XA. 9-4- 
 
 THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 LOS ANGELES
 
 MR. BALFOUR'S 
 
 RULE IN IRELAND 
 
 ^^~^r 
 
 BY 
 
 M. J. F.^M'CARTHY, B.A., T.C.D., 
 
 BARRISTER- AT- LAW. 
 
 " THIS is true; that the wisdom of all these latter times in princes' affairs, is rather 
 fine deliveries and shiftings of dangers and mischiefs when they are near, than solid 
 and grounded courses to keep them aloof." BACON'S ESSAYS. 
 
 DUBLIN : 
 HODGES, FIGGIS, & CO., GRAFTON- STREET. 
 
 LONDON: 
 SIMPKIN, MARSHALL, HAMILTON, KENT, & CO. 
 
 1891.
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 I. A DANGEROUS POST A LIST OF DEAD AND WOUNDED, . . 5 
 C/J 
 
 >- II. MR. BALFOTTK RECEIVED WITH DERISION HIS FIBST ENCOUNTER 
 
 pe 
 
 WITH A PARNELLITE, 10 
 
 CO 
 
 III. THE CRIMES BILL MR. BALFOUR's STYLE AND POLICY, . 13 
 
 IV. DEATH TO AGITATION THE IRISH REIGN OF TERROR, . . 18 
 V. THE CRIMES ACT MR. BALFOUR'S GREAT INVENTION, . . 26 
 
 VI. A LOYAL CHIEF AND LOYAL COMRADES THE PLAN OF CAMPAIGN 
 
 ;3)1 AND SHADOWING, ........ 30 
 
 VII. A TRUCE TO THE LAND WAR THE GREAT LAND ACT, . . 37 
 
 > * t 
 
 VIII. MR.PARNELL 8 FALL MR. BALFOUR 8 MODESTY AND KNOWLEDGE 
 
 UJ OF IRELAND, 43 
 
 o 
 
 ix. MR. BALFOUR'S TRIUMPH THE BURIAL OF HOME RULE, . . 47 
 
 X. PARNELLITES AND ANTI-PAKNELLITE8 NEW TERRORS OF HOME 
 
 Utl.i; THE PRIESTS, 52 
 
 xi. MR. DILLON'S GREAT EXPECTATIONS JARNDYCE AND JARNDYCE, 58 
 
 |JJ XII. THE TYRANT PARNELL, 64 
 
 2 
 
 oc xiii. MR. BALFOUR'S DISTINCTION AS CHIEF SECRETARY, . . 71 
 
 
 XIV. PERSONAL THE POLICY OF HEOGAR's PRIDE, . . . .78
 
 ME, BALFOUE'S BULE IN IRELAND. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 A Dangerous Post A List of Dead and Wounded. 
 
 WHEN Mr. Balfour assumed the reins of Government at 
 Dublin, the post of Chief Secretary had gained notoriety 
 as the ruin of many promising reputations, and a post of 
 considerable danger. 
 
 To go no farther back than the defeat of Lord Beacons- 
 field at the polls in 1880, one may recall the confusion 
 and retirement of Mr. Forster, the assassination of Lord 
 Frederick Cavendish, the harrowing of Sir Greorge Tre- 
 velyan and Mr. Campbell-Bannerman, the brief rule of 
 Sir William Hart-Dyke, and the sudden appearance and 
 disappearance of Mr. W. H. Smith. Then, from February 
 to July, 1886, while the Home Rule Bill was dangling 
 in the air, came the five months' rule of Mr. Morley, 
 signalized by the Belfast riots on the one hand, and the 
 patronage extended to the Chief Secretary by the Nation- 
 alists on the other. " We may safely receive him with 
 no unfriendly greeting. He is not coming to govern 
 Ireland," said Archbishop Walsh, speaking of Mr. Morley,
 
 6 Mr, Sal four's Rule in Ireland. 
 
 "he is coming to lend his help in the carrying out of 
 the noble scheme of his great political leader ... as 
 probably the last English Chief Secretary of Ireland." 
 
 Each of those Chief Secretaries had fought the Irish 
 Party in his own way, except Mr. Morley, who surrendered 
 to them, and not one of them had left the ground with 
 honour to himself or advantage to his party. 
 
 The body of politicians known as the " Irish Party," 
 and the common enemy of all these Chief Secretaries, had 
 been beneath notice before 1880, except when Ministers 
 urgently needed a dozen votes or so. 
 
 From 1880 to 1885, during its combats with Forster, 
 Cavendish, Trevelyan, Bannerman, and Dyke, the Irish 
 Party used to muster an effective strength of about thirty 
 members ; but the general election of 1885 increased the 
 strength of that party to the unprecedented number of 
 eighty-six representatives, all directed as one man by the 
 skill and power of Mr. Parnell. The new party acted 
 with the regularity of a machine. Its members had no 
 option but to attend or resign. Most of them were paid. 
 All of them submitted to their able leader with unquestion- 
 ing obedience. 
 
 Three Chief Secretaries have had to do with this for- 
 midable Irish Party of eighty-six. Mr. Morley acted the 
 part of their obedient servant for five months. Sir Michael 
 Hicks-Beach faced them for six months, and retired from 
 the position without adding to his reputation. Mr. Bal- 
 four has been fighting the party in Parliament, and in 
 Ireland, for over four years and a half now, and it is 
 his policy and its effects that we propose to review briefly 
 in the following pages.
 
 A Dangerous Post A List of Dead and Wounded. 7 
 
 The appearance of this new Irish force in Parliament 
 supplied Mr. Gladstone with the strongest argument for 
 his Home Rule Bill. Mr. Gladstone had, in fact, like 
 Frankenstein, created a monster by his Reform Act of 1884, 
 and when he found what he had done, he instantaneously 
 made up his mind on the Home Rule question. He 
 became a convert in despair, and sent Chief Secretary 
 Morley to Ireland as Mr. Parnell's most obedient servant. 
 Mr. Gladstone then unfolded his plan for dealing with 
 this new Irish monster. It was to wipe it off at one 
 grand stroke from the face of British politics; in other 
 words, to give Home Rule to Ireland and dismiss her 
 eighty-five troublesome members from Westminster. His 
 idea appeared magnificent to many at the time, but the 
 five years that have since passed have established its utter 
 unworkableness. The subsequent defeat of the Home 
 Rule Bill, which drove Mr. Gladstone's government and 
 Chief Secretary Morley from the field, left the Irish 
 Nationalists seething with anger and disappointment. A 
 vision of salaries and positions had been conjured up by 
 the bill and, with native improvidence, the Nationalists 
 had been counting their chickens before they were 
 hatched. But the dissolution, after the defeat of Home 
 Rule in 1886, which proved so disastrous to Mr. Glad- 
 stone's party in England, sent the Irish Party back to 
 Parliament in undiminished numbers and improved 
 discipline. 
 
 The Unionist triumph made them as desperate then as 
 they had been sanguine a month before, and, when Sir 
 Michael Hicks-Beach was appointed to govern Ireland, 
 the furious storm of thwarted ambition and consequent
 
 8 Mr. Balfour's Rule in Ireland. 
 
 rage gathered round him. He was harassed in Parliament 
 and out of it, in print, in speech, and caricature. Overtly 
 his assailants sat below the gangway, under the eagle 
 eye of " that institution " known as Mr. Parnell. But 
 covertly the ex-Premier and his colleagues lent their 
 support to every onslaught made upon the Chief Secretary. 
 After holding the position six months, Sir Michael Beach 
 retired, and the event, coming close as it did upon the 
 desertion of Lord Randolph Churchill, and the death of 
 Lord Iddesleigh, seemed to threaten the existence of the 
 Government. 
 
 When the resignation was announced, the Irish Party 
 gained fresh confidence and enthusiasm from the Secre- 
 tary's fall, glorying in it as the result of their own 
 pertinacity and prowess. " Another English statesman," 
 said United Ireland, " broken upon the wheel of Irish 
 misgovernment : another career ruined, perhaps a life 
 sacrificed. Once during the fierce attack under which lie 
 winced and writhed, he actually wept. It was impossible 
 not to feel pity for him, poor Mickey the Botch. It did 
 not take long to break him up. Old Buckshot's heart may 
 have been softer and warmer, as they say, but it was of 
 tougher stuff." 
 
 The Irish Party had then reached the pinnacle of its 
 power. Subscriptions from America were flowing into 
 the treasury of the National League, together with un- 
 ceasing grants from the Irish branches to head-quarters. 
 Special funds were started besides, to meet every special 
 emergency, and were bounteously subscribed to. In half 
 of Ulster and the entire of Munster, Leinster, and Con- 
 naught there was not a town, village, or parish without
 
 A Dangerous Post A List of Dead and Wounded. 9 
 
 its branch or branches of the League. Boycotting had 
 taken an apparently permanent place amongst the insti- 
 tutions of the country. Honest public opinion found no 
 expression amongst professing Nationalists, but resolutions 
 of the League, and inspired articles in a subservient press, 
 did duty in its place. Mr. Parnell's word was in many 
 senses sovereign, from Lough Swilly to Cork Harbour. 
 
 When Sir Michael Beach retired, it may be said, meta- 
 phorically, that Mr. Parnell attached the ex-Chief Secre- 
 tary's scalp to his belt with those of Forster, Cavendish, 
 Trevelyan, Bannerman, Dyke, Smith, and Morley ; and 
 began whetting his tomahawk for the unfortunate man 
 whose lot should be cast to succeed him. The Irish Party 
 cared little who the new Chief Secretary would be, and 
 the people of Nationalist Ireland cared less. They firmly 
 believed he would succumb to their own violent attacks as 
 they claimed his predecessors had done. 
 
 There may have been a little transient curiosity to 
 know who the foredoomed individual would turn out to 
 be, but of anxiety, as there used to be early in the 
 " eighties," there was none. The Chief Secretary had by 
 that time ceased to be feared, had ceased to be even a per- 
 sonage for the vast masses of the population. He had 
 come to be regarded as an official to be patronised like 
 Mr. Morley, or bullied like Sir Michael Beach.
 
 10 Mr. Balfoin's Rule in Ireland. 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 . Balfour Received \> i t h Derision His First 
 Encounter with a Parnellite. 
 
 WHEN Mr. Balfour's appointment was declared, the Irish 
 Nationalist papers indulged in hysterics of derision and 
 delight. Derision at the ascertained culture, delicacy -of 
 taste, and personal appearance of the new Chief Secretary ; 
 delight at the easiness with which so much sensibility was 
 hound to fall before their valour. " The new Chief Secre- 
 tary," said United Ireland, " who is a man of languor and 
 culture, and a person of exceedingly long, loose, and 
 almost disjointed frame, reminds one of nothing more, 
 when he throws himself horizontally back on the bench 
 with his feet on the floor, than that species of spider known 
 as Daddy Longlegs." 
 
 " We believe," said the Freeman, " he has undertaken a 
 task beyond the range of his genius. ... It is true the 
 task is Herculean. . . . But we are as convinced of his 
 inevitable failure as we are of our own existence." The 
 Annual Register for 1887, a compilation which professes to 
 be a colourless record of public events, stated that " the 
 selection of Mr. Arthur Balfour was interpreted as an act 
 of despair done by ruined politicians." 
 
 The Irish members openly expressed disappointment
 
 First Encounter with a Parnellite. 1 1 
 
 that a foeman more worthy of their steel had not been 
 appointed to the office. Although Mr. Balfour had been 
 a member of the House of Commons for thirteen years 
 prior to his appointment as Chief Secretary, he had not 
 as yet gained notoriety in that assemblage. During that 
 period when the noise and fury of a coeval parliamentarian 
 seemed likely to be permanently mistaken for greatness by 
 the outside world, Mr. Balfour was quietly garnering his 
 store of parliamentary experience. He had served as 
 secretary to his uncle, Lord Salisbury, during the Berlin 
 conference in 1878, and after 1885 had held the positions 
 of President of the Local Government Board and Secretary 
 for Scotland. He entered upon the duties of his office as 
 Chief Secretary for Ireland on the 8th March, 1887. Both 
 the Prime Minister and Mr. Balfour at once announced 
 their determination that the rule of the National League 
 should give way to the rule of the law in Ireland. The 
 authority of the law should be restored before any remedial 
 legislation would be passed. "Legislative relief," said 
 Lord Salisbury," instead of tending to quiet, will only 
 aggravate the disorder so long as it is believed that more 
 agitation can wring more measures of the same kind out 
 of the Legislature." The Cabinet forthwith set itself to 
 the task of preparing the Criminal Law Amendment (Ire- 
 land) Bill, better known as Mr. Balfour's Crimes Act. In 
 the interval during the preparation of the Crimes Bill, 
 Mr. Balfour was not left without opportunities of trying 
 his strength with the members of the Irish Party. One 
 of the first, if not the very first, of his encounters with a 
 Pavuellite is worth relating. We take the account ver- 
 batim from United Ireland of March 12th, 1887. " When
 
 12 Mr. Balfonr's Rule in Ireland. 
 
 Mr. P. J. O'Brien, calling attention to the fact that Baron 
 Dowse at Nenagh had declared the North Riding of Tip- 
 perary to be singularly free from crime, asked that the 
 extra police for that district should be removed, Mr. Bal- 
 four replied that he was glad to have such testimony from 
 the learned Judge as to the efficiency with which the 
 extra police discharged their duties, and that just in con- 
 sequence he should not think of removing officers whose 
 presence had brought about such a happy state of things. 
 It was flippancy like this that the lamented Jemmy 
 Lowther came his cropper at. Yet Jemmy was a full- 
 blooded, rough - riding, pachydermatous, devil-may-care 
 official, not at all a silk-skinned Sybarite whose rest a 
 crumpled rose-leaf would disturb. It will be an interesting 
 if somewhat ghastly experience, to watch the wilting of 
 this delicate lily in the fiery furnace into which it has so 
 boldly ventured. Mickey the Botch will enjoy the sight, 
 if his eyesight lets him." 
 
 As time wore on, and the Nationalist members dis- 
 covered Mr. Balfour's intellectual strength, debating skill, 
 humour, resource, and powers of repartee, they dropped 
 this derisive and sarcastic mode of attack, and assailed 
 the Chief Secretary in terms of brutal violence. But Mr. 
 Bal four held steadily on his course unawed, and apparently 
 even undisturbed, by the threats and denunciations of 
 that trained band of able men, all of whom were experts 
 in the parliamentary art of baiting a Chief Secretary.
 
 The Crimes Bill Mr. Balfour's Style and Policy. 13 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 The Crimes Bill Hr. Balfour's Style and Policy. 
 
