On Tuesday, Lord Salisbury addressed a great public meet- ing
at Preston. After noting that the country had suffered from a famine of discussion, rather than, as Mr. Gladstone complained, from a famine of legislation, he welcomed the Parish Councils Bill as a check on the( growing bureau- cracy of Whitehall. "You have heard of the French Minister who held out a book to a friend, and who told him, ' Look at this book. It is a grammar. At this moment—twenty minutes past eleven—every child in France is reading that grammar.' Well, that is the ideal of the bureaucrat." The Education Department came in for a specially hard rap,—as "those learned gentlemen in London who find that this con- flict of religious opinion is exceedingly inconvenient to the work they have got in hand. They long for a convenient religion, Certain persons have invented what I may call a patent compressible religion, which can be forced into all consciences with a very little squeezing, and they wish to in- sist that this shall be the only religion taught through the schools of the nation." At the end of his speech, which bristled with clever points—note the delightful way in which he dealt with the notion that attending a parish assembly between six and eight once a quarter could amuse the rural parishes—Lord Salisbury dwelt with emphasis on the Ulster side of the Home-rule question. To him, "one of the most powerful and cogent reasons against the Bill—a reason over- powering all others—is that of intense indignation at the part which it is proposed England should play in respect to Ulster."
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