Page:The Annual Register 1899.djvu/81

 1899.] Mr. Balfour and the Catholic Question. [73

obtain everything reasonable from the British Parliament. Here, however, when a vital question was presented, it was the Liberal Unionists, of which the Duke of Devonshire constituted himself the mouthpiece, who deliberately deprived themselves of their strongest argument against Home Eule. In his congratulatory speech to • the Liberal Unionist Council (March 16), the duke found much satisfaction in reviewing the recent declarations of Liberal leaders on Home Eule, and came to the conclusion that it was no longer the chief object in their programme as it was in Mr. Gladstone's days. It was no longer a cause of alarm as it was then ; rather it was a beneficial influence, for it acted as a clog upon their opponents, and it helped to unify their own party — which was of some importance since it contained strong Con- servatives on the one side and advanced Radicals upon the other. By a somewhat abrupt transition, which might, however, have been suggested by the icjea of party differences, he passed to Mr. Balfour's declarations on the subject of granting a Eoman Catholic University to Ireland. Some, he said, had thought it necessary to protest against these declarations, and even to withdraw from the ranks of the party. He himself did not see in these declarations anything which would justify opposition to the Unionist party. Mr. Balfour had been careful to explain, that these were his own personal views, and that the Govern- ment were not pledged by any declaration of his. He himself believed that several members of the Government were equally strongly opposed to these views. He should be extremely sur- prised if, during the existence of the present Government, any practical measure dealing with this subject were brought forward, though he admitted that he had not recently given any close study to the subject. Put briefly, this declaration of the Cabinet's intentions meant that the narrow bigotry of the Ulster Pro- testants, supported by the extremer forms of Protestantism in Scotland and England, had been allowed to triumph, and that expediency rather than justice was the recognised aim of political management.

By a singular coincidence, the signing between Great Britain and France of a convention defining the limits of the two Powers in Central Africa took place on the day (March 21) on which the German Minister of Foreign Affairs explained to the Reich- stag the state of the negotiations with Mr. Rhodes. The arrangement with France concluded between Lord Salisbury and M. Cambon promised to put an end to the rivalries and mis- understandings which on more than one occasion had threatened to bring the two nations into collision. Egypt and the Valley of the Nile were tacitly omitted from the convention, which pro- vided that the definite delimitation from the northern frontier of the Belgian Congo to the sixteenth degree of latitude was to be carried out by a mixed commission, on the general principle of Great Britain retaining the Bahr-el-Ghazal and Darfur, while France kept Wadai and Bagirmi, and generally the territory to