Sir Michael Hicks-Beach remarked that Sir William Harcourt, who had
expressed his opinion that the present government of Ireland is "the worst government in the world," had made that discovery just a year ago. But he had since taken so thorough- going a bath in "the Parnellite juice," that he had absolutely forgotten all his old opinions, and had come to speak already as if he had always been a Home-ruler. Sir Michael showed, in answer to the Parnellites, that far from having adopted his policy of bringing pressure to bear on the landlords as an afterthought, to make up for refusing Mr. Parnell's Bill in September, he had in the debates on that Bill, himself brought that pressure to bear. He showed by their speeches that the Parnellites were determined to make the government of Ireland as difficult as possible to the British Administration, since, an one of them had naively said, the success of the Government in ruling Ireland by the ordi- nary law would have been "to throw back our cause perhaps for a generation, and to give the lie direct to the prophecy of Mr. Gladstone that the people of England had to choose between coercion on the one hand, and Home-rule on the other." He showed how frequently jurors who had done their duty had been punished for doing that duty by popular persecution, and that jurors who did their duty had been told that, if that duty re- quired them to convict, penal servitude would prove a better fate than the odium they would have incurred. And he described the policy of the Government for Ireland in the same way as it had been described over and over again, as a policy of legal firmness and of remedial measures.
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