ad he to a great degree planned the murder and
helped to draw the others into it, but had actually selected the very
weapon by which it was accomplished, so that of all the miscreants
engaged in the perpetration he was perhaps the deepest dyed and the
most guilty.

Since then, and indeed all along, the struggle in Ireland itself has
been almost wholly an agrarian one. The love of and desire for the land,
rather than for any particular political development, is what there
dominates the situation. A heavy fall of prices has led to a widespread
refusal to pay rent, save at a considerable abatement upon the already
reduced Government valuations. Where this has been refused a deadlock
has set in, rents in many cases have not been paid at all, and eviction
has in consequence been resorted to. Eviction, whether carried out in
West Ireland or East London, is a very ugly necessity, and one, too,
that is indelibly stamped with a taint of inhumanity. At the last
extremity, it is, however, the only one open to any owner, _qua_ owner,
let his political sympathies or proclivities be what they may, so that
it does not necessarily argue any double portion of original sin even on
the part of that well-laden pack-horse of politics--the Irish
landlord--to say that his wits have not so far been equal to the task of
dispensing with it.

Within the last two years only one question has risen to the surface of
politics which gravely affects the destinies of Ireland, but that one is
of so vast and all-important a character that it cannot be evaded. The
question I mean, of course, of Home Rule. Complicated as its issues are,
embittered as the controversy it has awakened, dark still as are its
destinies, its history as a piece of projected, and so far unsuccessful,
legislation has at least the merit of being short and easily stated. In
the month of December, 1885, just after the close of the general
election, it began to be rumoured as forming part of the coming
programme of the Liberal leader. On April 8, 1886, a Bill embodying it
was brought forward in the House of Commons by Mr. Gladstone; upon June
7th, it was rejected upon the second reading by a majority of thirty,
and at the general election which followed was condemned by a large
majority of the constituencies.

And afterwards? What follows? What is its future destined to be? Will it
vanish away, will it pass into new phases, or will some form of it
eventually receive the sanction of t