Yesterday week, Mr. John Morley spoke at Glasgow. In commenting
on the charge that he had pilfered some of the social reforms of the Tory Party, he retorted that if it were so, he must have been like a man mentioned in one of Fielding's novels, who was by force of habit such an inveterate thief, that he could not help putting his hand into a pocket which he knew to be empty, and could not refrain from cheating at cards, though he knew that even if he won, he should never get paid. Mr. Morley very childishly charged the Government with turning party divisions into class divisions, and getting Dukes, Marquises, and Viscounts to flock round then. Con- sidering that Mr. Morley knows as well as any man living, that even if Mr. Gladstone has the majority of the electors on his side, it is a very small majority, and that meetings of tens of thousands of persons are just as easily and as often collected to cheer Unionists as to cheer Home-rulers, this is a very unreal mode of talking. Dukes, Marquises, and Viscounts do not do much to swell a crowd of that kind. And it was almost snobbish in Mr. Morley to attack the Duke of Fife for taking the chair at a Unionist meeting. Con- sidering that Lord Fife was a firm and professed Unionist years before his alliance with the Royal family was so much as thought of, it would have been very unmanly in him to drop his political faith just because he had married an English Princess, even though, as Mr. Morley asked his audience, in the true spirit of demagogue menace, to " mark," he received congratulations on his marriage only a few short months ago from every side of the House of Commons. It seems, then, that when Mr. Morley congratulates a Unionist on his alliance with the throne, he means it to be received as a warning to drop his Unionism straightway. This sort of threat is the last thing we should have looked for from Mr, John Morley.
