A new Government has come into being under a Prime Minister who, like his predecessor, is tied to Scotland by strong and intimate bonds.  Give him a fair chance.  Give the Government which he has brought into being the opportunity of handling the great machinery of State.  Be assured that, if you do, they will employ it for the greatest good of the greatest number.  I am well satisfied at what has taken place since I have been in Dundee.  I see a great concentration of forces throughout the constituency.  I see the opportunity of retrieving, and more than retrieving, the injury which has been done to the cause of progress and reform by elections in other parts of our island.

Ah, but, a very sad thing has happened; an awful thing has happened—­the Liberal Party has gone in for Home Rule. The Scotsman is shocked, The Times is speechless, and takes three columns to express its speechlessness; The Spectator, that staid old weekly, has wobbled back to where it never should have wobbled from; the Ulster Unionists declare that the Government has forfeited all the confidence that they never had in it, and thousands of people who never under any circumstances voted Liberal before are saying that under no circumstances will they ever vote Liberal again.  And I am supposed to be responsible for this revolution in our policy.

Why, the statements I have made on the Irish question are the logical and inevitable consequence of the Resolution which was passed by the House of Commons, in which every member of the Government voted, which was carried by an enormous majority—­more than 200—­a month ago[9]—­a Resolution which, after explaining the plain and lamentable evils which can be traced to the existing system of government in Ireland, affirmed that the remedy for those evils would be found in a representative body with an Executive responsible to it, subject to the supreme authority of the Imperial Parliament.

The Irish question at the present time occupies a vastly different position to what it did in the year 1886.  Ever since 1880 the attention of Parliament has been devoted constantly to Ireland, and the attention of Parliament, when devoted constantly to one object, is rarely fruitless.  The twenty-five years that have passed have seen great changes in Ireland.  We have seen a great scheme of local government, which Lord Salisbury said would be more disastrous than Home Rule itself, actually put into force.  We have seen the scheme of land purchase, which in the year 1886 did more to injure the Home Rule Bill than anything else, actually carried, not indeed to a complete conclusion, but carried into practical effect by a Unionist Administration.  These are great events; and their consequences, I think, ought to encourage us to move forward, and not to move back.  They have produced results in Ireland which are beneficent, and the Irish question no longer presents itself in the tragic guise of the early eighties.  They