Mr. Chamberlain addressed a crowded meeting of the delegates of
the Scottish National Radical Union in the Town Hall at Ayr, on Wednesday, in a speech of very great ability, in which he sketched the present condition of the Irish Question from the time of the Chicago Convention of last year. He recited Mr. Redmond's confidences to that Convention, by which the party of violence was appeased. Mr. Redmond, the delegate of the Irish Parliamentary party, assured the Convention that the one principle of the movement was " the unqualified recogni- tion of the distinct nationality of Ireland." " We are not work- ing," he bad said, "solely for the removal of grievances, we are not simply labouring for the amelioration of the physical con- dition of the country." " The principle," said Mr. Redmond, " at the back of this movement to-day is the same principle which formed the soul of other Irish movements in the last rebellion against the rule of the strangers. It is the principle which Rob O'Neil vindicated on the banks of the Blackwater, which inspired Wolfe Tone, and for which Fitzgerald and Emmett sacrificed their lives." " I assert here to-day," Mr. Redmond went on at Chicago, "that the government of Ireland by England is an impossibility, and I believe it to be our duty to make it so ;" and this principle he reaffirmed on Thursday in the House of Commons, while declaring, however, that in his opinion Mr. Gladstone's Bill would have satisfied Ireland. Such, said Mr. Chamberlain, was the language of the delegate of the Parliamentary party to the supporters of the movement in the United States. In England, of course; everything is toned down to suit the longitude of the place ; bat when the Nationalists get back, to Ireland, they smile at the conciliatory tone to which they have subdued their language while in this country, as Mr. John O'Connor did in the speech reported in the Freeman's Journal of November 21st last.
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