The Warwickshire Herald. — 1893-06-22 (Birmingham, West Midlands, England)

OUR IRISH MASTERS.  The silence of the Irish members in Committee OR the Disruption Bill is, the Saturday Review declares, no doubt maintained in fulfilment of a compact with Mr. Gladstone for the more expeditious rushing of that measure through the House of Commons. If the Home Rule Bill becomes law, they will be able to assert that they have given to its exclusions and restrictions nothing more than a kind of negative assent—if this phrase may be allowed in an Irish connection. They have not so much positively accepted the conditions which it lays downs, abstained from rejecting them. Already Mr. Sexton, Mr. Healy, and others have begun to protest against the acquiescence of the Government in amendments as to which they have not been consulted. It will be easy, if an Irish Legislature ever meets in Dublin, to allege that, though they have accepted the bill as a whole, they are by no means pledged to maintain it in all its details, whether organic or inorganic. They may point to disclaimers which will give plausibility to this contention. They seem already to be providing a machinery for bringing pressure to bear upon themselves. Mr. Devitt, for example,is apparently eager to remain out of the House of Commons, in order that he may not be pledged to the acceptance of the bill as a settlement even for a moment. He seems to court disqualification by bankruptcy. Mr. William O'Brien is understood to be meditating his own ejection from the House of Commons, and disablement from returning to it, on similar grounds. Their motive, it can hardly be doubted, is to prepare for the formation of an extra-Parliamentary party in Ireland which, the Disruption Bill once passed, shall set to work to abolish the restrictions which subordinate the Irish Legislature to the Imperial Parliament. It will be easy to coerce an Irish Legislature in the direction in which it ls anxious to go, and it will be morally :impossible for an Irish Legislature and Executive to coerce agitators who are simply carrying Out the principles common to both. The funds will come, as they do now, from the other side of the Atlantic. These American funds will be as necessary in the future as they are now. A large proportion of the 103 Irish members of the Imperial Parliament, and the satne number in the Dublin Legislature, will be practically subsidized by foreign Power—that is, by the party, the Irish voters in America, controlling the foreign Power. This, if not the aim, is the clear tendency of the ninth clause of the Home Rule Bill. It will bring to Westminster the paid agents of a foreign Power, or of the masters of a foreign Power to act for it under the mask and character of members of the House of Commons. The fear may have been chimerical a century ago—it is well founded now— of subjecting England to what Mr. Pitt describes as the greatest of all dangers—that of allowing a foreign influence to creep into the national councils. By • coincidence with Mr. Pitt's language, which is curious if it be accidental, Lord Salisbury spoke of the Irish constituencies as likely to become a hundred pocket boroughs in the hands of foreigners. The Union saved us from this danger scarcely a century ago; its maintenanee is our only safeguard now  More than £4OO has at present been subscribed to the public fund for the benefit of the widow of Sergeant Eves, of the Essex Constabulary, who was brutally murdered at Purleigh, near Maldon. As an express from Bristol to Birmingham, on Saturday afternoon, was approaching Wickmar Station, a passenger named Pritchard leaped out. His injuries are such that he is not expected to live. Frances Wiseman, aged 39, of Union-street, Lambeth. has just died at St. Thomas's Hospital from bum,: received at the recent fire in a Kennington Umbel-yard. Her injuries terminated in lockjaw.