be celebrating the fiftieth year of the reign of
the Queen, and that night's business was the strange and unforeseen goal
at which a journey of little more than the same period of time along the
high, democratic road had brought the commonalty of the realm since 1832.
Among the provisions that went into the bill without any discussion in
committee were those giving to the Irish executive the power of stamping
an association as unlawful; those dealing with special juries and change
of the place of trial; those specifying the various important conditions
attaching to proclamations, which lay at the foundation of the Act; those
dealing with rules, procedure, and the limits of penalty. The report next
fell under what Burke calls the accursed slider. That stage had taken
three sittings, when the government moved (June 30) that it must close in
four days. So much grace, however, was not needed; for after the motion
had been carried the liberals withdrew from the House, and the Irishmen
betook themselves to the galleries, whence they looked down upon the
mechanical proceedings below.

IV

In Ireland the battle now began in earnest. The Irish minister went into
it with intrepid logic. Though very different men in the deeper parts of
character, Macaulay's account of Halifax would not be an ill-natured
account of Mr. Balfour. "His understanding was keen, sceptical,
inexhaustibly fertile in distinctions and objections, his taste refined,
his sense of the ludicrous exquisite; his temper placid and forgiving, but
fastidious, and by no means prone either to malevolence or to enthusiastic
admiration." His business was to show disaffected Ireland that parliament
was her master. Parliament had put the weapon into his hands, and it was
for him to smite his antagonists to the ground. He made no experiments in
judicious mixture, hard blows and soft speech, but held steadily to force
and fear. His apologists argued that after all substantial justice was
done even in what seemed hard cases, and even if the spirit of law were
sometimes a trifle strained. Unluckily the peasant with the blunderbuss,
as he waits behind the hedge for the tyrant or the traitor, says just the
same. The forces of disorder were infinitely less formidable than they had
been a hundred times before. The contest was child's play compared with
(M136) the violence and confusion with which Mr. Forster or Lord Spencer
had to deal. On the other hand the alliance between