The political part of the problem, which concerned the relations between the two islands, had, when Mr. Gladstone came to deal with the question, assumed the aspect of a struggle for Home Rule. This was an ostensibly reduced and mitigated version of the struggle for the repeal of the Union, which had been set on foot by O’Connell, and, passing from him into more violent hands, had in 1848, under Smith O’Brien, come after a feeble outbreak to an unhappy end. The political movement, apart from the agrarian insurrection, had never shown much force. It was not on political change that the heart of the Irish people was set, but on the secure possession of their holdings and their deliverance from the grasp of famine. But the new leader, Charles Stewart Parnell, a real statesman in his way, combined the two objects, and the movement, carrying the people with it, became formidable in its political as well as in its agrarian form. There had been, as we know, an immense Irish emigration to the United States. This, while it had somewhat relieved the pressure of population, had in another respect greatly added to the difficulty of the case. It had given birth to American Fenianism, with its Clan-na-Gael, an agitation wholly political, sanguinary in spirit, formidable from the influence of the Irish vote on American politicians, having its headquarters and its centre beyond the reach of British repression. Gladstone had been in Ireland only for three weeks, and then, Mr. Morley says, he had not gone beyond a very decidedly English circle. There is, at all events, no trace of his having studied on the spot the character of the people with whom he had to deal, the influences which were at work, the various forces, political, ecclesiastical, social, and economical, to the play of which he was going to deliver the island. Had he done this, he might have known why it was that Irish Liberals, like Lord O’Hagan and Sir Alexander Macdonald, while they were Irish patriots to the core, and because they were Irish patriots to the core, shrank with horror from the dissolution of the legislative Union. He might have seen the probable futility of any clause of a Home Rule Act forbidding preference of a particular religion, and the ease with which it could have been practically nullified by the Roman Catholic hierarchy and priesthood, wielding the influence which they possessed over the people and over popular elections. He might also have more vividly realized the danger attending the relation of Protestant and Saxon Ulster to the Celtic and Catholic part of Ireland, when they came to face each other in a separate arena and their conflict was uncontrolled.