The Duke of Devonshire spoke twice at Swansea on Wednesday
to a Unionist audience, first to about five hundred persons in the Drill Hall, and next to a great evening meeting in the Albert Hall. In the former speech he dwelt especially on the almost unexpected Unionist victories in Wales, where seats were gained through the disgust felt by moderate Welsh politicians at the log-rolling which offered the Disestablish- ment of the Welsh Church less on grounds of justice than as a kind of payment to Welshmen for the support given by Welshmen to Irish Home-rule. At the evening meeting the Duke dwelt on the carelessness with which constituencies ignore great Imperial interests, almost under the illusion that nothing can endanger the Imperial interests of the United Kingdom, in the eagerness of the electors to carry some com- paratively small local change on which they had set their hearts. Then he attacked Lord Rosebery's description of England as "the predominant partner" in the United Kingdom, declaring that such a phrase assumes that there is a partnership which may one day be dissolved, — the very conception against which Unionists protest; and he pointed the moral of the recent breach between the English Nonconformists and the Irish Catholic Home-rulers, remarking that it proves to demonstration what Unionists have always asserted, that the majority of the last Government was attained by the conclusion of a treaty between Irish Catholics and English Nonconformists,—who had absolutely no political principles in common,—to support each other in doing what one of them at least did not wish to do, only on condition that the other should also consent to do what that other, in his turn, did not wish to do.
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