Lord Salisbury spoke with g reat force at a dinner of
the National Conservative Club, last Saturday, in Willis's Rooms. He declared the chances of peace to have improved considerably within the previous three weeks. He passed a most earnest enloginm on Sir Michael Hicks-Beach, and expressed his pro- found sense of the "disaster" which the Government had suffered in losing his active services, calling him " the ablest, the most loyal, the wisest, the most resolute of colleagues" and he said that the Irish Question pressed upon the Administration like "an evil dream." He understood the impatience with which the failure of the Government to re-establish order in Ireland was regarded, for it was a condition of things " disgraceful to law, disgraceful to constitutional government" "The great object of society is that wrong should be reduced and that crime should be punished." That object is not attained in Ireland. The jury system had utterly broken down. That rendered it necessary to alter the law which requires the intervention of a jury in punish.. ing crime. But no such law can be passed at Westminster in the present state of the House of Commons, and hence the neces- sity of patience till the machinery for legislation is renewed.
