Lord Bramwell, though he voted on the Liberal side, pleads,
in a letter to the Times, that Mr. Gladstone should offer a compromise to the Lords by producing his Redistribu- tion Bill. To this proposal, which is, in substance, that of Lord Cowper and all other advocates of compromise, Mr. John Morley replies, in a letter published on Friday, that as Lord Granville, in his answer to Lord Danraven on July 17th, showed, the debate in the Commons turned almost exclusively on this point, and it was-decided by an enormous majority that Redistribution should not accompany the Franchise. Is the Government to reverse the decision of its own majority P Mr. Morley farther argues that no Ministry could be sure of passing any Redistribution Bill it produced, for, not to mention that the Radicals would not swallow it whole, Mr. Parnell might dis- approve of the transfer of Irish seats from the South to the North, and this "would inevitably lead to combinations that might easily be fatal to the whole measure." The "only guar- antee against such combinations is the certainty that the Fran- chise Bill would come into operation in any ease." That is true, and it is also true that this is the only solid guarantee against the Lords insisting on rejecting any Bill not really drawn up by Lord Salisbury. That, as Mr. Morley says, "may be a very indecent hypothesis, but we must take this fallen world as it is."
