On Thursday Lord Salisbury made another speech in the Ulster
Hall, in which he pointed out that, so far from the Union having been a failure for Ireland, it had enabled Ireland to tide over two great economic catastrophes such as have sometimes swept away from the face of the earth great masses of the Eastern populations in China or India,—the great potato. famine of 1847, and the great shock to the agriculture of the West which had followed upon the full introduction of Free. trade, "I have ventured," he said in conclusion, "being in the presence of men of light and leading from all parts of Ireland, and especially from the more loyal part of it, to point out that we are not fighting a policy of despair,—that this agitation, nourished as it is largely by faction, and mainly by foreign gold, has come as a cloud across our path, and towers dark and dangerous upon us now; but that when it has passed away, as we have full confidence and certainty that it will pass away, there lies before Ireland, under the institutions that were framed nearly a century ago, a full and fair promise of growing prosperity, progress, and civilisation." Lord Salis- bury has as yet committed no indiscretions in his l71ster speeches. The phrase which is most likely to survive in the memory of politicians is that of "universal yielder," which he applied on Wednesday to Mr. Gladstone,—meaning that no statesman so great has proved in the end so universal a political provider for the demands of those pertinacious opponents whom he began by sternly resisting and even denouncing.
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