Lord Rosebery's ironic hyperbole as to there not being a
single Liberal who could spell a word in two syllables has given rise to quite a correspondence. Mr. Chamberlain took it up as if it were a boast that the Gladstoniane really do find their main strength in the party of ignorance, and wrote to Thursday's nines to express his dismay that any party should absolutely boast that its education is conspicuous by it absence,—which was not, we may be sure, Lord Rosebery's meaning, Yet, as Lord Rosebery evidently did mean to boast that almost all the wealth and almost all the strongest local prepossessions were opposed to him and constituted the great difficulties of his position, he can hardly have meant to charge the Opposition with making a totally false pretension to having most of the educated classes on their side ; or if he did, he must have mixed up with his argument a very misleading and confusing kind of joke. Mr. Gladstone, at all events, in the celebrated appeal to the masses against the classes, cer- tainly intimated that where intellectual culture loses its way, the instinct of democracies is a surer guide. The evening papers of Thursday fell upon Mr. Chamberlain for missing Lord Rosebery's irony; but they omitted to notice that the irony was quite out of keeping with the drift of the sentence in which it was embodied, which certainly was to magnify the obstacles in his way. But none of them drew atten- tion to Mr. Chamberlain's closing sentence, which was very pointed, and went home 1—" In the other portions of this speech, Lord Rosebery appears to be suffering from that confusion of thought which has filled his sup- porters with disquietude, and which has led one of the greatest of French critics to imagine that he has discovered in the Prime Minister 'a multiple personality.' At Edin- burgh he was one man ; at Bradford he was another; at Glasgow he was a third ; at Devonport he was all three, with an evident leaning to become a fourth. The fact is that Lord Rosebery is not a man at all,—he is a Political Joint Stock Company, Limited." This was much more to Mr. Chamber- lain's purpose than Lord Rosebery's irony was to Lord Rosebery's.
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