es of pay
or length of hours; whereas Ford's edict that no rent was to be paid
was issued not in consequence of anything that individual landlords
had done, but because Gladstone had put the leaders of the Land League
in gaol); that the men whom he had previously denounced as "marching
through rapine to the dismemberment of the Empire" were heroes who
deserved to be placed in charge of the government of the country; and
introduced his first Home Rule Bill. Some of his followers went with
him; others refused. His life-long ally, John Bright, said: "I cannot
trust the peace and interests of Ireland, north and south, to the
Irish Parliamentary party, to whom the Government now propose to
make a general surrender. My six years' experience of them, of their
language in the House of Commons and their deeds in Ireland, makes it
impossible for me to consent to hand over to them the property and
the rights of five millions of the Queen's subjects, our
fellow-countrymen, in Ireland. At least two millions of them are as
loyal as the population of your town, and I will be no party to a
measure which will thrust them from the generosity and justice of the
United and Imperial Parliament."

The Bill was rejected; at the general election which ensued the people
of England declared against the measure; Gladstone resigned, and Lord
Salisbury became Prime Minister.

CHAPTER XI.

THE UNIONIST GOVERNMENT OF 1886.

The Unionists, on returning to power in 1886, fully realized the
difficulty of the problem with which they were faced. The Nationalists
held a great Convention at Chicago, at which they resolved to make
use of the Land League not merely for the purpose of exterminating
landlords but as a means for promoting universal disorder and so
bringing about a paralysis of the law. As J. Redmond stated at the
Convention: "I assert that the government of Ireland by England is an
impossibility, and I believe it to be our duty to make it so." And, as
he afterwards explained in Ireland, he considered that if the Tories
were able to carry on the government with the ordinary law, the
cause of Home Rule might be set back for a generation; but if the
Nationalists could succeed in making such government impossible, and
the Tories were obliged to have recourse to coercion, the people
of Great Britain would turn them out of office, and Gladstone would
return to power and carry Home Rule. (This avowed determination on the
part of the Natio