Three long speeches have been made this week upon the
Special Commissioners' Report,—one by Lord Selborne, of very great impartiality and ability ; one by Sir William Harcourt, of the usual description, very slashing, very clever, very unfair; and one by Sir Charles Russell, far more respectable than Sir William Harcourt's, but not approaching the judicial character of Lord Selborne's. Lord Selborne addressed the Liberal Union Club on Tuesday. He judged rightly, we believe, in acquitting the Times of any but honest and honourable motives in making its very rash charges as to the forged letters ; but he did not insist enough on the grave respon- sibility involved in making charges so serious on evidence such as that which alone the Times had in its possession. Doubt- less the proprietors risked and lost enormously by their credulousness, and risked and lost it in what they genuinely believed to be the service of the nation. But it seems to us per- fectly clear that their credulousness, though entirely honest and very costly to them, involved carelessness as culpable as that, for instance, which sent out an ill-provisioned army to die in the trenches before Sebastopol.
