ee alike, and that every shield has its two
sides. In this matter, on the one side stand Earl Spencer, now
converted to Home Rule, since his Viceroyalty; on the other is the
example of Mr. Forster, who went to Ireland an ardent Home Ruler and
came back as strong a Unionist. The Quaker became a fighting man, and
the idealist a practical man, believing in facts as he had seen them
and no longer in sentiments he could not realise--in measures grounded
on the necessities of good government, and not like so many epiphytes
with their roots in the air. Let Lord Spencer bring to this test his
late utterances. He goes in now for Home Rule, and the right of
Ireland to appoint her own police and judges. He is out of the wood
and can hallo; but where would he have been if the Irish had appointed
their police when he was at the Castle?--with Lord Frederick and Mr.
Burke! And if the judges were appointed by the Irish, we should have,
in all probability, Mr. Tim Harrington, barrister-at-law, on the
bench; and a few years ago Mr. Tim Harrington crumpled up the Queen's
writ and flung it out of the Court House window. And what power over
the fortunes of others can be given to men who boycott a railway for
political spite?[G]

So many things have conspired to make this Irish question a
Gordian-knot which no man can untie, and but few would dare to cut.
The past extravagance of the landlords, absenteeism, rack-renting,
injustice of all kinds; the past jealousy of England and her
over-shadowing all native industries and productions; difference of
religion, racial temperament, and the irreconcilable enmity of the
conquered towards the conquerors; ignorance and idleness; the morality
which marries too early, when the land, which was just enough to
support one family, is expected to keep three or four; want of
self-respect in the dirt and disorder of domestic life; want of all
communal life or amusement, save in heated politics and drink; bogs
here, unthrift there, small holdings everywhere--all these things help
to complicate a question which passion has already made too difficult
for even the most radical kind of statesmanship to adjust. All the
panaceas hitherto tried have been found ineffectual. The repeal of
Catholic disabilities, the establishment of national schools, the
disestablishment of the Protestant Church, the Maynooth grant, the
various Land Acts--all have done but little towards the settlement of
the question, which, like cert