[In Midlothian, on November 9, Mr. Gladstone said:] "It will be a vital danger to the country and to the empire, if at a time when a demand from Ireland for larger powers of self-government is to be dealt with, there is not in Parliament a party totally independent of the Irish vote." ... Mr. Gladstone's cardinal deliverance in November had been preceded by an important event. On October 7, 1885, Lord Salisbury made that speech at Newport which is one of the tallest and most striking landmarks in the shifting sands of this controversy.... Some of the more astute of the Minister's own colleagues were delighted with his speech, as keeping the Irishmen steady to the Tory party.... The question on which side the Irish vote in Great Britain should be thrown seems not to have been decided until after Mr. Gladstone's speech. It was then speedily settled. On November 21 a manifesto was issued, handing over the Irish vote in Great Britain solid to the orator of the Newport speech. The tactics were obvious. It was Mr. Parnell's interest to bring the two contending British parties as near as might be to a level, and this he could only hope to do by throwing his strength upon the weaker side. It was from the weaker side, if they could be maintained in office, that he would get the best terms.... Some estimated the loss to the Liberal party in this island at twenty seats, others at forty. Whether twenty or forty, these lost seats made a fatal difference in the division on the Irish Bill a few months later.... But this was not all, and was not the worst of it.... Passions were roused, and things were said about Irishmen that could not at once be forgotten; and the great task of conversion in 1886, difficult in any case, was made a thousand times more difficult still by the antipathies of the electoral battle of 1885. Meanwhile it was for the moment, and for the purposes of the moment, a striking success. THE NEW ELECTORATE (1885). =Source.=--_The Times_, December 11. From a carefully prepared statistical abstract of the election it appears that in the English counties, out of a total electorate of 2,303,133 voters, 1,937,988 votes were recorded, in the proportion of 1,020,774 Liberal votes to 916,314 Conservative. THE OPENING OF THE RIFT (1886). =Source.=--Morley's _Life of Gladstone_, vol. iii., pp. 292-295. (Macmillans.)