Lord Randolph Churchill, at Reading, on Wednesday, was full of
'vigour, and excited storms of laughter by a comparison between the Government policy and the confidence-trick, the Government asking that the Irish should be trusted with power just to show the English confidence in their character; but the speech of the day was Mr. Chamberlain's at Birmingham. There he was on his native heath; and he let himself loose, declaring again and again that from all his experience he was satisfied that Scotland was turning, that England was opposed to the Home-rule Bill, and that "every Unionist was longing for a dissolution." The tide had turned and was flowing with them, and he knew personally that Mr. Gladstone would never be returned again for Midlothian. The Gladstonians knew the facts as well as he did, and were "fighting like pirates with ropes round their necks." The obstruction was due to the Ministry alone, who were sfaves not only to the Irish, but to factions whom they tried to pacify with many Bills, Bills which were like goods exposed in a shop-window for adver- tisement, not for sale. Mr. Chamberlain proceeded to denounce the Employer's Liability Bill, which greatly in- terests Birmingham, and the Veto Bill, which was not directed against drinking, but against publicans, and fell heavily on the poor, while wholly exempting the rich. As for -the Home-rule Bill itself, he repeated that it was dead, and the Gladstonians were " waking " the corpse, after the Irish manner, "with howls and disorder, and even violence ; " and Promised the most strenuous resistance to the "monstrous Proposal" that while the Irish were to have a practically co- ordinate Parliament of .their own, we should place in their hands 'the power of interfering in our affairs, of hampering our business, of controlling our Government, of electing our Ministry, and of settling our taxation, all so many weapons to extort from us further concessions." Mr. Chamberlain ended with an appeal to his hearers to face, like courageous men, the difficulties of governing Ireland, and not at the bidding of a pusillanimous Government to transfer her rule "to conspirators and adventurers who have been the ruin of their own country, but shall not be the ruin of ours."
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