Yesterday week, the debate on the Home-rule Bill was begun
by Mr. Justin McCarthy, in a speech so anxiously moderate as to be somewhat colourless, though Mr. McCarthy promised for the Irish Parliament that it would not be one of politicians, but of earnest, practical men, careful only to restore the prosperity of Ireland. Mr. Finlay, M.P. for the Inverness Burghs, then delivered a very impressive Constitutional speech against the Bill, in which he argued that, as it is at present drawn, the conspicuous absence from this Bill of the clauses in the India Act, and in the Colonial Laws Act of 1865, reserving the supremacy of the Imperial Parliament, would be construed by a Court of Justice to imply that that supremacy is not reserved ; and insisted that if it be reserved, that should be frankly avowed in the Bill, in which case the Irish Members would smart under the control of an " alien" Parliament, in which they are not even to be represented. He reminded the House how anxious the Irish patriots would be, in the words of Swift, "to burn everything that came from England except the coal," and how they would resent the exclusion from this Bill of any power to fix their own Customs and Excise duties ; and he quoted Macaulay's comparison of the proposed tie between the separate Legislatures to the bond uniting the Siamese Twins. England and Ireland would, he said, in Macaulay's words, be united under this Bill "by an unnatural ligament, making each the constant plague of the other, always in each other's way ; more helpless than others, because they had twice as many hands ; slower than others, because they had twice as many legs ; not feeling each other's pleasures, but tormented by each other's infirmities, and certain to perish miserably by each other's dissolution."
