Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CAUSES AND OBJECTS OF THE UNION. Paddixgton, June 26, 1886. [This speech was delivered shortly after the rejection of Mr. Gladstone's Home Rule Bill, on its second reading, by a majority of 30 (June 7). It presented an analysis of the Irish question from an historical point of view, and although some abridgment is indispensable here, the main portions of the argument are preserved. The results of the general election which followed in July are summarised in the general introduction to this work.] "PARLIAMENT has been to-day dissolved; that Parliament JL which you took your part in electing in November last; that Parliament which fully, more fully than any former Parliament, represented the British democracy ; that Parliament from which you justly expected so much, after a few weeks' existence has been scattered to the winds; and again you are called upon, in the exercise of the highest rights of citizenship, to take your part in electing a new Parliament. Mr. Gladstone has dissolved Parliament, and he has appealed to the nation. He has put a question to the country—a question which you, in common with the five million voters of the United Kingdom, are called upon to answer. Mr. Gladstone says of that question that it raises the simplest issue which was ever put before the people. That is the only opinion during the whole of this controversy which Mr. Gladstone has uttered in which I entirely agree with him. It is, gentlemen, I assure you, the simplest issue—intensely grave, intensely momentous—on the decision of which the destinies of empires hang; but it is a simple question. It may be put in many ways with equal simplicity. You may put it in this way. Will you, the electors of Great Britain, who are now entrusted with supreme political power, maintain in itspresent form, ...