The most difficult of the Ministry's problems was the Irish problem, and the most novel of its proposals were its Irish proposals. Judged by the degree of their success, these measures were perhaps not very important. At least, they did not settle the affairs of Ireland. But their spirit was of the greatest possible {248} significance. This Liberal Government was the first English Government which ever set itself to legislate for Ireland according to Irish ideas, to recognize the essential differences between the two countries, to establish in Ireland what it would not maintain in England, and to destroy in Ireland those English institutions which had been erected by the egoism of its predecessors. The existing system was recognized as hopeless. In February, 1868, the Tory Government suspended the Habeas Corpus Act for the fourth time in two years. Fenianism was checked, but the disease of which it was a symptom was not cured. The Liberals endeavoured to go to the root of the matter. The maintenance of order was only a condition of further action, and the only possible further action was the redress of grievances. The case of Ireland had for a long time caused anxiety to Liberal thinkers. In 1835 Cobden had contrasted England's readiness to sympathize with Poland and Greece with her complete indifference to the claims of Ireland. "Whilst our diplomatists, fleets, and armies have been put in motion at enormous cost, to carry our counsel, or, if needful, our arms, to the assistance of the people of these remote regions, it is an unquestionable fact, that the population of a great portion of our own Empire has, at the same time, presented a grosser spectacle of moral and physical debasement than is to be met with in the whole civilized world."[293] Disraeli in 1844 declared that it was the duty of an English Minister "To effect by his policy all those changes which a revolution would accomplish by force."[294] In 1847 Bright pointed to the root cause: "There is an unanimous admission now that the misfortunes of Ireland are connected with the question of the management of the land."[295] The rejection of Peel's Bill of 1845 has already been noticed. The only measure passed for the relief of Irish tenants since that date was the Encumbered Estates Act of 1849. This had provided State assistance for the sale of hopelessly mortgaged estates. Its chief result had been to substitute for a thriftless but easy-going gentry {249} a company of grasping absentees, who rack-rented their tenants without mercy, where their predecessors had at any rate let them alone. The state of the Irish peasantry, even though the pressure of population had been greatly reduced by famine and emigration, was substantially worse in 1868 than it had been in 1845. The violence of Fenianism, murder and armed rescue at Manchester, and gunpowder plot at Clerkenwell, at last drew attention to a state of affairs in which there was nothing new except the degree of its badness.