Mr. Fowler, the President of the Local Government Board, addressed
his constituents at Wolverhampton last Saturday, and took Home-rule for his chief subject. He was courageous enough to maintain that the Home-rule Bill of the Government was sufficiently well known before the General Election to make it clear that the narrow majority obtained at that election amounted to a mandate in favour of the Bill actually brought in. Even the retention of eighty Irish Members to vote on all subjects alike,—whether Imperial or purely Scotch, Welsh, and English,—was, he maintained, fairly before the constituencies, though the Bill of the Government itself pro- posed to give them votes only on Imperial subjects, and was not changed till the last available moment. And this extra- ordinary thesis he proved by quoting a passage from an article of Dr. Dale, of Birmingham, in favour of that course. Dr. Dale is a very able and influential man ; but we venture to assert that not one in a thousand, not one in ten thousand electors, had ever heard of his article in the Contemporary, nor that, if he had heard of it, he would have attached any importance to it as indicating the course of the Government. Moreover, the Government showed how little they themselves liked Dr. Dale's doctrine, by drafting their Bill on a different principle. Again, it was admitted on all bands that stringent guarantees of the effectiveness of the supremacy of the Imperial Parlia- ment were essential ; and no Unionist thinks that there are any such effective guarantees at all. Are the constituencies to have no right of judging whether they think the guarantees provided adequate or not ?
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