The Stourbridge Observer, Cradley Heath, Halesowen & District Chronicle.
Stourbridge, West Midlands, England, 1887-08-06 00:00:00

CONSERVATIVE DEMONSTRATION AT

HATFIELD.

In addressing the, annual demonstration of the
Westminster Constitutional Association, which met
at Hatfield on Monday, Mr. Burdett-Coutts, M.P.,
referred to the attacks which had been made by re-
sponsible statesmen upon two fundamental principles
of the Constitution—the supremacy of the Imperial
Parliament and the union between the two countries.
After acknowledging the enormous debt which the
cause of the Union owed to the Liberal Unionists,
the hon. member said that he believed that where-
ever those gentlemen were not able 'to feel at one
with the Conservatives upon their general, apart
from their Irish policy, as Mr. Goschen—(cheers;—
had shown himself to be, thereby giving them assist-
ance of incalculable value—wherever they could not
thoroughly join with the party, they would be con-
tent to go on making the sacrifice. He was not one
of those who thought that the constitutional cause
would be strengthened by Lord Salisbury resigning
the chief place in the GoVernment to Lord Harting-
ton. He yielded to none in his admiration of the
staunchness and honesty, the integrity and the purity
of purpose of that thoroughly English statesman;
but he saw this danger in any compromise which
would permanently enlist in the Conservative ranks
the leader or any large portion of the Liberal
Unionists. They would gain personally by the acces-
sion, but the separatist party would gain, he believed,
to a larger extent. On that side of the field the
Usioni t Liberals, comprising so many men of
authority and experience, disputed with the Separa-
tists the name and the prestige of the Liberal party.
The Separatists could now no more claim to be the
Liberal party than they could deny the great services
and loyalty of the Liberal Unionists to that party in
the past. Let the Conservative party absorb the
Liberal Unionists into their ranks, and the
Separatists would hold the field on their side.
He believed that the result would be that great
numbers of voters, wearied perhaps with the
Irish question, and not willing to join them
upon other questions—having to choose between
two parties, to one of which they had always be-
longed would cast their lot in with the only party
which would reta;n the name of " This
would be a greater danger if the Irish question were
for a time to lie dormant, and other political questions
as to which the old party division of opinion still re-
mained were to come into prominence. After referring
to the Crimes Act and the Laud Bill, he said he
believed the Government were willing to go farther
than the latter in assisting Ireland. Irish industries
required assistance—not the assistance which would
risk the money of the 3ritlsh taxpayer in large com-
mercial speculations, but the assistance which would
strike the fetters of ignorance and want of enterprise
from the hands of Ireland—which would enable the
Irish people to engage in the industries for which he
believed they were as well fitted as other people if
they only had the chance of a start given them—a
field to work in open to them. The hon. member,
after speaking of the advantages of a large scheme of
arterial drainage, said that he himself had had ex-
perience of the effects of such help given to an Irish
industry unaided by Government, and be had seen
trade revive and a distant and simple people rendered
prosperous and happy by those efforts. Now th 3
Government had granted £5OOO out of the £50,000
allocated to Ireland for an Industrial Fishing School
as Baltimore, amongst those same fishermen which he
believed would benefit the whole of Ireland. He
was about to make another journey, a mission of peace
to Ireland, in company with the Baroness Burdett-
Coutts, and it would be an unspeakable relief to him
to leave those dreary and wretched wrangles in the
House of Commons, and to find himself engaged once
more in the field of Irish industrial progress amongst
people who knew their faces, and who he did not
believe ever forgot a friend. The relation of Ireland
to the Empire compelled them not to satisfy the
claims of • a part at the expense of the whole. He
believed they would be willing when the country aas
quiet to give to the Irish—to both sections of the
Irish people—a large share in the management cf
their own affairs. He believed this would be at
enormous relief to Parliament, and along with it he
hoped to see a development, of local government for
all parts of the United Kingdom, which would relieve
Parliament from some of the burden of purely local
affairs which is ever growing more "heavy and
multifarious, and the struggle to cope with
which is every day becoming more hopeless.
He hoped also, and here he spoke solely for himself
and in his own name, that they would be able
to improve what was now called Dublin Castle, if, in-
deeri, they did not improve it away altogether, for it
was an institution which too often buried local Irish
claims in the pigeon-hole of officialism; which tinged
every act either of concession or restraint with the
provoking aspect of sham authority; which collected
the executive (sincere of our Government in Ireland
under the ban of a traditional and hereditary jealousy
which assumed all the attributes of a power, the es-
sence of which it did not possess; which intercepted
only in order to redistribute from a tainted source the
authority which, if it comes from the Imperial Parlia-
ment of English, Scotch, and Irish members' should
go direct from that Parliament to the Irish people;
and which, in spite of the efforts of many within it to
the contrary, was a halfway house of bureaucracy, con-
stituting a real barrier between the two nations. They
might do all those things, and many others, but what
they would never do was to let slip from their hands
the responsibility to the executive Government of Ire-
land, or destroy or weaken the real supremacy of the
Imperial Parliament, and the real Union of the two
countries. (Cheers.)