The Standard on Wednesday published a telegram from the United
States, in which it was asserted that Mr. '-.71rbert Gladstone had revealed to a correspondent in America the scheme of the new Home-rule measure. It is denied that the scheme is at all like that which is before the Cabinet, and also that Mr. Herbert Gladstone had written any such letter as was alleged. And no doubt the whole scheme of the alleged Bill
is a mere canard. The plan attributed to the Government by the soi-disant correspondent of Mr. Herbert Gladstone, is a sort of reversion to the scheme which Lord Granville and, at one time, Mr. Chamberlain, had rather favoured, for giving separate State Constitutions and Governments to the four separate provinces of Ireland. Each of these States was to name delegates, in proportion to its population, to a Central Senate in Dublin, and the President of Leinster was to be President of this Senate. This Senate was, in fact, to be the Irish Parliament, and (we suppose) to determine the Irish Ministry and Irish policy, so far as Ireland was to have a policy of her own. We need not give the details of a plan already known to be unauthentic, but evidently it was not one which would have satisfied Ireland at all. Nor would it have relieved the Parliament at Westminster of more than twenty- three Irish Members. According to the plan suggested, Ireland was still to have had eighty Members in the Imperial Parliament, and so far as we understand the scheme, it would have failed completely to satisfy the two main requisites of Irish Home-rule. It would not, in any degree, have gratified the national pride of the Irish, and it would not have relieved Parliament from the pressure of Irish business. The appeals from the Irish Legislature and Administration to the British Parliament would have been angrier, louder, and more numerous than ever.
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