 MR. BALFOUR'S first pitched battle with the Irish Party 
 began on the 21st March, when he gave notice in the 
 House of Commons that he would introduce his Crimes 
 Bill on the following day. Mr. W. H. Smith immediately 
 followed him with notice that he would move for prece- 
 dence for the Bill, both at its introduction and all subse- 
 quent stages. The House then went into Committee of 
 Supply, and the Irish Party obstructed every vote to such 
 vindictive length that the House did not conclude its 
 sitting until half-past one p.m. on the following day, 
 having sat for twenty hours and a-half. In a couple of 
 hours after, that is to say, at four o'clock p.m. on the 
 22nd March, the House met again to discuss Mr. Smith's 
 motion for precedence for the Crimes Bill. Mr. Morley 
 moved the Opposition amendment, and Mr. Balfour replied 
 in defence of the motion for precedence. This was his 
 first important speech as Chief Secretary for Ireland. He 
 craved the indulgence of the House. It was only twenty-four 
 hours ago since Mr. Morley had given notice of his amend- 
 ment, an amendment that amounted to a vote of want of 
 confidence. " I make no complaint," added Mr. Balfour, 
 " I merely state the fact. Since that time I was in the
 
 14 Mr, Salfour'a Rule in Ireland. 
 
 House till a quarter to four this morning, and had to return 
 at 10.30 and make two speeches before breakfast. The 
 House did not rise till 1.30 p.m., and at 1 p.m. there was 
 a Cabinet meeting." Few Chief Secretaries have made a 
 first speech in defence of their policy under circumstances 
 of greater difficulty. He had been taunted with not 
 having introduced a Land Bill before going on with the 
 Crimes Bill. His reply sums up the motive of the 
 Government's policy in a most trenchant style : " If the 
 effect of passing our Land Bill, or any Land Bill would 
 lead to such a change that juries would cease to be intimi- 
 dated, and that witnesses would come forward and give 
 their evidence, then every one of my colleagues would 
 hasten to bring forward such a measure. But what chance 
 is there that if we put off this Criminal Bill, when Ireland 
 is weekly going to the worse, when society is crumbling 
 to its original atoms, what chance is there that we shall 
 restore the sanctity of contract and respect for law by 
 introducing any Land Bill ? " Mr. Gladstone spoke 
 vigorously against Mr. Smith's motion, and the Freeman 
 proudly announced that " Mr. Gladstone had formally 
 taken command of the forces opposed to coercion, and last 
 night he plunged into the thick of the fray." 
 
 The Crimes Bill was introduced by Mr. Balfour on 
 March 28th, in a speech packed full of instances of the 
 cruel boycotting and social tyranny which was then ram- 
 pant in Ireland. The Chief Secretary concluded by 
 saying : " For the first time in the history of this coun- 
 try, the victims of oppression, of outrage, and of murder, 
 have called upon the Government to protect them, and 
 the Government has not been supported by the English
 
 The Crimes Bill Mr. Bnl/our's Style and Policy. 15 
 
 minority. Many of those who are most devoted to the 
 cause of liberty pay but a cold and frigid respect to the 
 cause of order. I will not ask whether, under some cir- 
 cumstances, these two great principles are or are not ever 
 opposed ; but I will say, and say boldly, that in this case 
 they are united, and that if I appeal to one rather than 
 to the other, it is in the cause of liberty that I ask this 
 House to support us in breaking the yoke under which so 
 large a part of Ireland is now groaning." 
 
 Mr. Parnell moved an amendment to the effect that a 
 further investigation into the state of Ireland should be 
 made before proceeding with the Crimes Bill. Mr. Balfour, 
 in reply, said : " I am afraid that the House is already 
 but too well acquainted with the state of Ireland, and if 
 anybody entertains doubts as to the condition of the 
 country, surely it is not the honourable member for Cork 
 and his friends. They, at all events, if no other members 
 of this House, should know to what an unhappy state the 
 country is reduced. They should know the condition of 
 Ireland, as an artificer recognizes his own handiwork." 
 
 Mr. Balfour stuck tenaciously to his post in the House, 
 and carried the Crimes Bill through successfully within 
 the session. His duel with the Irish party during the 
 long debates on the Bill was one prolonged contest between 
 intellect and sheer animal strength. He invariably had 
 the best of the argument, but over and over again he had 
 to invoke the aid of the Unionist majority to stop the 
 ceaseless stream of Irish talk. His sense of humour, and 
 a subtle sarcasm, of which he showed himself possessed, 
 enabled him to cope triumphantly with the leading spirits 
 of the Irish Party.
 
 16 Mr. Balfour's Rule in Ireland. 
 
 1^ the days of Banner-man, Trevelyan, Beach, and the 
 others, the Freeman and United Ireland used to tell proudly 
 how " the scintillating wit " of Mr. Healy, Mr. Sexton, or 
 Mr. O'Brien, used " to set the House in roars of laughter " 
 against " the thick-headed Saxon " who happened to be 
 Chief Secretary. Nothing could surpass the glorious vic- 
 tories then won by Irish talent over Saxon stupidity. But 
 all that was now changed. Mr. Balfour was never put out 
 by Mr. Healy's, Mr. Sexton's, or Mr. O'Brien's wit, no 
 matter how scintillating. His utter disregard of self 
 made him see things in a light which no previous Chief 
 Secretary had viewed them in. He appeared to regard all 
 the foul and false rhetoric, all the " scintillating wit," as 
 levelled against the office he held and not against him 
 personally. He carried this abstraction of self so far that 
 he laughed as heartily as the Gladstonians themselves at 
 the perfervid utterances of a Healy, an O'Brien, a Sexton, 
 or an O'Connor, even when he himself, as happened in 
 most cases, was the supposed victim of the speeches. He 
 never lost his temper at the overwrought abuse poured 
 out upon him. And what is most admirable, he never 
 abused the Irish members. He gave them back argument 
 attempered by the amount of sarcasm necessary to show 
 clearly that he saw through the rhodomontade which was 
 continually launched upon the House, and, through it, 
 upon the country. 
 
 The Irish " wits " could not cope with such an opponent. 
 Mr. Balfour was a " Saxon " who was not stupid, and a 
 man of humour who was not Irish. There never has 
 been a Chief Secretary who understood the Irish character 
 better than Mr. Balfour ; few, extremely few, have
 
 The Crimes Bill Mr. Balfour' s Style and Policy. 17 
 
 understood it as thoroughly, or known as accurately wL*:~e 
 lie the strength and weakness of Irish orators like Mr. 
 Parnell, Mr. Sexton, Mr. T. Healy, Mr. T. P. O'Connor, 
 Mr. J. Redmond, Mr. Dillon, Mr. W. O'Brien, and others. 
 Of these men their bitterest enemies cannot say they lacked 
 daring, ability, or skill in the parliamentary arena. As a 
 combination of politicians they possessed unparalleled 
 fertility of resource, unexampled cheek, and a persistency 
 heretofore unequalled. They infused into their leading 
 parliamentary performances an attractiveness that was 
 theatrical, and divided amongst themselves nearly all the 
 powers of elocution, exaggeration, rhetoric, and invective 
 which the House possessed. Therein lay their strength ; 
 and therein Mr. Balfour did not seek to share their glory. 
 But in matters of argument, of fact, of detail, and of 
 business, lay their weakness, and in that province Mr. 
 Balfour fought and vanquished them. In the profession 
 of an earnest desire to serve Ireland, Mr. Balfour entered 
 into the lists with them, and became their most formidable 
 rival. But whenever verbal desires for Ireland's welfare 
 had to be converted into deeds for Ireland's benefit, Mr. 
 Balfour's power and sincerity enabled him to out-distance 
 all his foes.
 
 18 J/r. Balfour's Rule in Ireland. 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 Death to Agitation The Irish Reign of Terror. 
 
 THE Irish Party were right in fighting tooth and nail 
 against the Crimes Bill; right from their own point of 
 view. That Act struck a death-hlow at the game of 
 political agitation in Ireland. Various means of repress- 
 ing the professional political agitator had previously been 
 tried, but they all failed, and the threatened species grew 
 and thrived. 
 
 In 1881 Mr. Forster arrested over a thousand of them 
 without trial under his Crimes Act, and, when he had 
 done so, he fondly believed he had all the disturbing ele- 
 ments of Ireland under lock and key, much as .ZEolus of 
 old is said to have confined the winds at his pleasure. 
 But the Land League and the Ladies' Land League 
 hastened to supply Mr. Forster's prisoners with the best 
 food, and, in case of poor people, with good clothes in 
 addition. The men who were arrested felt themselves 
 raised to the dignity of untried State prisoners, in clean 
 quarters, getting far better nourishment in most cases 
 than they were accustomed to at home, and undergoing 
 no punishment beyond a longer daily solitude than usual. 
 Numbers took refuge in the prison infirmaries, and came 
 out of prison in better health than when they went in. It
 
 Death to Agitation The Irish Reign of Terror. 19 
 
 is nevertheless true that many respectable men were 
 arrested as "suspects" who were in no sense professional 
 agitators or " village tyrants," and upon most of these the 
 enforced absence from their families and business told 
 grievously and injured their health. But on the whole 
 the penalty of imprisonment under Forster's Act was 
 looked upon as a farce ; and in many cases it secured for 
 the " suspect " a pecuniary testimonial on his release, and 
 gave him henceforth a higher standing amongst the 
 Nationalists of his parish. 
 
 Irish Members of Parliament, and aspirants to that 
 position, courted arrest under the Act as a certain avenue 
 to preferment. Mr. Forster could not inflict greater 
 punishment on such men than by declining to arrest 
 them. Consequently, when the Forster regime abruptly 
 came to an end, and the " suspects " were released in 
 1882, there was no feeling of relief or gratitude as for the 
 repeal of a penal law. 
 
 The almost immediate murder of Lord Frederick 
 Cavendish and Mr. Burke, and the contempt in which 
 the Gladstone administration continued to be held in 
 Ireland down to its fall in 1885, prove that no grati- 
 tude was felt for the liberation of the suspects, but, on the 
 contrary, the concession was interpreted as an act of 
 cowardice and as a consciousness of defeat on the part of 
 the Gladstone Government. 
 
 The National League held its reign of terror in Ireland 
 from the release of the suspects in 1882 down to the 
 passage of the Balfour Crimes Act in 1887. Outside the 
 North-east counties and the few large cities there was no 
 freedom, no independent public opinion in Ireland. Juries, 
 
 B2
 
 20 Mr. Balfour's Rule in Ireland. 
 
 through fear of personal violence or injury to their 
 business, refused to convict in cases connected with the 
 agitation. 
 
 That dreadful year of 1882, when Mr. Gladstone beat 
 his retreat before the Nationalists and released the sus- 
 pects, will be one of the reddest in the gory annals of Irish 
 agrarian agitation. 
 
 In January the public were horrified by the sinking 
 of Lord Ardilaun's two bailiffs in the waters of Lough 
 Mask. The wretched men were tied up in sacks 
 weighted with heavy stones, and then cast into the lake. 
 In February a labourer named Bailey was shot dead 
 one Saturday evening in Skipper's-alley, Dublin, at an 
 hour when the streets were full of people, the shops all 
 open, and the lamps all lighting. The assassins escaped. 
 In April a Westmeath landlord named Smythe was 
 returning from church on Sunday, his sister-in-law, Mrs. 
 Henry Smythe, with another lady, accompanying him in 
 the carriage. When nearing his gate lodge the carriage 
 was attacked by a fusilade of bullets from behind a 
 hedge, and Mrs. Henry Smythe was shot dead. It was 
 under circumstances of such terrible gravity that Mr. 
 Parnell was released from Kilmainham on parole " to 
 attend the funeral of a friend in Paris." And it was 
 under such circumstances that Mr. Forster was driven 
 from office and all the suspects released from prison on 
 May 2nd. But Mr. Gladstone's cowardice was destined, 
 not to pacify the country, but to drench it in more blood 
 and sink it in deeper infamy. On the 6th May, Lord 
 Frederick Cavendish and Mr. Burke were murdered in 
 open daylight on the main road of the Phoenix Park,
 
 Death to Agitation The Irish Reign of Terror. 21 
 
 in sight of the Viceregal Lodge. On the 8th June Mr. 
 Walter Bourke and his police escort were shot at through 
 a loop-holed wall at Gort, and both killed. On the 29th 
 June Mr. Blake, agent to Lord Clanricarde, and his 
 steward, Mr. Keene, were shot at through a loop-holed 
 wall and hoth killed. On August 17th a farmer named 
 Joyce, of Maamtrasna, in Co. Galway, his wife, his aged 
 mother, his son and his daughter were all butchered in 
 their bedroom at dead of night by a band of masked men. 
 The only member of the family who escaped the massacre 
 was a little boy who crept out into the bushes in the dark- 
 ness while the slaughter was being carried out. 
 
 At this crisis the Constabulary, having demanded an 
 increase of pay, took umbrage at a supposed insult offered 
 to them by their Inspector-General, an insult which the 
 Government had not the skill to alleviate. A partial 
 strike ensued, and for several months the whole force was 
 demoralised. The Dublin Metropolitan Police also struck, 
 and soldiers were picketted in the city. In November came 
 the attempt to take Judge Lawson's life by Delaney, who 
 was in the act of cocking a seven- chambered revolver within 
 a few paces of the judge in broad daylight in Merrion- 
 square, when he was seized by two detectives who hap- 
 pened to be guarding the judge. On November 25th a 
 band of armed men attacked a group of detectives in 
 Abbey-street, Dublin, and, after a free fight in which 
 revolvers and knives were used, succeeded in absconding, 
 leaving one of the detectives dead on the ground. On the 
 following day happened the attack on Mr. Field, who had 
 incurred hostility as a Dublin juror. He was set upon 
 near his own door, when returning from business in the
 
 22 Mr. Ealfour's Rule in Ireland. 
 
 evening, by a band of armed men, who stabbed him in 
 the back, breast, and sides, and left him for dead at his 
 threshold. 
 
 After the Phoenix Park assassinations Mr. Gladstone 
 was reduced to such an extremity that he brought in 
 his Prevention of Crimes Bill, empowering the Lord 
 Lieutenant, in cases where juries seemed to him un- 
 likely to fulfil the obligations imposed by their oath, to 
 appoint a Special Commission of three Judges of the High 
 Court of Justice, without a jury, with power to try and con- 
 vict persons accused of treason, murder, intimidation, and 
 other crimes. The Irish Judges protested against any such 
 duty being imposed on them. They declined to be parties 
 to a second " Bloody Assize." Times had changed, even 
 in Ireland, since the days of Jeffreys. They declared that 
 in a year or two, at most, the status of the Bench in 
 Ireland would be irretrievably lost if the Bill became law. 
 But Mr. Gladstone persisted, and the Royal Assent was 
 given to the Act in July, 1882. Baron Fitzgerald forth- 
 with resigned his seat on the Bench. But the Act which 
 was demanded so impetuously remained a dead letter, and 
 has never been acted upon to this day. 
 
 The State Trial, in which nearly all the talent of the 
 Irish Bar appeared on both sides, was another device 
 resorted to from time to time for the purpose of suppress- 
 ing Mr. Parnell and his camp followers, the professional 
 agitators. But these trials only served as huge advertise- 
 ments, flattered the vanity of the defendants, and made 
 splendid "copy" for the editors of the Nationalist sheets. 
 They were the very things the professional agitators liked. 
 They felt themselves great men while the trial lasted*
 
 Death to Agitation The Irish Reign of Terror. 23 
 
 "with the eyes of the civilized world fixed upon them," and 
 the whole thing invariably wound up with a fund, after a 
 disagreement of the jury or an acquittal. The last of 
 these State Trials was held in February, 1887, one month 
 before Mr. Balfour came into power. Here is the account 
 of the opening of that trial, taken from United Ireland of 
 February 19th, 1887 : " On Monday the trials of Messrs. 
 Dillon, O'Brien, Sheehy, Crilly, and W. Eedmond com- 
 menced in Green- street Courthouse. The Crown was 
 represented by the Solicitor- General (Mr. Gibson, M.P.), 
 Serjeant O'Brien, Q.C., J. N. Gerrard, Q.C., and GK V. 
 Hart (instructed by Mr. P. C. Coll, Chief Crown Solicitor). 
 The traversers were represented by the Eight Hon. Samuel 
 Walker, Q,.C. (ex- Attorney- General), Daniel O'Eiordan, 
 (i.C., D. B. Sullivan, Eichard Adams, E. Leamy, M.P., 
 and T. Harrington, M.P. (instructed by Alderman V. B. 
 Dillon, and Mr. P. Chance, M.P.)." For Nationalist 
 members and patriotic editors such facts were both glorious 
 and profitable to record. Such an army of Solicitor- 
 Generals, Serjeants-at-Law, Queen's Counsels, and bar- 
 risters set out in leaded type, made as brilliant a spectacle 
 for the devourers of United Ireland as a Field Day in the 
 Fifteen Acres does for lads who wish to join the army. 
 "Mr. Fottrell, Clerk of the Crown," continues United 
 Ireland, " read over the thirty-six yards of an indictment 
 which charged the five defendants, with Matthew Harris 
 and other evil-disposed persons, with having incited and 
 procured large numbers of tenants to refuse to pay and 
 not to pay to the owners of lands the rents they had con- 
 tracted to pay. The defendants were charged under other 
 counts with various other offences in connexion with the
 
 24 Mr. Balfour's Rule in Ireland. 
 
 Plan of Campaign, such as conspiring to prevent per- 
 sons from taking farms from which others had been 
 evicted." 
 
