ould happen that Irish loyalists should suffer from
extension of equal civil rights to Irishmen, what sort of reason was that
why the principle of exclusion and ascendency which had worked such
mischief in the past, should be persisted in for a long and indefinite
future? These views, it is important to observe, were shared, not only by
the minister's own party, but by a powerful body among his opponents. Some
of the gentlemen who had been most furious against the government for not
stopping Irish meetings in the autumn of 1883, were now most indignant at
the bare idea of refusing or delaying a proposal for strengthening the
hands of the very people who promoted and attended such meetings. It is
true also that only two or three months before, Lord Hartington had
declared that it would be most unwise to deal with the Irish franchise.
Still more recently, Mr. W. H. Smith had declared that any extension of
the suffrage in Ireland would draw after it "confiscation of property,
ruin of industry, withdrawal of capital,--misery, wretchedness, and war."
The valour of the platform, however, often expires in the keener air of
cabinet and parliament. It became Lord Hartington's duty now to move the
second reading of provisions which, he had just described as most unwise
provisions, and Mr. Smith found himself the object of brilliant mockery
from the daring leader below the gangway on his own side.

Lord Randolph produced a more serious, though events soon showed it to be
not any more solid an argument, when he said that the man who lives in a
mud cabin very often has a decent holding, and has money in the savings'
bank besides, and more than that, he is often more fit to take an interest
in politics, and to form a sound view about them, than the English
agricultural labourer. The same speaker proceeded to argue that the Fenian
proclivities of the towns would be more than counterbalanced by the
increased power given to the peasantry. The incidents of agricultural
life, he observed, are unfavourable to revolutionary movements, and the
peasant is much more under the proper and legitimate influence of the
Roman catholic priesthood than the lower classes of the towns. On the
whole, the extension of the franchise to the peasantry of Ireland would
not be unfavourable to the landlord interest. Yet Lord Randolph, who
regaled the House with these chimerical speculations, had had far better
opportunities than almost any other Englishman then i