Lastly:  it was in this session that the alliance of the Nationalists and the Tory Opposition became a potent factor in politics.  Its first conspicuous manifestation was in the defeat of the Government by the allied forces on the Affirmation Bill, when the least respectable privates in both armies vied with one another in boisterous rejoicings over the announcement of numbers in the division.  I do not refer to this as ground for complaint.  It was in the course of our usual political warfare that two groups, each hating and fearing the Ministry, should unite to displace it.  But we now saw what power the Irish section must exert when it came to hold the balance of numbers in the House.  Till this division, the Government had commanded a majority of the whole House.  This would probably not outlast a dissolution.  What then?  Could the two English parties, differing so profoundly from one another, combine against the third party?  Evidently not.  We must, therefore, look forward to unstable Governments, if not to a total dislocation of our Parliamentary system.

Session of 1884.—­I pass over the minor incidents of this year, including the continued neglect of remedial legislation for Ireland to dwell on its dominant and most impressive lesson.  It was the year of the Franchise Bill, which, as regards Ireland, worked an extension, not merely of the county but also of the borough franchise, and produced, owing to the economic condition of the humbler classes in that country, a far more extensive change than in England or Scotland.  When the Bill was introduced the question at once arose—­Should Ireland be included?

There were two ways of treating Ireland between which Parliament had to choose.

One was to leave her out of the Bill, on the ground that the masses of her population could not be trusted with the franchise, as being ignorant, sympathetic to crime, hostile to the English Government.  This course was the logical concomitant of exceptional coercive legislation, such as had been passed in 1881 and 1882.  It was quite compatible with generous remedial legislation.  But it placed Ireland in an unequal and lower position, treating her, as the Coercion Acts did, as a dependent country, inhabited by a population unfit for the same measure of power which the inhabitants of Britain might receive.

The other course was to bestow on Ireland the same extended franchise which the English county occupiers were to receive, applying the principle of equality, and disregarding the obvious consequences.  These consequences were both practical and logical.  The practical consequence was the increase in numbers and weight of the Irish party in Parliament hostile to Parliament itself.  The logical consequence was the duty of complying with the wishes of the enfranchised nation.  Whatever reasons were good for giving this enlarged suffrage to the Irish masses, were good for respecting the will which they might use to express it.  If the Irish were deemed fit to exercise the same full constitutional rights in legislation as the English, must they not be fit for the same rights of trial by jury, a free press, and all the privileges of personal freedom?