Lord Randolph devoted his Wednesday's speech to a tirade against
the agricultural labourer, as a person quite unfit for Parliamentary representation ; and a demand for redistribution in the representation of boroughs, which he declared to be at present unjust, while the enfranchisement of the rural labourer is not only not just, but altogether "premature, inexpedient, unnatural, and, therefore, highly dangerous." The Liberals wanted to enfranchise the poor farmer and the agricultural labourer, because they counted confidently on seducing their "uneducated minds and feeble political intelligence"with their worn-out sophistries and fallacies." He would wait, he said, with his usual sobriety and wisdom, till the agricultural labourers marched on London and pulled down the Hyde Park palings, before enfranchising them ; for that would constitute the kind of qualification for the franchise which it would be wrong and foolish to resist. Mr. Chamberlain's speeches were so "boastful," and Mr. Trevelyau's so "gushing," that Lord Randolph Churchill took no account of them. Further, Lord Randolph thought minority representation gross humbug (especially as, according to him, it gives the Liberals twenty seats, and the Conservatives only two). He con- cluded by expressing a confident hope that the Governmead's "sinister machinations" in proposing a Reform Bill as a last resource for retaining office would be foiled, and that the con- stituencies would "refuse to renew to these unmasked impostors the confidence which they so unblushingly demand." Lord Randolph's Parliamentary Billingsgate is not in any degree mitigated. Of increased exasperation it was intrinsically in- capable.
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