it; ought to have led Ireland to believe in the sincere friendliness of England, and produced a new cordiality between the islands.  It did nothing of the kind.  It was held to have been extorted from our fears; its grace and sweetness were destroyed by the concomitant severities which the Coercion Act had brought into force, as wholesome food becomes distasteful when some bitter compound has been sprinkled over it.  We were deeply mortified at this result of our efforts.  What was the malign power which made the boons we had conferred shrivel up, “like fairy gifts fading away”?  We still believed the Coercion Act to have been justified, but lamented the fate which baffled the main object of our efforts, the winning over Ireland to trust the justice and the capacity of the Imperial Parliament.  And thus the two facts which stood out from the history of this eventful session were, first, that even in legislating for the good of Ireland we were legislating against the wishes of Ireland, imposing on her enactments which her representatives opposed, and which we supported only at the bidding of the Ministry; and, secondly, that at the end of a long session, entirely devoted to her needs, we found her more hostile and not less disturbed than she had been at its beginning.  We began to wonder whether we should ever succeed better on our present lines.  But we still mostly regarded Home Rule as a disagreeable solution.

SESSION OF 1882.—­Still graver were the lessons of the first four months of this year.  Mr. Forster went on filling the prisons of Ireland with persons whom he arrested under the Habeas Corpus Suspension Act, and never brought to trial.  But the country grew no more quiet.  At last he had nine hundred and forty men under lock and key, many of them not “village ruffians,” whose power a few weeks’ detention was to break, but political offenders, and even popular leaders.  How long could this go on?  Where was it to stop?  It became plain that the Act was a failure, and that the people, trained to combination by a century and a half’s practice, were too strong for the Executive.  Either the scheme and plan of the Act had been wrong, or its administration had been incompetent.  Whichever was the source of the failure (most people will now blame both), the fault must be laid at the door of the Irish Executive; not of Mr. Forster himself, but of those on whom he relied.  It had been a Dublin Castle Bill, conceived and carried out by the incompetent bureaucracy which has so long pretended to govern Ireland.  Such a proof of incompetence destroyed whatever confidence in that bureaucracy then remained to us, and the disclosures which the Phoenix Park murders and the subsequent proceedings against the Invincibles brought out, proved beyond question that the Irish Executive had only succeeded in giving a more dark and dangerous form, the form of ruthless conspiracy, to the agitation it was combating.