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When Mr. Forster was appointed Irish Secretary in Mr. Gladstone’s Government which the General Election brought into power, we (by which I mean throughout the new Liberal members) were delighted. We knew him to be conscientious, industrious, kind-hearted. We believed him to be penetrating and judicious. We applauded his conduct in not renewing the Coercion Act which Lord Beaconsfield’s Government had failed to renew before dissolving Parliament, and which indeed there was scarcely time left after the election to renew, a fact which did not save Mr. Forster from severe censure on the part of the Tories.

The chief business of the session was the Compensation for Disturbance Bill, which Mr. Forster brought in for the sake of saving from immediate eviction tenants whom a succession of bad seasons had rendered utterly unable to pay their rents. This Bill was pressed through the House of Commons with the utmost difficulty, and at an expenditure of time which damaged the other work of the session, though the House continued to sit into September. The Executive Government declared it to be necessary, in order not only to relieve the misery of the people, but to secure the tranquillity of the country. Nevertheless, the whole Tory party, and a considerable section of the Liberal party, opposed it in the interests of the Irish landlords, and of economic principles in general, principles which (as commonly understood in England) it certainly trenched on. When it reached the House of Lords it was contemptuously rejected, and the unhappy Irish Secretary left to face as he best might the cries of a wretched peasantry and the rising tide of outrage. What was even more remarkable, was the coolness with which the Liberal party took the defeat of a Bill their leaders had pronounced absolutely needed. Had it been an English Bill of the same consequence to England as it was to Ireland, the country would have been up in arms against the House of Lords, demanding the reform or the abolition of a Chamber which dared to disregard the will of the people. But nothing of the kind happened. It was only an Irish measure. We relieved ourselves by a few strong words, and the matter dropped.

It was in this session that the Liberal party first learnt what sort of a spirit was burning in the hearts of Irish members. There had been obstruction in the last years of the previous Parliament, but, as the Tories were in power, they had to bear the brunt of it. Now that a Liberal Ministry reigned, it fell on the Liberals. At first it incensed us. Full of our own good intentions towards Ireland, we thought it contrary to nature that Irish members should worry us, their friends, as they had worried Tories, their hereditary enemies. Presently we came to understand how matters stood. The Irish members made little difference between the two great English parties. Both represented to them a hostile domination. Both were ignorant of the condition of their country. Both cared so little about Irish questions that nothing less than deeds of violence out of doors or obstruction within doors could secure their attention. Concessions had to be extorted from both by the same devices; Coercion might be feared at the hands of both. Hence the Irish party was resolved to treat both parties alike, and play off the one against the other in the interests of Ireland alone, using the questions which divide Englishmen and Scotchmen merely as levers whereby to effect their own purposes, because themselves quite indifferent to the substantial merits of those questions. To us new members this was an alarming revelation. We found that the House of Commons consisted of two distinct and dissimilar bodies: a large British body (including some few Tories and Liberals from Ireland), which, though it was distracted by party quarrels, really cared for the welfare of the country and the dignity of the House, and would set aside its quarrels in the presence of a great emergency; and a small Irish body, which, though it spoke the English language, was practically foreign, felt no interest in, no responsibility for, the business of Britain or the Empire, and valued its place in the House only as a means of making itself so disagreeable as to obtain its release. When we had grasped this fact, we began to reflect on its causes and conjecture its effects. We had read of the same things in the newspapers, but what a difference there is between reading a drama in your study and seeing it acted on the stage! We realized what Irish feeling was when we heard these angry cries, and noted how appeals that would have affected English partisans fell on deaf ears. I remember how one night in the summer of 1880, when the Irish members kept us up very late over some trivial Bill of theirs, refusing to adjourn till they had extorted terms, a friend, sitting beside me, said, “See how things come round. They keep us out of bed till five o’clock in the morning because our ancestors bullied theirs for six centuries.” And we saw that the natural relations of an Executive, even a Liberal Executive, to the Irish members were those of strife. Whose fault it was we were unable to decide. Perhaps the Government was too stiff; perhaps the members were vexatious. Anyhow, this strife was evidently the normal state of things, wholly unlike that which existed between Scotch members, to whichever party they belonged, and the executive authorities of Scotland.