NEWS OF THE WEEK.
THE week has been one of profound gloom, a gloom to Liberals at least both physical and moral. In the larger boroughs the new depositories of power are using their great accession of strength to repudiate those who conferred it. Two members of the last Liberal Cabinet have been rejected, Mr. Childers for Pontefract and Mr. Shaw-Lefevre for Reading. Of these, the first, a Minister of singularly temperate and passionless judgment, will be, if not returned elsewhere, a very great loss to the ranks of admini- strative statesmen ; while the second is a man of great economical attainments and general capacity. Besides the two ex-Ministers, Mr. G. W. E. Russell, late Secretary to the Local Government Board, has failed in his contest for Fulham; Sir Arthur Hayter (Financial Secretary under the Liberals to the War Office) has failed in his contest for Bath; Mr. Holms (late Parliamen- tary Secretary to the Board of Trade), in his contest for Central Hackney; and Mr. J. Kynaston Cross (late Under-Secretary for India), in his contest for Bolton. Besides these losses, a number of very able and valuable members of the Liberal Party have been rejected,—Mr. W. E. Briggs, at Blackburn ; Mr. J. A. Hard- castle, at Bury St. Edmunds ; Mr. William Fowler, at Cambridge; Mr. Sidney Buxton, at Peterborough; Mr. Horace Davey, at Christchurch; Mr. Samuel Smith, at Liverpool ; Mr. Arthur Arnold, at Salford ; Mr. Slagg, Mr. Blennerhassett, and Mr. Jacob Bright in Manchester ; Mr. Hopwood, at Stockport ; and Mr. Firth, in North Kensington. Then Mr. Brineley Nixon has failed in his gallant contest with Sir Michael Hicks-Beach in West Bristol ; Mr. Hilary Skinner, the distin- guished foreign correspondent, has been beaten by Lord Randolph Churchill, in South Paddington ; Mr. Plimsoll has been defeated in the central district of Sheffield ; and Sir C. Warren, in the Hallam district of the same great borough. Liverpool returns eight Tories and a Parnellite ; Manchester five Con- servatives and but one Liberal, Sir Henry Roscoe, a new mem- ber, who will be for the present the coryphens of the Liberal party in the great capital of cotton; Leeds returns three Con- servatives to two Liberals ; and Sheffield returns three Conserva- tives to two Liberals. Indeed, Lancashire is pretty thoroughly Tory, the Orangemen and the Parnellites acting steadily to- gether,—a strange and ghastly spectacle. And of fifty-one Metropolitan Members already returned, no less than thirty-one are Conservative, and only twenty Liberal.
