empted any task like it--a task involving the most elaborate
departmental readiness, in addition to the general duties and fatigues of
a prime minister, and that too in a session when questions are showered
like hail upon the treasury bench."(187)

Then the government put on pressure, and the majority sprang up to 80. The
debate in the Commons lasted over three and a half months, or about a
fortnight longer than had been taken by the Church bill. The third reading
was carried without a division. In the Lords the bill was read a second
time without a division. Few persons "clearly foresaw that it was the
first step of a vast transfer of property, and that in a few years it
would become customary for ministers of the crown to base all their
legislation on the doctrine that Irish land is not an undivided ownership,
but a simple partnership."(188)

In March Mr. Gladstone had received from Manning a memorandum of ill omen
from the Irish bishops, setting out the amendments by them thought
necessary. This paper included the principles of perpetuity of tenure for
the tiller of the soil and the adjustment of rent by a court. The reader
may judge for himself how impossible it would have been, even for Mr.
Gladstone, in all the plenitude of his power, to persuade either cabinet
or parliament to adopt such invasions of prevailing doctrine. For this,
ten years more of agitation were required, and then he was able to
complete the memorable chapter in Irish history that he had now opened.

V

(M91) Neither the Land Act nor the Church Act at once put out the hot
ashes of Fenianism. A Coercion Act was passed in the spring of 1870. In
the autumn Mr. Gladstone tried to persuade the cabinet to approve the
release of the Fenian prisoners, but it was not until the end of the year
that he prevailed. A secret committee was thought necessary in 1871 to
consider outrages in Westmeath, and a repressive law was passed in
consequence. Mr. Gladstone himself always leaned strongly against these
exceptional laws, and pressed the Irish government hard the other way.
"What we have to do," he said, "is to defy Fenianism, to rely on public
sentiment, and so provide (as we have been doing) the practical measures
that place the public sentiment on our side, an operation which I think is
retarded by any semblance of _severity_ to those whose offence we admit
among ourselves to have been an ultimate result of our misgovernment of
the country. I am af