a "counter scheme to Gladstone's," giving real powers of local
government. In 1887 he again insisted that the "opinion of quiet
reasonable people throughout the country" was bent on giving the Irish
the due control of their own local affairs. He pleaded for a system
"built on sufficiently large lines, not too complicated, not fantastic,
not hesitating and suspicious, not taking back with one hand what it
gives with the other." A similar system he wished to see extended to
England, and he pointed out that it admirably facilitated that national
control of Secondary Education for which he was always pleading.

Then again, with reference to Irish land, his belief in the action of
the State displayed itself very clearly. In his opinion the remedy for
agrarian trouble in Ireland was that the State should, after rigid and
impartial enquiry, distinguish between good landlords and bad, and then
expropriate the bad ones. This, he thought, would "give the sort of
equity, the sort of moral satisfaction, which the case needed." Once
again he was in harmony with Liberal opinion, when he desired to widen
the basis of the State by extending the suffrage in turn to the Artisans
and the Labourers. In one respect at least he was in harmony rather with
Collectivist Radicalism than with orthodox Liberalism, for he did not in
the least dread the intervention of the State between employer and
employed. He desired to strengthen Parliament, the supreme organ of the
national will, by reforming the House of Lords; though he strongly
dissented from a scheme of reform just then in vogue. "One can hardly
imagine sensible men planning a Second Chamber which should not include
the Archbishop of Canterbury, or which should include the young
gentlemen who flock to the House of Lords when pigeon-shooting is in
question. But our precious Liberal Reformers are for retaining the
pigeon-shooters and for expelling the Archbishop of Canterbury."[23]