Lord Hartington made a remarkable speech to his Lanca- shire
constituents at Bacup on Saturday. He spoke of the Liberal Unionists as political volunteers called out for a special purpose, embodied to meet a special danger, to defeat a policy which they thought full of peril to the State. He totally denied Mr. Gladstone's assertion that on the Local Government Act the Gladstonians had given the Government far more "unquestioning aid" than the Liberal Unionists. On the contrary, the aid given by the Opposition was often of an exceedingly questioning kind, and threatened the very existence of the Government which it professed to support. But for the Liberal Unionists, these measures would have been smothered by the tender solicitude of the Gladstonians. Lord Hartington quoted from a speech of Mr. Gladstone's, delivered in 1881, the most impressive testimony to the progress made by Ireland under the Union, a progress which Mr. Gladstone now just as eagerly denies. Yet as compared with the time at which Mr. Gladstone made this boast of Ireland's improve- ment, eight years ago, the condition of Ireland is again vastly improved. Lord Hartington accepted cheerfully the position of a party leader devoted to the one task of averting a specific political peril, with the cessation of which the need for his championship would cease.