 Thirty-six yards of an indictment read over by the 
 Clerk of the Crown ! How stupid the readers of United 
 Ireland must have thought those Saxons who could thus 
 think of capturing high-flying Celtic patriots with three 
 dozen yards of parchment ! 
 
 " It is one of the many comic aspects of the Green- 
 street farce," continued United Ireland, " that the tra- 
 versers take an occasional look in to see how far the play 
 has advanced towards the last act, and having lent an 
 indifferent attention for an hour or two they go about 
 their business. The Crown seemed at last to think that 
 the traversers were treating the majesty of the Law with 
 too much contempt when they walked on Saturday last 
 out of the Courthouse to certain railway stations, and 
 booked for scenes of action in accordance with the Plan of 
 Campaign. Mr. Dillon steamed down to Coolgreany to 
 fire an oratorical shot at the obdurate Brooke. Mr. O'Brien 
 turned up at Mitchelstown to pay his respects to the 
 Countess of Kingston, and to recommend her ladyship 
 to be wise in time and adopt the Plan." Mr. Sheehy is 
 reported to have gone somewhere else on the same business. 
 
 Such was the open contempt in which the administration 
 of justice was held in Ireland one month before Mr. Bal- 
 four assumed the reins of power. Men charged with 
 criminal conspiracy left the Court, and, going out, com- 
 mitted the flagrant contempt of doing the very acts for 
 which they were being tried by judge and jury at the pro- 
 secution of the Government of the country. And these
 
 Death to Agitation The Irish Reign of Terror. 25 
 
 men who were then leaders of " public opinion " in Ire- 
 land for they had nobbled every non-conservative paper 
 in the country publicly boasted of their contemptuous 
 conduct in their own journal, which then had a large cir- 
 culation amongst the farming population ; boasted of it 
 and revelled in it while the trials were yet proceeding. 
 Mr. Balfour did not exaggerate when he said, in intro- 
 ducing his Crimes Act, that Ireland was weekly going 
 to the worse, and society resolving itself into its original 
 atoms. The inhabitants of Nationalist Ireland, during 
 the years preceding Mr. Balfour, were virtually hypnotized. 
 During those years of Mr. Gladstone's rule the country 
 might be compared to an amphitheatre in which the entire 
 Nationalist population sat staring like mooncalves at the 
 daring theatrical feats of Mr. Parnell and his trained band 
 of agitators. All industry was at a standstill, the land, 
 in many cases, being barely tilled for a sustenance.
 
 26 Mr. Balfour's Rule in Ireland. 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 The Crimes Act Jlr. Balfour's Great Invention. 
 
 BUT all this defiant contempt for the law was soon des- 
 tined to be put a stop to by that great measure with which 
 Mr. Balfour's name will be for ever associated. Unlike 
 Mr. Gladstone's Prevention of Crimes Bill, Mr. Balfour's 
 Crimes Act did not aim at anything heroic. It left the 
 Irish Judiciary intact. The Judges were too august a body, 
 too valuable to the State to be risked in such employment 
 as the stamping out of professional agitators who were 
 the root of all disorder in the island. Public confidence in 
 the Judges, Mr. Balfour saw, should be maintained at any 
 hazard. 
 
 But in the stipendiary magistrates Mr. Balfour found 
 ready at his hand a body of State servants whom he deter- 
 mined to utilise. Previous to Mr. Balfour's Act the duties 
 of the stipendiaries had been of a light but by no means of 
 an unimportant description. They had to attend Petty 
 Sessions and assist the unpaid magistrates with their legal 
 advice and experience, and on occasions of public disorder 
 they commanded the military and police. But now, Mr. 
 Balfour's Crimes Act entrusted the hearing of all trials 
 for offences under its provisions exclusively to the stipen- 
 diaries. The unpaid magistrates, much to their gratification,
 
 The Crimes Act Mr. Balfours Great Invention. 27 
 
 were debarred from taking any part in the hearing of such 
 cases. When a person was to be tried for an offence under 
 the Act, such as boycotting, intimidation, an incendiary 
 speech or so-forth, two stipendiaries were appointed by 
 the Lord Lieutenant to try the case, and constituted the 
 Court. The longest sentence they could inflict was six 
 months' imprisonment with or without hard labour. Such 
 a Court was independent of local Nationalist violence. 
 Its sentences could be appealed against to the County 
 Court Judge of the district, whose decision was final. 
 Under the Crimes Act the accused could never attain the 
 honour and glory of a trial before a Judge of the High 
 Court of Justice. The whole proceeding was most prosaic, 
 and altogether a humble, business-like affair, resembling 
 a police-magistrate's court in Dublin or London. There 
 was no incentive to vanity in being tried before such a 
 tribunal ; no cheap fame to be gained from imprisonment 
 under its decree. For the imprisonment, unlike that 
 under Forster's Act, was real. No exception was made in 
 favour of offenders under the Act ; they were treated, 
 as ordinary misdemeanants in the class to which they 
 belonged. 
 
 High politicians were not attracted to the combat, as 
 in the case of Forster's Act. As a rule the field was left 
 to the " village tyrant," and lesser members of Parliament. 
 But when Mr. O'Brien and Mr. Dillon committed offences 
 under the Act, the same real but unheroic punishment was 
 dealt out to them as to the lowliest of their admirers. Mr. 
 O'Brien endeavoured to infuse some romance into the 
 business. He sought the notoriety of a hand-to-hand 
 fight with the Act, but, when worsted, became " lily-
 
 28 Mr. Balfour 1 s Rule in Ireland. 
 
 livered," as United Ireland would say, at having to bear 
 the consequences. 
 
 The " wilting of that delicate lily (Mr. O'Brien) in the 
 fiery furnace into which it had so boldly ventured " was 
 a sight which afforded innocent amusement to thousands. 
 Mr. Balfour, true to his character for impartiality, gave no 
 signs that he enjoyed the sight. On the contrary, he had 
 solicitously watched over the hon. member while in prison, 
 and sent him out of gaol weighing two pounds more than 
 when he went in. Mr. O'Brien tried hard to get imprison- 
 ment converted into the farce it had been under Forster's 
 Act, but he failed, and ended by greatly lowering if not 
 by entirely losing whatever character for manliness and 
 integrity he bore amongst the Nationalists of Ireland. 
 Nor could the Englishmen who committed offences within 
 the Act alter the rigid impartiality of Mr. Balfour's ad- 
 ministration. Mr. Wilfred Blunt, it was thought, would 
 kill the Crimes Act. The Freeman and the Irish Party 
 dared Mr. Balfour to inflict " the outrage," the " debasing 
 indignity " of imprisonment in " a coercion dungeon " on 
 a "cultured English gentleman." In anticipation the 
 Irish people were assured that Mr. Blunt would be ac- 
 quitted, for " Bloody Balfour " was " too 'cute " to put it 
 in the power of " a refined and highly-cultured English- 
 man " to narrate to the world on unimpeachable testimony 
 the horrors of an Irish prison. Mr. Balfour was now 
 designated " Bloody Balfour " ; he was no longer " a silk- 
 skinned Sybarite whose rest a crumpled roseleaf would 
 disturb." 
 
 The Nationalist papers were circulating a horrible tale, 
 on the authority of Mr. Blunt, to the effect that Mr. Bal-
 
 The Crimes Act Mr. Ealfour's Great Invention. 29 
 
 four had told a friend in conversation at an English 
 country house, that he intended to make imprisonment 
 under his Crimes Act so severe that it would infallibly 
 kill men of such delicate constitutions as the leaders of the 
 Plan of Campaign. 
 
 But Mr. Blunt's trial came on like that of the humblest 
 boycotter, and he was sent to gaol like an Irishman, no 
 exception being made in his favour. When Mr. Conybeare, 
 M.P., committed an offence against the Act, he was 
 similarly imprisoned. Priests a class that expected 
 immunity from punishment, though many of them were 
 the most violent of agitators received no better treat- 
 ment than laymen under the Act. The same consideration 
 was meted out to all convicted persons, " English gentle- 
 men," English members of Parliament, Irish agitators, 
 high and low, clerical and lay. A more useful instrument 
 for preserving the peace and re-establishing confidence in 
 the administration of justice in Ireland was never devised 
 than Mr. Balfour's Crimes Act. And never was a good 
 instrument more impartially and effectively employed. 
 Of the martyrs under the Crimes Act few were clerical, 
 and none were distinguished politicians, unless Messrs. 
 Dillon and O'Brien may lay claim to that designation. 
 Mr. Parnell and those members of his party who had a 
 reputation for possessing a glimmering of commonsense 
 showed their appreciation of the Chief Secretary's strength 
 by holding rigidly aloof from any encounter with Mr. 
 Balfour's Crimes Act.
 
 30 Mr. Balfour's Rule in Ireland. 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 A Loyal Chief and Loyal Comrades The Plan of 
 Campaign and Shadowing. 
 
 MEANWHILE in the House of Commons, neither strategy 
 nor violence could conquer the Chief Secretary. His 
 great ability, humour, and force of character repelled every 
 attack. His colleagues became infused with the same 
 spirit as their chief. The law officers who worked with 
 him, viz. Mr. Holmes (now Justice Holmes) ; Mr. Gibson 
 (now Justice Gibson) ; Mr. O'Brien (now Chief Justice 
 Sir Peter O'Brien, Bart.) ; and Mr. Madden, have never 
 been excelled by any set of Irish law officers. Confidence 
 in the Chief Secretary led to uniformity of action and 
 evenness of administration in every department. Mr. 
 Balfour's answers to embittered attacks made by the Irish 
 members on the Constabulary, stipendiaries, and the judi- 
 ciary were well calculated to inspire these bodies with 
 the highest confidence in their spokesman. The magistrates 
 and constables learned the faculty of humorous disdain 
 from Mr. Balfour. Fussy individuals, who considered 
 themselves personages, and often courted a collision with 
 the authorities for fame's sake, were ignored with a quiet 
 humour. 
 
 One colleague of Mr. Balfour deserves especial mention.
 
 A Loyal Chief and Loyal Comrades. 31 
 
 Colonel King-Harman, during the time he held the office 
 of Parliamentary Under-Secretary for Ireland, had to 
 bear the brunt of an attack second only in virulence to 
 that made upon his Chief. Seeing the gravity of his 
 position at the outset, Mr. Balfour had departed from 
 precedent by requiring the assistance of an Under-Secretary 
 in Parliament. The vexatious Irish questions which 
 appeared in thousands on the papers of the House, touch- 
 ing the most contemptibly trivial matters, could no longer 
 be answered by a Cabinet Minister having responsible 
 executive duties, and who had, besides, the charge of pass- 
 ing a Coercion Bill into law. Colonel King-Harman's 
 appointment was announced on April 9th, 1887. The 
 announcement infuriated the Irish Party, and, owing to 
 their obstruction a year elapsed from the date of his 
 appointment, before the Government were able to get a 
 bill read a second time legalizing the payment of Colonel 
 King-Harman's salary. During the whole preceding year 
 from April, 1887, to April, 1888, the Under Secretary had 
 borne, with extraordinary good temper, the derision and 
 abuse heaped upon him. He was a hospitable Irish 
 gentleman, a landlord in receipt of one of the finest rent 
 rolls in Ireland, one who had honourably filled the highest 
 positions in his native county of Roscommon, who had 
 been accustomed to every luxury and the best society 
 from his birth. Yet a pack of hounds never tore a fox to 
 shreds with more ferocity and joy than the Irish members 
 evinced in attacking Colonel King-Harman. The King- 
 Hannan Bill was read a second time on the 30th of April, 
 and, in his speech, Mr. Balfour defended the appointment. 
 He contrasted his own duties as Chief Secretary with those
 
 32 Mr. Balfour's Rule in Ireland. 
 
 of his predecessors, contending that "as he had to prepare 
 his own measures and conduct them through the House, 
 he was entitled to the same assistance as was given to the 
 other leading members of the Government." The King- 
 Harman Salary Bill was bitterly obstructed, so bitterly 
 that it never became law. On the 10th of June the Under 
 Secretary died of heart-disease at his residence, Eocking- 
 ham, Boyle, his friends attributing his death to the treat- 
 ment he received at the hands of his Parliamentary foes. 
 The Irish Party were indignant at Colonel King-Harman's 
 intervention between them and Mr. Balfour, whom they 
 regarded as their prey. The death of Colonel King- 
 Harman was claimed as a fresh victory for the Irish 
 Party, and when it was announced that henceforth Mr. 
 Balfour would do the Parliamentary duties of his office 
 unassisted, his speedy downfall was no longer doubted in 
 Ireland. The author of Philosophic Doubt, it was asserted, 
 would now go down dishonoured as " the nephew of 
 Macaulay and biographer of Fox " had done before him, 
 in a less unequal combat. 
 
 The loyalty of Mr. Balf our's colleagues has excited many 
 a derisive comment from the Nationalist descriptive writers, 
 and his private secretaries, Mr. George Wyndham, M.P., 
 and Mr. Hayes Fisher, M.P., have not escaped. These 
 two officials have served Mr. Balfour in their sphere, not 
 less effectively and loyally than all his other comrades in 
 his prolonged and bitterly contested battle with the Irish 
 Party. They have been described as " jackals " bringing 
 the Chief Secretary his glass of water, the volumes of 
 Hansard, the blue books and documents of reference 
 during the delivery of one of his great speeches. Since
 
 A Loyal Chief and Loyal Comrades. 33 
 
 Colonel King-Harman's death they have especially been 
 sneered at and denounced in Nationalist prints for the 
 performance of their duties in the House. Mr.Wyndham 
 was singled out for especial attack because the constituency 
 of Dover honoured him by returning him to Parliament 
 unopposed in 1889. 
 
 Nor should it be omitted that in Sir West Bidgeway 
 and Sir William Kaye, Mr. Balfour possessed an Under- 
 secretary and Assistant Under-Secretary, who performed 
 their duties with great firmness and tact. In Sir Andrew 
 Eeed, Inspector- General of Constabulary, and in Mr. 
 Harrel, Commissioner of Dublin Police, Mr. Balfour pos- 
 sessed two executive chiefs who kept their personality 
 completely out of sight, while directing the two forces 
 under their command with the highest energy and skill. 
 
