st be laid at the door of the Irish Executive; not of
Mr. Forster himself, but of those on whom he relied. It had been a
Dublin Castle Bill, conceived and carried out by the incompetent
bureaucracy which has so long pretended to govern Ireland. Such a proof
of incompetence destroyed whatever confidence in that bureaucracy then
remained to us, and the disclosures which the Phoenix Park murders and
the subsequent proceedings against the Invincibles brought out, proved
beyond question that the Irish Executive had only succeeded in giving a
more dark and dangerous form, the form of ruthless conspiracy, to the
agitation it was combating.

When therefore the Prevention of Crime Bill of 1882 was brought in, some
of us felt unable to support it, and specially bound to resist those of
its provisions which related to trials without a jury, and to
boycotting. It was impossible, on the morrow of the Phoenix Park
murders, to deny that some coercive measure might be needed; but we had
so far lost faith in repression, and in the officials who were to
administer it, as to desire to limit it to what was absolutely
necessary, and we protested against enacting for Ireland a criminal code
which was not to be applied to Great Britain. Our resistance might have
been more successful but for the manner in which the Nationalist members
conducted their opposition. When they began to obstruct--not that under
the circumstances we felt entitled to censure them for obstructing a
Bill dealing so harshly with their countrymen--we were obliged to
desist, and our experience of the stormy scenes of the summer of 1882
deepened our sense of the passionate bitterness with which they regarded
English members, scarcely making an exception in favour of those who
were most disposed to sympathize with them. Many and many a time when we
listened to their fierce cries, we seemed to hear in them the
battle-cries of the centuries of strife between Celt and Englishman from
Athenry to Vinegar Hill; many a time we felt that this rage and mistrust
were chiefly of England's making; and yet not of England's, but rather
of the overmastering fate which had prolonged to our own days the
hatreds and the methods of barbarous times:

hemeis d' ouk aitioi esmen
Alla Zeus kai Moira kai eerophoitis Herinus.

So much of the session as the Crime Bill had spared was consumed by the
Arrears Bill, over which we had again a "crisis" with the House of
Lords. This was t