Sir Michael Hicks-Beach is not fulfilling the promise of his
first speech as Irish Secretary. Yesterday week, in resisting Mr. Butt's Municipal Corporations (Ireland) Bill, he made an exceedingly arrogant and not very wise speech, taunting Mr. Butt with his wish to assimilate Irish to English institutions, and expressing his hope that the honourable gentleman and his friends would be induced to copy more of our institutions, " to restore to Ireland the blessings of an Established Church, and give back to Irish landlords the power over their own property which is possessed 'by landlords in England." Now, to attempt to reconcile Ireland to the excessively oligarchical character of its municipal institutions, —where it takes something like a £12 or £15 rental to become a burgess, so that Belfast, with a population of 174,000, has only 4,300 burgesses ; Limerick, with 40,000, only 11,000 burgesses ; Londonderry only 600, and so on,—by suggesting that if Ireland hires to covet English privileges it should surrender all the privileges which Englishmen do not possess, was a somewhat insolent course; and one of which even Sir Michael Beach himself seems to have been a little ashamed, for he made a half-retractation on the following Tuesday, when assent- ing to the second reading of Mr. Butt's Municipal Privileges (Ireland) Bill. Sir Michael Beach will have to conquer the -evidently irrepressible old Adam in himself, before he can win, as in his first adinirable speech he proposed to himself by 'candour and earnestness to win, Ireland.
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