Lord Rosebery broke his long silence on politics at a
meeting of the Liberal League at the Westminster Palace Hotel on Tuesday. He proposed to speak quite frankly of the new Government, to which he outed neither allegiance nor confidence. "He had no connexion with it, secret or open. He was not sure that be even owed it the, common courtesies of life." But this made it all the more incumbent on him to admit that the Government had surmounted its great difficulties with extraordinary success, and had come to its second Session, "not weakened, but livigorated by the experience of its first." Nevertheless, his apprehensions were threefold. First, there was the danger that the Government might cause disappointment and provoke reaction by vast promises, vague pledges, and an unwieldy 'programme. Second, he feared that the Liberal Party might find itself, through some of its members, permanently connected with hostility to property in all its forms, in which case he predicted that at no distant date it would find itself squeezed out between Socialism and Con- servatism. He regarded with the utmost misgiving the introduction of the Irish system of land tenure into Great Britain, via Scotland, which was practically guaranteed by the Prime Minister, and predicted that if the Government introduced dual ownership in land into Great Britain, the results would be even more disastrous and expensive than they had been in Ireland.
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