Sir Stafford Northcote also addressed on the same day a
monster Conservative meeting at Nostell Priory, near Wakefield, at which it was calculated that 25,000 persons were present, though very few of them, of course, could have heard the Chancellor of the Exchequer's speech. That speech was such as might be expected from the leader of the House of Com- mons,—but it would have had more effect on the country if the Prime Minister's speech of last week had not been couched in a tone so strikingly opposite to that of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, and if Lord Derby's speech of the same day had not been one to blight all the hopes which Sir Stafford Northcote's might have excited in any (too sanguine) mind. Sir Stafford said that "if, in the midst of anxious preoccupation, - —Mid in the necessity of dealing with the circumstances as they came, we have not always expressed ourselves perhaps so frequently and so warmly as others may have done" [with regard to the sufferings of the Christian subjects of the Porte], "you are not on that account to suppose that there is the slightest lack of sympathy amongst us." Sir Stafford here does injustice to his chief. Lord Beaconsfield has expressed himself both frequently and warmly, and we have no doubt that there is in him no lack of sympathy, —for the Turks. Only it is not with them, but with their victims, that the nation's sympathy has been so heart-felt.
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