g the strength of the arguments for and against
Home Rule, no material importance whatever. His concern is the merit or
demerit of a legislative enactment. He is not concerned at all with the
conduct or the character of legislators. Mr. Gladstone's motives may be
the highest which can be ascribed to the Premier by the voice of
admiring friendship, or the basest which can be imputed to him by the
unfairness of political rancour. In any case they are irrelevant to the
matter in hand. An unwise measure will not become a beneficial law
because its author is a saint or a patriot; a statesmanlike law will not
turn out a curse to the country because its defender is an intriguer or
a traitor. We all see that this is so if we carry our view back to the
controversies of the last generation; the personalities of fifty or
sixty years ago are reduced before our eyes into their real pettiness.
The first Reform Bill still retains its importance for as a measure
which for good or bad revolutionised the constitution; its beneficial or
pernicious effects are still traceable in the England of to-day; but its
evils are not lessened by the acknowledged virtues of Lord Althorpe, nor
are its good effects marred by the ambition of Brougham or the violence
of O'Connell. It is no slight recommendation of any mode of reasoning if
it suggests to us the prudence of judging the policy of 1886 in the
spirit and by the standards which every man of sense applies to the
policy of 1832. Academic disquisition has its faults, but ought to
produce academic calmness; a class-room is after all a better place for
quiet reflection than the House of Commons or the hustings.

The second of the advantages which marks the proposed mode of argument
is that a line of thought which fixes a reader's attention all but
exclusively upon the probable effects of Home Rule is a preservative
against the errors which arise from introducing into a dispute, bitter
enough in itself, all the poisonous venom of historical recrimination,
and all the delusions which are the offspring of the misleading tendency
to personify nations. The massacres of 1641, the sack of Drogheda, the
violated treaty of Limerick, the follies strangely mingled with the
patriotism of Grattan's Parliament, the outrages which discredited the
rebellion of 1798, and the cruelties which disgraced its suppression;
the corruption which carried the Union, and the broken pledges which
turned political union into a so