Our alarm at all this should not make us lose sight of the antecedent facts which have built up this force of mischief. Mr. Gladstone is Prime Minister by the favour of the Irish party, and this party is the outcome of Mr. Gladstone's own policy. Whether the fluent rhetorician foresaw his present position, whether perched on his slender ledge of power he now enjoys it, we need not stop to consider. What we would remind our readers is that for nearly twenty years past he has, in the main line of his public life, notwithstanding some convulsive oscillations, pursued with the pertinacity of one possessed the policy of which the present Irish organization is the natural and the logical development. The National League represents the spirit to which Mr. Gladstone appealed at Southport in 1867. In the December of that year he charged the new voters, in words of solemn adjuration, to look at Ireland from the Irish point of view. This appeal had an electric effect upon the population of that island. In the years which have passed since, his own injunction has been sometimes rudely disregarded by Mr. Gladstone himself, but he never long delayed to turn again to his favourite theory, to make another effort to justify the principle with which he had started, and at each renewal of his enterprise he plunged himself and his party deeper into the morass of Hibernian disorder. Mr. Gladstone's admirers are very proud of his numerous successes in carrying important Bills through Parliament, but it is forgotten that his Irish Bills, though carried, have never attained the ends for which they were passed. Twice have all the resources of his genius, all the machinery of his party, been called into requisition to bring about a final settlement of the Irish Land question, and yet the work is still to be done. The explanation is not far to seek. Mr. Gladstone's passionate recklessness committed him in 1867 to an enterprise, the magnitude of which excited his vanity, the actual nature of which he only dimly perceived.