Page:Mr Gladstone or Lord Salisbury.djvu/7

 Lord Carnarvon, the official representative of Lord Salisbury in Ireland, was willing to talk with, and did talk with, Mr. Parnell on the subject of Home Rule in Ireland. Though there is disagreement as to how much was said, it is clear that there was at least informal negotiation. It would be interesting if the revelations as to Lord Carnarvon were supplemented by further revelations as to the formal or informal proposals or suggestions made by Lord Randolph Churchill between the spring of 1885 and the date of the general election. It was only when the friends of Lord Salisbury found themselves at the close of the general election little more than one third of the new House of Commons, that they provoked a Ministerial crisis by proposing coercion in Ireland. To use Mr. Gladstone's own words: "The Irish question was thus placed in the foreground to the exclusion of every other." The new Prime Minister, thus compelled to deal with the question, adopted an anti-coercion policy. Mr. Chamberlain says: "I cannot admit that the due enforcement of just laws can be properly described as coercion". But it is just to describe as coercion such exceptional legislation as is intended to maintain purely English government in Ireland, especially when Mr. Chamberlain himself denounces that government as unjust. It is coercion when exceptional force backs the vicious centralisation of Dublin Castle. Even Lord Randolph Churchill, whose vote was against Mr. Gladstone on June 8th, in the same division list with that of Mr. Chamberlain, is able to tell his present ally against Mr. Gladstone what coercion really means.

"It means," said the noble lord, "that hundreds of Irishmen who, if law had been maintained unaltered, and had been