ABSTRACT
Salisbury was inclined to believe in the “disease of the pendulum” when too many electors were, in the nature of things, ignorant or indifferent,1 but the Irish question, which from 1886 appeared to introduce a fundamental difference of opinion between Unionists and Gladstonians, seemed to have lost its immediate menace after the fall of Parnell and the success of coercion, joined to a cautious but unmistakable policy of liberalizing Irish government when the necessary legislation could be got through parliament. The heavy programme of domestic legislation enacted since 1887 had furnished an almost entirely Tory cabinet with impressive credentials as reformers but, given the bi-partisan support which the most important of those measures attracted, it was hard to pretend that they were the political property of the governing alliance. Moreover, their parliamentary labours had wearied the unpaid Unionist backbenchers, driven the exhausted W.H.Smith, leader of the House, into the grave, and tired out his principal colleagues. The intentions of a mildly bored electorate were apparent from the opposition gains at by-elections, totalling twenty-two against the government’s two from more than a hundred contests. Ministers, the Russian ambassador remarked, wanted to lose the general election called for July 1892 by an insignificant margin.2 The desire for rest went with the anticipated satisfaction of watching the Gladstonians struggle in office, as a result of their commitments to Irish home rulers and Welsh Nonconformists and of the expectations they had fostered. Losing some eighty seats, the Unionists retained their English majority and led the Liberals by over forty in the country as a whole. The life of the Liberal ministry hung on the co-operation of the divided Irish nationalists.3
