There has been within the last week a great discharge
of letters intended to affect the election for the Ayr Burghs. Mr. Gladstone began it by writing to a correspondent on the Ayr election in a sense unfavourable to the attitude of the Liberal Unionists towards " coercion " and towards local government in Ireland, whereupon Lord Hartington addressed a letter to Mr. Grahame, dated this day week, and published in Tuesday's Times, defining what the attitude of the Liberal Unionists had been on these subjects. They had not said that the choice lay between Coercion and Home- rule; and he did assert that any Government might be com- pelled to resort to n*asures which could be reasonably described as coercive by any systematic resistance to, and defiance of, the law undertaken by a political party for political or social ends, and this, too, whether any such systematic resist. ance did or did not involve a great outburst of crime. As to local government, Lord Hartington had never said that the Irish must give up their national aspirations before local govern- ment could be granted them. What he did say was that it must be clearly and finally laid down whether the Irish national aspirations were or were not to be fed with hopes of a separate Irish Parliament, and that the law should be asserted in Ireland, and its supremacy definitely re-established, before local liberties could be granted to Ireland. But so far as Irish national aspirations can be satisfied as Scotch national aspirations are satisfied, Lord Hartington had always been heartily favourable to their satisfaction.
