e also, Mr. Gladstone, yielding to a powerful and not
over-scrupulous political agitation, suddenly determined to attempt a
great constitutional change in the relations between the United Kingdom
and Ireland. Whether the transference of the misgovernment of Ireland
from London to Dublin would have had results as disastrous or as
beneficial as disputants have asserted, may be matter for doubt, but the
manner in which the proposal was made certainly had one unfortunate
consequence. Mr. Gladstone's action struck a blow at the independence
and self-respect, or as M. Faguet terms it, the moral competence of our
parliamentary representation from which it has never recovered. Men were
called on to abandon, in the course of a few hours, opinions which they
had professed for a lifetime and this not as the result of conviction
but on the pressure of party discipline. Political feeling ran high.
The "Caucus" was called into more active operation. Political parties
began to invent programmes to capture the groundlings. The conservative
party, relinquishing its useful function of critic, revived the old
policy of eleemosynary doles, and, in an unlucky moment for its future,
has encumbered itself with an advocacy of the policy of protection. For
strangely enough the democracy, the bestower of power, though developing
symptoms of fiscal tyranny and a hatred of liberty in other directions
clings tenaciously to freedom of international trade--for the present at
least--and it would seem that the electioneering caucus has, in this
instance, failed to understand its own business. The doles of the new
State-charity were to be given to meet contributions from the
beneficiaries, but as the class which for one reason or another is ever
in a destitute condition, could not or would not contribute, the only
way in which the benevolent purpose of the agitation could be carried
out was by bestowing the dole gratuitously. The flood gates, therefore,
had to be opened wider, and we have been and still are exposed to a rush
of philanthropic legislation which is gradually transferring all the
responsibilities of life from the individual to the state. Free trade
for the moment remains, and it is supposed to be strongly entrenched in
the convictions of the liberal party. Its position, however, is
obviously very precarious in view of the demands made by the militant
trade unions. These, in their various spheres, claim a monopoly of
employment for their membe