Mr. Bright’s great speech at Birmingham on the 3rd of February, however, advanced the position of the Liberal Party in the boldest manner. There had been some talk of giving Ireland political autonomy, but it had failed to touch the sense of the nation. Oddly enough, however, Mr. Bright did not show himself strongly antipathetic to this policy. He was opposed to the Repeal of the Union, but on the other hand he declared that Repeal was a course which was open to consideration if remedial legislation failed. And he was at great pains to prepare the ground for a Repeal agitation by reconciling the English mind to the discussion of such a policy. It was for this reason that he dwelt on the fact that Repeal of the Union with Scotland was once defeated in a full House merely by a majority of two. That, said Mr. Bright, was a high precedent, if any one wished to adopt a Repeal agitation as a remedy for Irish discontent. But in the meantime Mr. Bright’s plans were (1), to disestablish the Anglican Church in Ireland and secularise its property, distributing the spoil in fair proportions among the chief sects of Ireland; (2), as to the land question, he proposed that a Land Commission should buy up the estates of absentee landlords and sell them to tenants, who were to pay the purchase-money in a certain term of years by a slight addition to their rent. In the meantime London was swarming with special constables. The garrison at Woolwich stood to its guns every night expecting a Fenian attack from the river. Special precautions had also to be taken to guard Windsor, and Lord St. Leonards, with unconscious humour, wrote a letter to the _Times_ imploring the Fenians to confine their operations to Ireland, because by annoying Englishmen they rendered the Irish cause increasingly unpopular in England. In these circumstances Ministers committed the fatal mistake of resolving to do nothing--except pass the Scottish and Irish Reform Bills, a Boundary Bill, and a Bribery Bill. They said that in two or three years’ time they might be in a position to consider other matters, such as that of National Education. The Irish Church could obviously not be assailed by a Party closely dependent on the goodwill of the English clergy. As for the Irish Land Question, Lord Stanley disposed of it by simply declaring that every proposal to deal with it which he would not like to see applied to England was pure “quackery.”