the negotiations and communicated the same night his version to the papers. The general correctness of this version was admitted by Mr. Parnell's followers, although they refused to recognise its completeness. They particularly complained of the omission from the list of assurances which it was proposed to obtain from the Liberal leaders of the condition that Mr. Parnell was to have the right of veto over any Home Rule Bill. They stated that, to their personal knowledge, Mr. Dillon, Mr. O'Brien, or both, had received written communications from Mr. Gladstone, Mr. Morley, and other Liberal leaders, as well as from Archbishops Croke and Walsh, and of these documents they demanded the publication. Furthermore, they denied having accepted the assurancesof the Liberal leaders as satisfactory, and declared that Mr. O'Brien wrote to Mr. Morley, begging him to amend them to satisfy Mr. Parnell's objections. Mr. Dillon, in answer to the charge that they had sent a telegram from America in favour of Mr. Parnell's leadership, and afterwards refused to support him, said that both he and Mr. O'Brien were begged to take the leadership, and were promised true and loyal support by the men who now protested undeviating support of Mr. Parnell. As to the question of control of the Constabulary, he maintained that, whereas Mr. Parnell agreed to reconcile the Irish people to a postponement of that point for ten or twelve years, in deference to the views of the English people, he and Mr. O'Brien had expressed their determination never to accept a measure in which that was not included. The organs of the Gladstonian Liberals, in referring to the dealings which the Irish Nationalists asserted to have taken place during the Boulogne negotiations, maintained that the only foundation for such an assertion was the speech publicly made by Mr. John Morley at Newcastle (Jan. 13), which probably was endorsed by Mr. Gladstone in some such way as stated by Mr. W. O'Brien. Following immediately upon this interesting rather than important pronouncement of the hopes and aims of the Irish Nationalists, the meeting of the Liberal Unionist Club (Feb. 3), at which Professor A. Dicey presided, and Lord Hartington was. the guest of the evening, attracted considerable notice. The chairman, who had been once termed "the keeper of the Liberal Unionist conscience," naturally took occasion to show in what it differed from the "Nonconformist conscience," to which somuch prominence had been recently given in a very heated newspaper correspondence. Professor Dicey, in proposing the health of Lord Hartington, said that he was warned off almost all the ground it was natural for him to take, by being told that if he dealt with the past, he was dealing with ancient history; that if he dealt with the future, he was a mere professorial prophet; and that if he dealt with the present, he was reprehensible for enlarging on "what are called recent events." He would therefore devote himself to the subject of his toast. And accordingly he contrasted the political character of Lord Hartington with that of Mr. Gladstone in a very able and sardonic fashion, the main point of his speech being that Lord Hartington was straightforward, plain, and consistent, no dealer in enigmas, no sphinx, no subtle discriminator between the force of closely related adverbs, such as "now," "at present," "presently," and "at the present moment." Lord Hartington, too, had nothing to conceal; and his courage and determination had saved Ireland and this country from such an Irish Parliament as had been prefigured in Committee-room No. 15. Professor Dicey maintained that the argument for Irish Home Rule was dead; but, as Home Rule had never depended upon argument, the destruction of the plausible case for it was not the destruction of the irrational fascination it exercised; and he thought that that fascination, far from being extinguished, was approaching a most critical and dangerous phase when that "policy of sentimental injustice which calls itself generosity" was but too likely to exert its greatest influence. "When I hear that impressive phrasethe Grand Old Man-I always think it is an infirmity of my mind of the immortal one-legged candidate for the Presidency : Then you call me Timbertoes, that's wut the people likes; We will have no old Timbertoes;' we will have a just and generous man, who will be to all the representative of a just and generous cause, and as such I call on you to drink the health of Lord Hartington." In acknowledging the toast, Lord Hartington spoke of the debt due from Unionists to Professor Dicey for the clear way in which he had urged their cause. Admitting that he had sometimes felt disappointed at the practical results of Unionist arguments, Lord Hartington congratulated his supporters that at any rate they had been able to place their case before their fellow-countrymen without reserve. While their