Sir William Harcourt addressed his constituents at Derby on Wednesday
night, and began by demagogic remarks on the results of the Parnell Commission, which he defended by airily remarking :—" For my part, at an English public meeting of my own constituents, I shall say what I like, and if they choose to put me in prison clothes, I think that there are men at Derby who will want to know the reason why." And accordingly he said what he liked, and what will be to the liking of no fair-minded mind from one end of the country to the other. But of this unpleasant subject we have said enough in another column. Then Sir William Harcourt, having thrown about his rockets in a very bold and furious fashion, went on to the comparatively dull subject of the Round-Table Conference, of which he had nothing to tell us that was new to any politician who had read the papers of the months in which it took place. We all knew that Mr. Chamberlain at that time was disposed to go a great deal too far in the concession of a local Legislature and Administration to Ireland modelled on the type of the State institutions included within the Dominion of Canada, and that the Home-rule Party suspended the negotiations in 1887 because Mr. Chamberlain wrote a letter to the Baptist newspaper on February 26th, 1887, which was not couched in a friendly tone to Mr. Gladstone. And the con- ferences thus suspended by the Home-rulers were never resumed, Mr. Chamberlain then very wisely declining to return to them, and no doubt feeling that he had conceded more than either Lord Hartington or the Liberal Unionists generally were at all likely to endorse. There was no news in all this, and Sir William Harcourt brought the dull record to an end by a few more scoffs at the small number of the Liberal Unionists.
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