IV. _Home Rule under the Gladstonian Constitution_[53]--No legislative proposal submitted to Parliament has ever received harder measure than the Government of Ireland Bill. Its introduction aroused the keenest political battle which during half a century has been fought in England. The Bill therefore became at once the mark of hostile and (what is nearly the same thing) of unfair criticism at the hands of opponents. This was to be expected; it is the necessary result of the system which makes tenure of office depend on success in carrying through or resisting proposed legislation. What did take place but was not to be expected was, that the Government of Ireland Bill met with harsh criticism at the hands of its friends. The Opposition wished to prove that the principle of the Bill was bad, by showing that it led to disastrous and absurd results. They therefore directed their assaults upon the details of a measure which they disliked in reality not because of the special provisions which they attacked, but because of the principle to which these provisions gave effect. Ministeralists on the other hand were only too ready to surrender any clause in the Bill as a matter of detail, provided only they could persuade Parliament to sanction the principle of the measure, and thereby affirm the policy of giving Ireland an Irish Executive and an Irish Parliament. Nor was this course of action dictated solely by the exigencies of Parliamentary strategy. Ministerialists saw the flaws in the Bill as plainly as did the Opposition, and no man (it may be conjectured), from the Premier who devised, down to the draughtsman who drew, the Government of Ireland Bill, would have wished it to become an Act in the form in which it stood on the 7th day of June, 1886. The supporters, moreover, of the Government emphasized their dislike to the details of the particular measure, because to attack a detail of the machinery by which it was proposed to give Ireland Home Rule countenanced in the critic's own mind the assumption that some mechanism could be invented which might carry out the principle of creating an Irish Parliament without violating the conditions on which alone the idea of any such measure could be entertained by any English statesman. Opponents, in short, of the Government of Ireland Bill attacked its details out of hostility to its principle; its defenders tried to win approval for its principle by conceding or insisting upon the defects of its details.[54] The result was unfortunate. The Bill was never either by its opponents or its friends regarded in the light in which it ought to be viewed by a constitutional lawyer. It was never criticised as a whole; it never therefore received full justice. Whoever examines the now celebrated Bill in the spirit of a jurist will see that it constitutes, in spite of many obvious blots both in its special provisions and in its language, a most ingenious attempt to solve the problem of giving to Ireland a