Lord Selborne made a very effective speech at the Birming-
ham Conference on Thursday, covering the whole ground of the Home-rulers, and insisting on the fact that since the time of Catholic Emancipation, no part of the United Kingdom had made more progress or been more carefully governed than Ireland. He was generous to Mr. Gladstone, and yet exposed his extraordinary inaccuracies both with regard to the Coercion Act and the Irish prison rules, quoting in this connection one of Mr. Grote's remarks in the History of Greece :—" I am quite amazed to discover the extraordinary greediness and facility with which men assert, believe, reassert, and are believed. The weakness appears to be next to universal." Yes ; but we should have supposed Mr. Gladstone, with his scholarly habits of mind, would not have been exposed to it. Yet he is.
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