In sober truth, however, the administration of Government really rests with the Chief Secretary in recent times, although it was not so before the advent of Mr. Foster.  Men like Lord Naas, Sir Robert Peel the younger, and Mr. Chichester Fortescue—­afterwards Lord Carlingford—­were mere official cyphers, but after Mr. Gladstone’s 1880 ministry this has never been the case.

Of Sir Robert Peel it was wittily said that when Chief Secretary he went through the country on an outside car, which made him take a one-sided view of the Irish question.

Lord Morris said to an inquiring Scottish M.P.:—­

’Did you ever know a Scottish Secretary who was not Scottish, or an Irish Secretary who was Irish?’

‘No,’ said the Scotsman.

’Well, go home and moralise over that as a possible solution of some Irish difficulties, for may be, if an Irishman was sent over, by accident, to be Chief Secretary, the official would not fall into the mistake of trying to reconcile the irerconcilable.’

And to my mind Lord Morris had the last word in every sense.

Mr. W.E.  Forster was far too honest to be the tool of Mr. Gladstone’s Hibernian dishonesty.  He was perfectly fearless, but, beneath his rugged exterior, deeply sensitive.  He winced under ‘buckshot,’ and many other epithets; but abuse and danger alike never prevented him from doing what he had to do to the best of his ability.  His earliest acquaintance with Ireland had been in the famine, when he was one of the deputation of succour organised by the Society of Friends, and everybody who has read Mr. Morley’s Life of Cobden will remember the appreciation of their efforts by the great free-trader.

Mr. Forster did not think the Irish administration should be all ’a scuffle and a scramble,’ and he inaugurated a reversal of the old balance between Lord-Lieutenants and Chief Secretaries which has never been subsequently changed.  Indeed, it is often only the latter who has a seat in the Cabinet.  He was the victim of many misapprehensions—­the bulk of them wilful—­but one which worried him was a widespread conviction that he was a slow man.  His delivery was slow, his manner deliberate, and he did not lightly give an opinion.  Yet emphatically he was not a slow man, and as an instance may be stated the fact that he elaborated his scheme of decentralising the powers of the Irish Government in a single evening in December 1881.  I know he was harassed, nay, martyrised, beyond endurance, through the evasive volubility of Mr. Gladstone, which, both by mouth and letter, formed a heavier burden than all the Irish attacks; but he was a just and conscientious man, and I never heard of a case where appeal was made to him on which he did not act as reasonably as was compatible with loyalty to such a Prime Minister.

His courage in walking unarmed and without police escort in Tulla and Athenry was as great as ever was displayed by a knight-errant of old.  The Nationalist papers, no longer able to taunt him with cowardice, took to declaring him to be a person notorious for ferocious brutality.