Mr. Dunbar Barton made a valiant but vain attempt to stem the tide against him, but he, like every other Unionist, was weighted down by the feeling that the Orangemen were doing immense service to the cause of Home Rule by their brutality.  However, the fumes of Unionist oratory seem to have ascended to the heads of all the excitable young men of the Tory party.  Mr. Dunbar Barton, personally, is one of the gentlest of men; his manners are kind and good-natured enough to make him a universal favourite—­even with his vehement Nationalist foes; and he speaks with evident sincerity.  But he had so worked himself up that he babbled blithely of spending a portion of his days in penal servitude—­talked big about a mysterious organization which was being got ready in Ulster, and declared that the day would come when he would stand by the side of the Orangemen in the streets of Belfast.  He was listened to for the most part in silence, until he tripped into an unseemly remark about Mr. Gladstone, when the much-tried Liberals burst into an angry protest.

[Sidenote:  Mr. Arnold Forster.]

Very different was Mr. Arnold Forster.  I must be pardoned if, as an Irishman, I always see something genial and not wholly unlovely even in the most violent Irish enemy.  We all like Johnston of Ballykilbeg—­most of us rather like Colonel Saunderson, and Mr. Dunbar Barton is decidedly popular.  But this Arnold Forster—­with his dry, self-complacent, self-sufficient fanaticism—­is intolerable and hateful.  He never gets up without making one angry.  There is no man whose genius would entitle him to half the arrogant self-conceit of this young member.  Acrid, venomous, rasping, he injures his own cause by the very excess of his gall and by the exuberance of his pretension.  He also saw that the riots would do no good, and he hinted darkly of what he called “ordered resistance,” whatever that means.  But, on the whole, the advocates of the Orangemen made a very poor show.

[Sidenote:  Tory obstruction.]

The Tories thus early developed the policy of preventing the Government passing any Bill—­English or Irish—­good or bad.  Whenever a good English Bill stood as the first order—­a Bill which they did not dare to oppose—­they found some excuse for moving the adjournment of the House.  This is a privilege which was intended to be used very rarely, but in the course of the present Session it has been very freely resorted to—­especially when it has afforded a chance of keeping off good Government business.  On Tuesday, April 25th, the excuse given was that Mr. Bryce had been guilty of political partisanship in adding a batch of Liberals to the Bench in Lancashire over the head of Lord Sefton—­the Tory or Unionist Lord-Lieutenant of the county.  Mr. Legh, a young, silent, and retiring Tory member, began the attack, and did so in a very neat, well-worded, and pretty little speech.  Mr. Hanbury—­who is making his fame as a champion obstructive—­followed