Mr. Gladstone, said Mr. Chamberlain, still declined to take the
people into his confidence as to how he proposed to solve the difficulties he had admitted. The English people would never tolerate a Parliament in Dublin at once co-ordinate and insubordinate, and Mr. Gladstone kept it a profound secret how he intended to secure the practical supremacy in policy of the Parliament at Westminster. The only mode in which Home-rule could still be a danger, was that the people might be taught to think it virtually dropped, and to vote as if it were dropped, when it was really not dropped at all, and this was what the recent circular, giving sixteen distinct heads of Liberal policy, of which Home-rule was not one, appeared to forebode, Mr. Chamberlain at once asked whether that implied a change of policy or was intended to mislead, and he found that "it was only a fraud." The Liberal Unionist policy is not so magnificent as the Gla,dstonian, with its Home-rule and its sixteen further heads of radical change ; but it was a practical policy, and not the prospectus of a Bubble Company which indulged in all sorts of promises, though the leader declared that none of them could in effect be fulfilled till Irish Home-rule had been got out of the way, —in other words, till the Greek /Lalonde.
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