Page:Mr Gladstone or Lord Salisbury.djvu/8

 firmly enforced, would now have been leading peaceful, industrious, and honest lives, will soon be torn off to prison without trial, and others will have to fly the country into hopeless exile; that others, driven to desperation through such cruel alternatives, will perhaps shed their blood, and sacrifice their lives in vain resistance to the forces of the Crown; that many Irish homes, which would have been happy if the evil course had been checked at the outset, will soon be bereaved of their most promising ornament and support, disgraced by a convict's garb and by a felon's cell.cell." [sic]

The question for the electors to decide at the polls is thus stated fairly enough by Mr. Gladstone: "Will you govern Ireland by coercion, or will you let her manage her own affairs?" Lord Salisbury, who is now ashamed of the unvarnished description of his own alternative, says: For twenty years we will not let Ireland manage her own affairs; for twenty years we will so resolutely rule Ireland that, though we deny that such rule will be coercion, we in express words admit that at the end of that twenty years there may be need for the "repeal of coercion laws". But I ask English voters, can you govern Ireland for twenty years with coercion laws? and if you can, ought you so to govern her? For eighty-six years, during at least five-sixths of that period, you have tried coercion, and for most of that time Ireland was practically powerless in the Parliament at Westminster. Now, with the state of English political parties, no English statesman can feel quite sure of retaining power with a band of eighty-six resolute men in face of him to turn the scale on each earnestly-contested division. Mr. G. O. Trevelyan does not like entrusting power to the Parnellite party, and I at any rate have had no reason to personally like them; but they are Ireland's representatives, by her