Legislature to settle such a matter in accordance with Irish feeling.  Curiously enough, the Unionists did not receive much encouragement on this point from the Irish branch of the enemies of Home Rule.  Mr. Macartney, an Irish Orangeman, proclaimed on the part of his co-religionists that the Irish Protestants had nearly as much objection to divorce as the Irish Catholics; and, so far as that part of the amendment was concerned, he had no desire to see it pressed.  What he apprehended was a change in the law for the purpose of prejudicing mixed marriages—­marriages between Catholics and Protestants.  Mr. Gladstone, it is well known, on the question of divorce is a very sound and very strong Conservative.  The sturdy fight he made against divorce still lives in Parliamentary history, and has often been brought up—­sometimes in justification of equally stubborn fights—­against him.  It is one of the points on which he does not seem to have much modified his opinions, in spite of the advance of time, and all that has taken place in the long stretch of years between now and the day when an unbelieving and pagan minister like Lord Palmerston enabled men and women to get rid of adulterous spouses.  But Mr. Gladstone declined to be drawn.

[Sidenote:  Disestablishment.]

On June 18th, Mr. Bartley proposed an amendment to a restriction in the Bill with regard to the establishment and endowment of any church.  By the Bill—­as is pretty well known—­the Irish Parliament are forbidden to confer on any church the privilege of State establishment and State endowment.  To this restriction no Irish member has ever raised the least objection.  It was reserved for Mr. Bartley—­one of the most vehement opponents of Irish nationality and an Irish Parliament—­to declare that such a restriction would make the Parliament unworthy of the acceptance of a nation of freemen, and to propose that accordingly it should be removed.  The position, then, in which the Irish opponents of the Bill were placed, was this—­that while denouncing the supremacy and encroachments of the Catholic Church as one of the main objections against the Bill, they proposed that the Irish Parliament should have the right to establish and endow that very Church.  Mr. Balfour perceived—­under the light thus borne in upon him—­that this was not an amendment which the Tory party could safely support; and he accordingly advised Mr. Bartley to withdraw it.  Mr. Gladstone made a few scornful observations; and, without a division, the proposal was huddled out of sight.  It was almost a pity.  It would have been such an instructive spectacle to see the whole Tory party voting that the Catholic Church in Ireland should have the right to be endowed and established; and some of the Irish members felt this so much, that they were very much inclined to force the Tories to a division.  But they let the incident pass.