Perhaps the most effective of the election addresses,— 'certainly the
most effective written by any man who has held the position of a statesman, though Mr.. H. M. Stanley's is quite as effective from its special point of view,—is Lord Randolph Churchill's. This we aCknowledge all the more emphatically because we consider Lord Randolph Churchill much more dangerous as a friend and ally than he is dan- gerous as a foe. In his address to the electors of South Paddington, his terse summary of the impossibilities of fmding any solution to the Home-rule problem, is as re- markable a piece of English as any we have read in a pretty long political life :—" The insanity of a scheme to create an independent Parliament in an island inhabited by two races 'controlled by two religions separated from each other by an impassable abyss ; the insoluble problem raised by such a scheme as to the representation or non-representation of Ireland in the British Parliament ; the impossibility of guaranteeing effectually under any such scheme justice to the Protestant minority mainly residing in Ulster; the endless and bitter conflicts which must arise again, as they arose before, between the Irish and British Parliaments, in addition to those which must surely arise between Irish and British Administrations ; the constitutional impossibility of estab- lishing any tribunal to pronounce authoritatively on the validity of laws passed by either Parliament; the certain divergence of commercial and financial policy to be followed by Ireland and Great Britain respectively,—all this Himalayan range of obstacles appears more utterly insuperable the closer it is looked at, the more attentively it is studied." Pity that the man who can sometimes write so well should play the will-o'-the-wisp in practical life.
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