The Sun.
London, England, 1868-02-05 00:00:00

11112. BRIGHT AT BIRMINGHAM.

BIRMINGHAM, Tuesday Night.
This evening Mr. John Bright and Mr. Dixon,
the members for the borough, addressed, in accord-
ance with their annual custom, a numerous meeting
of their canstituents in the Town Hall. Mr. John
Jaffray presided, and briefly opened the pro-
ceedings.
Mr. JOHN BRIGHT was received with several
rounds of most enthusiastic cheering from his friends
and supporters, but as soon as this had subsided it
was apparent that their political opponents also mus-
tered in strong force, and it was nearly 20 minutes
before the hon. gentleman was allowed to proceed
with his address. The disturbers of the proceed-
ings were eventually ejected after several sharp
struggles, and the hon. gentleman proceeded to
say :—Gentlemen,—From what has been said by
our chairman, and from what I have heard since I
came to Birmingham, and from what I have seen in
your newspapers, I am aware that there is at this
moment a subject of great irritation which is
greatly disturbing the feelings of your town.
I did not come here for the purpose of discuss-
ing it, because to my mind it seems hardly needful
to discuss it, the grievance is so great, and the irri-
tation is so sensibly felt in every street in your town
in which the newly-enfranchised, or to be enfran-
chised, electors are living. I propose, at a subse-
quent period of the evening, to speak a few sen-
tences on that point, but if you will allow me I
shall now ask your attention to another subject,
which, though not so immediately pressing upon
you, yet has pressed very much upon my mind, and
has compelled me to discuss it to-night. From the
moment when I accepted the invitation to this meet-
ing, although I had previously intended to discuss
some general topics, I felt my mind driven or drawn
irresistibly to that which has recently been declared
by high authority to be the great question of the
hour. Now, don't let any man in Birmingham im-
agine that he has no interest in what is called the
Irish question. (Cheers.) I will undertake to dis-
cuss it in a manner that I hope will not offend
the feelings of any man in this audience. It is
a question which now excites great feeling,
and which will excite great heartburning pro-
bably before it is settled. It is a question
which will be the cause, in all probability, of the
fall of Ministries, and it may be of the dissolution of
Parliament. Whether we look at the present or at
the future, to my mind it far transcends in import-
ance any other question that I could discuss to-
night. Perhaps many of you have read a speech
that was recently delivered by a member of the
Cabinet, the son of the Prime Minister, at a great
banquet that was given to him and to others in the
city of Bristol. In that speech there were three
things"stated. if there be any man here who thinks
that his opinions are utterly at variance with mine,
I ask him the more to listen to what I am about to
say. Lord Stanley, in that speech, declared that
the Irish question was the question of the hour.
He spoke of the condition of Ireland in these words.
He spoke of the painful, the dangerous, and to us,
in appearance at least, the discreditable state of
things which continues to exist in Iro land. He said,
" We have a strange and perplexing problem to
solve ;" he spoke of the state of Ireland as a miserable
state of things, and then, as if in despair, he turned
to his friends around him, and he said, " If we look
for a remedy, who is there that can give an in-
telligible answer? Ireland is the question of the
hour." And then he gave them this advice: having
nothing to offer as a remedy himself, he said,
" Don't let us call in quacks, don't let us fly to des-
perate remedies because the doctors cannot find out
an instant and perfect cure for a disease which is
of a long standing." Well, it is a disease much
more than 100 years old, and I think if the doctors
have not already found out anything about it, or
what will cure it, it may even be wiser to try a
quack. (Laughter and cheers.) In that speech
this Cabinet Minister spoke very vaguely on the
subject of compensation to tenants for improve-
ments, and he charged a considerable number of
the tenants with wishing to become possessed of
the land without paying for it, which was not a
very complimentary suggestion on his Dart ; and he
said further, which was a curious thing, consider-
ing what happened during the last session of Par-
liament, they would yield nothing to noise and to
menace—(cheers)—they would do only that which
was satisfactory to their consciences—(laughter)—
and he wound up this portion of his speech with this
declaration—" We will not allow the British Em-
pire to be pulled to pieces in virtue of any fantas-
tic theories. Ireland and England are inseparable
now and for ever." Let me ask you for a moment to
look at two or three matters of detail, and to see
how completely this Cabinet Minister, son of the
Prime Minister, is justified in the statements he
has made. For two years we have had in Ireland a
Suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act. Well, that
means this, that any man may be taken to prison
by the warrant of the Lord Lieutenant, and he
may be kept there as long as the Habeas Corpus
Act is suspended, as long as the Lord Lieutenant
may think proper. I don't say at all, I never have
said, that there may not arise emergencies in the
most free country where it may be necessary to sus-
pend the law for the sake of the preservation of the
public peace ; but this is a matter of frequent re-
currence in Ireland, and we have had during the
last two years, and even for a much longer period,
as you all know, a condition of chronic insurrection
in that part of the kingdom. We have had more
than that—not only attacks which were of the na-
ture of open war, but we have had throughout the
country, and in parts of England, a conspiracy of
very secret and apparently of a reckless character,
and as the result of that conspiracy we have seen
some violent outrages, such as this country
for a very long period has been a stranger
to. (Hear, hear.) We have had, as you all know,
also great alarm ; the chief magistrates of your
towns, the mayors, and the ordinary magistrates
have been in some places in a state of panic. You
have had troops moved from one part of the king-
dom to the other, and armed ships patrolling around
the coast of Ireland, almost as if the kingdom were
in a state of war. (Hear, hear.) More than this,
you have had special commissions in Ireland and
England trying men for the gravest offences ; your
police and your soldiers, and even the gallows, have
been brought into an unusual and unhappy acti-
vity, and at this very meeting at Bristol the Home
Secretary himself admitted that he had become
little more of late than a Commissioner of Police,
so much was the disturbance brought continually
before him; and even the northern residence of the
Queen at Balmoral and the southern residence of
the Queen in the Isle of Wight, both these places
have been, no doubt, by order of the Home-office,
specially guarded during the period of alarm. (Hear,
hear.) And more than all this, in Ireland and in
Canada—in Ireland to keep the peace, in Canada to
resist threatened invasion from Irishmen in the
United States, we are maintaining at least 50,000
armed men paid for out of the taxes of the United
Kingdom. (Cries of "Shame.") What I think I
might complain of is this, that the Cabinet Minister
of whom I have spoken had no remedy whatsoever
to offer to the people of this great Bristol banquet.
All that he says is this—that he will not allow the