till five o'clock in the morning because our ancestors bullied theirs
for six centuries." And we saw that the natural relations of an
Executive, even a Liberal Executive, to the Irish members were those of
strife. Whose fault it was we were unable to decide. Perhaps the
Government was too stiff; perhaps the members were vexatious. Anyhow,
this strife was evidently the normal state of things, wholly unlike that
which existed between Scotch members, to whichever party they belonged,
and the executive authorities of Scotland.

Thus the session of 1880, though it did not bring us consciously nearer
to Home Rule, impressed three facts upon us: first, that the House of
Lords regarded Ireland solely from the point of view of English
landlords, sympathizing with Irish landlords; secondly, that the House
of Commons knew so little or cared so little about Ireland that when the
Executive declared a measure essential to the peace of Ireland, it
scarcely resented the rejection of that measure by the House of Lords;
thirdly, that the Irish Nationalists in the House of Commons were a
foreign body, foreign in the sense in which a needle which a man
swallows is foreign, not helping the organism to discharge its
functions, but impeding them, and setting up irritation. We did not yet
draw from these facts all the conclusions we should now draw. But the
facts were there, and they began to tell upon our minds.

SESSION OF 1881.--The winter of 1880-81 was a terrible one in Ireland.
The rejection of the Compensation for Disturbance Bill had borne the
fruit which Mr. Forster had predicted, and which the House of Lords had
ignored. Outrages were numerous and serious. The cry in England for
repressive measures had gone on rising from November, when it occasioned
a demonstration at the Guildhall banquet. Several Liberal members (of
whom I was one) went to Ireland at Christmas, to see with our own eyes