When Mr. Balfour sat down, Mr. Gladstone rose and delivered
one of the most eloquent of all his many great speeches, speak- ing for nearly two hours. He declared Mr. O'Brien and his friends "the advocates and organs of a nation." He declared that in Ireland, and especially in Mitchelstown, "the agents of the law were the breakers of the law ;" he declared Mr. Balfour himself by clear implication a breaker of the law. He reiterated in still stronger language his attack on the action of the police at Mitchelstown ; he asked for a return of the successes of the Government in getting Irish peasants to take farms from which the previous tenant had been evicted,—which, of course, without drawing down the tender attentions of the boy- cotters, it is (as Mr. Gladstone mast have known) impossible to give,—and he represented the "Plan of Campaign" as mitigating the evils of the agrarian situation, without committing himself to its defence. Further, he declared that the National League has greatly more weight in Ireland now than it had before Mr. Balfour's administration began. In fact, he made a speech of extraordinary vivacity and power which identified him so closely with the Parnellites, that they cheered Mr. Gladstone at its close with a rapture with which they never cheered Mr. Parnell,— Mr. Gladstone, whom a few years ago Mr. O'Brien had compared to Judas Iscariot.
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