have adhered to him with glutinous tenacity. If Mr. Gladstone had proposed Mr. Chamberlain's scheme, Mr. Chamberlain's scheme would now command the assent of the majority of the Liberal party. If, in the exercise of his own freedom of judgment, Mr. Chamberlain had propounded a counter-scheme identical with that which Mr. Gladstone has put forward, he would be scouted and denounced as a traitor, animated by motives of jealousy and personal rivalry.

Mr. Gladstone is not himself responsible for this state of feeling among large classes of his fellow-subjects, possibly among a majority of the people of these islands. But it imposes an immense responsibility on him. The statesman who is sure that any scheme which he may devise will be accepted by half, or nearly, or more than, half of the nation simply because he has devised it, is hound to be very careful in his proposals-to think once, to think twice, to think thrice before he lays them before the world, and to think three times more before he refuses to modify them. The dictum of the old saint and sage, bidding his readers to consider the things said and not the person saying them, is a counsel of perfection to which the weakness of human nature can seldom be equal. But the more the hearers consider the person who speaks or writes, the more the person speaking or writing is bound to consider the things spoken or written. The jealous scrutiny, the minute and sceptical examination which they decline to exercise on him, he must exercise on himself. Mr. Gladstone has written much on the influence of authority in matters of opinion: it cannot be excluded from them. People will believe because the evidence has convinced somebody else. They assent to the conclusions of a man of thought or action without understanding his premisses or his processes. The wielders of an authority such as Mr. Gladstone exercises in England are invested with a power and a responsibility compared with which those of a despotic sovereign or a dictator are slight. Mr. Gladstone submits his scheme to the judgment of the country; and a large part of the country is prepared to submit its judgment to Mr. Gladstone's scheme.

Mr. Gladstone could not have gained such a position as this without being as well entitled to it as any human being could possibly be. But then no human being is entitled to such a position, or can occupy it with safety to himself or to those who submit themselves to his guidance. It is dangerous to his own reputation, and diminishes the services which he might render his country. The excessive confidence of large masses of his countrymen arouses in others a distrust as exaggerated and more blind. One of the denunciations of which he has lately been made the object is the familiar one of fomenting social discord, of inflaming the poor and ignorant against the rich and cultivated, of setting up uninformed sentiment against reasoned conviction. The accusation is unjust.

The antagonists of Mr. Gladstone's Home Rule scheme-for which I am not pleading, which, as I have endeavoured to point out in the pages of this Review, approaches the subject from a point of view and deals with it by methods essentially faulty-are not content to argue against it or to suggest amendments in it. They boast that the rank, the riches, the leisure, and the culture of England are hostile to it. When Mr. Gladstone says, 'I sorrowfully admit this,' the reply is, 'You are setting class against class. You are endeavouring to incite ignorance and poverty against station, title, and wealth, to drown social influence in numbers, to subject the instructed judgment of the professions to the crude sentiment of the labouring classes.' It is impossible to imagine anything more mischievous than this discrimination, whether for exaltation or disparagement, of certain classes in the nation against the great body of the nation itself. The classes do not exist apart from the nation; the nation is the aggregate of classes. The blame of this dangerous way of speaking and writing must rest in the main with those who set the example of it, and only in a secondary way, though still really, with those who retort it. There is fallacy in the argument on both sides -if that can be called argument which is rather an appeal by question-begging phrases to intellectual or moral Pharisaism. The words education' and 'culture' are much abused in this connection. Leisure and wealth and rank undoubtedly present opportunities of education and culture. But opportunity without stimulus is often barren. The number of persons belonging to the privileged and wealthy classes who achieve personal distinction is relatively few. The man who, born to affluence and social consideration, is content to work as if he had these things to gain, whom the love of fame or other worthy motive prompts to 'scorn delights and live laborious days,' is a very exceptional being, as is shown by the exceptional praise which he receives whenever he makes his appearance. The great body of what is called educated opinion is simply fashionable opinion. People who wish to be considered socially what they ought to be flock in herds after the society statesman and the pet political hero of the day, as they run after the pet actor, the pet painter, the pet lecturer, even the pet monstrosity, the last dwarf, or the latest two-headed nightingale of the season. This imitative and servile movement of fashion is dignified by the name of the tendency of educated opinion. Even when the education and culture are real, they should be appropriate to the subject-matter on which their authority is cited. The successful soldier of fortune, the court poet, the Albemarle Street lecturer who makes science, not popular, but fashionable, may be profound politicians, but the arts in which they are eminent do not give any presumption even of political capacity. There is a great run just now on the writings of Burke, which have become a sort of Holy Scriptures of politics, and of which, as of the Bible, it may be said:

