Lord Lansdowne followed Lord Crewe by moving " That this
House declines to proceed with the consideration of the Bill until it has been submitted to the judgment of the country." We say without hesitation that Lord Lansdowne's speech is the best public utterance which has been put before the nation, both as regards the need for a dissolution and also on the Ulster question generally. Very concise and very able was his summary of Ulster's case :—
" The grievance of Ulster is not merely that you are abandon- ing her, not merely that you are depriving her of a part of her representation, but that you are going to place her in subjection to the disloyal majority, and that you are going to do that as part of a very thinly veiled Parliamentary transaction. It is the price of the compact which saved your financial policy from defeat."
Each side to the bargain would deliver the goods, the Nationalist Party their seventy or eighty supporters, and the Government the loyalists of Ulster to such treatment as the Ancient Order of Hibernian chose to mete out to them.