 During the stress of the conflict with the Plan of Cam- 
 paign, boycotting and shadowing, all the permanent 
 officials under Mr. Balfour did their duty fearlessly. Of 
 the Plan of Campaign it is unnecessary to write at length ; 
 but it would be hardly possible to exaggerate the mischief 
 which it worked in Nationalist Ireland. Let us take a 
 concrete case to illustrate its viciousness. On an estate of 
 100 tenants, 40 are industrious, quiet men, who till their 
 land well, pay their debts, and provide for their families : 
 the remaining 60 are men who are addicted to talk, tobacco, 
 idleness, and drink. The 40 read little or no papers and 
 pay scant attention to the goings on in Parliament. The 
 60 are readers of United Ireland, and believers in the 
 gospel according to Mr. William O'Brien. The 60 have 
 bad crops, and cannot pay their rent. The 40 can well 
 afford to pay, and are willing to do so. But the 60 invite 
 
 c
 
 34 Mr. Balfour's Rule in Ireland. 
 
 a politician down from Dublin, and put their case in his 
 hands. He calls a meeting of the 100 tenants, and advises 
 them to adopt the Plan. His advice is carried by the votes 
 of the 60. Then every man who has his gale's rent is 
 called upon to deliver it up to the Dublin politician, who 
 puts the whole sum into the war chest. Then it is decided 
 that the minority will be bound in all things by the deci- 
 sion of the majority. The terms to be demanded from 
 the landlord are then carried by the votes of the 60, and 
 it is agreed that the entire 100 thereby bind themselves to 
 suffer eviction unless these terms are granted. Eviction 
 for the 40 means the loss of their improvements and the 
 breaking up of happy homes. For the 60 it means poli- 
 tical excitement, puffs in Parliament and in the papers, 
 and money grants from the public funds. The landlord 
 again and again demands his rent. He offers what he 
 thinks is a reasonable abatement, say 20 per cent. But 
 the Dublin politician, backed up by the 60, refuses any- 
 thing less than his pound of flesh. The 40 remonstrate, 
 but are outvoted. By-and-by the landlord increases his 
 offer to 25, and later on to 30 percent, abatement. Again 
 the 40 remonstrate, and advise a settlement. But the 
 Dublin politician and the 60 will not have it. Then the 
 landlord proceeds to eviction, and the 100 are put out of 
 their holdings. 40 industrious men are thrown out of 
 their land ; 40 thriving establishments are broken up ; 
 40 happy hearths are rendered desolate. 60 incapables 
 are in high glee, leading a Bohemian existence, for which 
 they are eminently qualified, camping out upon a liberal 
 allowance from Nationalist head-quarters. The 40 get 
 no allowance, for they are well-to-do men, and are told
 
 The Plan of Campaign and Shadowing. 35 
 
 they must suffer for the cause. Weeks grow into months, 
 and months into years. The landlord has grown dogged 
 and desperate under the torture of the picadors and tor- 
 readors of the parliamentary arena. The estate is a forest 
 of weeds ; the fences are in ruins. The 40 get into bad 
 health, or, what is worse, into bad habits ; while the 60 
 lord it at the fair, the forge, the meeting, and the public- 
 house. 40 honest men and their families have been sacri- 
 ficed on the altar of fraud, dissipation, and idleness. Why 
 did they allow themselves to be sacrificed ? Because they 
 feared being boycotted. Why did they not turn to some- 
 thing else ? Because in Nationalist Ireland there was 
 nothing else for them to turn to, and they were hoping 
 against hope. 
 
 The split in the Nationalist ranks has hastened many 
 a settlement, but it will take a decade before the indus- 
 trious men recover from the effects of the disturbance, and 
 it leaves the iiicapables no better than they were. The 
 Plan of Campaign was the chief source of disorder for the 
 first four years of Mr. Balfour's rule, and though the 
 Chief Secretary joined issue with it wherever the con- 
 spiracy raised its head, yet, to some extent, he seems to 
 have been in favour of giving the folly rope enough to 
 hang itself, as it has now done. The collapse of the twin 
 authors of that fatal folly, and the ignominious weakness 
 displayed by them ever since the Divorce Court disclosures 
 in November, 1890, were results to have been expected by 
 anyone who had attentively regarded their career. The 
 Plan of Campaign, which culminated in the ruinous folly 
 of New Tipperary, stands universally condemned in Ireland 
 to-day, and by none so earnestly as by those who were 
 forced to join it.
 
 36 Mr. Balfour s Rule in Ireland. 
 
 But if the death of the Plan of Campaign was only due 
 in part to the Crimes Act, and in part to its inherent 
 viciousness, the death of " shadowing " is wholly due to 
 Mr. Balfour's determined administration of the Crimes 
 Act. " Shadowing " was the means by which boycotting 
 was carried out in its entire rigour and cruelty. The 
 practice, which was fatal to the existence of liberty, had 
 been brought to the perfection of a fine art when Mr. 
 Balfour grappled with it. This was the custom : When 
 a man was boycotted by the League, a number of members, 
 generally evicted tenants, were told off to dog his foot- 
 steps, and watch the movements of his household, or, as it 
 was called, to " shadow " them. If the wife or child went 
 into a shop for food, the " shadow " on duty would warn 
 the shopkeeper, and the food would not be forthcoming 
 when asked for. Or, if the shopkeeper gave it, the " sha- 
 dow " would report him to the League, and a caution 
 would be administered to him never to do it again under 
 penalty of being boycotted himself. If the boycotted 
 man or his son went to the fair with a beast, the " sha- 
 dows " tracked him, and warned all dealers against buying 
 from him. If he went to a distance to get his horse shod 
 or his plough mended, he was likewise tracked, and the 
 smith warned against working for him. Mr. Balfour 
 stamped out this execrable system, by having the " sha- 
 dows " themselves " shadowed " by policemen in plain 
 clothes. After a conflict of several years, and a number 
 of very prosaic trials and smart little sentences under the 
 Crimes Act, the Chief Secretary's " shadows " proved the 
 better men, and " shadowing" in Ireland has ceased to be 
 an effective weapon in the hands of the boycotters.
 
 A Truce to the Land War The Great Land Act. 37 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 A Truce to the Land War The Great Land Act. 
 
 So far we have dealt with that side of Mr. Balfour's policy 
 which was directed to the rehabilitation of the law in 
 Ireland. Let us now examine his remedial and construc- 
 tive policy. His policy, both repressive and remedial, is 
 chiefly remarkable for the lack of that grandeur which 
 Mr. Gladstone sought to infuse into all his Irish schemes. 
 Without disparaging Mr. Gladstone's great public career, 
 it must yet be conceded that one of his great uses in 
 British politics has been to teach others how not to do 
 things. In this trait, no less than in his style of oratory, 
 he resembles the Circumlocution Office as exactly as it is 
 possible for a corporation sole to resemble a corporation 
 aggregate. Mr. Gladstone would grandly sweep the Irish 
 members and Ireland itself away from Westminster rather 
 than have his way blocked by the Irish Party. Mr. Glad- 
 stone would sweep the Irish landlords and tenants from 
 the face of creation with 160,000,000 of money rather 
 than have his way blocked by an Irish Land Question. 
 Mr. Gladstone would ram a thousand men into gaol, un- 
 tried, in hopes that when the sun rose next morning it 
 could be said that no political agitator was at large in 
 Ireland to disturb the peace of the Liberal Party. 
 
 .391790
 
 38 Mr. Balfour's Rnle in Ireland. 
 
 Mr. Balfour, on the contrary, lias never been guilty of 
 anything like a coup during his tenure of office in Ireland. 
 Things have been taken bit by bit as the opportunities 
 came. He stated at the outset, immediately after his 
 appointment, that he believed in no Land Bill but a 
 Purchase Bill ; that his only hope of settling the land 
 question was by making the occupier the owner in fee. 
 The Ashbourne Land Purchase Act so called after its 
 able and sensible promoter in the House of Lords had 
 already taken a nip at the land difficulty. That Act was 
 passed in 1885, when Lord Salisbury's Government held 
 power on sufferance for 227 days. Despite all the efforts 
 of the National League to deter tenants from purchasing, 
 the 5,000,000 advanced by the Act was applied for as 
 fast as the Commissioners could applot the loans. Twenty 
 years' purchase of the existing rent would be much higher 
 than the average of the transactions under the Act, yet 
 the tenant who bought under the Ashbourne Act at that 
 price now finds that the interest and sinking fund on the 
 money advancedby the Treasury is 20 per cent, less annually 
 than his old rent. After paying this decreased sum for 49 
 years, the tenant will become owner in fee simple, and 
 possess the holding free of all rent. In 1888 the Chief 
 Secretary passed an Amending Act by which a second 
 sum of 5,000,000 was advanced on the same terms. 
 Mr. Balfour only succeeded in passing this Act after Mr. 
 Gladstone and Mr. Parnell, with their respective parties, 
 had resorted to the most open obstruction for the purpose 
 of defeating the measure. The success of the Ashbourne 
 Act and the amending Act of 1888 may be judged from 
 the fact that the total amount of advances applied for
 
 A Truce to the Land War The Great Land Act. 39 
 
 under these Acts up to 2 1st August, 1890, was 9,217,388 
 by 23,348 tenants. For the year ending 21st August, 
 1886, the purchase money actually issued was 18'3 years' 
 purchase on the rental. For the year ending the same 
 date, 1887, it stood at only 17'5 years' purchase: in 1888 
 it was 17'4 ; in 1889, 17'2 ; and for the year ending 21st 
 August, 1890, it was 17*2 years' purchase on the rental. 
 A tenant whose rental was 100 a- year, and who pur- 
 chased at 17 years' purchase on the rental, has only to 
 pay 68 a-year for 49 years in order to become owner in 
 fee. Emboldened by the success of these cautious measures, 
 Mr. Balfour has now passed an Act advancing a further sum 
 of 33,000,000 upon still easier terms. Mr. Parnell, speak- 
 ing of this Balfour Land Act of 1891 at Limerick, on the 
 24th of May, said : " What will this measure do ? It 
 will do two things. It will enormously benefit the 
 Irish tenant-farmers and it will greatly benefit the Irish 
 labourers. . . . How will it benefit the Irish farmers ? 
 It wiU enable about 200,000 of the 520,000 Irish tenant- 
 farmers to become the owners of their holdings at a reduc- 
 tion of about 40 per cent. That is to say, the man who 
 now pays 50 a-year will get his holding for considerably 
 under 30 a-year, and the others in like proportion, and 
 at the end of 49 years he will have his holding for 
 nothing. . . . Let me now explain what it will do for 
 the labourer. It will give to the Irish labourer, for the 
 purpose of building houses and fencing in small plots of 
 land, the sum of 115,000 a-year in perpetuity that is 
 to say, the 115,000 a-year will every year be spent 
 under the provisions of this measure for the building of 
 cottages for Irish labourers." A Congested Districts
 
 40 Mr. Ha/four's Rule in Ireland. 
 
 Board is also appointed under the Act to which a capital 
 sum of 1,500,000 from the Irish Church Surplus, and 
 the growing produce thereof, is granted. The board will 
 have power to spend this money annually in the poorest 
 districts of Ireland, fostering native industry, assisting 
 migration from over-populated baronies to less thickly 
 inhabited parts of the country, and iu doing all other acts 
 which in their opinion are necessary for the well-being of 
 the congested districts. 
 
 The Balfour Land Act, with its two pioneers, the Ash- 
 bourne Acts, will in all human probability settle the Irish 
 agrarian difficulty. The experience gained from the 
 working of the Ashbourne Act has been most valuable. 
 Guided and encouraged by that experience, the landlord's 
 desire for ready money and fixity of income, as well as 
 the tenant's anxiety for ownership, gives a guarantee that 
 the entire sum granted under the Act of 1891 will be 
 applied for. This is one of the most important points, as 
 the Act, like its predecessors, is not compulsory. The Act 
 will create a revolution in Ireland, inasmuch as it will 
 give the general community a direct interest in seeing 
 that the tenant pays his annual instalments punctually. 
 The advances made under the Act are secured on the 
 rates. Defaults in payment will therefore increase the 
 rates, and excite public indignation against the defaulters. 
 The British Exchequer could not issue better security than 
 Irish Land Stock. When the Irish tenant once fully 
 realizes that in a generation his land will be his own, rent 
 free, and that whining for reductions is useless, he will 
 become one of the best pays on earth. His passionate 
 affection for his farm has been proved, and in that
 
 A Truce to the Land War The Great Land Act. 41 
 
 love for his holding lies the best security of the British 
 Government. When there is no longer a landlord or 
 landlady to be wheedled or threatened, and when local 
 sympathy is withdrawn from the defaulter, the tenant will 
 have every inducement to pay his instalments punctually. 
 We have it on record from Mr. Gladstone that the Irish 
 tenant "is the best rent-payer in the world," and Mr. 
 Parnell has asserted more than once that "if you once 
 make the Irish tenant owner of his holding he will turn 
 the sands into gold." In every case of purchase under 
 the Balfour Land Act and its pioneer measures the eldest 
 son can look forward without presumption to the day 
 when he will be owner in fee. The holdings will be all 
 real property descending in tail, unless otherwise expressly 
 devised. Such an operation of law cannot fail, in time, 
 to give the Irish tenant an ancestry, and make him a 
 personage in the community. Critics have censured the 
 measure because it does not propose to buy out all the 
 landlords in Ireland at one stroke, as Mr. Gladstone pro- 
 posed to do in 1886. Referring to these strictures, Mr. 
 Balfour, speaking on the 4th of June, said: "I have 
 heard many gentlemen representing Nationalist opinion 
 in Ireland state, within the last few days, that the present 
 measure of Land Purchase, large and generous as it is, 
 will not ultimately prove adequate to the interests of 
 Ireland : and they have been bold enough to prophesy 
 that when the money has been exhausted, new money will 
 not be forthcoming to accomplish the task of converting 
 the Irish occupier into an owner. Well, my business has 
 been to frame a bill of which it can be truly said that it 
 does not endanger, by the fraction of a penny, the pockets
 
 42 Mr. JBalfour's Rule in Ireland. 
 
 of the taxpayers of this country, and I have framed such 
 a bill. Therefore, when the 30,000,000 advanced under 
 the bill are exhausted, if it is found that the loss to the 
 locality is so insignificant that it may be ignored, I, for 
 my part, if Ireland still forms an integral portion of 
 the United Kingdom, will not be averse to seeing some 
 increase. . . . The experiment will by that time be con- 
 clusively proved to have been successful or unsuccessful." 
 A more cautious, a more modest reply to his critics could 
 not have been made by Mr. Balfour. He might have 
 pointed to tbe experience of the Ashbourne Acts, where 
 the loss did nctually turn out to be so insignificant tha it 
 might be ignored, and he might have argued that the loss 
 under his own Act was likely to be still less, inasmuch as 
 the advances were made on the collateral security of the 
 rates, which is not the case under the Ashbourne Acts. 
 
 Another considerable grievance was removed by the 
 Unionist Government during the rule of Mr. Balfour in 
 Ireland. The leaseholders whom Mr. Gladstone had 
 excluded from the benefit of his Land Act of 1881 were 
 admitted to all the privileges of that measure by the Land 
 Law (Ireland) Act, 1887, and middlemen whose sub- 
 tenants had got reductions in the Land Courts were 
 allowed also to break their leases.
 
 Mr. Pai-nell's Fall 43 
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 Mr. Parnell's Fall Jlr. Ualiour'* modesty and 
 Knowledge of Ireland. 
 
 ONE adventitious circumstance notoriously hastened the 
 realization of Mr. Balfour's wishes, and helped to ripen 
 the good fruits of his wise and firm policy in Ireland. 
 But important political facts as were the disclosures made 
 in the Divorce Court in November, 1890, and the con- 
 sequent rupture in the Irish Party, they only hastened the 
 crowning triumph of Mr. Balfour's Rule in Ireland. Even 
 if Mr. Parnell had not at that moment got into trouble, 
 the seeming unity in Nationalist Ireland could not have been 
 long maintained. The truly Celtic elements of the middle 
 and lower classes, the most unanglicized of the population, 
 ever inconstant, had followed Mr. Paruell like dumb dogs 
 for years chiefly because they feared him. He persistently 
 treated the most exalted of his followers with a not un- 
 deserved contempt. Witness his refusing to grant Arch- 
 bishop Croke an interview, and his not acknowledging the 
 receipt of the Catholic Primate's ambiguous letter asking 
 him to restrain the Plan of Campaign. Witness again 
 his not uttering a word of thanks when handed the cheque 
 for 40,000 as a personal testimonial for his political ser- 
 vices, though he must have known how eager the Irish are
 
 44 Mr. Balfour's Rule in Ireland. 
 
 for thanks, preferring lip-thanks to deeds of kindness and 
 gratitude. 
 
