Mr. Gladstone's speech at Edinburgh on Thursday was very important,
very animated, very eloquent, and very mischievous. He laid it down that the supremacy of the Central Parliament at Westminster is to be supremacy of just the same type as that which it now exercises over the self-governing Colonies,— a sort of supremacy which it is to be hoped, as he says, that there will never be any occasion to use. He assumed that Mr. Parnell's absolute acceptance of the chief limitations in the Bill of 1886 is still in force ; and he completely ignored the repudiations of these limitations which have since been made on all sides, from Mr. Parnell to the least of his followers. He admitted that Ireland would have a perfect right to de- mand control of her own Customs duties, and gave her great credit for renouncing that right in 1886. And he made a most eloquent and mischievous appeal to the jealousy of wealth and education and leisure felt by the great masses of the people, which stirred his audience to an enthusiasm of
which we must say that we think they should be ashamed :— " You are told that education, that enlightenment, that leisure, that high station, that political experience, are arrayed in the opposing camp, and I am sorry to say that to a large extent I cannot deny it. But though I cannot deny it, I painfully reflect that in almost every one, if not in every one, of the great political controversies of the last fifty years, whether they affected the franchise, whether they affected commerce, whether they affected religion, whether they affected the bad and abominable institution of slavery, or whatever subject they touched, these leisured classes, these educated classes, these wealthy classes, these titled classes, have been in the wrong. (Loud and prolonged cheers, many persons rising and waving hats and handkerchiefs.)" That is the sentence of an eloquent demagogue, not of a great statesman. Its tendency is to disintegrate socially, as much as the tendency of Mr. Gladstone's political proposal is to disintegrate politically. The same appeal failed notably in 1886. We trust that it may fail again now even more disastrously. But it is very painful to have to speak in this way of anything said by Mr. Gladstone.
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