Mr. Gladstone made one of the most effective speeches he
has made within the last year, at Limehouse Town Hall last Saturday, by way of endeavouring to convert London to Home-rule. He referred to the retirement of Lord Hartington and a number of other Unionist Liberals from the National Liberal Club as a painful event, but rather as a painful event which had become necessary, and which should logically be followed by the retirement of Liberal Unionists from the Opposition benches in the House of Commons, than as one which he deprecated. Indeed, it was a grievance to him, he said playfully, when turning for encouragement to the benches of his nominal supporters in the House of Commons, to meet the eye, not of a cordial friend like Professor Stuart, but of a steady enemy like a certain Liberal Unionist lawyer whom we conjecture to be Mr. Finlay. With a passing stroke at Lord. Salisbury for the unforttmately contemptuous reference to Mr. Naoroji's candidature for Holborn in 1886, Mr. Gladstone went on to complain of the tyranny of the majority in the House of Commons in disposing of the business during the Session just at an end, and to throw much blame on Mr. Smith, though Mr. Gladstone admitted that the necessary increase of business would alone cause a crush of work from which the House of Commons could only extricate itself, he believed, by relieving Parliament of the Irish business. He did not discuss, and never does discuss, the contention of his opponents that this proposed relief would, by virtue of his latest concession, bring more and bitterer Irish controversy on the House of Commons than ever.
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