The speeches of Lord Ripon and Mr. Morley were good
of their kind,—good, that is, as speeches of convinced Home- rulers. Lord Ripon, in accepting the freedom of the City of Dublin, and remarking on the great rareness of that honour amongst Englishmen, said that though Irishmen had not always been just to England, Englishmen had often been unjust to Ireland, an assertion which no one can deny. He admitted that before he was converted to Home. rule he had himself been a coercionist, but declared the reign of coercion over. In his evening speech, he condemned the "foul murder" in Kerry, and exhorted Irishmen to set their faces like flint against outrages of all kinds ; but he did not expressly include boycotting, and the treatment of loyalists as if they were lepers, amongst those dastardly outrages which he condemned. As to the fear that the Catholics would oppress the Protestants under Home-rule, he regarded it as simply ridiculous, and pointed to the choice of Protestant leaders as refuting it. We do not ourselves believe that, in any state of the country which now seems likely, religions bigotry would run very high ; but then, we cannot tell what a revolution,—and Home-rule would be a revolution,—might produce. Alter such a revolution, we should, for ourrbwn parts, fear the rise of a persecuting atheism at least as much as the riiie of a persecuting Romanism.
