The Liberal leader has
driven it home; and wantonly, in the way of a pedestrian demagogue, some
think; certainly to the discomposure of the comfortable and the myopely
busy, who prefer to live on with a disease in the frame rather than at
all be stirred. They can, we see, pronounce a positive electoral
negative; yet even they, after the eighty and odd years of our domestic
perplexity, in the presence of the eighty and odd members pledged for
Home Rule, have been moved to excited inquiries regarding measures--short
of the obnoxious Bill. How much we suffer from sniffing the vain incense
of that word practical, is contempt of prevision! Many of the measures
now being proposed responsively to the fretful cry for them, as a better
alternative to correction by force of arms, are sound and just. Ten
years back, or at a more recent period before Mr. Parnell's triumph in
the number of his followers, they would have formed a basis for the
appeasement of the troubled land. The institution of county boards,
the abolition of the detested Castle, something like the establishment of
a Royal residence in Dublin, would have begun the work well. Materially
and sentimentally, they were the right steps to take.
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