Mr. Balfour made a striking speech to his constituents in
East Manchester last Saturday, in defence of the Irish policy of the Government. It was no longer necessary for him, he said, to occupy the greater part of his time in dissi- pating legends as to his administration of the law in Ireland during the years of his Irish Secretaryship ; yet even now these legends die hard. Only the other day, he was accused of sending a little girl "not higher than the table" to prison for terrorising two policemen. The " little girl" was, according to her own admission, twenty-four years of age. She was 5 ft. Gin, in height, and he did not think that even Glad- stoniaus ate off tables 5 ft. 6 in. high. She weighed nine stone, and it was not two policemen, but two tenant-farmers who had taken the land of an evicted tenant, alias "land-grabbers," whom she had terrorised ; and she was sent to prison, not for the terrorising, but for flatly refusing to give bail for good behaviour in future. He had seen a picture of himself as Irish Secretary glaring in triumph through the windows of her cell at this supposed little child as she lay on the bed.
Such were the legends which a few years ago were circulated in sheaves. Now it was rarely indeed that he heard of their revival. He had been bitterly attacked for speaking, when he introduced the Irish Local Government Bill, of the benefits he had secured to Ireland by the Crimes Act, commonly known as the Coercion Act. Did anybody really suppose that he was ashamed of that Act? On the contrary, he held that it had conferred "incalculable blessings" upon Ireland, and that instead of thrusting Ireland back into what Mr. John Morley, with his fine literary sense for noble phrases, called "the sullen furnace of her old afflictions," this Act had rescued her from her old afflictions.
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