Lord Derby made one of his singularly perfect speeches at
the Birmingham Liberal Unionist Conference on Wednesday, after one from Mr Chamberlain, of which the most charac- teristic portion was his admirable comment on a passage in United Ireland, complaining bitterly of a .number of tenants who had been slavish enough to vote in a body for their land- lords,—"exterminators," as United Ireland termed them ; but exterminators for whom the exterminated insist on voting against the advice of the agitators, are probably exceptionally beneficent friends. Lord Derby showed that the Liberal Party was broken up by Mr. Gladstone's Home-rule Bill, and by that alone ; that the line of fracture was not the line which divided the Moderates from the Radicals, since many of the Moderates adhered to Mr. Gladstone, while many of the Radicals left him ; and that nothing but Mr. Gladstone's proposal had even so much as threatened the unity of the party. Then Lord Derby went on to say that Ireland has every right and privilege which any other part of the United Kingdom possesses, and that no part of that Kingdom is so certain to get a full hearing for its grievances as Ireland. But the Parnellites want more than this ; they want an Irish Parliament, and to give them an Irish Parliament on condition they do not use it against us, is like giving a child a drum on condition it shall not make a noise. As for giving them a big vestry when they ask for a Parlia- ment, that is a pure mockery of Nationalism ; and if Nationalism is to be humoured at all, nothing short of true national institutions will do.
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