It was a Tory Government which in the London Riots of 1866 made, as Matthew Arnold said, “an exhibition of mismanagement, imprudence, and weakness almost incredible.”  Next year the Fenians blew up Clerkenwell Prison, and the same acute critic observed:  “A Government which dares not deal with a mob, of any nation or with any design, simply opens the floodgates to anarchy.  Who can wonder at the Irish, who have cause to hate us, and who do not own their allegiance to us, making war on a State and society which has shown itself irresolute and feeble?”

But the head of that feeble State, the leader of that irresolute society, was the fourteenth Earl of Derby, whose ancestors had practised the arts of government for eight hundred years.

In Ireland the case is the same.  Both parties have succeeded in governing it, and both have failed.  Mr. Balfour has been justly praised for his vigour in protecting property and restoring order; but it was Lord Spencer and Sir George Trevelyan who, four years before, had caught and hanged the assassins of the Phoenix Park, and had abolished agrarian murder.  It was, alas! a Liberal Government that tolerated the Ulster treason, and so prepared the way for the Dublin rebellion.  Highly placed and highly paid flaccidity then reigned supreme, and produced its inevitable result.  But last December we were assured that flaccidity had made way for firmness, and that the pudding had been replaced by the flint.  But the transactions of the last few weeks—­one transaction in particular[*]—­seem worthy of our flabbiest days.

[Footnote *:  A release for political objects.]

I turn my eyes homewards again, from Dublin to the House of Commons.  The report of the Mesopotamia Commission has announced to the world a series of actions which every Briton feels as a national disgrace.  Are the perpetrators of those actions to go unpunished?  Are they to retain their honours and emoluments, the confidence of their Sovereign, and the approbation of his Ministers?  If so, flaccidity will stand revealed as what in truth it has always been—­the one quality which neutralizes all other gifts, and makes its possessor incapable of governing.

V

THE PROMISE OF MAY

This is the real season for a holiday, if holidays were still possible.  It is a point of literary honour not to quote the line which shows that our forefathers, in the days of Chaucer, felt the holiday-making instinct of the spring, and that instinct has not been affected by the lapse of the centuries.  It stirs us even in London, when the impetuous lilacs are bursting into bud, and the sooty sparrows chirrup love-songs, and “a livelier iris changes on the burnished dove”—­or, to be more accurate, pigeon—­which swells and straddles as if Piccadilly were all his own.  The very wallflowers and daffodils which crown the costers’ barrows help to weave the spell; and, though pleasure-jaunts are out of the question, we welcome a call of duty which takes us, even for twenty-four hours, into “the country places, which God made and not man.”