Lord Derby made an admirable speech on Wednesday at a
Unionist demonstration in the skating rink at Ashton-under- Lyne. He maintained that the objection of the Liberal Unionists to give up the name of Liberals was most natural, because it was as Liberals that they opposed the new policy. The Southern States, in trying to break up the Union,—in which, by-the-way, they found enthusiastic supporters amongst the Irish Home-rulers, John Mitchell being one of the most notorious,—tried to back it up on Tory principles, as apologists for slavery. The Irish Home-rulers would no sooner gain their Legislature than they would propose Tory measures,— Protection for Irish trade for one, and Roman Catholic denominstional education for another. In Italy and Germany, all the Particularists are Particularists on Tory principles. It is the Central Government which represents the Liberal prin- ciple. Why did Garibaldi obtain so much sympathy from the Liberals and so much disfavour from the Irish Home-rulers, if his Italian cause was not the cause of Liberalism and the Papal cause that of Conservatism? Moreover, Home-rule restricted as Mr. Gladstone proposed, would not satisfy the Pamellites at all. They would only support it, indeed, in the hope of greatly extending it. Such a measure as Mr. Glad- stone's would "disgust one-third of the Irish people in order to disappoint the other two-thirds,"—an epigrammatic but strictly accurate summary of the whole matter.
