The Chancellor of the Exchequer's first or Tuesday's speech at
Bristol, was in the main an answer to Mr. Morley's speech at Bristol on October 29th. Mr. Goschen replied to the taunts levelled against the distrust of juries in Ireland by pointing out how, in similar cases, there is much the same amount of distrust of juries in the United States, more jurors having been chal- lenged in the Cronin trial, for instance, and told to stand aside, than in any trial in Ireland. Mr. Goschen took very calmly the imprisonment of twenty-two Irish Members of Parliament for short terms for misleading the people of Ireland into resistance to the law. They could hardly, he said, have better deserved punishment than by so misleading an ignorant peasantry. He quoted a municipal election in a town of Kerry, in which two Unionists have beaten the Nationalist, who was last year at the top of the poll with a great majority, as proof that popular feeling is returning into more loyal channels in Ireland; and he added that letters from Ireland assert that tenants have not exhibited such cheerful and pleasant faces for eleven years back. In regard to Mr. Morley's remark that to discover a passable State Legislature and Administration for Ireland is a much easier task than was the construction of the United States Constitution, Mr. Goschen declared that, on the contrary, he thought the latter much the easier task of the two, for it did not involve the breaking-up of a great historical Constitution in order to find room in it for a brand-new State quite without any natural links to the political world with which it is to be loosely associated.
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