success in 1886 had produced a feeling of triumph that it had been worth working for, nothing could for a moment be compared to the enjoyment recently afforded to them, not by any action of their own, but by the action of their opponents. "We have seen a statesman, who has spent many years of his life in propounding what were recommended to us as final solutions of the Irish difficulty, all at once renouncing the task in despair, and declaring his conviction that neither Parliament nor the public of Great Britain possesses the knowledge, if it did possess the will, to legislate fairly and justly for Ireland. We have seen the leader of the Home Rule party reverting from this position and declaring that, after all, it is not Irish but British public opinion which in moments of crisis or emergency must prevail even in Irish affairs. ... We have also had in the debates in Committee-room No. 15. a sort of rehearsal for our benefit and edification of Home Rule. as it will be in Ireland. The ability of these debates I fully and completely admit. But it is not surprising if we, as impartial and disinterested spectators, should have found some things in the frank expressions of opinion that were uttered there as regards each other, as regards their English allies, as regards the character of their past and future policy towards English parties,. which have not been altogether painful to us, but which have afforded us, I think, some legitimate source of amusement." Continuing, Lord Hartington said that the Irish members had shown by their statements that they had acted and intended to act on the principles of the advice given to a Scotch member on entering Parliament-" Be always asking for all you can think of, be always taking all you can get, and when you have got it, be always asking for more.' Lord Hartington could not believe it true that Mr. Parnell had, after all, gained his point-that he had gained as the price of his resignation of the leadership certain concessions and additional declarations from the leaders of the Home Rule party in England. As to the new leaders of the Irish party, it was now asked that there should be reposed in them the blind confidence that once was asked for in Mr. Parnell. When it was suggested that perhaps there was not much to choose between either of these two contending parties, when some may have suggested that perhaps the cause of order and good government in Ireland would be most promoted by the success of the party which had taken off the mask rather than of that which, for English purposes, at all events, still kept it on, the absurd and false charge was brought that they were taking sides in this question and deliberately siding with the most violent and most advanced party of Irish Nationalism. "I know nothing which can more accurately express what, in my opinion, is the attitude which we Liberal Unionists have taken throughout these quarrels and disputes than is conveyed in the old English phrase, When thieves fall out, honest men come by their own.' The concluding sentence of the speech, as might have been expected, led to angry expostulations from the Opposition, and in another way it was perhaps liable to the retort that if the honest men of the Liberal party had not fallen out, others who were less scrupulous would not cherish hopes of coming by what was not their own. It has so rarely happened that an ex-Premier and the actual leader of the Opposition has appeared as the promoter of a private bill, that Mr. Gladstone's attitude with regard to the Religious Disqualifications Removal Bill was viewed with much ungenerous suspicion. It was asserted that the object of the bill, which was more properly one for a responsible minister to propose, was purely personal, and that it had been framed in view of Mr. Gladstone's return to office, in order that he might be able to entrust to the Marquess of Ripon, as Viceroy of Ireland, the task of establishing the Parliament in Dublin. In the interesting speech, lasting more than an hour, in which Mr. Gladstoneexplained and advocated (Feb. 4) the second reading of the bill, he gave the House a brilliant specimen of his unfaded rhetorical power, adorned with all the arts of humour, persuasiveness, flashes of eloquence, vigour in attack, and subtle skill in defence. That Mr. Gladstone was seriously hampered by two awkward facts-his own publication of the famous pamphlet on the Vatican Decrees, and his emphatic refusal when in office to move in the direction he now wished to take-did not distress him in the least. He laughed at the "murmurings and mutterings" which had been heard against his proposal, and at the hostile petitions. which had been presented; and, while he admitted that it was doubtful to some eminent legal authorities whether the old disability of Roman Catholics to be Lord High Chancellor or Viceroy of Ireland still existed-a favourite theory being that the