22 NOVEMBER 1890, Page 3

As to the imputed attack of the Government on the

right of Irishmen to combine, Mr. Balfour asked if it were likely that the party which has done most for the English workmen's right to combine would attack the Irish tenant-farmers' right to combine. As a matter of fact, the "Plan of Campaign" in Ireland, which is not an assertion of the right to com- bine, but of the right to break deliberately even fair and reasonable contracts already made, had been started chiefly on estates where there was no over-renting, and where the tenants and their landlord had previously been on the best of terms ; and had been started not by the tenants themselves, but by politicians who wished to force the tenants to do what the tenants themselves had no wish to do.