Mr. Balfour, the Secretary to the Lord-Lieutenant, made a very
masterly speech at Birmingham yesterday week, of which the only disfigurement was his description of Mr. Gladstone's Nottingham and Derby speeches as marked by " unblushing " perversions of fact, where the word " unblushing " certainly suggests intentional perversions, and his use of the adjective " spiteful " as generally characterising those speeches. Unjust, extremely unjust, those speeches, in our opinion, were ; but intentional perversions of fact, and spiteful, they certainly were not ; nor, indeed, was there ever a speech of Mr. Gladstone's which, in our opinion,could be properly so described. His rancour, where rancour can be discovered, is always rancour excited by his anger against what he regards as almost wilful error, and though his impression may be, of course, nearly the opposite of the truth, his speeches are never disfigured by a desire to lower the reputation of any individual politician ; and this is the proper criterion of" spite." Otherwise, Mr. Balfour's speech was one of extraordinary effectiveness. He described the conversion of Liberals to Home-rule, after Mr. Gladstone had embraced it, as a spectacle for which there had been no parallel since our barbarous ancestors were baptised in tribes on the conversion of their Kings to Christianity. He went on to criticise the alliance between the Liberals and the Parnellites as less an alliance than a fusion. The two parties had not merely acted together when the issue was one of Home-rule, but had adopted the same tactics and manceavred in the same manner when it was a ques- tion not of Home-rule, but of order and obedience to unquestion- able law. For instance, almost every sentence, he said, of Mr. Gladstone's recent speeches at Nottingham and Derby appeared to be deliberately calculated to make the task of the Govern- ment in maintaining order in Ireland more difficult than it would otherwise have been.
