On Friday week, the last evening of the debate on
Mr. Parnell's amendment, Mr. Balfour, Mr. Gladstone, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, and Sir William Harcourt were the principal speakers. Mr. Balfour's defence of his policy in Ireland was a masterly one, though he gave too much time to the subject of the Carnarvon Viceroyalty, which was not one on which he could possibly succeed in making it appear that the Conserva- tive Government of 1885 had shown either clearness of purpose or firmness of will. He remarked that Mr. O'Brien's attack upon him on the previous day did not seem to him at all violent. Everything goes by comparison; and after being told in United Ireland that he lasted for slaughter "with an ennuohised imagination," and remembering that the same journal had said
of Sir G. Trevelyan that "if Nature had denied to him the resources of the skunk and the cuttle-fish, Art had enabled him to supply their place," he regarded the Parliamentary attack made upon him as bearing to the former language of the same authority the same relation that moonlight bears to sunlight, or water unto wine. Mr. Balfour showed that Mr. Parnell's denial of the circumstances of Hannah Connell's boycotting was a tissue of misstatements ; and this has since been amply borne out by the personal evidence of Dr. Bonynge, the Rector of Miltown Malbay, County Clare, who has shown that Mr. Balfour's story was absolutely true in relation to all the particulars on which it was traversed by Mr. Redmond and Mr. Parnell. Mr. Balfour proved that whereas Sir G. Trevelyan had boasted in 1884 that for every meeting prohibited by the Government, five meetings of the National League had been held unopposed, his (Ur. Balfour's) administration had greatly the advantage of Sir George Trevelyan's, since for every meeting prohibited, seventeen or eighteen were held, so that free speech is certainly much less imperilled in Ireland under his administration than it was under Sir G. Trevelyan's. As to the pretended failure of the Govern- ment to suppress National League meetings in the districts in which they had been prohibited, many of the meetings boasted of and reported, never took place at all, and were mere bogus meetings manufactured for the Press.
