extended action by the State fell in with the Liberal movement of his
time. The hideous misgovernment of Ireland he had always deplored. It
touched him long before it touched the great majority of Englishmen.
With a view to informing people on the Irish question, he compiled a
book of Burke's most telling utterances on Ireland and her woes. Those
utterances, as he said, "Show at work all the causes which have brought
Ireland to its present state--the tyranny of the grantees of
confiscation; of the English garrison; Protestant ascendancy; the
reliance of the English Government upon this ascendancy and its
instruments as their means of government; the yielding to menaces of
danger and insurrection what was never yielded to considerations of
equity and reason; the recurrence to the old perversity of mismanagement
as soon as ever the danger was passed." To all these evils he would have
applied the remedies which Burke suggested. He would have had the State
endow the religions of Ireland and their ministries, supply Ireland with
good schools, and defend Irish tenants against the extortions of bad
landlords. He was vehemently opposed to Gladstone's scheme of Home Rule,
because, in his view, it tended to disintegration where he specially
desired cohesion: but, in the tumults of 1885-8, he never lost his head,
never forgot his old sympathy with Irish wrongs, never "drew up an
indictment against a whole people."[22] All through these stormy years,
he stood firm for an effective system of Local Government in Ireland.
Irish government, he said, had "been conducted in accordance with the
wishes of the minority, and of the British Philistine." He desired a
system which should accord with the wishes of the majority. He
deprecated Forster's "expression of general objection to Home Rule";
because, though Home Rule as understood by Parnell was intolerable,
there was another kind of Home Rule which was possible and even
desirable. He was keenly anxious that his friends, the Liberal
Unionists, should not let the opportunity slip, but should bring forward