 The priests never loved Mr. Parnell's rule, nor is it to 
 be wondered at, for no political change could improve the 
 condition of the priests, who are the most affluent body in 
 Ireland. The rigid impartiality and determination with 
 which the Crimes Act was administered and the defections 
 caused by the operation of the Land Purchase Acts were 
 fast beating all life and energy out of Mr. Parnell's politi- 
 cal machine in Ireland. The shrewd though timid priests 
 and laymen, who had been bending the knee to him since 
 1880, were fast gaining confidence in a higher power 
 than Mr. Parnell. Mr. Balfour and Mr. Parnell in their 
 respective careers have acted and re-acted upon each other 
 like planets in their orbits. Mr. Balfour's policy prepared 
 the way for Mr. Parnell's dethronement, and Mr. Parnell's 
 private sins against morality hastened the triumph of Mr. 
 Balfour's policy. When national gratitude began to be 
 expressed for Mr. Balfour's great services to Ireland and 
 the empire, he still continued to evince that forgetfulness 
 of self which was his earliest and best characteristic as 
 Chief Secretary. At the public banquets at which he 
 was entertained at Dublin, Edinburgh, and elsewhere, his 
 speeches betray that modesty and belittlement of his own 
 services so singularly rare nowadays in public men. At 
 Edinburgh, in December, 1889, he said, " I am aware 
 and I am glad to think that this great manifestation of 
 National opinion is due to the fact that you regard rne as 
 the holder for the time being of the office of Chief Secretary, 
 as being the embodiment of that respect for law, of that 
 determination that the laws of the country shall be obeyed,
 
 Mr. Balfour' s Modesty and Knowledge of Ireland. 45 
 
 which I believe, in spite of all that party feeling can do, 
 lies deep down in the heart of every British subject." 
 Replying to an address of congratulation on the beneficial 
 results of his work in Ireland, he thanked the deputation 
 " on behalf of the Government " for their approval of 
 the Government's Irish policy, and added : " As repre- 
 senting that policy by the accident of my official position 
 I thank you for the support which you have thus given to 
 the cause of law and order." Mr. Balfour understands the 
 Irish character better than any other public man who has 
 had to do with Ireland, except possibly Mr. Parnell. He 
 justly appraises the inglorious historical record of the Irish 
 nation as contrasted witli the undoubted genius of indivi- 
 dual Irishmen. A false pride in the inglorious past of his 
 country is the characteristic of every ignorant or semi- 
 educated Irishman, and Mr. Balfour has never been guilty 
 of pampering that pride. Speaking once as a Scotchman 
 to a Scottish audience, Mr. Balfour said : " We are a 
 nation, ladies and gentlemen, in a sense in which Ireland 
 never has been, and is not a nation. Before the union 
 with England we had a long, an independent, and a 
 glorious history. We had a constitution the fruits of our 
 own labours. We had a foreign policy carried on by our 
 own statesmen. We had a religious and political evolu- 
 tion, the result of our own activity. Ireland has never 
 in that sense been a nation. There was a time when 
 it was independent of England many centuries ago ; but 
 at that time it was not united under a single political 
 organization. There was a period when it was so united, 
 but then it was not independent, and through the whole 
 period of its history, down even to the present day, I do
 
 46 Mr. Balfour's Rule in Ireland. 
 
 not think it would be accurate to say that the inhabitants 
 of Ireland constitute a single nationality at all in the same 
 sense in which the inhabitants of Scotland constitute a 
 single nationality." 
 
 Again : " I have never hated any nation," said Mr. 
 Balfour, replying to Sir W. Harcourt's accusation that he 
 never spoke of Ireland except with contempt, " and I am 
 certain that, if I did hate any nation, that nation would 
 not be the Irish nation. And as for contempt, I reserve 
 that for politicians who use Ireland as a stalking-horse for 
 an English ambition, whose loud-voiced gaiety is equally 
 at the service of coercion or separation ; who are equally 
 ready to stimulate crime or to repress crime, and who, as 
 occasion may serve, have at their command either invective 
 for the Irish leaders which I might describe as coarse, or 
 flattery, which I might describe as fulsome. But for 
 Ireland I, in common, I believe, with every man and 
 woman who hears me in this hall, have no desire except to 
 see her, under circumstances of increasing well-being, 
 adding a lustre to a united empire which her genius is so 
 well capable of adorning." 
 
 Mr. Balfour frequently expresses his pity for Ireland, 
 a prey as she is to agitators on the one hand, whose aim 
 it is to draw her people from the paths of homely honesty, 
 industry, punctuality, and self-reliance, and to unscru- 
 pulous English politicians on the other hand, whose only 
 consideration has ever been to achieve power for themselves 
 by means of Irish votes.
 
 Mr. Bal/our's Triumph. 47 
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 
 Jlr. Balfour's Triumph The Burial of Home Rule. 
 
 THIS is the fifth year of Mr. Balfour's combat with dis- 
 order in Ireland, and cautious a politician as he is, the 
 Chief Secretary is at last convinced of the success of his 
 own policy. He enjoys the satisfaction of seeing the light 
 railways, subsidized by his Act of last year, progressing 
 to completion, to the great benefit of the poorest localities 
 in Ireland. Although the distress was not at all so severe 
 during the winter and spring of 1890-91 as the speeches 
 of the Irish members, previous to the Divorce Case in 
 November, had led people to believe it would be, yet 
 the Relief Fund started by Lord Zetland and Mr. Balf our 
 has alleviated much suffering in the poorest districts of the 
 country. That fund was the only practical effort made to 
 cope with the much-talked-of distress. It has been dis- 
 tributed through the hands of the stipendiaries upon 
 whose shoulders fell the brunt of the work of repressing 
 agrarian crime under the Crimes Act. The stipendiaries 
 or removables, as they were called, have now leisure time 
 to spend in philanthropical avocations. The Viceroy has 
 made several tours through the island, and has been re- 
 spectfully received everywhere, while in many localities 
 his reception was enthusiastic, an unprecedented occurrence
 
 48 Mr. Balfour' s Rule in Ireland. 
 
 since the beginning of the agitation. The Chief Secretary's 
 tour last autumn through the west and north proved to 
 him that the most uninformed classes in the country were 
 beginning to appreciate his firm, wise, and generous policy ; 
 and were not afraid to express their gratitude. He is now 
 convinced that Ireland may be relieved from the Crimes 
 Act, and he made the important announcement casually 
 on the 4th of June. " Certain portions of the Crimes Act," 
 said Mr. Balfour, "had been loudly proclaimed by Mr. 
 Gladstone as being in themselves not coercive but beneficial, 
 and as being of such a character that they might properly 
 be embodied in the general legislation, not of Ireland only, 
 but of England. In the law of Scotland they were already 
 to be found. These provisions he thought might properly 
 be extended to the whole of Ireland, and might be made 
 part of the general system of legal administration ; but 
 those parts of the Crimes Act which specially dealt with 
 criminal conspiracy, and which had been absolutely neces- 
 sary in order to deal with the social disorders of the last five 
 years, had now, in his judgment, so effectually done their 
 work that they might be, by proclamation, removed from 
 the whole of Ireland, except only possibly one county and 
 a few baronies here and there where perfect order had 
 not yet been restored. It might be of interest to know 
 that, while at present there were some 3,019 persons in 
 prison in Ireland under the ordinary law, there were 21 
 persons only imprisoned under the Crimes Act." 
 
 This announcement was made less than a fortnight 
 after the following attack on Mr. Balfour had appeared 
 in the leader columns of the Freeman: "So far as the 
 memory of living men reaches, he is the meanest mortal
 
 Mr. Bal/our's Triumph. 49 
 
 who has ever directed the policy of the English Grovern- 
 ment in Ireland. To steal the clothes of one political 
 opponent, to do another to death, and to make merry over 
 the achievement in after- dinner speeches, to confine poli- 
 tical prisoners in a fever den, . . . such are the methods of 
 his statesmanship. A notable Frenchman once described 
 his countrymen as half-monkey, half-tiger. Mr. Balfour, 
 though a Scotchman, might have been the subject of the 
 acrid saying." The immediate reason for this attack on 
 the Chief Secretary in the leading Irish daily paper was 
 that Air. Balfour did not force the authorities to stay all 
 proceedings for the estreatment of Messrs. Dillon and 
 O'Brien's sureties. Those two politicians having been 
 arrested for offences against the Crimes Act were liberated 
 on giving bail to appear at their trial. The bail was 
 500 a-piece for the defendants, and each defendant had 
 in addition to get two sureties of 250 each. The sureties 
 were readily got amongst the townspeople of Tipperary. 
 The two principals, instead of abiding by their bond and 
 waiting the conclusion of their trial, left the country sur- 
 reptitiously in a trawler, and landed in France, whence 
 they proceeded to America on a political mission. The 
 sureties got alarmed, and one of them cabled to Mr. Dillon, 
 asking what they were to do, as they feared a seizure of 
 their goods. Instead of the expected reply telling the 
 sureties that they would not be suffered to lose their pro- 
 perty by reason of his breach of faith, Mr. Dillon cabled 
 across the Atlantic a reply to the following effect. He 
 told the sureties that the bails would not be estreated, 
 because the Superior Courts would decide that the original 
 charge had been varied after the trial had commenced ;
 
 50 Mr. Balfour y s Rule in Ireland. 
 
 in other words, after the defendants had fulfilled their 
 obligation by appearing. When a man has done all that 
 in him lay to discredit the administration of justice, his 
 opinion as to what the High Court will decide in his own 
 case is generally worthless. In no case could such an 
 opinion be worth being cabled across the Atlantic at so 
 much per word to a poor man in daily fear of a seizure of 
 his goods. 
 
 Messrs. Dillon and O'Brien fled from justice in the most 
 contemptuous way, and then sought to have themselves 
 released from their bond on the pettifogging point men- 
 tioned above, which was scouted out of the Exchequer 
 Division as soon as it was mentioned. Not content with 
 their defeat in the endeavour to get imprisonment con- 
 verted into a farce, as in Foster's time, they now whined to 
 have bail-bonds pronounced a farce by the Government 
 and the Courts. But the Government of Mr. Balfour, 
 true to its impartial policy, declined to stay the process of 
 law in order that Messrs. Dillon and O'Brien might play 
 at contempt of Court " on the cheap." Their advocates 
 in the press set up a whine which was at once piteous and 
 impertinent for a special exemption in their case from the 
 ordinary law of the land, and the Chief Secretary was 
 called a " half-monkey, half-tiger," because he did not 
 grant the begging petition. 
 
 Mr. Balfour, as we have seen, came forward to govern 
 Ireland at a crisis when that country had been almost 
 driven to distraction by the production and defeat of Mr. 
 Gladstone's Home Rule and Land Purchase bills. He 
 manfully expounded his alternative policy, and as man- 
 fully has carried it through to the successful termination
 
 The Burial of Home Rule. 51 
 
 which we have heard described by himself in words of 
 studious moderation. It remains for us now to show that, 
 in the opinion of the most sanguine Home Rulers, the 
 success of Mr. Balfour's policy means the death of Mr. 
 Gladstone's. The generosity of Mr. Balfour's great Land 
 Act has been proved out of the mouth of his chief anta- 
 gonist, Mr. Parnell. Let us now hear the death-knell of 
 Mr. Gladstone's grand scheme of Home Rule tolled by 
 that intense Gladstonian, Dr. Croke, the Catholic Arch- 
 bishop of Cashel. Having declared in a previous speech 
 that Home Rule would never come in his day, Dr. Croke 
 said, speaking at Galbally on the 4th of June : " And 
 now I am done with Mr. Parnell, and probably, so far as 
 controversy is concerned, done with him for ever. He is 
 a fallen man. Should his name survive for any time in 
 Irish history, it will be only as that of a traitor to the 
 National cause and of a mischief-maker. Having deli- 
 berately placed himself outside the pale of Christian 
 civilization, his future mission appears to be to create as 
 much confusion as possible and to make his followers as 
 dead to every moral feeling as he himself has proved to be. 
 He has killed Home Rule and buried it with his own 
 reputation in the London Divorce Court." 
 
 Though the supporters of Mr. Balfour's policy will differ 
 from Dr. Croke as to the identity of the person who actually 
 killed Home Rule, they will not be the less pleased to have 
 it on his authority that the grand scheme is dead and 
 buried. 
 
 1)2
 
 52 Mr. Balfour's Rule in Ireland. 
 
 CHAPTER X. 
 
 Parnellites and Anti-Parnellites \ o\\ Terrors 
 of Home Rule The Priests. 
 
 ONE thing remains to be done for Ireland by the Unionist 
 Government, and it is to be hoped that well-intentioned 
 timidity will not obstruct Mr. Balfour in getting it done 
 before the dissolution, unless, indeed, the Unionist party 
 are confident of returning to power. Ireland requires a 
 Local Government Bill similar to the Acts already in force 
 in Great Britain, with reasonable facilities for promoting 
 private bills in Dublin, and until she gets it, those who 
 constitute themselves her champions will not be deprived 
 of their best remaining argument for Home Rule. The 
 National League is no longer a great political power in Ire- 
 land, and the Federation has no future before it. Discussion 
 between Nationalists is no longer stifled, and the estab- 
 lishment of County Councils should precipitate the efface- 
 ment of both political machines, by diverting the energy 
 of local politicians into a channel where ability can pro- 
 duce results at once novel, useful, and legitimate. 
 
 Mr. Balfour, speaking at Plymouth on the 10th August 
 last, said that his Local Government Bill would have a 
 general similarity to the English and Scotch measures 
 already passed. But he hastened to add that a system of 
 minority representation would be adopted, and that the
 
 Parnellites and Anti-Par nellites. 53 
 
 Irish Police would continue to remain a centralized force 
 as at present. 
 
 " I believe," said the Chief Secretary, " that a cen- 
 tralized force of that kind is absolutely necessary in Ireland. 
 I believe it is necessary not merely for the protection of 
 the loyalists in the south, but also for the protection of 
 the disloyalists in the north." 
 
 If the Constabulary were disbanded now or in the near 
 future, and County Police under the control of County 
 Councils substituted for the central force, no man could 
 follow his daily avocation or hold his property in safety. 
 
 Not alone is the security of a centralized police neces- 
 sary for the reasons adduced by Mr. Balfour, but also for 
 the protection of the devoted followers of Mr. Parnell 
 from the violence of the anti-Parnellites. 
 
 The unknown men brought into Irish politics by Mr. 
 Parnell now seek to rule Nationalist Ireland. These 
 men, mostly drawn by Mr. Parnell from the lower strata 
 of society, are now fighting under the leadership and 
 pay of the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland as they 
 formerly fought under Mr. Parnell. Home Rule, with 
 an executive under these men, would be as intoler- 
 able for the Parnellites as for the loyalists. And if it 
 were ever possible that Irishmen would resort to steel 
 and shot in defence of their liberties, those who placed 
 their faith in Mr. Parnell would be, in their own way, 
 as much justified in armed rebellion against Gladstonian 
 Home Rule as was the Ulster loyalist who urged his 
 compatriots to "line the ditches." 
 
