Mr. Goschen's speech at Free.trade Hall in Manchester, on Wednesday,
was remarkable for the force with which he kept
the attention of his great audience fixed on the agrarian ques- tion, in all its aspects, as the central Irish issue. There is not, as he showed, the smallest evidence that, if the agrarian ques- tion could be settled finally by the Parliament of Westminster, 'the very root of Irish grievances would not be plucked up. The proposed Irish Parliament, as he showed, could not settle that question fairly, because the mercantile and manu- facturing interests of Ireland would not be adequately repre- sented at all in the proposed Dublin Parliament. That, as Mr. Davitt admits, will be almost purely agrarian, and the interests of Irish trade and Irish wealth will not be represented in it. The one of Ministers now is to give the agrarian question the go-by. Mr. Gladstone forgot the land question in introducing the Bill, and was completely silent on it in moving the second reading. Sir George Trevelyan passes it over ; the Attorney-General never refers to it. But yet all the collateral evidence we have, is to the effect that the tenant-farmers are to have their Sown way. The Evicted Tenants Bill, in part adopted by Mr. Morley, is to reinstate, at the cost of the State, every drunken and idle tenant who has been evicted for non-payment of rent. And yet, after the Rome-rule Bill passes, if it ever should pass, all the cost of the agrarian movement will have to be extorted, in some form, from the only well-to-do part of Ireland,—the cities whose voice will not be effectually heard in the new Parliament. Ulster will have to pay for the indolence and thriftlessness of the remainder of the island.
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