5 JUNE 1886, Page 2

Sir William Harcourt's speech was heavy, and cumbered with Constitutional

technicalities. He has, indeed, made so many public statements adverse to Home-rale, that the fly-leaf of excerpts from his speeches published by the Unionists is the best answer to his rather ponderous advocacy. The only clever part of his speech was founded on Lord Salisbury's warnings of what he proposed, or was understood to propose, for Ireland, of which Sir William Harcourt said that the only result of threatening a people with twenty years' penal servitude and a plank bed (which, however, was a travestie of Lord Salisbury's language), was to excite in them an inextinguishable hatred.