In the great evening meeting in the Drill Hall, in
which ten thousand people were assembled, Mr. Balfour took up the subject of Mr. Morley's recent speech at Newcastle, and de- scribed it as embodying on the Irish Question a tone only "one remove from despair." Mr. Morley complained of about twenty misrepresentations in fifteen weeks of government. He ought to have felt how blessed was his lot. In Mr. Balfour's time, one single national convention, with half a dozen speeches from Irish patriots who never practised any " niggardly economy " in misrepresentation, would have pro- duced not twenty but two hundred misrepresentations of the kind which so much disturbed Mr. Morley's repose. Mr. Balfour expressed his unbounded astonishment at Mr. Morley's assertion that on " the Evicted Tenants' Commission " the landlords had been better represented than the tenants, and dealt with it in detail. He said that he could not have under- stood the Commission at all except on the principle that the Gladatonians had incurred obligations to Mr. Dillon and Mr. O'Brien and their friends, which they were bound in honour to meet; and that Mr. Shaw-Lefevre especially had made pro- mises about the evicted tenants which it would require some- thing of a heroic effort to fulfil. The consequence was that what Mr. Morley termed a policy of staunching wounds and passing purely healing measures, had become a crusade in the interest of a single class alone, from the benefit of which all other classes were completely excluded.
