On Monday, Mr. Gladstone's last guillotine motion was made in
a short speech in which he merely claimed that it Was the necessary and logical corollary of the previous guillo- tine resolutions which the House had carried, and that it was constitutionally necessary to maintain the right of the majority to carry its proposals, even in the face of a large and powerful minority. Mr. Chamberlain then moved his amendment, which he supported in a very masterly, though perhaps too incisive and irritating speech, showing how Mr. Gladstone had at one time condemned all Closure when a powerful minority resisted that Closure ; how he had, as late as 1890, expressed his horror of coercing such a minority in precisely the way in which he is now coercing it ; and that he could easily have avoided this, had he devoted the whole Session to the Home-rule Bill, instead of encumbering himself with a number of political baits. The truth was that Mr. Gladstone knew perfectly well that there was no public enthusiasm behind his Bill. He felt it there- ore absolutely necessary to run other Bills more attrac- tive to the British public coordinately with it, in order to take out the taste of its unpopularity with his own party. Hence the great delay and backwardness of this most im- portant measure. The real truth was that the Government did not dare to treat the Irish measure as the one representing most adequately their policy, before the people of Great Britain. Mr. Chamberlain appealed to the country "against this political dictatorship, against the policy by which the interests of Great Britain have been surrendered and betrayed, and against the tactics by which the House of Commons has been insulted and degraded."
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