As regards social order, I have shown that the choice which lies before the opponents of Home Rule is either to continue the policy of coercing the peasantry by severe special legislation, or to remove the source of friction by buying out the landlords for the benefit of the tenants.  The present Ministry have chosen the former alternative, but they dangle before the eyes of their supporters some prospect that they may ultimately revert to the latter.  Now, the only way that has yet been pointed out of buying out the landlords, without imposing tremendous liabilities of loss upon the British Treasury, is the creation of a strong Home Rule Government in Dublin.  Supposing, however, that some other plan could be discovered, which would avoid the fatal objections to which an extension of the plan of the (Salisbury) Land Purchase Act of 1885 is open, such a plan would remove one of the chief objections to an Irish Parliament, by leaving no estates for such a Parliament to confiscate.  As for coercion every day, I might say, every bye-election shows us how it becomes more and more odious to the British democracy.  They dislike severity; they dislike the inequality involved in passing harsher laws for Ireland than those that apply to England and Scotland.  They find themselves forced to sympathize with acts of violence in Ireland which they would condemn in Great Britain, because these acts seem the only way of resisting harsh and unjust laws.  When the recoil comes, it will be more violent than in former days.  The wish to discover some other course will be very strong, and the obvious other course will be to leave it to an Irish authority to enforce social order in its own way—­probably a more rough-and-ready way than that of British officials.  The notion which has possessed most Englishmen, that Irish self-government would be another name for anarchy, is curiously erroneous.  Conflicts there may be, but a vigorous rule will emerge.

Lastly, as to local government.  If a popular system is established in Ireland—­one similar to that which it is proposed to establish in England—­the control of its assemblies and officials will, over four-fifths of the island, fall into Nationalist hands.  Their power will be enormously increased, for they will then command the machinery of administration, and the power of taxing.  What with taxing landlords, aiding recalcitrant tenants, stopping the wheels of any central authority which may displease or oppose them, they will be in so strong a position that the creation of an Irish Parliament may appear to be a comparatively small further step, may even appear (as the wisest Nationalists now think it would prove) in the light of a check upon the abuse of local powers.  These eventualities will unquestionably, when English opinion has realized them, make such a Parliament as the present pause before it commits rural local government to the Irish democracy.  But it could not refuse to do something; and if it tried to restrain popular