Mr. Gladstone's speeches have been too numerous this week, and
too diversified, for us to give any adequate account of their substance. At Newton this day week he demolished very ably the only counter scheme to his own, the reform of the Irish Church recommended by the Commissioners. Ile pointed out that the very essence of that recommendation involves freih injury to Catholic Ireland, for it proposes to divert the tithes now at least spent in Catholic counties like Clare and Kerry to counties where Protestants are far more numerous, and there is, therefore, more pretence for spending on the Protestant forms of worship. Such an appropriation, Mr. Gladstone,—bor- rowing Mr. Disraeli's expression,—declared "dangerously like an act of public plunder." He pointed out that the reason the Com- missioners in their report had not made any estimate of the actual amount of the proposed savings, and given a scheme for diverting them to other portions of the Irish Church, was that they shrank from deliberately proposing to transfer £80,000 a year from places where it is not wanted at all to places where it is not wanted much, in the face of the hard-working, great, poor Church of the nation,—the Catholic Church. Their scheme was one of which they themselves were ashamed, and they had not the courage to put it down in black and white.
