In the evening, Mr. Gladstone delivered a very eloquent speech
to Sir Hussey Vivian's party, and claimed the restoration of an Irish Legislature to Ireland as being at least as much of a Con- servative as of a Liberal proposal. (In precisely the same sense, by-the-way, the restoration of the Heptarchy would be a Con- servative proposal.) He was quite willing, he said, to confer with Lord Harlington on the modifications to be given to the Irish Home-rule scheme, if Lord Hartington were willing" to assent to the constitution of any Assembly qualified, under however strict conditions, to act for the whole of Ireland." Mr. Gladstone was not prepared to assert that the grant of a separate local Legislature necessarily implied exclusion from the British Legislature. Even if Scotland should get Home-rule, he should not be willing to admit the reasonableness of ex- cluding Scotchmen from the British Parliament. But the Irish case was somewhat different, and undoubtedly there were difficulties in either excluding or including the Irish representatives in the Imperial Parliament. On the whole, Mr. Gladstone indicated his preference for what he called an " inversion " of Mr. Whitbread's proposal to exclude Irish Members for a time, and subsequently to reconsider the relation of the Irish Members to the British Parliament ; and though Mr. Gladstone clothed this part of his speech in carefully ambiguous language, be appeared to mean that the safest plan would be to leave Irish Members for the present where they are in the British Parliament, but to settle all Imperial questions by Acts requiring renewal after a certain lapse of years, at the close of which the relation of the Irish Members to the British Parliament would be reconsidered and revised.
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