NEWS OF THE WEEK.
THE Irish Nationalist Convention, attended by upwards of three thousand delegates from all parts of the country, met in Dublin on Tuesday, and unanimously rejected the Govern- ment's Irish Council Bill. Mr. John Redmond, who presided, moved the rejection in a long speech largely devoted to a vindication of his own consistency. He began by vigorously repudiating the insinuation that he and other leaders of the Parliamentary Party were committed to the Bill or to the Government, and declared, on the contrary, that the framers of the Bill bad entirely refused the advice he had given them as to the only safe basis on which the new Council could be founded. But he could not have denounced the Bill directly it was intro- duced without breaking his solemn pledge to submit the Bill to the Convention. Mr. Redmond quoted at length from his speeches to show that he was committed all along to reject any proposal calculated to injure the power and prestige of the Irish Party, his first and greatest policy, overshadowing everything else, being to preserve a united National Party in Parliament, and he now stood before them to fulfil that pledge. Mr. Redmond indignantly repudiated the charge that they bad refused a better scheme offered them three years ago by the Tory Party. With all its faults, the present Bill was a thousand times better than the Devolution scheme of Lord Dnnraven, which, moreover, was never offered to them.
