nal principles of their once powerful and
still deeply revered chief--the late Lord Beaconsfield--to whom Home
Rule meant "veiled rebellion," and presented a danger "scarcely less
disastrous than pestilence and famine." The Liberals are equally
unlikely to risk the integrity and unity of the party by the concession
of a claim which even an advanced Radical like Mr. Chamberlain has
condemned as unwarrantable, unwise, and impossible to be granted. Still
this and nothing less than this is the hope and expectation of the great
majority of the Irish people. This and nothing less will be the demand
of the Irish leaders as soon as Parliament assembles at the beginning of
the ensuing year.

In order to a clear and correct understanding of the position of Irish
affairs at the present juncture, and of the nature and ground of the
Home Rule demand, it will be necessary briefly to sketch the history of
the agitation's genesis and growth. It is all the more necessary to do
this as there are few political or social problems, even in England
itself, more grievously misunderstood and wantonly misstated. It is
truly surprising how much confusion, ignorance, and irrational antipathy
may be nursed and maintained by an excited state of public feeling and a
partisan and prejudiced press. Mr. Justin McCarthy complains with some
bitterness that "people found their deepest sympathies stirred by the
sufferings of cattle and horses in Ireland, who never were known to feel
one throb of compunction over the fashionable sin of torturing pigeons
at Hurlingham." And the words he quotes from a letter addressed to the
_Times_ of Dec. 3, 1880, by the illustrious General Gordon, after a
visit to the much afflicted country, show with equal clearness the sad
condition of affairs in Ireland, and the apparent incapability of the
English public to realize it. "I have been lately over the south-west of
Ireland," he wrote, "in the hope of discovering how some settlement
could be made of the Irish question, which, like a fretting cancer, eats
away our vitals as a nation." After the bold and, as some would think,
unstatesmanlike proposal, "that the government should, at a cost of
eighty millions, convert the greater part of the south-west of Ireland
into Crown lands, in which landlords should have no power of control,"
Gordon concluded, "I must say, from all accounts and my own
observations, that the state of our fellow-countrymen in the parts I
have named is wor