Obstruction was an ugly novelty to the Parliament of 1874. Some ominous improprieties had marked the resistance to the Irish Church Bill, the Ballot Bill, and the Bill for the Abolition of Purchase in the Army, during Mr. Gladstone’s Administration; but no serious deadlock had arisen. Suddenly the House of Commons awoke to the fact that half-a-dozen of its members were persistently and deliberately engaged in paralysing its business. The procedure of those days offered a virgin field. No closure terminated the debate. No Supply rule regulated financial business. No restriction was imposed upon the right of members to move to adjourn the debate or the House or to report progress in Committee. The minority was restrained only by custom and awe. It now appeared that a few members were resolved to destroy conventions which had been consecrated by centuries of observance. The mutineers were so few in number that they excited almost as much surprise as irritation. Public reprobation, newspaper abuse, Parliamentary disgust, were directed upon them in vain. The leaders of the Opposition vied in terms of condemnation with Her Majesty’s Ministers. The Irish party was shocked and silent. Nothing availed against men whose only object was to inflict an outrage upon Parliament, and who gauged their success by the indignation and sorrow they created. At length, during one weary sitting, in an evil hour for his own authority, Mr. Butt was persuaded to denounce the obstructives and to declare, amid resounding English cheers, his deep detestation of their tactics. But the censure which was so general in England awoke its counter-cry across St. George’s Channel. The measure of British hatred and contempt became the measure of Irish sympathy and partisanship. ‘Parliamentarianism,’ writes Mr. Barry O’Brien drolly, ‘was apparently becoming a respectable thing. It might be possible to touch it without being contaminated.’ The Fenian organisations, long disdainful of Mr. Butt’s constitutional methods and confronted at every session with their utter futility, turned with interest to the new man who moved with unconcerned deliberation into the centre of the stage and dealt with others as though it was his birthright to command and theirs to serve him. Delicate and subterranean negotiations followed with secret societies who were reluctant to compromise the purity of their revolutionary creeds by any paltering with half-measures or pseudo-constitutional agitation. Sympathetic acquiescence--if not, indeed, actual co-operation--was at length almost unconsciously conceded. In two years Mr. Butt was broken. The Home Rule Confederation cast him off; his friends sorrowfully but unhesitatingly deposed him; his followers enlisted with the conqueror. Mr. Butt’s end was melancholy. Hunted and harassed by debt and illness, worn with prolonged exertions and mortified by supersession and defeat, he lived only to see his authority exercised by another and the land for which he had