Mr. Goschen made a brilliant speech in the Free-trade Hall,
Manchester, on Tuesday. He reminded his hearers that when, twenty-five years ago, Lancashire was suffering terribly from the cotton-famine caused by the war between the Northern and Southern States of the American Union, Lancashire did not quail, but refused to lend any countenance to those who were then threatening the United States with disintegration. The present struggle for the Union with Ireland is, for us, as great a question as the revolt of the South was for the United States a quarter of a century ago. No one ought to regard it as a question of conventional party politics. The conditions of healthy national life are confidence, credit, character, the power of making wise laws, obedience to the laws, respect for authority, stability, order, peace. Without these, no community can be prosperous and strong, and these had all been endangered by the proposal to establish a separate Legislature in Ireland in deference to the threats of the National League, and by the consequences of that proposal. Mr. Gladstone himself had felt the very serious danger that when mobs in London had begun to do what the League had long been endeavouring to do in Ireland, the Irish cause would suffer by its associa- tion with English disorder, and had put forth a very striking rebuke to that disorder. Yet was it not quite as true in Ireland as in England, that no good citizen should resist the Executive Government when it administers laws passed by Parliament on the best legal advice it can get ? Nothing could prove more clearly that the Irish Question is not a separate question, than the impulse given to disorder here by the party which had sheltered and apologised for disorder there. "Anarchy," said Mr. Goschen, "is contagions."
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