Relief Act of 1863 had abolished the last disabling test-he maintained that legislation was necessary, if only to put an end to all doubt, as no Roman Catholic could possibly be appointed to either office while his right to fill it was open to question. Grappling with his own work on the Vatican Decrees, he pointed out that though in the first edition he questioned the loyalty of Roman Catholics, he subsequently had evidence submitted to him which induced him to modify that opinion, and to state, in a later edition of the pamphlet, that "so far as the mass of Roman Catholics were concerned," their loyalty was "untainted and secure." In an eloquent passage he reminded the House of the immense extent of the Roman Catholic body, and he denied the justice of retaining disabilities against them alone in a country and under a constitution which professed to allow of no civil disabilities on account of religious opinion. Laughing at charges brought against him by "a courteous correspondent," that he was engaged in "relighting the fires of Smithfield," and trying to alter the succession to the Crown, he urged that the question of the succession could not possibly arise, as the Crown was "not open to competition." He contrasted the disability in the case of the Irish Viceroy with the complete absence of it in the case of the Viceroy of India, who carried on his work over many more millions of people many thousands of miles away, and therefore not nearly so closely in touch with Parliament and the Imperial Government, and he denied all force and vitality in these days to the ancient and now obsolete doctrine, real enough no doubt at one time, that the Lord Chancellor was "keeper of the Queen's conscience." There was much laughter when he asked whether the House was "prepared to place Lord Halsbury in the position of private confessor to her Majesty ?" He reminded hon. mem bers that the present Home Secretary was a Roman Catholic, and yet exercised ecclesiastical patronage on behalf of the State in the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands, but the Home Secretary (Mr. Matthews) at once explained that since he had been in office he had never submitted any name whatever to the Queen for any ecclesiastical appointment-he had handed over all that part of his duties to the First Lord of the Treasury. Mr. Gladstone expressed his full belief in Mr. Matthews's "perfect honour and impartiality," but, though he recognised that the Home Secretary, "like Cæsar's wife," must be above suspicion, he questioned the legality of the course the right hon. gentleman had pursued, for the Roman Catholic Relief Act expressly provided that where a right of presentation to an ecclesiastical benefice belonged to any office of State, and the holder of that office was a Roman Catholic, the right of presentation must be exercised by the Archbishop of Canterbury. But Mr. Matthews at once disposed of this point by showing that such ecclesiastical patronage as attached to the office of Home Secretary was not a right of presentation," which belonged to the Queen herself, but only the suggestion of candidates for the Royal approval, whereupon Mr. Gladstone quitted the topic with the remark that the making of such recommendations was no part of the duty of the First Lord of the Treasury. At all events, the Home Secretary was as near to the Sovereign as the Lord Chancellor and nearer than the Irish Viceroy, and was himself a member of the Church of Rome, yet no body had petitioned for his removal on that ground. Mr. Gladstone next urged the injustice of the existing law in preventing the "successors of Pascal, of Thomas à Kempis, and of Pope Gregory the Great," from holding offices which might be held by Jews, Mohammedans, Buddhists, Hindoos, Secularists, Materialists, Agnostics, or Atheists, any of whom might become Lord Chancellor and exercise the right of presentation to benefices in the English Church, even though some of them professed no religion at all, and "threw away everything that constituted our consolation and hope, and that guided our conduct in life and death." 66 Mr. W. H. Smith (Strand) replied on behalf of the Government, moving the rejection of the bill on the ground of expediency. He expressed surprise that Mr. Gladstone should have chosen this particular time for his proposal; for, although he had expressed the same views in 1867, he had since then had two periods of six years each during which he had been in office, and had never opened the subject; and when, in 1881, he was asked if he would do so, he replied that he certainly would not. If there was no need for such legislation when Mr. Gladstone was in power, there was no need for it now; and while it only sought to apply to two offices in the whole kingdom, it would alarm and distress many thousands. Mr. Smith went on to suggest that the only possible reason for such a bill now was that it might |