Mr. Davitt made a long speech at Liverpool on Tuesday
-on his policy for Ireland, a speecb perfectly temperate in tone, though permeated, of course, by the wildest and most revolu- tionary ideas. He condemned the Prevention of Crime Bill as a purely wanton attempt to interfere with Irish liberty, and he seemed to treat the outrage-mongers whom it is intended to detect and punish by the help of the machinery of this as if they, and the sympathy felt with them, were the legitimate products first of the evictions, and then of Mr. Forster's use of the Protection Act. He defended the pro- posal that the State should resume possession of the whole land -of Ireland, and conceded as a sort of supererogatory act of -clemency, that the landlords might be permitted to receive about half the value of their estates, by way of compensation for their expropriation. He would then impose on the farmers a land-tax of ten per cent., which he deemed sufficient to carry on the administration ; while the remainder of the sum gained by the confiscation of half the property of the landlords would be
• sufficient to pay the interest on the debt incurred for their ex- propriation, and to extinguish that debt in fifty years. Finally, he demanded an Irish Legislature for Ireland of the colonial type, and the abolition of the Dublin-Castle system: We have discussed these remarkable suggestions at length elsewhere. One sentence in Mr. Davitt's speech, however, has a somewhat -different ring in it :—" While I yield to no Irishman alive in my allegiance to the principle of Ireland's right to govern her- self, I would infinitely prefer to deal directly with the English Government, to dealing with its exacting and unscrupulous mercenaries, the Irish landlords." That does not look altogether like Enid alienation from Great Britain.
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