In 1869 a man of great power and eloquence, wide views, and firm resolve became Prime Minister. He realised the habitual injustice of England to Ireland, and he saw the perils impending. By his strength of will he forced an unwilling country and an indifferent Parliament to devote its serious attention to Irish questions. He disestablished the Church. He was defeated on Irish education, but he laid the foundation of a land settlement by conferring on the tenants, in spite of strenuous opposition from the Tories, the rights of fair rents, fixity of tenure, and free sale, and his measures were marked by an earnest desire to deal liberally with Ireland to the utmost extent consistent with equity to the British tax-payer. Finally, when Ireland sent to Westminster more than four-fifths of her representatives pledged to Home Rule, he accepted this expression of the national will, and became a convert to the principle of Home Rule. I deal later in detail with his two Home Rule Bills of 1886 and 1893, which were defeated, and I need only here deal with finance of the third period, apart from the provision of the Home Rule Bills. Before Mr. Gladstone was converted to Home Rule, Home Rule finance attracted little attention. That eminent statistician, Sir Robert Giffen, made, indeed, in 1885, a singular suggestion to the _Statist_ newspaper, viz., that the Irish landlords should be bought out at the cost of the Imperial Exchequer, and that the rent charge, which would then be payable by the purchasing tenant, should be given to an Irish authority, in lieu of payments from the Exchequer, for the internal administration of Ireland. Again, Sir Robert wrote an article in the _Nineteenth Century Review_, March, 1886, a few weeks before the introduction of the first Home Rule Bill, to show how unimportant, from a financial point of view, Ireland had become to us, and to suggest the expediency of devising some form of Government under which the special needs and circumstances of that country would receive more and better attention than they did under the existing arrangements. His figures might be, in some instances, doubtful, perhaps even incorrect, but it can hardly be denied that he made good his point. Sir Robert was, we see, greatly in advance, not only of the ordinary Briton, but of financial experts generally, both as regards the land question and also that of the Government of Ireland. Perhaps the most able thinker and writer on economic questions in the second half of the nineteenth century was the late Mr. Bagehot, and, in proof of the general indifference to Irish questions in England, it is notable that his collected works, ranging over a wide field in politics and literature, contain no paper on the government or condition of Ireland. Yet he had witnessed O’Connell, the famine, the depopulation of Ireland, the Committee on Irish Taxation, and the Fenian outbreak in 1866.