se than that of any people in the world, let alone
Europe. I believe that these people are made as we are, that they are
patient beyond belief, loyal, but at the same time broken-spirited and
desperate, living on the verge of starvation, in places where we would
not keep our cattle.... Our comic prints do an infinity of harm by their
caricatures. Firstly, the caricatures are not true, for the crime in
Ireland is not greater than that in England; secondly, they exasperate
the people on both sides of the Channel, and they do no good. It is ill
to laugh and scoff at a question which affects our existence."

To Gordon's appeal on behalf of Ireland no one was more ready to listen
with sympathy than the Prime Minister himself. The claims and grievances
of the people whose magnanimous endurance, self-restraint, and patience
had so excited Gordon's admiration and called forth his warmest words of
praise, the great Liberal statesman had never been slow to recognize.
Ireland has not always been willing to be grateful to him; but he has
always striven to be more than just to her, and has more than once
incurred the odium and reproach of the aristocracy of England, and even
the disaffection of many of his followers, in his truly heroic "attempts
to mitigate the miseries of the Irish people." When he surprised the
country by his sudden and unexpected dissolution of Parliament in 1874,
he had certainly done something to earn the gratitude and confidence of
Ireland. He had disestablished the Irish Protestant Church. He had
passed a Land Act, which at the time (1870) was regarded as a valuable
contribution to the settlement of the land problem, aiming, as it did,
first, to give the tenant some security of tenure where, as in the
majority of cases, he had been practically unable to plead any rights as
against the landlord; second, to encourage the making of needful
improvements throughout the country; and, thirdly, to promote the
establishment of a peasant proprietorship. In the attempt to confer a
third great boon on the discontented nation in the shape of the Irish
University Education Bill, he and his administration went to pieces on
the immovable rock of Protestant prejudice.

Of course the provisions of the Land Act, while they occasioned some
fretting and exasperation among the land-owners, who are in the habit of
regarding every effort of legislation for the benefit of their tenants
with a fixed sense of calamity, failed entirely