Considering that so trusted a Liberal leader as Sir Edward
Grey went quite as far as Lord Rosebery in regard to the impossibility of the party dissolving the Legislative Union, Mr. Redmond's speech has a very special significance. It will not injure the Liberals in a single English constituency, where the next electoral battle will be won, but will, instead, immensely strengthen them at the polls. The strength of the Liberals in the country may be measured by the nature of their relations with the Nationalists. When those relations are strained there are hundreds of electors in every con- stituency who double their enthusiasm for the Liberal cause.
Nothing, again, will so greatly conduce to the whole-hearted support of Liberal candidates by Unionist Free-traders as an assurance that the Liberals are in no way dependent upon the Nationalists. No doubt Mr. Redmond can retort by refusing to help to defeat the present Government. If he does, he will have doubled his services to Free-trade. Nothing could more tend to discredit the present anti-Free-trade Government than the knowledge that they owe their con- tinuance in office to the benevolence of the Nationalists.
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