Mr. John Morley delivered a very vigorous speech to the
Eighty Club on Tuesday evening, the evening after the great division. If any one were in the humour, he said, he might make over the Gladstonian umbrella a speech closely resem- bling Mark Antony's over Otesar's mantle :—
"Look ! in this place ran Cassius' dagger through;
See what a rent the envious Caeca made ; Through this, the well-beloved Brutus stabb'd."
Only he forgot to remark that the rents made were not in the Gladstonian umbrella of the September manifesto, but in the brand-new one devised expressly for Parnellite colleagues. He attacked the Radicals for taking steps to restore Lord Salisbury to power. "They do the best they can to eject us from office and power, in order to open a way for a plan whioh they hate, or pro- fess to hate, as much as they hate ours, and for statesmen whose principles they repudiate as vehemently as they embrace ours. Oh, strange logic ! Oh, wondrous policy ! Oh, most mysterious and inscrutable statesmanship !" He charged Lord Hartington and Mr. Goschen with the folly of the rustic who sat waiting to cross till the river should run itself out, though the river of Irish democracy was running faller and stronger with every year. Mr. Morley further insisted almost pathetically on Mr. Parnell's conciliatory declarations. It is noticeable that Mr. Morley, for his own part, sticks to the original idea of the Bill, the exclusion of the Irish representatives from Westminster. If you retain them, he says, you hand over all real power to Mr. Parnell, even in Imperial affairs. "For the sake of flourishing about with a Court sword,—the nominal veto,—you are giving to him the real strength and the real sharpness of the weapon."
Oa that point, at least, we heartily agree with Mr. Morley. If there is to be an Irish Legislatare,—which we hope there never will be,—it is sheer madness to insist on refusing us all British compensation for such an evil.
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