THE IRISH QUESTION.
[To THE EDITOR or THE .‘ SPECTATOR."' SIR,—Professor Goldwin Smith in last week's issue, for some extraordinary reason, founds his objection to the Govern- ment's Irish measure of next Session upon an allusion to my visit to Canada nineteen years ago to appeal to Canadian public opinion against the Luggacurran evictions, which had just been carried out by Lord Lansdowne, who was then Governor-General. My fate on that occasion, so far as the province of Ontario was concerned, was to have one of my ribs broken by a mob in Professor Goldwin Smith's city of Toronto, to be subjected to ferocious attacks with sticks and stones in Ottawa and Kingston, and to be the target in Hamilton for a fusillade of revolver-shots, one of which pierced the hand of the driver of my " hack " (an Orange- man, as it happened), and necessitated the amputation of his arm. At the present moment the Luggacurran evicted tenants have become peasant-proprietors, and Lord Lans- downe is one of the most eminent of the Tory statesmen supposed to be implicated in the "mysteries" connected with Sir Autony MacDonnell's despatch to Ireland upon a mission of conciliation and Devolution, and the Independent Order of Orangemen have been won over to the same order of ideas. If Lord Lansdowne is as willing to forget my Canadian mission as I am to forget my bruises, and if the Belfast comrades of the Toronto Orangemen have come to a better opinion of their Nationalist fellow-countrymen, does it not seem a pity, for the sake of his own great past on the Irish question, that Professor Goldwin Smith alone should see reason in the altered state of things for a fresh appeal to the distrusts and hatreds which, in the minds of all the principal parties to these old transactions, are peacefully
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