On Wednesday, Sir Michael Hicks - Beach addressed a mass meeting of
Conservatives in the Guildhall at Plymouth. In dealing with Mr. Morley's speech at the Welsh National Conference, the President of the Board of Trade was par- ticularly happy. Mr. Morley, in reply to the demand for Home-rule for Wales, told the Welsh Nationalists that they should look to the Imperial Parliament with regard to the Church, and to the working of the Local Government Act for anything else they wanted. "That is the very answer that the Unionists have been giving to Irishmen when they talked about Home-rule for Ireland." What was the cause of this difference of attitude on the part of the Gladstonians ? "The Welsh are calmly told-that they have but twenty-six Members, while there are eighty-six Irish Nationalists." The great policy of con- ciliation, then, only applies where the numbers are sufficiently large. Another remarkable passage in the speech contained the statement that "it is an impossibility that the relations between landlord and tenant should be permanently destroyed in any country in the world." In the United States even, one-third of the land is let. "You must either have the relation of land- lord and tenant, or that of the money-lender and the free- holder." It is well that the public should sometimes have the adamantine nature of the great laws of political economy brought before them. You may destroy the existing landlords in Ireland, but, in truth, you can no more banish political economy to Saturn than you can translate Mr. Gladstone to the moon. As a sign of the times, we may also notice in. the speech the declaration that "it is an essential part of con- stitutional government that the majority should make the law, and that that law should be obeyed by the minority until they are strong enough to alter it." Twenty years ago, no Tory statesman would have ventured to enunciate such a principle, even if he had held it in his heart of hearts.
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