ABSTRACT
William Ewart Gladstone found in the Nationalist spirit, in revolt in Ireland, something akin to the spirit that had drawn his sympathy to the Italian movement. He saw that in combating Fenianism an English Government was struggling with crimes prompted by patriotic feeling. Gladstone and Gladstone alone among political leaders treated the Irish question as the supreme problem, because he differed from his contemporaries both in his love and his fear of the self-conscious impulses of national sentiment. Gladstone hoped that if the opportunity was taken in 1886 and Ireland received the Parliament she had demanded, she would set out on her new career in a spirit of goodwill, and that her sense of wrong would be merged in the new ambitions and new tasks on which she was entering. With his strong sense of the value and place of self-respect in the life of a nation, Gladstone saw the whole Irish problem with very different eyes from his contemporaries.
