Mr. Chamberlain was entertained at dinner by the Fishmongers' Company
on Wednesday, and received the honorary freedom of the great Whig corporation. His speech, which was one of great power and eloquence, began by complaining of the gross personal attacks made on him— attacks which must be repudiated not only by all honour- able but by all sane men—but soon passed on to a general defence and panegyric of Imperialism. With the substance of his defence and praise we have no fault to find, but we are old-fashioned enough to wish that he had been a little more careful to avoid the appearance of boastfulness. We feel also that he very much exaggerates the indifference shown to the Empire in the "sixties" and "seventies." There were plenty of men in those days who were not disciples of the Manchester school, and even the Manchester men had only to be scratched—witness the Mutiny—to show plenty of the Imperial spirit. The speech closed with a passage of the loftiest eloquence, in which Mr. Chamberlain described the help given us by the Colonies. "In our trial our hands were stayed by our Colonies, as the hands of Moses were stayed by Aaron and Hur, till victory waited upon our arms. Shall we ever forget, shall we ever be ungrateful, will any one ever again dare to say that the Colonies are an encumbrance to the Empire which they have done so much to maintain and support?" That is real oratory. Mr. Chamberlain never overloads his pieces of imaginative eloquence, or makes them too literary in tone. One feels that they belong of right to the spoken, and not the written, word.
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