it convinced the Conservative Government of 1885 that the executive in Ireland was bound to bow to the will of the Irish people, and was relieved from the obligation of enforcing at all costs the law of the land. Popular sympathies, moreover, blend in the minds of modern Englishmen with feelings of a much less generous and much less respectable order. Dislike of trouble, hatred to the performance of arduous public duties, a growing indifference to ordinary commonplace ideas of law and justice, contempt for the legal rights of individuals whenever these rights clash for a moment with the ease or interest of the public, exert an incalculable influence on the conduct, and in truth upon the convictions, both of Members of Parliament and of electors. It is not too much to say that the favour or acquiescence with which so-called practical politicians are prepared to accept Home Rule is grounded to a far greater extent than any one who respects the character of England likes to confess upon the _naive_ but intense conviction that it is too much to expect from five hundred and more English gentlemen that they should take the trouble of withstanding the continuous pressure exerted by eighty-six Parnellites. Cowardice masks itself under the show of compromise, and men of eminent respectability yield to the terror of being bored concessions which their forefathers would have refused to the threat of armed rebellion. It is unnecessary to explain how this condition of opinion, under which the best and the lowest feelings of human nature are blended in a current of democratic sentiment, predisposes large bodies of Englishmen towards acquiescence in the Home Rule movement. My aim is not so much to analyse with precision the mode in which the cause of Home Rule is fostered by the moral atmosphere of the day, as to insist upon the all-important consideration that the progress of the Home Rule movement is due rather to the encouragement it derives from prevailing sentiment than to any intellectual conviction on the part of Englishmen that it is dictated by considerations of sound policy. CHAPTER IV. ENGLISH ARGUMENTS IN FAVOUR OF HOME RULE. [Sidenote: Arguments by which Home Rule policy defended.]