which Burke suggested.  He would have had the State endow the religions of Ireland and their ministries, supply Ireland with good schools, and defend Irish tenants against the extortions of bad landlords.  He was vehemently opposed to Gladstone’s scheme of Home Rule, because, in his view, it tended to disintegration where he specially desired cohesion:  but, in the tumults of 1885-8, he never lost his head, never forgot his old sympathy with Irish wrongs, never “drew up an indictment against a whole people."[22] All through these stormy years, he stood firm for an effective system of Local Government in Ireland.  Irish government, he said, had “been conducted in accordance with the wishes of the minority, and of the British Philistine.”  He desired a system which should accord with the wishes of the majority.  He deprecated Forster’s “expression of general objection to Home Rule”; because, though Home Rule as understood by Parnell was intolerable, there was another kind of Home Rule which was possible and even desirable.  He was keenly anxious that his friends, the Liberal Unionists, should not let the opportunity slip, but should bring forward a “counter scheme to Gladstone’s,” giving real powers of local government.  In 1887 he again insisted that the “opinion of quiet reasonable people throughout the country” was bent on giving the Irish the due control of their own local affairs.  He pleaded for a system “built on sufficiently large lines, not too complicated, not fantastic, not hesitating and suspicious, not taking back with one hand what it gives with the other.”  A similar system he wished to see extended to England, and he pointed out that it admirably facilitated that national control of Secondary Education for which he was always pleading.

Then again, with reference to Irish land, his belief in the action of the State displayed itself very clearly.  In his opinion the remedy for agrarian trouble in Ireland was that the State should, after rigid and impartial enquiry, distinguish between good landlords and bad, and then expropriate the bad ones.  This, he thought, would “give the sort of equity, the sort of moral satisfaction, which the case needed.”  Once again he was in harmony with Liberal opinion, when he desired to widen the basis of the State by extending the suffrage in turn to the Artisans and the Labourers.  In one respect at least he was in harmony rather with Collectivist Radicalism than with orthodox Liberalism, for he did not in the least dread the intervention of the State between employer and employed.  He desired to strengthen Parliament, the supreme organ of the national will, by reforming the House of Lords; though he strongly dissented from a scheme of reform just then in vogue.  “One can hardly imagine sensible men planning a Second Chamber which should not include the Archbishop of Canterbury, or which should include the young gentlemen who flock to the House of Lords when pigeon-shooting is in question.  But our precious Liberal Reformers are for retaining the pigeon-shooters and for expelling the Archbishop of Canterbury."[23]