At the Liberal meeting held at Dalkeith on Tuesday, a
letter was read from Mr. Gladstone, in which he said :—" The excesses of the Government have gone beyond all expectation, and have reached a point at which, through the officers whom they appoint and encourage, they who are paid as well as bound to support the law, have become the most glaring offenders against it. The rejection of Home-rule has, in the natural course, been followed by coercion. Coercion, professedly aimed at crime, has been directed against the Press and the right of public meeting. The arbitrary prohibition of public meetings was not enough, and has been followed at Iditchelstown by the most wanton and the most disorderly disturbances, with those deplorable and fatal consequences of which the Ministers have declared in Parliament their approval." That sounds as if Mr. Gladstone meant to say that the Government had expressed their approval of the fatalities at Mitchelstown ; whereas all they have said, and rightly said, is that the persons to he condemned for them are not the police who defended themselves, but the persons who set on the people to attack the police. But Mr. Gladstone has now apparently become incapable of judging the Government as he would have wished his own Government under the same circum- stances to be judged, and everything which he writes on matters of this kind gives many of his former most faithful followers and admirers acute pain. The letter is one to inflame Irish passion against a Government quite as honest as his own Government five years ago, and much more lenient.
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