This is the book where each his doctrine seeks, and this the book where each his doctrine finds.' 'It cannot escape observation,' says Burke, 'that where men are too much confined to professional and faculty habits, and, as it were, inveterate in the concurrent employment of that narrow circle, they are rather disabled than qualified for whatever depends on the knowledge of mankind, on experience in mixed affairs, or a comprehensive connected view of the various complicated external and internal interests which go to the formation of that multifarious thing called a State.' We may set this passage against the often-quoted sentence of Jesus the son of Sirach: 'How can he get wisdom that holdeth the plough, and glorieth in the goad, that driveth oxen and is occupied in their labours, and whose talk is of bullocks?' To be in close and vital contact for existence' sake with the essential realities of life is often a more copious source of that moral and practical wisdom which is the basis of politics than the exclusive pursuit of special arts or sciences, or than a dilettante trifling with them. It is, however, pertinent to remark that the author of Ecclesiasticus was not speaking of Parliamentary government, Home Rule, or the agricultural labourer's vote. As a matter of fact, the tribunal has been constituted by the consent of Liberals and Conservatives alike. To endeavour to discredit its moral competence is idle, and is very bad tactics besides. An advocate who should denounce the jury he addresses as unintelligent and ignorant, would stand a small chance of getting a verdict. To begin by setting the Court against you is a blunder into which an old forensic hand would not fall.

That the labouring classes are the best judges of the question which will be at issue in the coming election is not so much a true, or a false, as an idle proposition. They are more under the influence of feeling and less under the influence of fashion than persons in easier social circumstances. But sometimes feeling may be wrong, and occasionally fashion may be right. They have a strong instinct of justice and fair play when their own real or supposed interests are not too directly involved; but that instinct, it may be hoped, and that qualification of it, it is to be feared, are common to Englishmen of all ranks. A wise statesmanship will appeal to the conscience and judgment of the country as a whole, endeavouring to enlighten the one and to stimulate the other, and will avoid disparaging the selfish prepossessions of the classes to the people, or the ignorance of the people to the classes. The commencement of this crimination and recrimination has been with the partisans of rank, wealth, and leisure as the guides of political conduct. History warns us. The distinction drawn between the optimates and the populares in Rome, in the days before the republican constitution perished, under the demagogic one-man rule' of Julius Caesar, corresponded very closely with that which imprudent persons are drawing now between the

cultivated and the ignorant. The optimates consisted, we are told by one of their partisans, of the senate, the better and larger part of the equestrian order, and such of the plebeians as were unaffected by pernicious counsels-the upper and upper-middle classes, that is to say, with a sprinkling of the conservative working men. As contrasted with the populares, they were made up of the men and classes 'qui neque nocentes sunt, nec natura improbi, nec furiosi, nec malis domesticis impediti.' The distinctions which were drawn in Imperial Rome between the honestiores and the humiliores, between the fat people' and the 'lean people' in some of the Italian republics of the Middle Ages, between the aristocrats and the populace under the first French Revolution, and in later revolutions between the labourers and capitalists, suggest caution to persons inclined to insist on similar distinctions for purposes of political warfare in England. This method of controversy will raise directly far more serious questions than any which it may be employed indirectly to settle.

