The defeated Home-rulers have been confiding the cause of their
woes to the Pall Mall Gazette, with, on the whole, a good deal of truth and naivete. What it comes to is chiefly this,—that the season was an unfortunate one for getting labourers either to listen or to vote, which is quite true, but which tells as much one way as the other ; that the dread of the pecuniary respon- sibility under the expected Irish Land Bill was very keen ; that the dislike to the idea of Separation was very strong, and widely prevalent ; and that the authority of Mr. Bright, Mr. Chamberlain, and Mr. Spurgeon, and some of the Wesleyan ministers, told very heavily against the Gladstonians. All this is doubtless true ; but that is only another way of saying that the mode of putting the issue which was adopted by the Home-rulers, even when sanctioned by Mr. Gladstone's great authority, did not satisfy the Liberals of last autumn, when they heard that it had not satisfied Mr. Bright, Mr. Chamberlain, Mr. Spurgeon, and the Wesleyan ministers referred to. That is all that the Unionists expected. They only hoped to convince a great many more Liberals of the dangerous- ness of Mr. Gladstone's policy, than Mr. Gladstone had found Irishmen eager to accept it. And they entirely succeeded. The transferred Irish vote counted by scores where the trans- ferred Liberal vote counted by hundreds.
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