I should also strongly hope that some compromise might be arrived at this season with regard to the amendment of the tenure clauses. It is unnecessary for me to dwell upon the enormous advantages to be derived from the full extension of the purchase clauses, which now seem practically to have been adopted by all parties. The accomplishment of the programme I have sketched would, in my judgment, be regarded by the country as a practical settlement of the land question, and would, I feel sure, enable us to co-operate cordially for the future with the Liberal Party in forwarding Liberal principles; so that the Government, at the end of the session, would, from the state of the country, feel themselves thoroughly justified in dispensing with further coercive measures.--Yours very truly, C. S. PARNELL. _Saturday, April_ 30, 1882. MY OWN QUEENIE,--He[3] came over to see me, so I thought it best to give him a letter, as he would have been dreadfully mortified if he had had nothing to show. Everything is going very well, and I hope will continue straight. Received two letters from my own lovie yesterday. Do, my own, keep up as much as you can. YOUR OWN KING. {162} I had reason to know, from various sources of information kept open by me on Parnell's behalf during his imprisonment, that the Government would liberate him with considerable relief if given any surety of conciliatory policy on his part. Parnell at liberty was a disturbing force, and the culminating embarrassment of English government in Ireland, but Parnell in prison had become merely a concentrated embarrassment in that there was now no governmental possibility of dealing with the reactionary spirit he had let loose in Ireland--a spirit that was at least better controllable as a weapon in Parnell's hand than as the scattered and absolutely irresponsible fulminations, unreasoning and motiveless, of lawless desperadoes. With Parnell as her chief the Ireland he had roused might indeed be a scourge of whips to the British Government, but without him this Ireland was undoubtedly a scourge of scorpions.