Mr. Gladstone's reply on Tuesday was full of fire, and
pro- duced even more effect than his great opening speech. He insisted on the duty of undoing the great act of fraud by which the Union was carried. He made light of the securities for the protection of the minority, declaring that, for his part, he entirely trusted the Irish people, and that he had pro- vided the guarantees only for those who could not trust them. (But it is not four years since he expressed his horror of the Parnilite Party, the steps of whose organisa- tion, as it spread through Ireland, were everywhere, he said, dogged by crime.) He spoke with extreme disapprobation of those who had " no faith in the people." The Liberal critics of his scheme seemed to attribute to the Irish people " a double dose of original sin." The Irish might well have had their moral perception twisted by the injustices which the Devon Commission first brought to light as the chronic injustices of centuries ; but he thought the time had come to trust the Irish people, and he predicted that if the Bill were rejected, we should have to struggle on from hand to mouth, "leaving England and Scotland to a famine of needful and useful legisla- tion, and Ireland to a continuance of social disease the depth of which we have never understated,—of social disease which you do not know how to deal with, and which in her angry discord with Great Britain you make no attempt to cure." But is not Mr. Gladstone explicitly entrusting the cure to those who per- sistently deny the disease, and who have all along done their best to represent the disease itself as a form of health P
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