The ablest part of Mr. John Morley's speech,—and he is
always, in grappling with argumentative issues, the ablest of Home-rule orators,—was the part of his speech in relation to Irish Land.parohase. His point was that any Purchase Bill modelled on the lines of the Bill of 1885 cannot succeed, because it makes the British State the creditor of a number of individual Irish tenant-farmers who would not scruple to break faith with the British State, especially if by refusing Home-rule, we should make the Nationalists eager to egg them on to those breaches of faith. That is very true, and applies to a mere extension of Lord Ashbourne's Act ; but it need not apply, and does not apply, to all the suggestions for a Land-purchase scheme. And while we heartily agree with Mr. Morley that the condition of a great many of the Western districts of Ireland is so poverty-stricken that it is hardly possible to conceive the advent of prosperity to them, even if rent absolutely ceased to-morrow, the maddest of all the mad schemes for restoring that prosperity seems to us to be to cut loose Ireland from England, and leave her to sink by herself.
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