Now fortune played a strange trick. Parnell, the leader and mainstay of the League, Gladstone's ally, was convicted of adultery. Adultery is not political, but it was too much both for the Irish hierarchy and for the nonconformist conscience. Parnell had to be dragged from the helm of the Irish party, to which he clung with a frantic tenacity, such as proved him after all to be, though a very remarkable, hardly a very great, man. Raised once more by another turn of fortune's wheel in the party game to power, Gladstone again brought forward a Home Rule Bill. This time he, with the help of the Irish members, pushed the bill through the House, partly by closure, in a form already condemned by himself, giving Ireland a separate Parliament for her own affairs, and at the same time retaining her representation in the British Parliament, with power there to vote upon all questions. The Irish delegation would have played, as in fact it does now, for its own purposes, on the balance of British parties, and baffled any attempt to enforce restrictions on the doings of its own Parliament which the Home Rule Act might have imposed. The majority for the bill in the Commons was forty-three, including eighty Irish members. British members of the House of Commons who voted for the bill probably reckoned on its being killed in the Lords. Killed it was there with a vengeance. Gladstone appealed to the people against the Lords, but in vain. Thus ended in disaster his wonderful career. His speeches on Home Rule showed, like all his speeches, vast oratoric power, mastery of details, clearness and liveliness in exposition. But weak points are also apparent. The Irish Parliament cannot have been at once a sink of corruption and an institution with which it was sacrilege to interfere. The comparison of the union in criminality to the massacre of St. Bartholomew must surely have made all hearers but the Irish smile. Upon this subject the speaker raves, and generally he forgets that the mission of reconciliation which he had undertaken would not be furthered by opening old sores. The examples of Austria-Hungary and the connection of Norway with Sweden, cited by him as proofs that a conjunction of two Parliaments worked well, would be generally taken not as encouragements but as warnings. The case of Norway and Sweden has since become a warning indeed. The intricate machinery by which the speaker proposes to regulate the action of his two Parliaments has too much the look of a speculative structure elaborated without reference to the peculiar state of Ireland and the forces to be encountered there. Of the force of the Catholic priesthood, nothing is said. In fact, the political architect knew little of the country with which he was dealing, having been in it only for three weeks, and then not at a good point of view.