-

'If I had a Balfour who wrong would go,
Do you think I'd tolerate him?--No, no, no!
I'd give him coercion in Kilmainham jail,
And return him to Arthur, who'd laugh at his wail.'

In fact the impression prevailed that Ireland was then sacrificed to the
nepotism of Lord Salisbury, who had inflicted the least capable of the
House of Cecil on the distressful country.

When the Duke of York was in Ireland, he stayed with Lord Dunraven, and
Mr. Gerald Balfour as Chief Secretary was one of the house-party, and
the mother of the Knight of Glin was also there.

A short time before, a chemist from Cork, who had been appointed
sub-confiscator, and desired to secure his own position, had heavily cut
down the Fitzgerald rents.

Mr. Balfour, by way of making polite conversation, observed to Mrs.
Fitzgerald:--

'I believe your son's property has been a long time in the family.'

'Yes,' she said, 'we got it in the reign of Edward I., and held it until
last year, when the Government sent an apothecary from Cork to rob us of
it.'

The conversation dropped.

Mr. Arthur Balfour was very plucky, not only personally, but in his
legislative efforts, and he did wonders for Ireland--the light railways
relieving numbers from starvation, and opening up the country.

An English journalist went down to the West, and tried to make inquiries
about the popularity of the Chief Secretary.

He came to the cabin of a man who had been rescued from starvation by
getting Government employment, and had thrived so well that he had
become possessed of a pig.

This pig, on the appearance of the Englishman, escaped into a
potato-field, and he heard the woman of the house shout to her son:--

'Mickey, look sharp and turn out Arthur Balfour before he does any
mischief.'

The name of the pig showed the gratitude of the family.

When alluding to Mr. Lowther I omitted to mention that he was always of
opinion that a well-planned scheme of education was the best panacea for
the Irish troubles, and it certainly would have brought up a generation
less keenly sensitive to the exaggerated wrongs of the country to which
both sexes are so frantically attached. During his not very lengthy
tenure of the office of Chief Secretary it was asserted that Sir George
Trevelyan also had some such idea; but whether he went so far as to
draft his plan, and it was consigned to some forgotten pigeon-hole by
Mr. Gladstone, I cannot say.

When the Duke of