Sir George Chesney, M.P. for Oxford, calls attention, in Monday's
Times, to Mr. Gladstone's speech on July 11th, 1892 (just before the General Election), on " the awful story" of " what has been, and to a great extent still is, the military occupation of Ireland :"—" When the Union, by a horrible combination of violence and fraud, was forced upon Ireland, the number of men kept under arms to prevent Ireland from shaking off the Union, rose to close upon 140,000 men. We were in the middle of the great European war. All that time, when we required to strain every nerve for the pur- poses of that war, 140,000,—I think it was 136,000,—were detained in Ireland." Sir George Chesney shows that Lord Cornwallis returned to the Government the total strength of troops of all kinds under arms in Ireland as 46,000, which included 20,000 Militia, of whom it would be impossible to speak as "detained" in Ireland, as Ireland was their proper home. To get anywhere at all near Mr. Gladstone's figures, it would be necessary to include 60,000 Irish Yeomanry, hardly any of whom were embodied at the time, so that they were not under arms ; and yet Mr. Gladstone, in his speech at Penicnik, compared these imaginary 136,000 men to the " 25,000 to 00,000 " men now employed in Ireland "for keeping down the people." But these 25,000 to 30,000 men now in Ireland are regular troops, so that Mr. Gladstone appeared to suggest the monstrous exaggeration that all the 136,000 men he paraded as the occupying force were regular troops also, whereas not 26,000 of them were regular troops. This is a curious light upon the way in which Mr. Gladstone's imagina- tion magnifies and distorts the grievances of his bête noire, the Act of Union.
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