On Wednesday Mr. Clancy introduced his Bill for reinstating the
evicted tenants under a plan which would involve the use of public money. Mr. Gerald Balfour opposed the Bill in the most masterly speech ever delivered on this tiresome and thorny subject, though a speech marred by a slight slip. Mr. Gerald Balfour had pressed upon him certain
speeches, more or less favourable to the evicted tenants, made by Liberal Unionists. Instead of ignoring these speeches, as he would have had a perfect right to do, he dwelt upon the fact that they were by Liberal Unionists and not by Conservatives. Of course the Radical gallery reporters all saw signs of terrible annoyance in Mr. Chamberlain's face; but we think we are not far wrong in saying that this inferential repudiation of the Duke of Devonshire and Lord Lansdowne is not going to blow the Unionist party into atoms as the Gladetonian papers seem to imagine. It was a slip, nothing more, and will have no results whatever, if only because more than half the Liberal Unionists, like ourselves, were dead against any scheme for pampering the men who were deluded into a fraudulent withholding of rents which were in all cases legally due, and which in most cases they would have had no difficulty in paying.
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