Mr. T. W. Russell made a very able speech at
Nottingham on Tuesday, in answer to the speech delivered by Mr. Parnell in the same town on December 17th. He dealt chiefly with Mr. Parnell's charge that the initial blunder of the Government had been their refusal to pass the Bill which Mr. Parnell proposed in September, 1886, to meet the great fall in the price of Irish agricultural produce, and to modify the Land Act of 1881 in favour of the tenants. That refusal, said Mr. Parnell, was the real origin of the "Plan of Campaign." The despair caused by the rejection of his Bill drove the Irish tenants to adopt the illegal "Plan of Campaign." Mr. Russell's answer was that in every case where the "Plan of Campaign" had been adopted and worked, the landlords had themselves offered much better terms than Mr. Parnell's Bill would have provided, and that it would not, in fact, have affected so many as one-fourth of the tenants of Ireland,—indeed, that the "Plan of Campaign" had been determined on beforehand, and that Mr. Parnell's Bill was introduced in order to afford an excuse for the "Plan of Cam- paign," not the "Plan of Campaign" adopted because Mr. Parnell's Bill had been rejected. To this the Gladstonians reply that Mr. Russell confutes himself, since he makes out that Mr. Parnell's Bill would have done too little instead of too much; and that it is hardly possible to conceive that a Bill which was too moderate to be effective was introduced on purpose to be defeated and to afford excuses for an illegal and desperate agitation. But the obvious rejoinder is that a Conservative Government only just installed in office, and which had not had time to inquire, could not possibly have greatly extended the provisions of a Land Act which almost all the members of that Government had denounced as of a confiscatory tendency, without full inquiry ; and that Mr. Parnell was perfectly aware of this, and felt as sure that a small measure hurried on in that sense must be rejected by such a Government, as a greater measure. It was, at the time it was introduced, premature, and known to be premature. But none the less Mr. Russell has shown that the Irish land- lords were prepared to grant a great deal more without any "Plan of Campaign," than Mr. Parnell reproached the Govern- ment for refusing to concede.
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