Is the argument valid?  Is the plea of necessity made out?  The answer may be given without hesitation.  It is not.  The allegations on which the whole train of reasoning rests are tainted by exaggeration or misapprehension, and the allegations, even if taken as true, do not establish the required inference; the premises are unsound, and the premises do not support the conclusion.

The premises are unsound.

The Gladstonians are far too much of parliamentary formalists.  Their imagination and their reason are impressed by the strength in the House of Commons of the Irish party.  The eighty votes from Ireland daunt them.  But wise men must look behind votes at facts.  The eighty Irish Home Rulers are, it is true, no light matter, even when allowance is made for the way in which corruption and intimidation vitiate the vote of Ireland.  But their voice is not the voice of the Irish people; it is at most the mutter or the clamour of a predominant Irish faction.  It is the voice of Ireland in the same sense in which a century ago the shouts or yells of the Jacobin Club were the voice of France.  To any one who looks behind the forms of the constitution to the realities of life, the voice of Irish wealth, of Irish intelligence, and of Irish loyalty is at least as important as the voice of Irish sedition or discontent.  The eighty votes must in any case be reckoned morally at not more than sixty, for to this number they would be reduced by any fair and democratic scheme of representation.  No one can be less tempted than myself to make light of Irish turbulence and Irish misery.  But it must not be exaggerated.  The discontent of 1893 is nothing to the rebellion, sedition, or disloyalty of 1782, of 1798, of 1829, or of 1848.  If Irishmen of one class are discontented, Irishmen of another class are contented, prosperous, and loyal.  The protest of Irish Protestants—­the grandsons of the men who detested the Union—­against the dissolution of the Union, is the reward and triumph of Pitt’s policy of Union.  The eighty Irish members ask for Home Rule, but the tenant farmers of Ireland ask not for Home Rule but for the ownership of the land; and the Irish tenant farmers will and may under a Unionist Government become owners of their land, and, what is no slight matter, may become owners by honest means.  Vain for Mr. M’Carthy[110] to assert that Irish farmers would not have accepted even from Mr. Parnell the most favourable of land laws in exchange for Home Rule.  Mr. M’Carthy believes what he says, but it is impossible for any student of Irish history or of Irish politics to believe Mr. M’Carthy.  Facts are too strong for him.  Mr. Lalor showed a prevision denied to our amiable novelist.  Gustave de Beaumont understood political philosophy better than the lively recorder of the superficial aspects of recent English history.  Mr. Parnell and Mr. Davitt, and the whole line of witnesses before the Special Commission, tell a different tale.