accepting and defending the actions of the Home Rulers.  He worshipped what he had formerly burnt, and he burned what he had hitherto worshipped.  The result was that for several years England beheld for the first time the scandalous spectacle of men who had held high office under the Crown openly defending—­and even instigating—­lawlessness and disorder, shielding and excusing criminals, proved such before the courts, and thwarting, misrepresenting, and obstructing those whose duty it was to restore order and legality in Ireland.

Such were the difficulties that confronted Mr. Arthur Balfour as Chief Secretary for Ireland from 1887 to 1891, difficulties which he surmounted with such resolution and such statesmanship that he retired from an office that has been called “the grave of reputations” with a reputation so much enhanced as to ensure him the leadership of his party and the gratitude of Irishmen of all classes for generations to come.  And yet his method was a supremely simple one—­to reassert the supremacy of the law, to neglect, almost ostentatiously, all merely political cries, and to set himself seriously to deal with the real Irish question, that of conferring some measure of security and prosperity on a population which over wide districts had known too little of such things.

Occupying ownership of Irish land by means of State credit was not, of course, a new policy in Mr. Balfour’s day.  The Bright clauses (1869) had introduced the principle into the Statute-book, and Lord Ashbourne’s Act (1885) had carried it several steps further.  But it was Mr. Arthur Balfour and his successors, Mr. Gerald Balfour and Mr. George Wyndham, who carried it by a series of boldly conceived steps almost within sight of completion.  So thorough was the success of this policy of land purchase, and so marked was the cessation of crime and outrage and seditious agitation in every district into which it was carried, that those who made their living by agitation grew alarmed, and did all in their power to stop the working of the Purchase Acts.  One Nationalist member declared that the process had gone “quite far enough,” and that he wished it could be stopped.  The farmers who had purchased their holdings were declared to have become selfish, and “as bad as the landlords.”  In other words, they had become orderly and industrious, and had ceased to subscribe for the upkeep of the United Irish League and its salaried agitators.

The unhappy result of this outcry on the part of those whose occupation would be gone, and who would be compelled to resort to honest industry should Ireland become peaceful and prosperous, was the passing of Mr. Birrell’s “amending” Bill, which has practically stopped for the present the beneficent working of the Wyndham Act of 1903.  Under the various purchase Acts over 180,000 Irish farmers have become the owners of their holdings, thanks to over one hundred millions of public money advanced on Imperial credit for the purpose.  The first task of a Unionist government, when again in power, must be the resumption of this policy of State-aided land-purchase—­the only completely and unquestionably successful and pacifying piece of agrarian legislation in the history of English rule in Ireland.