In referring to Mr. Gladstone's attack on Mr. Justice Harrison
for addressing the people of Galway as if they ought to lynch those who intimidate and oppress them,—a slip of the tongue which Mr. Balfour maintained that no one misunderstood as serious advice,—Mr. Balfour said that the excuse for Mr. Justice Harrison was that in East Galway, where the "Plan of Campaign" had been at work, patrols were needed even across the fields, and not merely along the roads, if the lives of men who paid their rent and fulfilled their legal obligations were to be safe. The terrorism there, in a limited district, is extreme, and an attempt had even been made to blow up the police and the party that accompanied the police to the house of one of the evicted tenants, an attempt so flagrant that only through the mercy of Providence was a scene of unexampled horror avoided. Mr. Justice Harrison had been rendered justly indignant by learning all these par- ticulars, and in denouncing the want of union and open resistance to intimidation of this kind, used expressions which were obviously culpable, though nobody interpreted them in their strict meaning. Finally, Mr. Balfour discoursed on the fatal effect of allowing the House of Commons to fall under the tyranny of fools and bores, a part of his speech on which we have commented sufficiently in another column.
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