At Cork on Tuesday, Mr. William O'Brien received a deputation
of evicted. tenants, and gave them what comfort he could when they expressed their "bitter disappointment that the Government had failed to carry out their solemn promises to introduce a Reinstatement Bill into Parliament this year." No idea, said Mr. O'Brien, could be gathered from the newspapers of what they had been doing to get the Govern- ment to move. "To the Government themselves, it was a question upon which their very existence depended that a Reinstatement Bill should be passed as quickly as it was humanly possible for it to be done." The Government were pledged to make the question their own, next Session. It was hard and cruel that the evicted tenants should be forced to wait, but the only alternative was turning out the Government. But "was there a man present who would ask them to undertake such a horrible responsibility as that of driving Mr. Gladstone to his grave and bringing Mr. Balfour and the landlords back to rule in Dublin Castle?" A curious tremor has got into Mr. O'Brien's shrill voice. We suppose he is beginning to realise that a Revolution always devours its own children, and the knowledge that in reality nothing can or will be done for the evicted tenants makes him feel that this unpleasant process may not be far off. When it once becomes clear to the evicted tenants that they are to be thrown over, Mr. O'Brien and Mr. Dillon will be worse hated in Ireland than the hardest landlord.
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