On the subject of Ireland, Mr. Trevelyan's speech was of
con- siderable interest. He was prepared, he said, to give Ireland complete self-government on the subject of education, and to give her civil self-government, in the sense in which the English are asking for local self-government, on all matters of local business. Of this programme Liberals were not ashamed. But he held that Tories must be and were ashamed of the sort of alliance with the Parnellites which they had contracted lately. He described the House of Commons' scene of yesterday week, when the English Solicitor-General, Mr. Gorst, rebuked a Conservative only because he had ventured to say a few generous words of Lord Spencer, and spoke of him contemptuously as holding a brief for Lord Spencer. And he painted the present situation of the Tory Government as one in which over-eagerness for office had compelled them to sacrifice all their most respectable principles, and to burden themselves with a discrediting and discreditable alliance, a needless deficit, and Foreign Office diffi- culties created by themselves.
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