The first outward and visible sign was the creation of the Irish Home Rule party, which constituted itself separate and distinct from the rest of the House of Commons, the standard of which the new gang was to debase. Nor did they rest content until it became the scene of faction fights and organised obstruction in combination with the flagrant violation of all decencies of language and behaviour. Members were returned for Irish constituencies who had been convicts; others came who richly deserved imprisonment for life. They instigated murders, and clamoured because the murderers were not regarded as heroes; or if they were hung, canonised them as martyrs. They attempted to prostitute the law to their own base standard of political morality. They assiduously laboured to render life valueless in Ireland and property worthless, whilst no deed was too cowardly, no atrocity too barbarous, for them to praise. They alone in modern times warred against women and children. Animals were the dumb victims of the inhuman ferocity they in no way tried to check, and they effectively taught the receptive Irish millions that a British Government could be coerced into giving what was demanded provided a sufficient number of crimes created a holocaust large enough to intimidate the weak-kneed at St. Stephen's. But Mr. Parnell and the Land League would all have been promptly reduced to the pitiful unimportance from which they had so noisily emerged if it had not been for Mr. Gladstone. The root of English politics has been party government--'where all are for a party, and none are for the State,' to reverse Macaulay's famous line. Now the Irish vote of sixty was a solid asset, capable in many cases of weighing down one side of the political scale. It was obvious that the votes would be unscrupulously given, and Mr. Gladstone bid higher than the Tories. Literally the necessary parliamentary machinery for the government of the United Kingdom was clogged by the Nationalists, who brought obstruction to a fine art, and it was Mr. Gladstone who always gave in when the Irish outcry would have stimulated an honest man to avail himself of all loyal forces which law and the common weal provided. Long before this the Irish political agitator had set himself to embitter the relations existing between landlord and tenant. An Englishman goes into Parliament for various motives; an Irishman for his living. If he did not outshout his neighbour, if he were not implicitly obedient to Mr. Parnell, if he did not arouse the worst passions of the worst people in his constituency, he was promptly dismissed. To do them justice, the Irish members gave such an exhibition of blackguardism as has no parallel on earth, though it earned but the mildest rebuke from their obsequious ally, Mr. Gladstone.