We regret much the withdrawal of Mr. T. W. Russell,
M.P. for South Tyrone, from the ranks of the Liberal Unionists. He does not withdraw because he disapproves the proclamation of the National League, which he supported on Thursday in an able speech, though he regretted the moment chosen, but because be thinks that he has not been adequately supported by the Liberal Unionists in the attempt to enlarge the scope of the Irish Land Bill,—or, as he would say, to keep its scope what it was before it went to the House of Lords. But he seems to ignore the fact that numbers of those who supported the Bill in the shape in which it was sent up to the Lords, understood the provisions of the 23rd Clause in the very sense in which Lord Cadogan's amendment has now expounded them, and would not have supported the Bill if they had understood them in the sense which he himself attaches to them. Indeed, we cannot understand how any one could have understood temporary abatements of rent such as were there provided for, in Mr. Russell's sense. For he insists that the Commissioners were intended to have power to take into account not only the fall of prices, but the specially bad yield of recent years, in assessing reductions of rent,—a matter of infinite detail.
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