In plain truth we have all of us forgotten the meaning of necessity.  Gladstonians have come honestly to confuse the needs of a party with the necessities of the country.  This is a delusion that at all times and in all lands affects great political connections which, having once rendered high services to the nation, have outlived the valid reasons for their existence.  The Republicans saved the United States from disruption.  Hence in 1888, when Secession was an historical memory, many of the most to be respected among Americans believed that the rule of an honest Democrat was a worse evil than the rule of a corrupt Republican.  Thousands of Frenchmen, amidst the moral bankruptcy of Republican politicians, still hold that, because Republicans years ago saved France from ruin, even reconciled Conservatives cannot in the year 1893 be placed in office without danger to the commonwealth.  So it is abroad; so it has been in England.  In 1760 the best and wisest of English statesmen deemed it impossible that England should be rightly governed by any politicians but the representatives of the Revolution Families.  In 1829 honest citizens trembled at the thought of power passing into the hands of the Whigs; for the Tories had ruled for nearly sixty years, and the Tories had preserved England from revolution and invasion.  So at this moment to many well-meaning Liberals the long predominance of the Liberal party makes the possibility of a Cabinet containing politicians who may in any sense be called Tories seem a monstrous calamity, which it is a necessity to avert.  Vain to point out that Lord Salisbury and Mr. Balfour are such Tories as Eldon would have called Jacobins and Lord Melbourne Radicals, and that, they are allied with the best and most trustworthy of living Liberal leaders.  Their is no arguing with sentiment; it is necessary to keep the Gladstonian Liberals in office, and the constitution must be sacrificed in order that Lord Salisbury may not resume the Premiership.  But there is a deeper cause than all this for our strange ideas of necessity.  Habitual ease and unvarying prosperity have for a moment lowered the national spirit.  Englishmen confuse inconveniences with dangers; they have forgotten what real peril is; they cannot understand the calmness with which, not a century ago, their fathers resisted at once insurrection in Ireland and the most powerful foreign enemy who has ever challenged the power of England, and this too at a time when the population of Great Britain was not above nine millions and the people of Ireland numbered more than four millions, when France was the leading military power of the world, and Ireland might at any moment receive the aid of a French army led by one of the best French generals.  The men of 1798 or 1800 would mock at our ideas of necessity.  Ireland has not an eighth of the population of the United Kingdom; our Home Rulers are not Ireland; they are a very different thing—­the Irish populace.  Let us yield everything which ought