The Birkenhead News and Wirral General Advertiser. — 1882-04-15 (Birkenhead, Merseyside, England)

LORD SAMS I TRY AND IRELAND.  Lord Salisbury was venemously bitter, but exceedingly diplomatic, in what he said on Ireland. Of c urse he held the Govemment responsible for the murders and outrages which are now being committed there, and uttered a large number of unuleasant things about the "social revolution" and how it had been created. The conclusion which he appeared to endeavour to convey to the minds of his hearers was that if the Tories had been permitted to remain in power the sacred rights of the landlords would never have been interfered with, and Ireland would now, consequently, have been in a state of the utmost tranquillity and prosperity. Bat he frankly, if drearily, admitted that a return to tile totiatuati nonunion of things, whose departure he depiored, was impossible. "I am not," he observed, "one of those who believe that after a revolutionary step you can go back. It is one of the curses of revolution that it separates you by a chasm from the past which you have left—a chasm which you can never reeross." However, he seemed to think that something might be done by the establishment of a peasant proprietorship ; he was characteristically vague on the point, but he referred approvingly to the proposition of Mr. W. H. Smith, and became quite ecstatic over the argument that to restore the Conservative instincts of Ireland you must provide the population of Ireland with motives for resisting change instead of giving concessions to agitation. This is decidedly a new departure on the part of the Conservative party, and the bait is not without seductiveness, but until the plan groping about in the brains of the noble earl has been more plainly formulated we must confess that we shall not have much faith in it. He was still more enigmatical with regard to the present disturbed condition of Ireland, which he attributed to the destruction of doctrines which have been upheld for centuries, and "the sudden setting aside of rights .which, beyond the memory of man, have been acknowledged without dispute, suddenly transferring to one set of men the property that has belonged to another." He genially observed in his most genial style, making his hearers as delighted as if he had imitated the example of Mr. Healy and playfully designated the Government a lot of brigands, that "he was not going to fix any ethical name to the transference." He then went on to eulogise the landlords, who, having been placsd between two fires, the tenants, who would not pay their rents, on the one hand, and the Imperial Government, who "transferred their property," on the other, hal been "ungenerously accused of feebleness in supporting the Government and defending their own  rights." But he altogether lost sight of the way in which tenants had been ill-used anterior to the passing of the Land Act, and he did not seem to recognise that, after all, the landlord class form but a fractional part of the population of Ireland, and that, therefore, their comfort is not more to be considered than that of the tenants who constitute the bulk of the population of the country.