• Mr. Gladstone's speech to the fifteen hundred was very
violent. Referring to the emblematic figures of Poland and Ireland on the presentation vase, he said that not even in Poland is there an adequate parallel to the condition of Ireland. Even in the barbarous administration of the Neapolitan prisons under King Bomba Mr. Gladstone found signs of grace which he could not find in the administration of the Irish prisons by Mr. Balfour. King Bomba "did not put his political prisoners into the company of felons." It has been shown that in his celebrated pamphlet Mr. Gladstone expressly complained that Poerio and his friends were sur- rounded by felons, and that they had to pay even to be accommodated in a separate division of the same room ; that they were loaded with heavy chains, and exposed to the most fcetid atmosphere, which even the prison doctors declined to enter ; and that their hardships were to Mr. O'Brien's hard- ships what the sufferings of the martyrs were to the sufferings of soldiers under discipline. Bat, of course, what Unionists deny, and justly deny, is that politicians who incite Irish tenants to break deliberately the law of contract, are political prisoners in any true sense. Irishmen all over the country denounce Mr. Balfour and the British Government as base, bloody, and brutal till they are hoarse ; they advocate if they please, not only Home-rule, but independence; and no one touches them. If they had done similar things in Naples in 1851, or if they did them in Poland now, their lives would not have been worth an hour's purchase. None the less Mr. Gladstone suggests that the tyranny in Ireland is worse than the tyranny in Naples or Poland. This is the very ne plus ultra of partisan exaggeration.
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