 One of those members of Parliament above referred to, 
 one whose action has been described as that of a wild man
 
 54 Mr. JJulfour's Rule in Ire/and. 
 
 of the woods, since his escape from the control of Mr. 
 Parnell, spoke of the Parnellites at a Federation meeting 
 on August 12th, as follows : " What hope have we now 
 for the return of these men ? If they are right we must 
 be wrong, and if we are right in our position towards the 
 Irish movement the others must be traitors to the move- 
 ment, not, I grant, with the guilt of intentional perfidy ; 
 but what matters it to us whether the cause of Ireland be 
 lost by knave or fool ? . . . Argue we cannot when men's 
 passions and their jealousies get entangled with their 
 reason. Statesmen differed as to the construction of the 
 American constitution. But what did Ralph Waldo 
 Emerson say about it when North and South wrangled 
 for a long time on the question of slavery ? ' This,' said 
 Emerson, ' is a question for the gun.' And I say of the 
 present situation, in regard to Mr. Parnell's immediate 
 followers, this is a case for the sweeping -brush." 
 
 In a land of settled civilization the utterances of an 
 enraged demagogue excite nothing but ridicule, and in 
 the appearance of such a termagant, sweeping-brush in 
 hand, there would be nothing inappropriate. But in 
 Ireland such words have more than a metaphorical appli- 
 cation. Commenting upon them, the Evening Telegraph, 
 then the most consistent and energetic of the Parnellite 
 newspapers, wrote as follows on August 13th : " This 
 talk about the ' sweeping-brush ' is a timely exposure of 
 the real spirit of malignancy which lurked behind the 
 seductive phrases at Mallow, about forgiveness and bro- 
 therly hand-shaking, and unity. Messrs. Dillon and 
 O'Brien hang out all their most alluring phrases at 
 Mallow to seduce the Parnellites, and then Mr. Tim
 
 New Terrors of Home Rule. 55 
 
 Healy, thinking of the arbitrament of the gun, comes 
 along with his ' sweeping-brush.' The game of Messieurs 
 the Timhealyites is transparent. It may be the true 
 policy from the M'Carthyite standpoint, but it is tyranny. 
 The Eev. W. C. M'Gill, C.O., president of the Trinity 
 Ward branch of the Federation, whose speech at Tuesday's 
 meeting of that body has been partly suppressed by all 
 the morning newspapers, gave us a further glimpse of the 
 4 sweeping-brush ' plot, alias the ' true policy.' He de- 
 clared that the henchmen of Mr. Parnell ' must be fired 
 out of Irish life ' : that they must be treated as persons 
 affected with small-pox, and must not be touched ' until 
 the scabs had been sloughed off them ' : and then the rev. 
 gentleman went on to excuse the Timhealyites who had 
 been using ' strong language ' towards the Parnellites, on 
 the plea that they are 'humble imitators of the great 
 Founder of Christianity, who had been obliged to use 
 strong language in expounding the Decalogue.' That is 
 the ' sweeping-brush ' method." 
 
 A Kildare priest was fined 20*. by the looal magistrates 
 quite recently for having assaulted several of his own parish- 
 ioners on the public highway on the 23rd July. The men 
 were returning from the Parnellite convention held in 
 Dublin that day, when the priest met them, obstructed the 
 passage of their cart by several times drawing his horse 
 across the road, took down their names, threatened them 
 in violent terms, aud finally struck one of them with his 
 umbrella. In Ulster, some of the Roman Catholic bishops 
 have instructed their clergy to refuse the sacraments to 
 followers of Mr. Parnell. The Freeman's Journal was 
 denounced by Archbishop Walsh, on the 6th August, as
 
 56 Mr. Baffonr's Rule in Ireland. 
 
 " an apostate journal," because it continued to support 
 Mr. Parnell for the leadership, after the Catholic bishops 
 had condemned him by resolution. On March 2nd the 
 Freeman had explained its own position in these words : 
 " The attitude of the bishops appears to us to be impolitic, 
 and with all possible respect we claim we have a right to 
 say so, and that Catholicity does not imply a blind attach- 
 ment to the teachings of individual ecclesiastics in matters 
 political." 
 
 But on the 7th August that newspaper, the most widely- 
 read and wealthiest journal in Ireland, which had until 
 then accorded a spirited and thoroughgoing support to Mr. 
 Parnell, even after its chief proprietors, Mrs. E. D. Gray 
 and her son, had declared for the anti-Parnellites, lost 
 courage, and reeled before this epithet given to it by Dr. 
 Walsh. " Before we write another word," said the 
 Freeman, on the 7th August, " we deem it due to the 
 Archbishop and to ourselves as Catholics, to proclaim our 
 complete and unreserved obedience to the doctrines of the 
 
 Catholic Church on the subject We respectfully 
 
 claim from our Archbishop a direct and impartial hearing. 
 .... This is not the place to discuss theology : nor would 
 it, if there were any difference between the Archbishop 
 and ourselves on any Catholic doctrine the thought is so 
 presumptuous, the idea so absolutely foreign to every fibre 
 in us that we shrink from the mere mention of it be 
 decent to devote a secular journal to such a discussion." 
 The Freeman staggered in pitiable indecision for three 
 weeks after this, and then an extraordinary meeting of the 
 shareholders was held, at which the then existing directors, 
 including the Lord Mayor of Dublin, were all dismissed,
 
 The Priests. 57 
 
 and the control of the paper entrusted to a board who 
 entertained the same opinions as Dr. Walsh on the leader- 
 ship question. But the National Press, the organ of the 
 Federation, established during the " apostacy " of the 
 Freeman, refused to yield its place in the affections of the 
 clergy to its repentant rival, and then it came to pass that 
 the two representative journals of Nationalist Ireland 
 openly and abjectly scrambled for the patronage of the 
 Catholic Archbishop of Dublin. In Belfast, the Catholic 
 bishop, for the same reason, has started a daily paper 
 called the Irish News, in opposition to the Morning News, 
 which was until theu the only Catholic paper in the nor- 
 thern city. In Cork, both the daily Nationalist sheets 
 are with the priests. Thus, the press in Nationalist 
 Ireland, which from time immemorial has been the most 
 powerful defender of the liberty of the subject, is com- 
 pletely under the influence of that Church, which, according 
 to Mr. John Morley, " has broken with knowledge, has 
 taken her stand upon ignorance, and is striving might and 
 main, even in countries where she has no chance, to use 
 the machinery of popular government to keep back educa- 
 tion." Without expressing any opinion on the Church's 
 attitude towards education a subject outside the scope of 
 this work it will be conceded that no condemnation can 
 be too severe for the ex-Chief Secretary of five months* 
 standing, who would hand Ireland over to the control of 
 a body to which he has given such an evil character.
 
 58 Mr. Baffow't Rule in Ireland. 
 
 CHAPTER XL 
 
 >Ii- Dillon's Great Expectations" Jarndyce 
 and Jarndyee. 
 
 THE anti-Parnellite members of Parliament, who lately 
 constituted Mr. Parnell's trained band, now look forward 
 to the incoming of Mr. Gladstone next year with the same 
 sanguine expectancy that they brought to bear on the 
 passage of the Home Rule Bill in 1886. Mr. Dillon, 
 speaking at Mallow on the 9th August, with the assumed 
 authority of a leader, in so far as men like his associates 
 can be said to have a leader, predicted the immediate 
 downfall of Mr. Balfour. " Until that hour comes which, 
 please God, in spite of the speeches of Mr. Paruell, is now 
 at hand," said Mr. Dillon, as reported in the National 
 Press, " when the Tory, the Coercion Government, shall be 
 hurled from office, and when, believe me, the landlords 
 will come round hat in hand, requesting every evicted 
 tenant to come back to take possession of his farm very 
 much on his own terms you will see what an astonishing 
 diiference, the moment the election is declared, you will 
 see what an extraordinary change will come over the 
 demeanour of these gentlemen. Every resident magis- 
 trate, every policeman, every landlord in the country will 
 be all servility, as they once were for a short time before
 
 Mr. Dillon's " Great Expectations." 59 
 
 the Home Rule Bill was about to pass. Why, they were 
 coming to us with their hats in their hands, assuring us 
 that they would serve us as faithfully as ever they had 
 served the Castle. I am afraid there are some of them we 
 would not have at any price." Incoherency of language 
 becomes intelligible when addressed to a sympathetic 
 crowd, and the reader may be left to realize the effect of 
 such words on an audience more ignorant than, and just as 
 sanguine as, the orator himself. Continuing, Mr. Dillon 
 said, "we have only one short year, according to Mr. 
 Balfour, and I think I notice a change even in Mr. 
 Balfour's tone. He has got quite civil already. They 
 say that coming events cast their shadows before. I think 
 the shadow of the election has fallen upon Arthur James 
 Balfour. We have only- one short year to continue the 
 struggle." The following and final extract from the 
 same speaker, though to educated men such bathos may 
 seem unworthy of quotation, gives us a glimpse of Ire- 
 land under Grladstonian Home Rule : " I am prepared 
 not only to trust the people of Ireland but the priesthood 
 of Ireland, and I say that we the priests and people of 
 Ireland are prepared to manage our own affairs, and I 
 believe that we will show to the world when we do get, as 
 we shall get, in spite of this unfortunate struggle, as we 
 shall get the right to manage our own affairs, we will 
 show to the world the attempt to represent the present 
 struggle as sectarian is one of the basest calumnies that was 
 ever uttered. We will show that the priesthood, the bishops, 
 and Catholic people of Ireland, are the most tolerant body 
 of people in the world. We will question no man as to 
 his religion, but we will question him as to his public
 
 60 Mr. Balfour's Rule in Ireland. 
 
 character, and on the great uprising of the people of 
 Ireland which we have recently witnessed." It will be 
 observed that the priests are spoken of as a body separate 
 from, and of equal authority with, the people of Ireland. 
 Amongst the civilized nations of the earth one never hears 
 of " the priests and people " of any other country. Such 
 phrases as " the ministers and people of Scotland," " the 
 parsons and people of England," " the priests and people 
 of France," would excite indignation or ridicule if used by 
 public men in those countries. But in Nationalist Ireland 
 the claim of the priests to take precedence of the people 
 has been long asserted and never disputed. 
 
 Those whose political views have differed, and still 
 differ, from Mr. Dillon and the priests, will shudder at the 
 prospect of being put to the question " as to their public 
 character and on the great uprising of the people of Ireland 
 which we have recently witnessed." It would be better 
 for such men to be told that they were to be put to the 
 question as to their religion. For while a religious perse- 
 cution within the British empire is impossible, a persecu- 
 tion for political opinions has been proved to be not only 
 feasible but popular in Ireland. Under Mr. Balfour's 
 administration in Ireland "the priests and people" are 
 powerless to put such words into practice. But when the 
 millennium pictured by Mr. Dillon arrives, and when Mr. 
 Gladstone is entirely advised by the revolted Parnellites 
 in his government of Ireland, the case will be different. 
 
 In weighing the statements of Mr. Dillon it should be 
 borne in mind as characteristic of his public career that he 
 has denied most reported utterances of his whenever they 
 have been definitely laid to his charge. Instances of this
 
 Mr. Dillon s " Great Expectations." 61 
 
 trait could be multiplied, but the importance of the matter 
 is not sufficient to justify us in burthening these pages 
 with any more quotations from so incoherent an orator. 
 
 Mr. Gladstone should dread Mr. Dillon's " great ex- 
 pectations," for they constitute a very ancient and dis- 
 agreeable trait of Irish politics. " In May, 1880, Mr. 
 Gladstone's Ministry was constituted," wrote Mr. A. M. 
 Sullivan in his New Ireland ; " never before did the good 
 wishes, the sympathies, and the hopes of Ireland more 
 earnestly attend the advent of a British Minister to power. 
 The Prime Minister was the first English Premier since 
 Lord Melbourne who could be called really popular with 
 Irishmen." Mr. Sullivan claimed that " in England alone 
 some thirty or forty seats were carried by the Irish vote " 
 in favour of Mr. Gladstone at the election of 1880. 
 
 Yet, in less than eighteen months after, Mr. Gladstone's 
 name was execrated by every Nationalist in the country, 
 and his Chief Secretary, Mr. Forster, was lassoing Mr. 
 Sullivan's friends with the energy of a Mexican vaquero, 
 and driving herds of them into prison without trial. Yes, 
 execrated. Though in the interval he had passed his 
 Land Act of 1881, of which Mr. A. M. Sullivan eloquently 
 suys : "It abolished for ever the landlordism that had 
 been a curse to Ireland ; namely, the landlordism of 
 avarice, the landlordism of dominion, the landlordism of 
 caprice. The loug scourged tenantry of Ireland might now 
 sing aloud with the freed bondsmen of Port lioyal 
 
 ' We, last night slaves, 
 To-day, the Lord's free men.' 
 
 As I sat there and listened to the words of the Premier,
 
 62 Mr. Bnlfour's Rule in Ireland. 
 
 I felt as if I had, after the cruel toils and privations of the 
 desert, been at length vouchsafed a glimpse of the pro- 
 mised land. . . . Seldom in the history of the world had 
 the course of human legislation witnessed a more wise and 
 elevated purpose than that proclaimed in every page of 
 this scheme." 
 
 Under Mr. Gladstone's influence the proceedings of the 
 Imperial Parliament have long been regarded as a great 
 Chancery suit from which every Irish Nationalist has ex- 
 pectations, and thousands of Richard Carstones pay their 
 Messieurs Vholes or Messieurs Kenge for working up 
 their interests in that great cause the Irish JAUNDYCE AND 
 JARNDYCE. " Jarndyce and Jarndyce drones on. This 
 scarecrow of a suit has, in course of time, become so com- 
 plicated that no man alive knows what it means. The 
 parties to it understand it least : but it has been observed 
 that no two Chancery lawyers can talk about it for five 
 minutes without coming to a total disagreement as to all 
 the premises. Innumerable children have been born into 
 the cause ; innumerable young people have married into 
 it ; innumerable old people have died out of it. Scores 
 of persons have deliriously found themselves made parties 
 in Jarndyce and Jarndyce, without knowing how or why : 
 whole families have inherited legendary hatreds with the 
 suit. The little plaintiff or defendant who was promised 
 a new rocking-horse when Jarndyce and Jarndyce should 
 be settled, has grown up, possessed himself of a real horse, 
 and trotted away into the other world. Fair wards of 
 Court have faded into mothers and grandmothers ; a long 
 procession of Chancellors has come in and gone out. . . . 
 but Jarndyce and Jarndyce still drags its dreary length
 
 Jarndyce and Jarndyce. 63 
 
 before the Court, perennially hopeless." So the Nationalist 
 Irish cause, as it is called, has droned on. " Be this 
 struggle long or short, be it easy or hard, on the cause 
 must go ! " said Mr. O'Brien at Mallow on the 9th of 
 August. Funds without number have been started, sub- 
 scribed to, and squandered. Generation after generation 
 of Irish agitators and English legislators have passed 
 away. But yet the Nationalist portion of the country 
 does not thrive. To look for alms to America, and for 
 eleemosynary Acts of Parliament to England is still the 
 highest ideal of duty known to what is called an Irish 
 patriot. The manlier inhabitants of Nationalist Ireland 
 have been driven yearly to the shores of the New World 
 in disgust at the endless proceedings of that great cause 
 which has been a curse to them and their progenitors, and 
 the arena in Ireland has been left to " the man from 
 Shropshire," the Miss Elites, and the Richard Carstones. 
 Such is the case in Nationalist Ireland ; but in the North 
 it is quite different. There Jarndyce and Jarndyce, " the 
 grand old cause," is treated with contempt, and regarded 
 as the curse that it is. There honest toil and enterprise 
 have routed idle expectancy. There the hammers ring all 
 day and the looms are buzzing through the land. There 
 wealth accumulates and men multiply. These men of the 
 North have as much claim on Jarndyce and Jarndyce as 
 the men of the South and West, but they have foregone 
 their claims on that " scarecrow of a suit " whicli has 
 blighted the hopes of every one who has depended upon it 
 except the Messieurs Vholes and the Messieurs Kenge.
 
 64 Mr. Balfour's Rule in Ireland. 
 
 CHAPTER XII. 
 
