The various Unionist addressee are all interesting, though one can
discern in them too often the endeavour to offer shadowy substitutes for Mr. Gladstone's promisee,—substitutes which would not satisfy Ireland, and which would lend the National League immense opportunities of drawing blood. Thus, Mr. Story-Maskelyne, who, in his address to the Cricklade Division of Wilts, says most admirably of the Irish minority that they. look" with dread on the installation of the founders of the Land League and the National League as the advisers of the Irish Executive, and as the lawgivers for Irish property," and declares that the true alternative for coercion "is a type of local Legisla, tare in accordance with real safeguards for the imperilled liberties and property of the minority, and the retention in its integrity and with its paramount authority of the Imperial Parliament." But Mr. Maskelyne does not tell his constituents what this type of local Legislature, if it exists, is like. Thus, too, even Sir John Lubbock, in his interesting address to the electors of the London University, in which he insists with great force on the economical root of Irish grievances, and the tendency of the proposed measure to strengthen and deepen that root, would "provide for Ireland the same powers of self- government for purely internal affairs as for England and Scot- land," which means, we suppose, that he would hand over at once the Irish police to the nominees of the National League. And so, too, Mr. Brinsley Nixon, in his very telling and vigorous Unionist address to the electors of Dundee, where he is fighting most gallantly a very hard battle, thinks that in regard to local self-gbvernment, "the Irish people have a claim to exceptional consideration over their Scotch, Welsh, or their English fellow- citizens." Will it be possible to put down boycotting by the aid of a police paid and instructed by the inventors of the process ? The completion of agrarian reform must, in Ireland at least, precede the development of local self-government.
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