ections.

The Queen was in high good humour, as she had a right to be. She gave Mr.
Gladstone ample credit for his conciliatory spirit. The last two months
had been very trying to her, she said, but she confessed herself repaid by
the thought that she had assisted in a settlement. Mr. Gladstone's
severest critics on the tory side confessed that "they did not think he
had it in him." Some friends of his in high places even suggested that
this would be a good moment for giving him the garter. He wrote to Sir
Arthur Gordon (Dec. 5): "The time of this government has been on the whole
the most stormy and difficult that I have known in office, and the last
six weeks have been perhaps the most anxious and difficult of the
government."

V

One further episode deserves a section, if the reader will turn back for a
moment or two. The question whether the extension of the parliamentary
franchise to rural householders should be limited to Great Britain or
should apply to the whole kingdom, had been finally discussed in a couple
of morning sittings in the month of May. Nobody who heard it can forget
the speech made against Irish inclusion by Mr. Plunket, the eloquent
grandson of the most eloquent of all the orators whom Ireland has sent to
the imperial senate. He warned the House that to talk of assimilating the
franchise in Ireland to the franchise in England, was to use language
without meaning; that out of seven hundred and sixty thousand inhabited
houses in Ireland, no fewer than four hundred and thirty-five thousand
were rated at one pound and under; that those whom the bill would
enfranchise would be taken from a class of whom more than forty per cent.
could neither read nor write; that the measure would strengthen the hands
of that disloyal party who boasted of their entire indifference to English
opinion, and their undivided obligation to influences which Englishmen
were wholly unable to realise. Then in a lofty strain Mr. Plunket foretold
that the measure which they were asked to pass would lead up to, and would
precipitate, the establishment of a separate Irish nationality. He
reminded his hearers that the empire had been reared not more by the
endurance of its soldiers and sailors than by the sagacity and firmness,
the common sense and patriotism, of that ancient parliament; and he ended
with a fervid prayer that the historian of the future might not have to
tell that the union of these three kingdoms on which res