Mr. Gladstone's first Edinburgh speech was delivered in the Music-hall
yesterday week. Arguing that of the 250 Conser- vative seats, 40 were due to the Irish votes, he held that if the Irishmen in the constituencies had not voted for those who turned out to be their foes, the Bill would have been carried, for- getting, however, that if there had then been an alliance between the Parnellites and Mr. Gladstone, Liberals who now condemn that alliance would have voted the other way. As to the recent Bills, Mr. Gladstone described them as dead, but the principle of a statutory Legislature for Ireland as surviving for the accept- ance of the electors. He insisted that Lord Carnarvon must have told Lord Salisbury all about his interview with Mr. Parnell, and that the Tory Prime Minister had certainly acquiesced in a Lord-Lieutenant who was not only himself both at heart. and avowedly a " dismemberer and disintegrator" of the United Kingdom, but who had confidentially communicated that bias of his to the great Irish " dismemberer and dis- integrator" himself. In a passage of very skilful banter on Mr. Chamberlain, Mr. Gladstone rallied him on being first for a large scheme of federation, and then for a small scheme of provincial government, which would cut the national aspirations of Ireland into quarters "as a man is hung, drawn, and quartered." "So up rises Mr. Chamberlain like a lark, and so low flies Mr. Chamberlain like the swallow before a storm." In short, all the rival schemes to his own were mere shifting, fluctuating, and vanishing dreams ; the only real rival to his policy was the policy of coercion,—the policy of Lord Salisbury.