 The Tyrant Parnell. 
 
 IT often appears to readers of the American cablegrams 
 in the press, as if blizzards, railway catastrophes, and 
 dynamite explosions were the main business of life in the 
 United States of America, and to those who only know 
 Ireland through the energetic daily press, it must seem 
 as if making political speeches, collecting political funds, 
 marching and counter-marching the constabulary, issuing 
 proclamations, and passing resolutions were the sole busi- 
 ness of life in this country. As there are many blizzards 
 in America, so there is much politics in Ireland, but it 
 is not all blizzards in the one country nor all politics in 
 the other. Where there is much politics, there is much 
 neglect of business, and consequent poverty, from which 
 come discontent, and trouble, and crime. Such has been the 
 condition of Ireland from 1878, until the present year, to 
 a greater extent than at any period of equal length in her 
 history. The present trouble had its origin on the 19th of 
 May, 1870, in the foundation of the Home Rule League, 
 or, as it was formally styled, the National Home Govern- 
 ment Association, at the Bilton Hotel in Dublin, by a few 
 scores of people, many of them Dublin Protestants, irritated 
 at the then recent disestablishment of their Church. The
 
 The Tyrant ParnelL 65 
 
 concession of disestablishment, fairly as it may have been 
 effected, gave the present Home Rule movement its first 
 impetus, and a Protestant clergyman's son struck the first 
 blow at the unity of the three kindgoms. When the 
 Protestants recovered from their alarm and chagrin, caused 
 by disestablishment, and when they had in a most self- 
 helpful manner reconstituted their Church upon a sound 
 financial basis, they quickly dropped away from the Home 
 Rule movement led by their co-religionist, Mr. Isaac Butt. 
 But Mr. Butt continued to lead the movement in a Platonic 
 spirit from 1874, until his death in 1878. He was suc- 
 ceeded by Mr. William Shaw, who followed his late 
 leader's policy until 1.880, when he was dismissed to make 
 way for Mr. Parnell. Butt and Shaw and their followers, 
 like the great O'Connell, were amateur politicians. Butt 
 was a distinguished and able lawyer ; Shaw was a banker, 
 and, up to that time, a successful speculator. Their 
 followers were citizens of Ireland or England, who 
 worked in the ordinary way for their living, or who had 
 amassed a competence in the ordinary walks of life. But 
 Mr. Parnell straightway set himself to politics as to a 
 profession or trade. He searched the country for unknown 
 men whom he forced upon the Irish constituencies, and 
 whom he paid for their services. He drove every man 
 out of Irish politics who did not surrender unconditionally 
 to his own rule. During the ten years that elapsed from 
 1880 to 1890, the noisy elements of Ireland gathered 
 themselves around Mr. Parnell, and the history of their 
 doings at home, as well as of their encounters with the 
 Imperial Legislature at Westminster, and the results flow- 
 ing therefrom constitute the greater part of the history of
 
 66 Mr. Balfour's Rule in Ireland. 
 
 the country for that period. In discontented countries, 
 the noisy element possesses political power, and in thrift- 
 less countries a political despot generally seizes that power. 
 
 In Mr. Parnell, Ireland found such a political despot as 
 few countries have been subject to in modern times. Mr. 
 Parnell trained his band of professional politicians, and 
 showed them that agitation was their bread of life. The 
 large masses of timid, indifferent, thriftless people who 
 fill the south, west, and central districts of Ireland, soon 
 joined with the noisy element and swelled Mr. Parnell's 
 following. A few consecutive bad harvests and a fall in 
 prices of agricultural produce worked in Mr. Parhell's 
 favour. He and his trained band collected subscriptions 
 from the farming and labouring classes, for which they 
 promised in return to wring Land Bills from the English 
 Government. But when the Land Bills came they im- 
 plored the farmers not to avail themselves of their provi- 
 sions, lest the country should settle down, and thereby 
 deprive them of their occupation. The farmers paid scant 
 heed to their entreaties. They got all they could out of 
 every Land Act as it came, but continued to pay in their 
 subscriptions, hoping for more. A spirit of gambling was 
 infused into the country, the farmers looked to legislation 
 to do everything for them, and they neglected to till their 
 land. Every new concession increased the thriftlessness 
 and recklessness of those who believed in Mr. Parnell's 
 omnipotence. 
 
 Meanwhile Mr. Parnell ruled over all these elements of 
 the Irish population with all the attributes of sovereignty. 
 He indifferently used the Land question or the Home 
 Rule question, as occasion served, for maintaining and
 
 The Tyrant Purnell. 67 
 
 increasing his power. As the typical constitutional 
 sovereign is defined to be a monarch who reigns but does 
 not govern, so Mr. Parnell's position may be defined as 
 that of a sovereign who governed but did not reign. Like 
 a small Augustus, declining the title of king, he gave to 
 his followers a semblance of liberty of opinion and yearly 
 sought the suffrages of the members of the Irish Party for 
 his election to the chair. 
 
 From 1880 till 1890, assisted by his trained band and 
 a large permanent staff of servants, he levied taxes, decided 
 causes, punished offenders, held the sole prerogative of 
 nominating persons to seats in Parliament, and entered 
 into treaties on behalf of his subjects with Viceroys and 
 Prime Ministers. He more than once despatched his 
 deputies to the limits of the earth, to Australia, South 
 Africa, Canada, and the United States to levy grants in 
 aid of his policy from the resident Irish populations. He 
 himself was received by the American Congress in the 
 Capitol, at Washington, as Leader of the Irish Race, and 
 was afterwards voted 100,000 by popular subscription in 
 the United States, to be spent in furtherance of his policy. 
 The immense sums collected everywhere were entrusted to 
 him and his trained band with absolute discretion to use 
 as he thought fit. Augustus has been called a " crafty 
 tyrant" by the historian of the "Decline and Fall," though 
 his name is associated with a long period of peace and 
 prosperity within the boundaries of the Roman Empire. 
 The appellation would not be inappropriate to Mr. Parnell. 
 His empire was governed without an armed force, but at 
 one time, in 1886, it seemed as if the British Legislature 
 were about to confer upon him the power of the sword, 
 
 E2
 
 68 Mr. Balfour's Rule in Ireland. 
 
 and thus complete his assumption of despotic sway. It 
 does not follow from anything we have said that Mr. 
 Parnell would have used that new power to the disadvan- 
 tage of Ireland. Every capable tyrant from the mild 
 Pisistratus to Napoleon Buonaparte had good intentions. 
 What Mr. Parnell would have done for Ireland, had Mr. 
 Gladstone then conferred on him the control of her destinies, 
 must now remain a matter for conjecture. His ultimate 
 aims were never known to anybody. But we may infer from 
 such indications as we can get what use he would have 
 made of his power with regard to England. During the 
 election of 1880, Mr. Parnell was absent in America, 
 collecting subscriptions for his movement, which was newly 
 started, and then called the Land League. Meanwhile his 
 colleagues at home aided the Liberal party in the English 
 contested elections, and claimed that they had thereby 
 turned the scale in favour of Mr. Gladstone in from thirty 
 to forty constituencies. When Mr. Parnell returned, he 
 was jubilantly informed of what had been done. But, 
 so far from being delighted at the Liberal victory, he told 
 Mr. A. M. Sullivan, who was his informant, that " it 
 would have been infinitely better for Ireland to keep the 
 Conservatives in power, as Lord Beaconsfield would infal- 
 libly bring England into some disastrous European com- 
 plication, the occurrence of which would be the sigual for 
 concessions to Ireland, far far beyond anything Gladstone 
 would ever conceive." 
 
 Such was the political despot who went so near wresting 
 the government of Ireland from the English Crown. Jin- 
 goism expired with Lord Beaconsfield, and Lord Salisbury 
 and his colleagues are admitted to be as free from the
 
 The Tyrant ParnelL 69 
 
 faintest tinge of that once fashionable craze as Mr. Glad- 
 stone himself. But a nation with such vast and varied 
 interests as England can never be absolutely certain that 
 she will not one day, however reluctantly, find herself 
 involved in a European complication. Had Home Rule 
 been given in 1886, the first European embarrassment in 
 which England was involved would have found Ireland 
 under Mr. Parnell demanding concessions far far beyond 
 anything Gladstone would ever conceive. If it be given 
 in 1893, it is to the creatures of Mr. Parnell's despotism 
 the country will be handed over. Will Ireland prosper 
 under those men whose lives have been devoted to foment- 
 ing all those forces of discontent, which will be numerous 
 in Nationalist Ireland till crack of doom, unless the 
 character of its people be radically improved ? It is not 
 from a political despotism like Mr. Parnell's, or from a 
 priestly despotism such as we are now threatened with, 
 that national prosperity can come. True national improve- 
 ment can only be achieved by each man acting for himself 
 upon the principles of self-help and self-reliance. " I have 
 heard a great deal," said Mr. Dargan, "about the indepen- 
 dence that we were to get from this, that, and the other 
 source ; yet I have always been deeply impressed with the 
 conviction that our industrial independence depends upon 
 ourselves. Simple industry and careful exactness would 
 be the making of Ireland." As long as Nationalists are 
 so wanting in self-respect as to trot in herds before the 
 whipcrack of the politician or ecclesiastic, they can enjoy 
 no lasting prosperity. 
 
 Now that Mr. Parnell is dead, it will be conceded that, 
 besides being a daring and capable tyrant, he was one of
 
 70 Mr. Balfour's Rule in Ireland. 
 
 the most powerful and remarkable men of the nineteenth 
 century. His end was in keeping with his life and 
 character. Deserted, reviled, and anathematized by the 
 majority of his ungrateful and inconstant countrymen, 
 who owed every concession wrung from England in recent 
 years to his genius and courage, his business on earth was 
 finished. Such a man could not survive in a subordinate 
 position. He was the greatest parliamentary leader 
 Ireland ever had, and his death has deprived Mr. Glad- 
 stone of that most plausible, but most cowardly, pretext 
 for the concession of Home Rule, viz. the fear of Irish 
 obstruction of English business in the House of Commons.
 
 Mr. Half our' s Distinction as Ohief Secretary. 71 
 
 CHAPTER XIII. 
 
 9Ir. Balfonr's Distinction as Chief Secretary. 
 
 THE following are the names of the Chief Secretaries since 
 the Union, with the periods for which they have held 
 office : 
 
 1801 Eight Hon. Charles Abbott. 
 
 1802-1804 William Wickham. 
 
 1804 Sir Evan Nepean. 
 
 1804-1805 N. Vansittart. 
 
 1805-1806 . ,, Charles Long. 
 
 1806-1807 William Elliott. 
 
 1807-1809 Sir Arthur Wellesley. 
 
 1809 ,, Robert Dundas. 
 
 1809-1813 W. W. Pole. 
 
 1813-1818 Robert Peel. 
 
 1818-1821 Charles Grant. 
 
 1821-1827 Henry Goulburn. 
 
 1827-1828 William Lamb. 
 
 1828-1830 ,, Lord F. Leveson-Gower. 
 
 1830-1831 Sir Henry Hardinge. 
 
 1831-1833 E. G. S. Stanley. 
 
 1833 Sir John Hobhouse. 
 
 1833-1835 ,, E. J. Littleton. 
 
 1835 ,, Sir Henry Hardinge. 
 
 1835-1841 Viscount Morpeth.
 
 72 Mr. Balfour's Rule in Ireland. 
 
 1841-1845 Eight Hon. Lord Eliot. 
 
 1845-1846 Sir Thomas Freemantle. 
 
 1846 ,, Earl of Lincoln. 
 
 1846-1847 Henry Labouchere. 
 
 1847-1852 Sir William Somerville. 
 
 1852-1853 ,, Lord Naas. 
 
 1853-1855 ,, Sir John Young. 
 
 1855-1857 ,, Edward Horsman. 
 
 1857-1858 H. A. Herbert. 
 
 1858-1859 ,, Lord Naas. 
 
 1859-1861 ,, Edward Card well. 
 
 1861-1865 Sir Eobert Peel. 
 
 1865-1866 C. S. P. Fortescue. 
 
 1866-1868 Lord'Naas. 
 
 1868 Wilson Patten. 
 
 1868-1871 C. S. P. Fortescue. 
 
 1871-1874 ,, Lord Hartington. 
 
 1874-1878 Sir Michael Hicks-Beach. 
 
 1878-1880 James Lowther. 
 
 1880-1882 W. E. Forster. 
 
 1882 ,, Lord Frederick Cavendish. 
 
 1882-1884 Sir George Trevelyan. 
 
 1884-1885 ,, H. Campbell-Bannerman. 
 
 1885-1886 Sir W. Hart-Dyke. 
 
 1886 W. H. Smith. 
 
 1886 ,, John Morley. 
 
 1886 ,, Sir Michael Hicks-Beach. 
 
 1887- ,, ARTHTJB JAMES BALFOUB. 
 
 From the beginning of the Land agitation in 1879, 
 down to Mr. Balfour's appointment in 1887, that is to say 
 
 in eight years, nine different Chief Secretaries succeeded 
 each other in quick succession. During no period of the
 
 Mr. Balfour's Distinction as Chief Secretary. 73 
 
 same length since the Union were there so many changes 
 in the office. Mr. Balfour has now held office longer than 
 any Chief Secretary since the Land agitation commenced 
 in 1879, and of all the Chief Secretaries since the Act of 
 Union was passed in 1800, only two have held the position 
 as long as Mr. Balfour will have held it at the end of the 
 coming session, viz. Mr. Henry Groulburn and Viscount 
 Morpeth, each of whom held it for about six years. It 
 will be observed from a perusal of the above list, that many 
 Chief Secretaries rose to eminence afterwards mother and, 
 perhaps, higher spheres, but it remained for Mr. Balfour 
 to be the first Chief Secretary to attain the highest poli- 
 tical eminence by reason of ability displayed during his 
 actual tenure of that office. More than one politician who 
 served as Chief Secretary in his salad days, afterwards 
 became Prime Minister of the Crown. But Mr. Balfour 
 has been the first to display, during his administration of 
 Ireland, such powers of statesmanship as entitle him, by 
 general consent, to serve the Crown in the highest capacity, 
 should the occasion arise. 
 
 The finest trait of Mr. Balfour's rule in Ireland has 
 been that stern impartiality of administration which gives 
 general security. " In my judgment," said Mr. Balfour 
 at Plymouth, on the 10th August, " administration is the 
 first duty of the Government, and legislation only the 
 second duty." The record of Liberal rule in Ireland, on 
 the other hand, shows legislation in unlimited quantities, 
 but no steadiness or thoroughness of administration. Had 
 Mr. Balfour's policy of administration first, and legisla- 
 tion after, been adopted and honourably adhered to a 
 quarter of a century back, as he has adhered to it since
 
 74 Mr. Balfour' 8 Rule in Ireland. 
 
 his accession to power, Nationalist Ireland would not now 
 be crowded with idle expectants. If previous Govern- 
 ments had united Mr. Balfour's stern impartiality of 
 administration with his modest and moderate language 
 when speaking of his Irish measures, great expectations 
 would not have given birth to the anguish of disappoint- 
 ment. " It does not rest with one individual with one 
 Government," said Mr. Balfour at Plymouth, on August 
 10th, " it does not rest, I had almost said, with one gene- 
 ration, completely to solve so ancient a controversy, so old 
 an historic difficulty as that presented by what is known 
 as the Irish question. All we can claim to have done 
 certainly the most I can ever claim to have done is to 
 be in process of solving it, and that claim we may put 
 forward with something like moderation and justice." 
 