As the election proceeds, the language of intellectual and social scorn now used towards the great body of the electors will be abated. It will be well if it be not exchanged for coarse and fulsome flattery. Horace Walpole mentions that Lord Talbot, addressing the House of Lords on some matter connected with the King, was misled into calling the peers 'your majesties' instead of 'your lordships.' He withdrew the phrase as an oversight, but said he should have used it by design if addressing the people. The people, the legal people as the French phrase has it, are sovereign in fact, and not merely in rhetoric; the ultimate appeal is to them; the Crown, the two Houses of Parliament, the Ministry, the rival parties in the State, submit to their decision as final. It is vitally important that the issue which they have to decide should be correctly apprehended. Apart from that, the most righteous feeling will help but little to the solution. Mr. Gladstone presents it in the question, Will you govern Ireland by coercion, or will you let her manage her own affairs?' If the controversy were simply between himself and Lord Salisbury, this might be enough. Lord Salisbury now denies-and of course everyone will accept his disclaimer-that when he spoke of twenty years of resolute government, he meant twenty years of coercion. Unfortunately he spoke of coercion in the sentence in which, according to his later account, he was not thinking of it. He mentioned the repeal at the end of the twenty years of the coercive laws of which he had not dreamed, and the introduction then of the local liberties which he was ready to grant now. Moreover, Lord Salisbury had made a commencement of his resolute policy while he was yet Prime Minister, in the framing of a Bill for the suppression of the National League. It is satisfactory to know now that he did not mean what he seemed to say. When, however, a man talks of twenty years of resolute policy, he almost deprives himself of title to rank among

statesmen. If Lord Salisbury were infallible, a policy chosen once for all might be usefully persisted in; Lord Salisbury being fallible, he is just as likely at the very beginning to be wrong as he is to be right, and the resolute policy would in this case be blind obstinacy. The faculty of adapting methods of government to constantly changing circumstances, of varying the means because the end is the same, is the mark of capable statesmanship; while persistence in the maxims and rules of government once for all adopted is a stupid pedantry. The issue, however, is not simply between the policy of coercion and the policy of allowing Ireland to manage her own affairs. If a majority is given to Mr. Gladstone at the elections, it will, in spite of vague disclaimers, be understood as sanctioning the particular scheme which he has already devised for enabling Ireland to manage her own affairs. That scheme, as I endeavoured to point out in this Review, tends not only to the complete Parliamentary independence of Ireland, but to its ultimate severance from the Crown of England. Mr. Gladstone properly claims for all parties and sections of parties in Great Britain, that they are Unionists in intention. The word Unionists, however, has its own defined meaning in Anglo-Irish politics. It means supporters of the Act of Union, those whom Mr. Gladstone calls paper Unionists. He contrasts with them the promoters of real union of heart and affection. Does this necessarily mean more than such a bond of cordial regard as now exists between the United Kingdom and the United States, and between the severed kingdoms of Holland and Belgium? Such a union is obviously compatible with complete political separation. It is a phrase of sentiment and not of politics.

The people of England and Scotland are animated by two convictions and determinations in this matter. The first and most vital of them is that the Imperial Parliament shall remain the Parliament of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, that the three countries shall be represented in it fairly in proportion to their numbers, and that representation shall be continuous for all of them. The mere turning, from time to time, of the representatives of Ireland, or some of them, into a Parliament in its ordinary condition consisting exclusively of the members for England and Scotland, would simply confuse public business and would probably make its transaction impossible. The Imperial politics, domestic and foreign, in which Irish members are to bear their part, cannot be shoved off into particular weeks and months, of which formal notice shall be given. The essence of Parliamentary vigilance and control is that they shall be always attentive and active. From day to day, and from hour to hour, almost, events occur which suggest questions and which call for Ministerial explanations. Members who are not continuously following the course of events and discussions, and taking part in the Parliamentary business which rises incidentally out of them, cannot