Lord Lansdowne made two important speeches at Glasgow on Wednesday
at the Scottish Unionist Conference. In his address at the Conference Lord Lansdowne replied to Mr. Lloyd George's astonishing assertion that the Unionists had raised the question of Ulster to divert attention from his land policy. Mr. Lloyd George's land proposals betrayed gross ignorance, they spelt bureaucracy, and were thoroughly undemocratic, while the proposed Ministry of Land would supersede a properly constituted Court of Law by an amateur tribunal. In the evening Lord Lansdowne dealt at length with Home Rule and the Ulster problem. Personally, he had never concealed his distrust of settlement by exclusion, but in view of the extreme gravity of the case the Unionist leaders felt they would not be justified in rejecting overtures. They did not, therefore, repel the overtures made by Mr. Asquith at Lady bank, since they took them to mean not only that there would be such changes in the Bill as would be necessitated by exclusion, but also that these changes might lead to some extension of the principle of devolution to the other parts of the kingdom. But after Ladybank came Leeds, and Lord Lansdowne could only interpret the second speech—with its ominous final statement, " We mean to see this thing through "—as showing that " Mr. Asquith has been, on the whole, cooling down in his desire to see a settlement." The situation therefore remained full of danger, and they must be prepared for the worst. The reference to devolution, as apparently extenuating the evils of exclusion, seems to us the only weak point in an excellent speech.
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