The last important speech in Mr. Gladstone's tour was delivered
yesterday week, to an audience of five thousand people, in the Drill Hall at Plymouth. In this speech Mr.
Gladstone went over the old ground as to the mode by which the Act of Union was obtained, and made much of not asking for a repeal of the Union, whereas what he does ask for is really a very much stronger measure than the repeal of the Union, since it gives Ireland not only a separate Legislature, but a separate Administration responsible to that separate Legisla- ture, *hich she never had before. Then he went on to argue that the grant of Home-rule to Ireland is not only not the concession of Separation, but the only way of avoiding Separa- tion, and he enumerated again the various cases in which local autonomy had succeeded in pacifying a discontented country, —for example, in the case of Hungary with Austria, in the case of Finland with Russia, in the case of Norway with Sweden, even in the cases of Rhodes, and Samos, and the Lebanon, with Turkey. Then there is the case of our own Colonies, which Mr. Gladstone counts as telling in favour of local autonomy. In his peroration, Mr. Gladstone exhorted England to grant Ireland Home-rule not only for Ireland's sake, but for her own. Ireland is grateful, he said, for what has been already granted, —the Disestablishment of the Church, the mitigation of the Land Laws, and the ballot, —so grateful, by-the-way, that in 1885 the whole Irish Party denounced Mr. Gladstone and his Administration in terms as violent as the vocabulary of the language would admit,—hut she beseeches us likewise for Home-rule, and if it is given, "the benefits of that measure will porn- a golden flood throughout the country." It will "raise, enlighten, strengthen, and enrich" the whole Kingdom. So far as we remember, that was the prophecy concerning the former concessions to Ireland,—just concessions, which this is not,—but the prophecy was never fulfilled, nor would it be fulfilled now. What is just, let us give. What is not just, let us firmly withhold. The last thing we can hope for is to bribe Ireland into complaisance.
Previous page