 Mr. Balfour has done much more than he admits to 
 solve the Irish question. He has fought and conquered 
 the professional agitator. He has passed a great Land 
 Bill which will convert tens of thousands of occupiers into 
 owners. He has made the first practical attempt to deal 
 with those plague spots known as the congested districts. 
 He has improved the means of communication in the most 
 inaccessible parts of the country. He has extended the 
 uniform protection of the Crown to Loyalist and Nation- 
 alist, to Parnellite and anti-Parnellite. He has revived 
 the drooping spirits of the permanent servants of the 
 Crown in Ireland, who were beginning to lose all con- 
 fidence in English Ministers. He has brought local self- 
 government to our doors. What more could a Cabinet 
 Minister do, except to change the nature of Nationalist 
 Ireland by infusing into it some of the energy and self-
 
 Mr. Balfour's Distinction as Chief Secretary. 75 
 
 reliance of the Northerns ? Nationalist Ireland is said to 
 consist of the priests and the people. The people have 
 yet to learn self-reliance. But the priests to deal with 
 them an entire treatise would hardly suffice. 
 
 We have seen that when Mr. Balfour assumed the 
 government of Ireland in 1887, Mr. Parnell was at the 
 pinnacle of his power. In proportion as Mr. Balfour's 
 firm administration pacified the country, so Mr. Parnell's 
 trained hand of professional politicians found their occu- 
 pation going from them, and their future prospects 
 becoming gloomier. In this frame of mind they leaned 
 towards the Liberal party, secretly at first, but afterwards, 
 when openly put to the test of choosing between Mr. 
 Parnell and Mr. Gladstone, they deserted the Irishman 
 whose policy was ceasing to be lucrative, in favour of the 
 Englishman whom they thought soon likely to have the 
 spoils of office in his gift. 
 
 The fight between Mr. Parnell and the deserters does 
 not come within the scope of this work, but it is worthy of 
 note that proportionately as the trained band of agita- 
 tors and their allies drove Mr. Parnell to bay, so did 
 Mr. Parnell the more energetically adopt towards them 
 the policy of Mr. Balfour, which he found so fatal to him- 
 self. Mr. Parnell then called upon the farmers to adopt 
 the Balfour Land Act, and advised the evicted tenants on 
 the Plan of Campaign estates to come to settlements. He 
 had seen how the Balfour policy of Purchase Acts, coupled 
 with the firmest Irish administration of modern times, 
 pacified the country, and weakened his own position. 
 Experience had taught him that the complete triumph of 
 the Balfour policy means the death of agitation and
 
 76 Mr. Balfour's Rule in Ireland. 
 
 unrest, and the consequent downfall of tlie professional 
 agitators who had rebelled from his authority. To such 
 a happy pass did Mr. Balfour bring affairs in Ireland. 
 Will the electors of England support the Chief Secretary 
 in his successful policy, or will they abandon Ireland 
 again to Mr. Gladstone, and his allies the professional 
 agitators ? 
 
 The fifth year of Mr. Balfour's rule has been signalized 
 by a tranquillity to which Ireland had been long a stranger. 
 We have already mentioned Lord Zetland's progresses 
 through the country as evidencing the goodwill which is 
 beginning to prevail. It is not unreasonable to state, in 
 addition, that never was there such a concourse of visitors 
 from all parts of Ireland and from Great Britain at the 
 Royal Dublin Society's Horse Show as there was this 
 year. The Horse Show has long established its claim to 
 be called the Carnival of Ireland, and this year the 
 Viceroy and Prince Albert Victor were the central figures 
 of the assemblage. As His Excellency and His Royal 
 Highness passed in their unguarded carriages to and from 
 the Show they were enthusiastically cheered by the tens 
 of thousands of people assembled at Ball's Bridge and 
 along the route on the public thoroughfares. 
 
 Another incident worth mentioning was the conference 
 of the Royal Institute of Journalists. This powerful body, 
 representing the journalists of the three kingdoms, selected 
 Dublin as the site of its annual reunion this year, and its 
 members spent a week of combined business and pleasure 
 in the Irish metropolis. The Associated Chambers of 
 Commerce, representing the mercantile interests of Great 
 Britain and Ireland, also held their annual conference in
 
 Mr. Ba (four's Distinction as Chief Secretary. 77 
 
 Dublin this year, for the first time in the history of the 
 Institution. They were entertained by the Lord Mayor, 
 Lord Ardilaun, Lord Iveagh, and by the Dublin Chamber. 
 Amidst these scenes of peace and pleasure the nightmare 
 so long brooding over the country seemed to have passed 
 away. Not a word was spoken of the land agitation, or 
 of Home Rule. The Queen's health was toasted every- 
 where and in all companies with as much enthusiasm as 
 the city of London itself could have evinced. 
 
 But with the cessation of festivities, apprehensions 
 naturally revive lest Mr. Gladstone, and his ex-Chief 
 Secretary of five months' standing, should be empowered 
 to cast the country back again into the grip of the paid 
 agitators, who are at present relegated, if not to obscurity, 
 at least to impotence, under Mr. Balfour's rule in Ireland. 
 Of these men it may be truly said that but for the counte- 
 nance aud pecuniary support now given to them by the 
 Catholic Church in Ireland, they would die a natural 
 death, as public characters, in six months. They and 
 their organization represent nothing now but the truly 
 formidable power of the Catholic Church a power with 
 which no fault can be found, so long as it is confined 
 to ministering to the religious wants of the people and 
 guiding them in the paths of morality, but \\ hich deserves 
 nothing but condemnation when employed as a lever to 
 direct the political actions of Irishmen.
 
 78 Mr. Balfour's Rule in Ireland. 
 
 CHAPTER XIV. 
 
 Personal The Policy of Beggar's Pride. 
 
 THE writer of the foregoing pages has no inherited sym- 
 pathy with the cause of landlordism or conservatism in 
 Ireland. Having all his relatives amongst the farming 
 classes, and being the son of one who for many years pre- 
 sided over a branch of the Land League, and who was 
 imprisoned under the Forster Crimes Act, his sympathies 
 naturally lie with the tenants. In the early days of the 
 Land League the writer took part in the movement, and 
 youthful enthusiasm brought him into hostile contact with 
 the police authorities once at a public meeting, and once 
 at a seizure of his father's cattle, for wilful non-payment 
 of rent, in obedience to the League. He may lay claim, 
 without arrogance, to a knowledge of how the defunct 
 Land League, and the moribund National League worked 
 in practice in the country districts. 
 
 For the past ten years he has attentively observed 
 the policy pursued by the wirepullers of those political 
 machines. While admitting that both those organizations 
 procured reductions of rent, he denies that they benefited 
 the country. He denies and his denial is borne out by 
 the facts that Nationalist Ireland has improved either in 
 wealth, or intelligence, or population, or enterprise since
 
 Personal The Policy of Beggar's Pride. 79 
 
 the death of Mr. Butt in 1878. While admiring the 
 firmness of will, shrewd sense, tactical ability, and the 
 absence of lying sentimentality which have marked Mr. 
 Parnell's character in the main, he cannot blind himself 
 to the fact that the late Irish leader, and more especially his 
 agents, preached a gospel of greed, selfishness, and dis- 
 honour to the Irish farmers. 
 
 He is convinced that idleness, constantly deteriorating 
 husbandry, political gossipping, and undue expectations 
 from Parliament have marked the progress of Mr. Parnell's 
 movement in Ireland amongst the farming classes, with a 
 recrudescence of which " on the old lines " we are now 
 threatened by Messrs. Dillon and O'Brien. 
 
 The writer fearlessly asserts that the integrity of Nation- 
 alist Ireland has been sapped, and that the fundamental 
 distinctions between right and wrong, meum and tuurn, have 
 been wilfully confounded during the last eleven years by 
 Mr. Parnell and his trained band of agitators and their 
 abettors, clerical as well as lay. Demoralizing as were the 
 effects of the real agitation, he is convinced that the pre- 
 tence of agitation kept up on paper to-day is still more 
 disgraceful to the nation which tolerates it. The writer 
 is convinced that although the decades from the passage 
 of Baron Deasy's Act in 1860, to the general election of 
 1880, were characterized by high rents and humility on 
 the part of tenants to their landlords, yet the country was 
 more prosperous as a whole than it has been since the 
 advent of Mr. Parnell. There was more money in cir- 
 culation and a greater spirit of enterprise amongst the 
 farmers. 
 The land-grabber, who has been so mercilessly denounced,
 
 80 Mr. Bul/our's Rule in Ireland. 
 
 was generally the most prudent and energetic man in his 
 vicinity, and, as a general rule, had a large family of sons 
 amongst whom he divided his holdings at his death. The 
 sous of the land-grabher were a vast improvement on the 
 ne'er-do-wells whom they supplanted ; they were better 
 citizens, better ratepayers, and altogether the fittest men 
 of the community. The writer has seen the spirit of enter- 
 prise and all free trading in land crushed under the rule 
 of Mr. Parnell ; he has seen the ne'er-do-wells fostered 
 and supported by funds collected, under duress, from their 
 industrious neighbours. 
 
 The decade from 1880 to 1890 has seen the wealth of 
 the agitators and of the priesthood accumulating, while 
 the men and women who subscribed it were decaying in 
 numbers and in moral fibre from day to day. That 
 decade has witnessed the humiliating spectacle of Irish 
 politicians begging funds for their own support in distant 
 lands, and accepting large donations by way of alms from 
 men who owned no kith and kin to Ireland. The writer 
 has been struck with the fact that emigration has received 
 no check during these years of agitation, despite all the 
 so-called advantages claimed to have been won by the 
 agitators for the farmers and the labourers. And he 
 points to that important fact in support of his contention 
 that these advantages were only seeming and bore no 
 practical fruit. 
 
 While he admits that the Irish landlords, especially the 
 smaller ones, and their blood relatives, oftentimes abused 
 the privileges bestowed upon them by their social position, 
 wealth, and culture, in times gone by, he denies that the 
 spirit of swaggering rudeness and ignorant self-conceit
 
 Personal The Policy of Beggar's Pride. 81 
 
 disseminated amongst the farmers and labourers during 
 the agitation has left them better men. Bearing in mind 
 the geographical isolation of Ireland, and the fact that the 
 priesthood of Ireland is a peasant priesthood, he believes 
 that the wholesale flight of the landlords, and other gentry, 
 would cause Ireland to relapse towards barbarism for a 
 considerable time. 
 
 As the last decade opened most ominously for the land- 
 lords, so the beginning of the present decade discovers 
 the camp of the agitators rent with discord, and their 
 army in all the confusion of defeat. It is to be hoped 
 that at length the system of paid agitation has had its day, 
 and must cede place to the spirit of self-help and indivi- 
 dualism. Whatever may have been the secret end and 
 ultimate aim of the agitators and far be it from the 
 writer to impugn their motives no censure can be too 
 severe for the means they adopted, means which have 
 temporarily ruined the national character. 
 
 For the disasters wrought by the agitation, the writer 
 believes in no remedy but the self-help and individualism 
 which seem likely to result from the Ashbourne and Bal- 
 four Land Acts. The concession of Parliamentary self- 
 government proposed by Mr. Gladstone, instead of undoing 
 the mischief, will intensify it. It will, if granted, at once 
 revivify the system of paid agitation which rose to such 
 surpassing power under Mr. Gladstone's rule in Ireland, 
 and which Mr. Balfour fought and conquered. As part 
 of the British Empire, having one hundred and three 
 representatives in the House of Commons, Ireland at 
 present enjoys sufficient Parliamentary self-government 
 for every practical purpose. If Irish constituencies will
 
 82 Mr. Balfour's Rule in Ireland. 
 
 only learn how to make up their minds individually as to 
 what they require, and return efficient representatives, 
 definitely pledged to obtain what is required, the Parlia- 
 ment of the United Kingdom will not be found wanting. 
 The obstruction of Irish business of late years has been 
 deliberately caused by the Irish members. 
 
 The writer is convinced that it is not real necessity, but 
 national vanity, which is at the bottom of this cry for 
 Home Rule. He points to Belfast and the North as a 
 proof that where this spirit of national vanity is trodden 
 under foot, and where men march under the banner of 
 self-help and proper pride, the present Constitution enables 
 Irishmen to compete successfully with England and Scot- 
 land. He conscientiously believes this spirit of national 
 vanity to be a foolish spirit, out of which no good can 
 come. He believes that if its clamourous cries are yielded 
 to by British statesmen, the government of the country 
 will be thereby handed over to incompetent men, who will 
 assuredly plunge Ireland into a sea of turmoil and debt, 
 from which it can only be rescued by a revolution. 
 
 Such will, in the writer's opinion, be the effect of Mr. 
 Gladstone's Irish policy upon Ireland, with which he is 
 chiefly concerned. As for its effect upon England, which 
 is more a matter for Englishmen, he fails to see how 
 England can maintain her position as a Great Power, if 
 the legislatures of the two countries are once separated. 
 The writer cares not how circumscribed may be the powers 
 granted to a Dublin Parliament at first, for experience 
 teaches that there is no such word as finality in dealing 
 with the question of English concessions and Irish 
 demands.
 
 Personal The Policy of Beggar's Pride. 83 
 
 Such being the writer's conviction, he believes that the 
 policy of true Irish patriotism should be to draw the bonds 
 of union with England still closer than at present, to learn 
 of Englishmen in all that is useful, to copy those excel- 
 lences which have contributed to their national prosperity, 
 in a word to meet England with her own weapons in the 
 fair competition of every-day life. Like the Saxons of 
 old, after the defeat at Hastings, let us at length coalesce 
 with our conquerors and become part and parcel of them- 
 selves. They have proved themselves to the world better 
 men than we have been ; let us now imitate them and strive 
 to put our children on an equal footing with theirs. 
 
 This noble end cannot be achieved by isolating ourselves 
 in the Atlantic Ocean, or by any longer pursuing a policy 
 of beggar's pride. Nor could it be achieved by all the 
 paper Acts which a' Parliament in Dublin could pass in 
 fifty years. 
 
 History teaches us that Ireland, separated as she was 
 from England by a sea treble the breadth of that which 
 rolls between England and France, was conquered by a 
 small irregular body of English adventurers seven cen- 
 turies ago. Since then she has never regained her liberty 
 for a moment, notwithstanding all the troubles through 
 which England subsequently had to pass. Seeing the 
 enormous disproportion between the resources of the two 
 countries at present, the consideration of that historical 
 fact alone should convince the high-minded Irishmen of 
 1867 of the utter hopelessness of now attaining anything 
 worthy the name of national freedom. 
 
 Whatever concessions may come from vote-huckstering 
 between Irish Nationalists and English Liberals, they
 
 84 Mr. Balfour'* Rule in Ireland. 
 
 will only result in Ireland's slinking further to heel in 
 sullen isolation injurious to herself and dangerous to Great 
 Britain. 
 
 When Irishmen further consider that Scotland, a smaller 
 and less fertile country than Ireland, and joined to England 
 by land, was never permanently conquered despite the many 
 pitched battles and massacres which drenched the border 
 counties in blood for centuries, it should remind them that 
 it was not merely circumstances but a serious defect in the 
 national character that really kept Ireland in bondage. 
 Our ancestors have left us ce'nturies in arrear of Great 
 Britain, and when we gratefully acknowledge the kind- 
 ness of an English statesman in having removed an Irish 
 grievance, we generally bear witness to the helplessness of 
 our own ancestors, who should have long before settled the 
 question for themselves. 
 
 It is not by harking back to their ways now that we can 
 make up for lost time. Old times are changed. The 
 present is pre-eminently a day of big things, and it is for- 
 tunate for Irishmen that they find themselves members of 
 the biggest and wealthiest empire on earth an empire 
 whose language they speak and whose citizenship they 
 possess. 
 
 It is Mr. Balfour's policy to maintain Ireland's power 
 in the very heart and life-seat of that empire, while con- 
 ceding to her all necessary powers of local government, 
 and in that policy he should have the support of every 
 Irishman who truly loves his country. 
 
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