Mr. Balfour's speech was the most massive in the debate,
being marked, however, here and there by an accent of scorn that was in excess of wisdom. He commented on the singular ingratitude with which the Opposition treated the willingness of the Government to give them all the information about the administration of the law in Ireland which they desired,—an amount, indeed, that no previous Government of Ireland had ever even distantly approached,—though they got nothing for their pains but taunts on the inadequacy of the information given, the form of it having been nevertheless dictated by the Opposition themselves. The reason was that the informa- tion provided made the case of the Opposition much worse than before, and of course, therefore, they were discontented. In reply to the question whether he was going to dismiss the Magistrates who were overruled in the Killeagh case, he said at once that he was not, and that if, as Mr. Gladstone asserted, Lord Spencer would not have defended them, it would be no precedent for himself to know that Lord Spencer would have been willing to throw to the dogs good servants of the Crown against whom a popular cry was raised. Never had there been a Government that had to struggle for its life like the present Irish Administration, or which had used its power with less harshness and injustice. To maintain that Mr. Dillon, who explicitly advised that all those who took a farm from which another had been evicted should be perse- cuted till their lives were unhappy lives, was guilty only of a political crime, and ought to be treated with ceremony as a man convicted of revolt against the State, seemed to him monstrous. The National League were undermining the agricultural prosperity of Ireland, and were confiscating the value of tenant-right by not allowing an evicted tenant to sell that tenant-right to a successor. Suppose an Irish Republic were established to-morrow, how could a people among whom lawlessness had been for years fostered by their own leaders, expect to build up on such a foundation any structure that would stand or endure P It is the Government who are trying to build on the foundations of honesty, liberty, and law, and these are the only foundations on which it is possible to raise political structures with any chance of durable vitality.
Previous page
