Mr. Trevelyan made an admirable speech last Saturday at Taunton,
in which he pointed out how greatly the condition of Ireland had deteriorated since the Tory Government came in. "When Lord Spencer and I were in Ireland, men fulfilled their civil obligations. They are not fulfilling them now. When Lord Spencer and I were in Ireland, rent was paid more readily than it is paid in England. At the present moment, in many parts, I think we might almost say in most parts of Ireland, rent is not being paid at all. And as for boycotting, the notion that boycotting is not much more virulent and mach more universal now than it was under Lord Spencer is a notion which could never be maintained for one single moment by anybody who is boycotting, or by anybody who has been boycotted." And of this he gave a graphic illustration, which we have extracted in another column. Mr. Trevelyan referred also to Mr. Parnell's sermon, in which he told the Irish peasants to pay no more respect to the judicial rent than they did to the old rents before the Courts had revised them ; and remarked that on the very day after that speech, Lord Dunraven at Norwich had pro- claimed that the Government were anxious for the support of the Parnellites. At this moment, said Mr. Trevelyan, "the sale of land in Ireland would be as cheap and easy as of Console, if it had not been that Lord Salisbury and Lord Carnarvon, by dropping Lord Spencer's method of preserving law and order, have taught the Irish farmer that it is much cheaper and easier to pay no rent, than to buy his farm under the most simple method that human ingenuity ever devised."
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