We are, it seems, to hear a good deal more about Ireland in the coming Sessions of Parliament. We have understood for some time: past that the Government will next Session introduce the Local Government Bill for Ireland; and now there is a rumour, which receives support in very reliable quarters, that this measure is to be closely followed by a Redistribution Bill the main purpose of which will be to reduce the Irish representation in Par! ment to its due proportion to population. This will b+ an extremely difficulty task to undertake. Of course, if the Local Government is, as some Radicals prophesy, to bea Home Rule Bill in disguise, it is perhaps just within the bounds of possibility that the Irish will be so well satisfied that they will submit without a murmur to the curtailment of their representation at St. Stephens. But it is far from likely. The Irish landlords are already strongly disaffected towards Lord Salisbury's Government. They complain that the Irish and Act of last year was a betrayal of their interests—that it has done more harm to them than any of the measures of land law reform which have been carried ments. They are as firmly convinced, too, as any of the Nationalists that Ireland is unjustly treated in the matter of taxation, and they have been fighting side by side with their old enemies on this question. The Government cannot therefore introduce a measure of Loos! Government which will take the power out of the hands of the landlord class without utterly alienating their supporters in Ireland. And there is some show of justice in the contention that her hundred members in the British Parliament were given to Treland in compensation for the loss of her Parliament at Dublin, and that even though-Ireland's population has decreased the number of her M.P.'s cannot be reduced without a complete reconsideration of the terms of the parliamentary union of the two countries. All this, however, is a subject which is at present interesting only the "keenest of politicians. The country asia whole is profoundly apathetic ith regard to polities, and even the imminence of a by-election cannot rouse it.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.