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The second difficulty is that of maintaining social order in Ireland. What that difficulty is, and whence it arises, every one knows. It is chronic, but every second or third winter, when there has been a wet season, or the price of live stock declines, it becomes specially acute. The tenants refuse to pay rents which they declare to be impossible. The landlords, or the harsher among them, try to enforce rents by evictions; evictions are resisted by outrages and boycotting. Popular sentiment supports those who commit outrages, because it considers the tenantry to be engaged in a species of war, a righteous war, against the landlord. Evidence can seldom be obtained, and juries acquit in the teeth of evidence. Thus the enforcement of the law strains all the resources of authority, while a habit of lawlessness and discontent is transmitted from generation to generation. Of the remedies proposed for this chronic evil the most obvious is the strengthening of the criminal law. We have been trying this for more than one hundred years, since Whiteboyism appeared, and trying it in vain. Since the Union, Coercion Acts, of more or less severity, have been almost always in force in Ireland, passed for two or three years, then dropped for a year or two, then renewed in a form slightly varying, but always with the same result of driving the disease in for a time, but not curing it. Mr. Gladstone proposed to buy out the landlords and then leave an Irish Parliament to restore social order, with that authority which it would derive from having the will of the people behind it; because he held that when the people felt the law to be of their own making, and not imposed from without, their sentiment would be enlisted on its side, and the necessity for a firm Government recognized. This plan, has, however, been rejected, so the choice was left of a fresh Coercion Act, or of some scheme, necessarily a costly scheme, for getting rid of the source of trouble by transferring the land of Ireland to the peasantry. The present Government, while guided by Sir M. Hicks-Beach, who had some knowledge of Ireland, did its best to persuade the landlords to accept reduced rents, while the Nationalist leaders, on their side, sought to restrain the people from outrages. But the armistice did not last. The Ministry yielded to the foolish counsels of its more violent supporters, and entrusted Irish affairs to the hands of a Chief Secretary without previous knowledge of the island. An unusually severe Coercion Act has been brought in and passed by the aid of the dissentient Liberals. And we now see this Act administered with a mixture of virulence and incompetence to which even the dreary annals of Irish misgovernment present few parallels. The feeling of the English people is rising against the policy carried out in their name. So far from being solved, the problem of social order becomes every day more acute.

There remains the question of a reform of local government. For many years past, every English Ministry has undertaken to frame a measure creating a new system of popular rural self-government in England. It is the first large task of domestic legislation which we ask from Parliament. When such a scheme is proposed, can Ireland be left out of it? Should she be left out, the argument that she is being treated unequally and unfairly, as compared with England, would gain immense force; because the present local government of Ireland is admittedly less popular, less efficient, altogether less defensible, than even that of England which we are going to reform. If, therefore, the theory that the Imperial Parliament is both anxious and able to do its duty by Ireland is to be maintained, Ireland, too, must have her scheme of local government. And a scheme of local government is a large project, the discussion of which must pass into a discussion of the government of the island as a whole.