ced it accordingly. What I have since learned leads me to fear
that he really may have said something capable of being construed in
this absurd sense, but if he did, it must have been under the
exasperation produced by finding himself locked up."

I heard the story of Mr. Balfour's meeting with Mr. Blunt very plainly
and vigorously told, while I was staying the other day at Knoyle House,
in the immediate neighbourhood of Clouds, where the two were guests
under conditions which should be at least as sacred in the eyes of
Britons as of Bedouins. In Wiltshire nobody seemed for a moment to
suppose it possible that Mr. Blunt can have really deceived himself as
to the true nature of any conversation he may have had with Mr. Balfour.
This is paying a compliment to Mr. Blunt's common sense at the expense
of his imagination. In any view of the case, to lie in wait at the lips
of a fellow guest in the house of a common friend, for the counts of a
political indictment against him, is certainly a proceeding, as Davitt
said yesterday of Mr. Blunts tale of horror, quite "open to question."
But, as Mr. Blunt himself has sung, "'Tis conscience makes us sinners,
not our sin," and I have no doubt the author of the _Poems of Proteus_
really persuaded himself that he was playing lawn tennis and smoking
cigarettes in Wiltshire with a modern Alva, cynically vain of his own
dark and bloody designs. Now that he finds himself struck down by the
iron hand of this remorseless tyrant, why should he not cry aloud and
warn, not Ireland alone, but humanity, against the appalling crimes
meditated, not this time in the name of "Liberty," but in the name of
Order?

What especially struck me in talking with Mr. Balfour to-day was his
obviously unaffected interest in Ireland as a country rather than in
Ireland as a cock-pit. It is the condition of Ireland, and not the
gabble of parties at Westminster about the condition of Ireland, which
is uppermost in his thoughts. This, I should say, is the best guarantee
of his eventual success.

The weakest point of the modern English system of government by Cabinets
surely is the evanescent tenure by which every Minister holds his
place. Not only has the Cabinet itself no fixed term of office, being in
truth but a Committee of the Legislature clothed with executive
authority, but any member of the Cabinet may be forced by events or by
intrigues to leave it. In this way Mr. Forster, when he filled the place
now he