Mr. Morley made a spirited speech in Dumfries yesterday week,—spirited
but eminently partisan. Mr. Morley is losing that detachment of mind which used specially to characterise him as a politician, and the loss of which is far from com- pensated by the gain of a certain popular brilliancy. He ridiculed the Pecksniffian pretension of the Unionists to act upon principle ; showed where the Government had done in relation to its Irish policy much that it had previously repelled the bare thought of doing; and then attacked them for not having done more in the same direction, quoting the large remission of arrears to the crofters of Scotland as a reason why the Government was very wicked for not having con- sented to remit arrears to the tenants in Ireland, except on condition that arrears of other debts, besides rent, should be dealt with on the same basis. Mr. Morley forgot to say that one Arrears Act for Ireland had been passed before the late fall in the price of produce, and that the refusal of the Government to deal again with Irish arrears really applied to arrears of only one or two years' standing, and not to such cases as those of the Scotch crofters.
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