“The Cabinet, I am safe in saying, are earnestly desirous of doing justice to Ireland, and not only that, but of so shaping reform as to make the cure as lasting as such a cure can be. No government can consent to revolution (though this was deemed possible in some quarters as respects some governments twenty years ago), but the present ministry are willing to go all lengths that are feasible and wise in the way of reform and reparation. Their greatest obstacle will be the overweening expectations and inconsiderate temper of the Irish themselves, both of them the result of artificial rather than natural causes. For no reform will be effectual that does not gradually nullify the unhappy effects produced by the influence, through many generations, of the pitiable travesty of feudal relations between landlord and tenant, making that relation personal instead of mercantile, and thus insensibly debauching both. “The condition of Ireland is not so disturbed now as it has been at several periods during the last eighty years, and precisely the same system of organization was brought to bear against the collection of tithes fifty years ago that has now been revived to resist the payment of what are considered excessive rents. The landlords are represented as the minions of a foreign and hated domination, and the use of the epithet _foreign_ has at least this justification, that there is certainly an imperfect sympathy between the English and Irish characters which prevents each from comprehending either the better qualities of the other or, what is worse, the manner of their manifestion. “I cannot perceive that the public opinion of the country has withdrawn itself in any appreciable measure from sympathy with the Cabinet, though there is considerable regret among thoughtful liberals that coercion should have been deemed necessary and that the proposed reforms should not have gone farther. If the Irish could only be brought to have as much faith in Mr. Gladstone as he has desire for their welfare, there might be more hope than I can now see for a permanent solution of the Irish question.”