Lord Hartington, in a speech marked by even more than
his usual dignity and force, delivered on Wednesday, at Holloway Hall, West Islington, pointed out that the great question of the day is this,—" Whether law, as constituted by Parliament," shall be maintained in every part of the British Empire, or whether it shall be superseded in some por- tions of the United Kingdom "by the will of a faction which happens at the moment to be the most powerful, the strongest, and the most violent." Great Britain, he pointed out, had become the commercial and industrial centre of the world, mainly because its people have been a " law-abiding people," have "loved order, and have scrupulously adhered to their engagements." If these characteristics of the people of the United Kingdom were to disappear, the commercial prosperity of Great Britain would certainly be most seriously impaired, even if it did not also disappear. He sharply condemned Lord Spencer for speaking of the representatives of 1,700,000 Trish men as "a most miserable and despicable body," and asked whether it was statesmanship so to speak of the repre- sentatives of a party who had supported Lord Spencer's administration at the risk of much persecution and of not a little physical danger. It is "absolute insanity," said Lord Hartington, "to ignore the opinion" of such a minority as that. Remarking on Sir W. Harcourt's assertion at Derby that the Unionists' war-cry of " Parnellism and Crime" chokes them, Lord Hartington pointed out that it was not the Times but Sir W. Harcourt who first invented that war-cry ; and he read amidst loud cheering a remarkable passage from Sir W. Harcourt's speech on March 3rd, 1881, in the House of Commons, to demonstrate this. In that speech Sir William Harcourt said that the civilised world would to-morrow pronounce judgment on the "vile conspiracy" to spread the doctrine of "treason and assassination."
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